The Quasimodo of Lowell

In honor of this beautiful man's birthday, I present to you an essay I have written about my dear friend, Jackyboy K. 

************

A wise man once said, “When I come to Paris in March and get drunk and pass out you may all stomp me to death in the gutters of St. Danis and I will rise going Hm he h eee hee hee he ha ha and be Quasimodo.”¹ This man was the late and great Jean-Louis Kérouac, better known as Jack Kerouac. Yes, the same Jack Kerouac that hitchhiked across the country dozens of times and wrote a novel in three days straight while purportedly hopped up on Benzedrine. The same man that was married three times by the time he was 47, at which age he died of an internal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of excessive drinking. This is the man who has inspired my literary career, who changed my life with endless strings of incomprehensible complete-sense nonsense. A photo of him cradling a kitten holds a four-by-six-inch space on my bedroom wall, and eight (and counting) volumes of his work line my bookshelf at home, making my personal collection 8.25% Kerouac, 91.75% everything else (I calculated that. The percentage is exact).

I've known Jack since the summer of 2011. I will henceforth refer to him as Jack (and perhaps on certain occasions Jackyboy) because we are soul mates and soul mates are always on a first-name basis. When you meet a soul mate, you don't realize it at first. The relationship is fairly neutral. They're just an ordinary friend. But there comes a time when the raw emotion overwhelms you and it becomes achingly clear that this person was meant for you. That there is some tangible, invisible, visceral cord binding the two of you, stretching across time and space and dimensions. That is how it is with me and Jack. When I read On the Road, I wasn't impressed. I was injected with a bit of wanderlust, maybe, but I didn't get it. And because I didn't get it, I didn't get it. I was a member of a sad part of the population that thinks that Jack was a reckless alcoholic womanizer that lived fast and died young, and finds nothing admirable or inspirational about him or his work. It wasn't until I went to a Richard Avedon exhibit at the Gagosian gallery the following summer, which featured several portraits of Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky, that I was flipping through the exhibition's book at the front of the gallery and stumbled across Allen's (yes, the rule applies to soul mates' close friends as well) poem “Who Be Kind To.” Later that month I stopped at the library and found an anthology of letters written between Jack and Allen between the years of 1945 and 1969, the year of Jack's death. From the moment I left the library, that book and I were attached at the hip. I carried it around with me for weeks. I had to renew my hold on it three times. I carted it all around, whipping it out to show to friends, asking them if they knew who these men were. Most people said they'd heard of On the Road. End of conversation. I'd shove the book dejectedly back in to my bag, silently taking note that this person didn't get it, that there was an intrinsic disconnect between us. When I finished it, I sat on my couch on a Friday night and meticulously typed out every quote that I had dog-eared, culminating in a six-page, single-spaced document. That was the beginning of my love affair with Jack.

The first and inexplicably important thing to note is that Jack is not so much an author as he is a lyrical musician of sorts. His writing is not meant to be read for plot, nor his sentences dissected. His works are like jazz compositions—the reader has to feel them out, ride the rhythm of his syntax and effortlessly absorb the semantics of his word choices. The most common misconception I've found to be believed among the anti-Jack cohort echoes what Truman Capote said about On the Road: “That's not writing, it's typing.” And you know what I have to say to you Capote? Eff you. People like you make me angry. You make me sad, because you're missing out. It's not that you're inferior or stupid (although, Capote, only jerkwads publicly insult people), you're just not getting it. And that's an honest-to-God bummer. Fear not, however; I have reason to believe that the cause of this fault lies not (entirely) in your court, AJCs (Anti-Jack Cohort). I think the discrepancy is rooted in the fact that we are taught, and subsequently communicate through, the Language of Thought. We use dictionaries and spellcheck and we proofread and edit, and before we speak we must be certain that we are right. We rely on facts and data, and we can affirm and disprove each other's statements using facts and data. This is a fair and valid method of communication. The problem is, Jack speaks the Language of Feeling. Dictionaries and spellcheck and facts are completely useless weapons against the cavalry of ostensible absurdity that is Jack's writing.

