"On The Road"

Since Jack Kerouac's centennial is coming up -- it's March 12 -- I've been trying to read his breakthrough novel, "On The Road."  It's been a losing proposition.  I've never particularly liked the book.  It's kind of a closet intellectual's lowbrow slum run.  Drugs, drink, and paid sex.  People used to call that the "high life."  What a conundrum.  You couldn't get any lower if you tried.  Self-abasement as an art form.  The "license" of the artist.  I'm not buying it.  He (or she) who tastes for the sake of tasting gets caught like a fly in the honey pot.  You'd think people would know better.  It's hard to watch stupidity in action.  The people who think they can have their cake and eat it too end up doing a faceplant in that cake. But that's life, folks.  Learn the hard way if you must.

In a way, it isn't anybody's fault.  It was an inevitable reaction within American culture.  It just so happens that it was Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and a motley collection of like-minded fools who broke through the impassive, moralistic constraints of mid-20th century America, destroying walls, breaking through boundaries, ignoring strictures, burning all their bridges and themselves in the process.  

There's always been a paradoxical flavor to the brew of American opposites.  Despite the religiosity of the people who moved to this continent from Europe, way back in 1832 Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, while touring the country, that he'd never seen a people who drank so much or so hard.  This hardcore bohemian underbelly has always existed and, of course, is naturally constellated by the innate repression of religious moralism.  

So when Jack Kerouac and buddies began searching in the early Forties in New York City for a more authentic life, it was natural that their assumption was that liberation came from doing whatever you wanted, i.e, instead of repressing all your desires, simply indulge them all.  These guys were the seedbed for what followed in the Sixties.  One would think that someday the pendulum would find the middle ground, but so far, it still seems to be swinging between the extremes of repression and indulgence, as it ever has.

Anyway, reading about Kerouac's relentless pursuit of pleasure, kicks, and cheap thrills gets a bit old after a while.  I always bog down about midway through the book and have a hard time finishing it.  What Kerouac did do, and what was long overlooked due to the sensationalism of the subject matter, was to liberate a kind of stream of consciousness wordplay and thought process.  Much art that has followed would not have existed had he not had the courage to find that voice within himself.

For me, the most interesting part of the book is his first experience of Mexico. I even bought a companion biography by a Mexican poet and journalist, Jorge Garcia-Robles, entitled -- aptly -- "Jack Kerouac In Mexico."  Nice to get an insider's take on Jack's take of the country south of our border.  This guy, like almost everyone who reads Kerouac, feels like he really "gets" Jack, so there's that perspective to overcome.  But it was nice to also see the author's recognition of when Jack got it right.  

There's a long passage that Garcia-Robles quotes in its entirety, from late in the novel, when Jack, Neal, and some other lost soul are driving down the Pan American highway towards their arbitrarily chosen destination, Mexico City.  Along the way, the other two characters fell alseep in the car while Jack drove on alone.  I too want to quote this long passage of Jack's ruminations upon the land as he drove through it, both because it's a perfect example of that stream of consciousness voice and it's also unexpectedly insightful.

"I took the wheel and drove among reveries of my own, through Linares, through hot, flat swamp country, across the steaming Rio Soto la Marina near Hidalgo, and on.  A great verdant jungle valley with long fields of green crops opened before me.  Groups of men watched us pass from a narrow old-fashioned bridge.  The hot river flowed.  Then we rose in altitude till a kind of desert country began reappearing.  The city of Gregoria was ahead.  The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow.  Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World.  These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore -- they had high cheekbones and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were the great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it.  The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing.  As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of "history."  And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.  For when destruction comes to the world of "history" and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know.  These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria."

I find that entire passage amazing and a prescient sensing on Kerouac's part of the re-emergence of the indigenous peoples throughout the world, and the final acknowledgement that they understood themselves and the earth far better than do we.  Such are my own conclusions.  Trust me, nobody else in the twentieth century saw Mexico or this truth quite so clearly.  The only disappointment is that Kerouac wasn't able to integrate that massive insight into his own life and re-ensoul himself thereby.  "...the earth is an Indian thing."  I love that.

After whoring in Gregoria, the threesome staggers into Mexico City, Jack gets dysentery, Cassady leaves, and the novel collapses into a kind of meaningless denouement in its final pages.  As Jack intended.  In his private journals of 1947, ten years before the publication of "On The Road," Jack mentions a new story idea he has of two guys hitchhiking across America in search of something that they never quite find.  As it turns out, he lived that story line out in his own life.

But it's all learning, right?  Next life, Jack won't have to do all that gallivanting about.  Been there, done that.  IF the lesson was learned.  People mightily resist learning the lessons that life is trying to teach them.

So this week I'm going to read my favorite of Kerouac's novels, "Dharma Bums," plus the swaggering sutra, "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity."  I'll report on both for Jack's centennial next weekend.  Till then.