Kerouac: mad crazy bastard

Apparently, Viking is publishing an uncensored version of On The Road this year, in honor of the 50th anniversary of its publication. I'm all aflutter.

I've been reading Desolation Angels for the past few months and I have found it the slowest going of the three Kerouac books I've read. It more obviously, and less intelligibly, demonstrates his "Spontaneous Prose". I didn't think it was possible, but the plot is even less clear than that of On The Road. So I decided to do some outside reading about Jackie and the Beats to see if approaching it from a more crit-lit perspective would help me out...and I found this:

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your own life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatcal and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact picture of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

My favorite part of this list is how it devolves. From point 6 on, it just spirals down in the the maw of Keroauc's...spiritualism? Beat-ness? I'd suggest Buddhist, but there's very little of classical Buddhism in the ecstatic why that Kerouac advocates living life (a conundrum discussed at some length in Dharma Bums).

And I love how 19 pauses the whole list. Here you go, shooting through Kerouac's thoughts when all of that sudden you hit that grief snag. And then you follow it up with "the holy contour of life." Oh Jack, you get me every time.

This is the most concise piece Kerouac wrote about his method for "Spontaneous Prose", this is the "essentials" list. And despite the streamy consciousness of this list, its a goody. Especially for me, tucked away as I am in my own literary/editorial cap...I'll have to take a feather from Jack's (or Horse's) cap.

Straddling the Divide

I just stumbled on an interesting review of Steven Erikson's fantasy series the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I finally picked up the Bonehunters, the 6th book, and wanted to refresh my memory of the first 5 books. Gritty and realistic, told mostly from the perspective of individual soldiers in a vast imperial army, and set against the millennia spanning plots of gods and ascendents, these are not your typical D&D style fantasy. This worm's eye view in fantasy and sci-fi is a Good Thing, and the post-mortem popularity of Firefly and the steadily increasing fan-base of the Malazan books seem to agree with me.

For the sake of contrast between Erikson's populist narrative and traditional fantasy, the review referenced a Salon.com editorial by sci-fi author David Brin. The editorial detailed some of Tolkien's oft-ignored themes, all relating to a tenacious war between pragmatists and Romantics dating back to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution (which I recommend reading, as I am only touching on a quarter of his very interesting points). His underlying point is a valid one: where is nostalgic Romanticism going to get us? But his blind and optimistic faith in science to pull us out of an ever-deepening hole is disappointing.

Brin sees The Lord of the Rings as a condemnation of principles of the Enlightenment, such as "progress, egalitarianism, positive-sum games." This condemnation began with the Romantics, almost as soon as the Enlightenment got on its feet, "rejecting the very notion of progress." A counter rebellion to the rebellion (a funny little tug-of-war which has been ongoing in artistic movements ever since).

The Enlightenment was a rejection of feudalism, of the elite wielding power over the common man. The Romantics first allied themselves to this viewpoint, but as their heady ideals were summarily brought down to earth and dirtied (see the Industrial Revolution), they were disillusioned by "progress" and by the common man, who continued to want said progress.

And thus began a stand off which continues to this day. On the one side, the descendants of Enlightenment scientists, ever forging ahead to greater possibilities (or humanity's imminent destruction), and on the other, the descendants of the Romantics, who look back on old agrarian peasant life with nostalgia tinted glasses that filter out the filth and squalor.

Tolkien, along with his old compatriot C.S. Lewis, stood solidly on the Romantic side of this divide and the Lord of the Rings, says Brin, showcases this attitude. It's hard to ignore his point: the utopian nature of the Shire, of monarchic Gondor, of the noble, aloof elves, contrasted with the industrial nature of Mordor, the racial impurity and diversity of Mordor's forces.

Who fought for Gondor? A bunch of white guys determined to maintain the status quo (and some ghosts who had a debt to pay). Who fought for Morder? Everyone else in Middle Earth.

In short, Brin is advocating closer reading of our favorite fantasies. Expounding on this dynamic between Romantics and pragmatists seems to be a hobby of his. In another editorial about the same themes in Star Wars, he is slightly more heavy handed about the damage that such nostalgia can do. Are we teaching our children to look forward or backwards?

The problem with both these world views is that neither seems to look to the present. Gazing misty-eyed and nostalgic at 18th century village life is not going to address the fact that the majority of humanity are riding a diesel spewing steamroller toward Impending Doom. At the same time, looking eagerly forward to a Star Trek style brotherhood of humanity that benignly stewards the world is doesn't seem to be stopping weather patterns from getting screwier and screwier every year.

I admit to espousing a certain amount of elitism (a trait which Brin associates with the Romantic conundrum). I like my art high and incomprehensible to the masses, and my conversation heady, philosophical, and completely unpragmatic. There is a strain of fatalism in my worldview that I may have inherited from my father ("The world is doomed? Good riddance!"), and I generally feel nothing but contempt for "the common man."

At the same time, I hold on to a little hope that the world is salvageable, that humanity is not necessarily constrained by it's baser nature, that we can and will learn from the mistakes of our predecessors before it's too late. I been running up and down this teeter totter of forward-looking/nostalgic-gazing for years, until I read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and got myself standing firmly on the fulcrum of the seesaw.

According to Quinn/Ishmael, the reason our culture is not sustainable is the reason Ishmael names it the "Taker" culture: we have taken the responsibility of "the gods" into our own hands, or, in Christian terminology, eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But it was not humanity that did that, merely by being human.

Humanity is not, despite the easy and popular appeal of the idea, fundamentally flawed.

One of the most relevant examples given in the Quinn Canon is the Taker system of law and order. Law making is reactionary; even as the laws are made, the lawmakers know they will be broken. So they set up a series of punishments for breaking the laws. The laws are made assuming that people will act at a higher level than human nature dictates that humans will act. It is the laws that are flawed, not humanity itself.

Brin is saying that our children can learn from our mistakes and become better people. He argues against the Romantic assumption that human nature and experience are static. This resonates strongly with my optimistic side. But Quinn's assumption that human nature and experience are indeed static (in as much as any animal's ecological imperative to "go forth and multiply" is static), and we should look at the problems of the future from this angle (rather than the nebulous and uncertain hope that this time we'll be better people and learn from our mistakes, despite several thousand years of contradictory historical evidence), appeals to my more vocal and realistic pragmatic side.

And I think my pragmatic side is right. Technology alone is not going to do the trick. It is akin to treating a tumor with aspirin. I am not a primitivist (not yet, at any rate); I definitely think that technology has a part in the solution. But fixing the fundamental flaw in Taker culture is the only way to do away with the symptoms.