The beautiful thing, though, is that it's not nonsense, it only seems that way to us, speakers of the Language of Thought, for we are hindered by the rules and restrictions of our dialect, and the society in which our dialect prevails. In Tristessa, Jack wrote: "I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature." Who would have thought to say Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity? I don't think anyone could have. But if we understand what he's saying, we feel it. We know exactly what this looks like. It's synesthetic; if I focus, I can experience the milky white light, and it's...transcendental...and...empty. Try to explain it in a more conventional way and the impact can never be as great, nor as deep. There’s something inherently more tactile, visual, and emotional about the way Jack writes. It’s transportive, almost as though I am Jack and I am the Milk Light and I am the realization, simultaneously. When he said, "Then she was running down the street with her $2, going to the store long before it opened, going for coffee in the cafeteria, sitting at the table alone, digging the world at last, the gloomy hats, the glistening sidewalk, the signs announcing baked flounder” in The Subterraneans, I, too, am digging the world at last. There’s a rush of relief that floods my body when I register what it’s like to sit at a table after coming in from the rain, being chilly but not shivering, just cold enough that my jacket is comforting but not overwhelming; sitting alone, looking around, wide-eyed, absorbing, being aware of how dismal everything is and seeing the unfettered grace of being conscious enough to comprehend the gloom.

I’m often told that Jack’s work is something that most people are into as teenagers, but grow out of soon after teenagerdom ends. After Kerouac we pick up Nietzsche and Tolstoy and Dante and we never look back. That’s just how it goes. Jack is like our training wheels—we learn from him how not to be, so that when we grow up we can look down on others in disdain when they romanticize the Beat Generation, scorning their sad preoccupation with immaturity, recklessness, and youth. How unfortunate it is that they couldn’t move past high school. To understand the misconception here, it is critical to note the stark contrast between myself and Jack. I am a vegan straightedge homebody, if I were to categorize myself. My idea of 'experimenting' is trying the oil cleansing method on my face; my average Friday or Saturday night consists of me reading on my couch, or maybe, if I'm feeling up to it, I'll go to a yoga class. Undoubtedly, I am the inverse of everything that he is. And yet, I love him. Why? How? Wherefore? Because, as I said, the plot lines of his novels don't mean much. He may have climbed Matternhorn Peak with Gary Snyder, but the point of him writing The Dharma Bums wasn't to tell people that they should really go out and climb Matterhorn, too. It's the way he tells his ridiculous stories that matters. How he writes “Leave me alone I am so delicate”² and I can't help but feel like I need to hug a crumbling flower. But it's also because he says things like, “But the bushes and the rocks weren't real and the beauty of things must be that they end.”³ He doesn't go off an existential tirade and renounce the world in a flourish of artfully worded cynicism. Jack reminds me gently that we're floating in the middle of nowhere and we won't figure out where we are until we touch down at home base once more, but it's a-OK because there's a beauty to the cycle of life that we are a part of, and it's best if we try to accept as much of reality as we can confirm is real, instead of digging our heels into the ground, fighting death to the last second. In other words, pain is not suffering; it is the resistance to suffering that is painful. When Jack began to vomit up blood on October 20^th, 1969 all he said to his wife was, “Stella, I'm bleeding.” He had to be persuaded to go to the hospital. He had been killing himself for years, and he knew it. But he didn't fight it. I'm sure he and his friends and family wished he had, but that wasn't the way things played out. He contributed to this world all that he did, and then he left. No heel-digging, no suffering.

There's a reason that On the Road is not one of my favorites—and probably why it took around seven years for anyone to publish it—and that I loved Maggie Cassidy, a book about teenage Jack growing up in Lowell, MA, courting his high school sweetheart (Maggie). The beauty of The Subterraneans is that it's exactly what he was thinking, no editing, no bullshit, and that's what makes it so real. It's time that the myth is debunked that Jack's writing was about THROW EVERYTHING OUT THE WINDOW GRAB A CARDBOARD SUITCASE AND HITCHHIKE TO FRANCE ON BENZEDRINE, because (a) that is completely inaccessible to about 99% of the population, and (b) that actually sounds like a terrible experience. I don't love him because him and I have any particular hobbies in common (I had to slug through pages and pages of baseball play-by-plays in Dr. Sax); I actually doubt we would have been friends had we known one another. (A quick pause to recognize the sadness of the previous statement.) I love him because there is so much urgency in his writing, so much honesty, so much unfiltered this-is-what-I'm-thinking-and-thus-who-I-am-take-it-or-leave-it. And that's how he changed my life. He taught me that there's simply NO TIME to be vacillating and tiptoeing around going "hmm haww should I do/say/think it hmmmm I dunno!!!" and he knew that, and that's what part of it's about. And if I hadn't learned that, I'd be in a paralyzed ball in the corner of a white room twitching and crying. He taught me to free myself, to say “Fuck it, and fuck you” to everything that tries to hold me back from realizing my true self, from reaching as high and/or as far as I want.

