In honor of this beautiful man's birthday, I present to you an essay I have written about my dear friend, Jackyboy K.
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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.”
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”
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.”
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 20th,
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 16th,
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.
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