I’m interleaving my favorite books with a spiritual bent. Dharma Bums is cracking open the sky for me, like it did in college. So much beauty and hope in Jack’s heart and broken sadness in his soul. The campfire night before they climb for the summit, he says, “In my recent years of drinking and disappointment.” It was the alcohol that killed him. That and becoming unthethered from money worries. He could drink and smoke and party until his liver kicked it. He was not a happy famous writer.
The Razor’s Edge is reminding me what an odd book it was, but deep. I want to rewatch Bill Murray in the botched attempt at a movie. At the moment, I’m bogged down in the ending, a series of monologues Larry makes to the author. Yeah, Summerset is the identified author and narrator. Funny, that’s where I’m skating with hyperfiction. Who is the author and who is the protagonist? Are they always the same person? Does the omniscient voice play a part? Or is that just me again?
I guess now, I should open Siddhartha and Catcher, make it a full sweep.
Reading your old favorite books can be a powerful tonic. Your mind loves pattern recognition. (Sort of like AI.) The familiarity of the characters, maybe even the surprise left in the story, little details you forgot, or for me, the flow and pacing of the prose. Kerouac wrote on speed and booze, his prose blisters your mind with metaphor, crazy antics, and zen all in the course of a single paragraph. I want to be like John Muir in the book. I want to redo On the Road in my best friend’s Sprinter van, across Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and into California. Maybe I’ll go see the sweetest woman who ever loved me unconditionally. Or not.
Women can be a distraction. I understand this better since my last moonshot. I was writing, yes, but I was warped. She had a problem with setting a schedule and we’d drift on into the ones and twos, sometimes threes, before we could let the other’s body sleep. Wow.
Daniel Martin, by John Fowles, has a lyrically dense prose filled with darkness, sexual mischievousness, and flow. More highlighted sentences in my Kindle than almost any other author. Kerouac is the king for me, boy-o!
How our minds work is under investigation. They’ve put CT-scans on meditating monks who can light up different parts of their mind, or more importantly, shut them down. I do a microform of this: repeating the serenity prayer with my mind becomes a runaway meltdown of energy and language. “God grant me the serenity,” I say over and over. Sometimes I don’t even complete the prayer, just the first line. It works great anytime my mind needs to change the channel or change the pace and trajectory. I need sleep to stay well.
The books in my life have imprinted their patterns in mine. Holden’s voice is a common mental refrain, “Goddamn phonies!”
“Grant me the serenity, grant me the serenity, grant me the serenity.”
Like liquid cooling for overheating GPU clusters, images and words regenerated with chemicals and dramatic lighting. Most people are running with their “check engine” light on and an oil change that was due four months ago. Sleep limits their entertainment time. It’s good that hangovers provide feedback. But, if you’re not listening to your body or your mind, if you’re mindlessly scrolling and swiping, drinking and smoking, staying out past everyone’s bedtime while trying to hold down a job… If you’re running that pattern, it’s no surprise we have a lot of depression, drug use, and suicide. The body and mind are linked. You can try to be a religious drunk or a beatific drug addict like Kerouac and his crew, but it’s going to end early and poorly. It’s hard to believe old Jack died at 47, of liver poisoning. He also gave us a few signposts about the writing ahead for those of us who followed.
Techniques for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy/dumb saint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Book/movie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
He wrote On the Road in three weeks and Subterraneans in nine days. He burned hot. Cooled his fires with alcohol and died bitter and bloated. The fame and chicks didn’t help Jack at all. Seeing him on the Jack Allen show in videos, he’s hard to watch. A bit like my angry/drunk father. Oh, I never made that connection before. Hmm. I like to read him, not watch his readings. Jazzy sometimes, happy sometimes, but mostly bitter, even in his fame and inebriation. He wrote hard in the Dharma Bums to free his soul, to join with Gary Snyder and become a wandering bottisatva. If anything, he did bring rip roaring prose with run on sentences and no commas. Jack gives us permission to skip commas anytime we feel a rush coming on. Strong readers don’t need commas or plot or deep hidden meaning.
Opening the vein on page is the goal, I think, of a great writer. Bleed onto the page. Give the iron taste and fury to others who come along later. Kerouac’s is a cautionary tale. The naked run down the mountain in Bums is as funny as it gets. “You cannot fall off a mountain!”
This is the morning I am supposed to be wrapping up my creative projects. Getting ready for the contract work ahead. The anxiety I have is old residual trauma from my last two corporate jobs and vindictive managers. (Yes, it could’ve been me.) I am not worried about doing the work. I am worried that I won’t get the money soon enough to avoid some more painful interventions from the banks and creditors.
Today is beautiful. So are you. And according to Jack Kerouac,
“You’re a Genius all the time.”
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