I have been called out for writing LIFE, in the same vein as REALITY, both of which supposedly indicate that Jack insists that we must, as my caller-outer said, cast off the veil of habit and [insert cardboard-box-benzedrine-France line here]. An understandable misconception, yes, but a misconception nonetheless. I wrote LIFE because once you've tapped into it, once you really get what Jack and his work are about, you can't help it. You really mean it. You feel like you have to make sure everyone knows that you don't just mean "life," as in "a bug's life" or "life is good,” or something mundane like that, but you mean the entire, urgent, honest, pure, everythingness of existence, that life. And in your urgency to make sure people know which life you're talking about—you feel that it is your obligation, as a human bean, to say exactly what you mean or else you would feel as though you were lying—you capitalize everything, hoping that our language's limited characters can somehow convey the difference.

I often wish that people would take the tilde seriously. This ~ is our good friend, Tilde. That little symbol conveys so much meaning that we miss out on by not using it for communicative purposes. When bracketing a word, such as “the ~future~” the tilde invokes a sense of gentle sarcasm, useful in adding a note of lightheartedness to an otherwise serious word or phrase. If used at the end of a sentence: “please help~~~~” the symbol expresses exasperation, as if one is waving one's arms around helplessly. This note about tildes may seem out of the blue or unnecessary, but it's another lesson from Jackyboy. He has helped me realize, as part of the whole cut-the-bullshit-there-is-just-not-enough-time-in-this-life-for-conventions ideology, that we have so many amazing symbols that we use for punctuation or in math or as accents in other languages, but we don't use them except for punctuation/math/accents because conventions tell us that we cannot do this. Theoretically, I cannot write ?????? in a serious piece of writing, such as this one, because we have restricted ourselves from doing so, and in order for my work to be earnestly considered I must adhere to these rules. Look again. Those question marks tell you a lot, possibly even more than words could depending on what I'm trying to say. They convey infinitely more meaning than any well-intentioned “Oh my God!” or “holy shit!” The ?????? is unsayable, accurately conveying how indescribable a deep, whirlwind, neuron-buzzing confusion is. But those goddamn conventions, man. They tell us, “Nope, if you intend to be taken seriously you have to follow all these rules, and you have to make everything clear and concise, and also you can't use tildes or ampersands or all caps.” ...Alright then. I guess I'll have to go join a knitting circle. People don't understand Jack's writing because while everyone else lauds the MLA handbook as the Gospel of the Written Word, him and I are thinking, “What the hell?? Why all these rules when adhering to them overcomplicates things and makes life harder? In reality, things are quite simple and we humans are responsible for constructing the skyscrapers that stand in the way of attaining, acknowledging, and fully expressing our—and life's—true essence.”

“You see how honest-dishonest I am? You see how good-bad the world? You see how we must shelter ourselves from the cold-warmth?” —letter to Allen Ginsberg, December 16^th, 1948

I won't hate you if you give Jack's work a second (or first, or third, or twentieth) try and genuinely don't...gulp...like it. I promise. At least you made an effort. But if you refuse to read any of his writing and continue to dismiss him as an invalid literary figure, I will give you a dirty look. Perhaps even a succession of angry glares. Lacking knowledge is not a sin in and of itself, it's when we have knowledge that we choose to ignore that it becomes an issue. So give him another chance. Who knows, you might just find a soul mate.

_______________________________________________________

1From a letter to Allen Ginsberg, December 10^th, 1957

2From Tristessa.

3From The Dharma Bums.