20 Amphetamine-Fueled Days

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down." — Jack Kerouac (Wikipedia)

"Not all the writing I do is divinely inspired. The difference is tangible. Many writers who have felt guided by unseen spirits testify that the writing poured forth with ease. Much of the time we labor over our words." - bell hooks

Those last posts, graceless labor, and I am haunted read it yourself below & your revelation vs spinning silly tales for money & Richard's comment too:

Just as Thomas Friedman promised us that country’s with MacDonalds franchises will never go to war with one another, so I will guarantee that no blogger will ever provide lasting wisdom to later generations. - Andrew Keen

Yeah they thought that monkeys wrote my stuff too. "That's not writing - that's typewriting." No, you know what I mean. It's the lasting wisdom bit. Jack, I can't believe I missed your exhibit in San Francisco.

It's not my exhibit. So what, anyhow, you didnt hear about it cause you were in Thailand and Sri Lanka with real people forgodsake why do you want to check out rolls of paper?

To keep the rhythm rolling, he fed the long and winding scroll into his typewriter to avoid changing paper and not disrupt the fast-paced, single-spaced story of two friends on the road to becoming iconic rebels by way of cross-country escapades, Mexican whorehouses and Frisco's Skid Row. - San Francisco Chronicle, January 18, 2006

(You know you can put the quotes in later - you're spoiling the flow). Yeh, you're right. Especially about visiting yellow rolls of paper. Hold on, they might not know that you wrote On the Road in 20 days.

20 days. There's 20 days left to go to the 1906 Earthquake centennial.

Enough backstory that earthquake thing reminds me:

...Kerouac's celebrated TV appearance on the Steve Allen show, reading from "On the Road," and there is one naked moment, unlike anything you'll ever hear on TV today, when Kerouac blurts, "I wrote the book because we're all gonna die." Whatever blemishes and indulgences mar Kerouac's writing, that mortality-driven urgency continues to animate it for us. - Scott Rosenberg

This isn't a Cinderella story, Jack implies. He ain't no cheerleader fairy or prince. This isn't a one-night-stand (although you know he looks like my ex-boyfriend). Nope, soul-buds.

Bud, he calls me that sometimes. Of course we're aware that the flowering is ripe. Surround myself with good company on the edge too, that's one of the lessons he learned. Don't rest too long on the edge - that fence is limbo-land too.

Anyway, we don't talk much. Not like when Blake visited Ginsberg in Harlem '48. Not like that at all.

I walked to the park bench in my neighborhood yesterday and a lot was absorbed in silence.

Sometimes he nudges me to read a passage from one of his books, or a poem sketch, or haiku or a letter to Ginsberg or Snyder. Forget the history lessons. Read the work. That's what speaks volumes.

No scolding, ripping apart. Don't have to really rub it in I've been writing crapola. He only inspires. Been blocked on how to do the tsunami writing too. Aghhh, there's no villain, no conflict - hence no plot! Ya think On the Road had a plot? Shit, it's about love for everyone, everything - drug dealers, the down and out, everyone - everyone else thinks is a loser.

"Sketching...everything activates in front of you in myraid profusion, you just have to  purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% personal honesty." - Jack Kerouac in intro to Book of Sketches

I realize now how brave that was. Is.

I walked in nature for the first time since I came home from Asia last Thursday, or Friday. I'm as far as you get from warm dry car on Wildcat Canyon trail, which really does have cougars on it sometimes if you are lucky, when it starts to drizzle. Lately these drizzles flick to torrents around here. Mind leaps, peace shatters, damn, I'm going to get soaked.

Then would come wild hysterical drizzling rain, from the south, in the wind, and I'd say "The taste of rain, why kneel?" and I'd say "Time for hot coffee and a cigaratte, boys," addressing my imaginary bhikkus [hey, you know I, not Jack, met Richard the rebel monk from Penang that does smoke]. The moon became full and huge and with it came Aurora  Borealis over Mount Hozomeeen  ("Look at the void and it is even stiller," Han Shan had said in Japhy's translation); and in fact I was so still all I had to do was shift my crossed legs in the alpine grass and I could hear the hoofs of deers running away somewhere. Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed  see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boosting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and planets and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence. - Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

"Taste the rain!" I recall. Of course. Taste the rain, why kneel? This. This is it. The church, the altar, the pews, the universe in a grain of sand. I let my neck go soft and gaze upward, the creek by my side. Open mouth and lick the sky.

Lick the sky, my mommy-artist friend Ruby would say. Her way of saying the Unnameable Infinity is that close to our face we literally can lick it.

I would have been deliriously soaked but that wasn't in the cards. The rain gently caressed and slipped into stillness instead.

"This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia," [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti [, City Lights bookstore owner and publisher of Howl & other Beats] said with a guilty smile. "I'm interested in the future." - SF Chron

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all." — Allen Ginsberg (Wikipedia)

[You know the work is not finished. Yeah Jack I know that. I know it got derailed.]

"I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's." — Bob Dylan (Wikipedia)

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality...woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearnings of the human soul." - Kerouac

"This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out." - Kerouac

"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away," says Jack in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. "I insist on your freedom."

...throw it away and lick the sky

credits Unattributed Jack quotes from Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and The Beat Generation (highly recommend); photo from Desolation Peak in National Geo's "Hiking Jack Kerouac's North Cascades".

tags licking the sky making a difference beatblog art innovation startup passion buddhism inspiration jack kerouac beat generation counterculture literature creativity spirituality

Comments

[Paul Maher Jr.]

Great Kerouac blog! Keep spreading the good word . . .

[Stavro]

Liking Kerouac and maybe even understanding him seems a very solitary place to be these days.
So, thank you for this blog!!
Best
Stavro

[Curt Worden]

To all those who love Jack Kerouac - New Documentary
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur. http://www.kerouacfilms.com