On The Beats

Last year or two I been really going off on some mild obsession with the whole Kerouac beat thing: I think it started the last time I was on the road in Mexico back in fall ’09, this weird draw I had to San Miguel Allende which I later found out was where Neal Cassady died and also re-reading On The Road for maybe the third or forth time when I was in Mexico City. I think I got it in my head that there was something of their spirit of restless It desire in me – not necessarily reincarnation, but perhaps a carrying over, a passing of the torch or something. Certainly, in my own writing and life I’ve mused much about the Kerouac connection, thinking my book – Discovering Beautiful – an in-parts companion piece – the wildness, the hedonism, the lost, the found, the search – but a then going-beyond into the spirituality that Kerouac and co flirted with – which is why I subtitled it ‘On The Road To Somewhere’ – but never quite broke through into, always backsliding, as it seems to me, to booze, to the search for thrills and kicks, intellectualism and mad poetry and expression – ya know, just words wrapping around each other in interesting sentences but ultimately meaningless, insubstantial madness – fun stuff, like the nonsense I like the write sometimes.
    Of course, Kerouac’s mastery of language and poetry and imagery and the sheer energy he puts into his words – particularly On The Road – is something I can only dream of: I ain’t got nothin’ in those regards. But as to life – well I gotta say I feel he failed somewhat at that, consciously drinking himself to death and losing himself in bitterness and anger: ‘cos first and foremost your loyalty, surely, is to creating yourself as a realised human being, looking in the mirror and polishing away the tarnishes, ironing out the creases, seeing what works and what doesn’t and going beyond it all, forsaking each level of reality for the next when it grows old and tired and like a caterpillar we are ready to emerge anew into some other layer of existence. But booze and anger ain’t it. And that’s why I say I think he failed.
    Cassady, for his part, does seem to have gone beyond somewhat – but not enough. Ah well, what do I know? Booze and wildness are powerful lures: the point is, I wonder why I’m so hung up and fascinated with these guys when all at once I find their lifestyles and even personalities so distasteful. There’s so much I love about On The Road – not much, I have to say, about his other works – but would I want to hang out with the characters in that book? Even for five minutes? Probably not: probably as much as I’d want to hang out with the drunks and tramps of Leeds. And not even with the people those characters became in their later, post-adolescent years. Bill Burroughs and his mad bony head all shooting up junk and rapping endlessly about young boys’ cocks? Neal Cassady bouncing up and down and saying “yass! yass!” and Alan Ginsberg’s long mad wailing ‘poetry’ on doldrums and Lord knows what else? And Kerouac’s bitter drunk nonsenses as they all puff cigar smoke in my face and pop bennies and loll around in a big old bed posturing Rimbaud and tin-pot Buddhism while soldiers fight and die and roll sadly home in great clomping army boots still caked with the mud and blood of a ruined French farm? No, I shouldn’t think so.
    So why this fascination? Why me sharing emails with still fiery Carolyn Cassady, now eighty-eight years of age? Why pulling out library copies of practically unreadable novels like Visions of Cody and Doctor Sax and giving them a go? Why always listening to audiobook of On The Road, and two copies of it right now by my bed – the published version, the Original Scroll – always dipping in and thrilling at sentences like “the man was a good man: his truck was poor” and “there was even a Chinese” and “bourbon-orooni” and “they were delicious” and “this is a table that’ll last a thousand years” – and yass and roared and groaned and moaned, and all those adjectives you throw in there to not mean anything but give the impression of meaning – make everything holy, make everything sad or mad, call everything “the night” – the vast empty sadness of the black American night – the groaning continent – the holy road, holy Neal, holy everything – and: wherefore goes this sentence? Wither goest thou America? I love it.
    Shawn always used to tell me in sweet moments of encouragement, “you could be the new Kerouac.” I used to think he said it cos I was a hitchhiker and cos I wrote about it. But then lately I’ve found new meaning in that. I can’t write as well as Kerouac – and I can’t capture no spirit of a generation – too old, don’t know what this generation is, if there is one (doesn’t seem to be) – but there’s something in our philosophies that seem the same: just wanting to write, to type, to get everything out there: to plunge down into the depths of our own beings and bring it all back up to the surface to show the world and say, see this is what we’re all like deep down, in our darks, in our subconscious – and I’ll share shamelessly so you can realise you don’t need to feel no shame. To show the possibilities of a life. And to relate that life in full extent. Kerouac has his Dulouz Legend – and more and more what I feel, if I’m to continue on this writing path – cos, for sure, I sometimes feel that if the cup could pass from my lips and I could still be happy and fulfilled – always the number one criteria – then I would gladly let it go (Jonah and his whale) – more and more what I feel is that what I want to share is the entirety of the life I’ve led, will lead – to put it all out there in autobiographical splurges – like blogging, I suppose – of romance and living and fear and hope and experience and loss and goodness and day-to-day and women and, yes, holy road, and search and find and all all all of that: just simply this: to relate everything I ever felt and thought and did. Wouldn’t that be useful? So that future generations could look back and say, “there was once this guy…” All we want these days is fiction – made-up stories – pretty little tales with arcs and drama – but what value even Midnight’s Children compared to an actual account and history of Indian independence? What that but another pretty little clever man’s empty tellings? And worth nothing next to the true history of scrawled Pompeiian toilet wall graffiti on whores and faeces – even On The Road, enhanced reality as it is, ain’t factual enough for me. Why not just what actually happened? What so wrong with that? And so to leave, for posterity and whatever, the totality of a life in its actuality is what, in my grandest moments, I think of doing. And then I take a shit, and do the washing up, and think, nah, let’s watch a movie instead, play a bit of squash, be nothing more than yet another slowly-ripening human compost plodder. But but but – it is getting to that stage where…no, fuck that.
    The point is: I’m fascinated. And I don’t know why. And to make some sense of it I suppose I ought to slow down, stop typing gibberish, put some –
    The funny thing is – and what you may not believe – is that I didn’t actually read On The Road until late 2000 when all my drinking and wild and hedonistic days were over. When America was over too: I haven’t been back since before then. But I’d had it on my list because, of course, when I was hitching back and forth across the States in ’98 and ’99 every tenth person who picked me up would say, have you read On The Road? I knew it was something – I imagined it was a book about a hitchhiking man from the past – and I avoided it because I thought, why read when you can do? And who, anyway – what young man – wants to be out there discovering his own magic and philosophies and wonderment and then sit down and read it all in some long-before book? Might as well just go home: experience is teacher, not library. So I didn’t read it until I was safely done with hitchhiking through America and, even funnier thing is, I actually read it when found upon a shelf in Paris bourgeois apartment of these three French people I was madly living with trying desperately to all become Buddhas and Christs and emissaries of The Light – thinking ourselves sometimes that – and all we thought about then was yoga and meditation and not eating preservatives.
    So I pulled it off the shelf – and I read – and I found it filled me with the fever of making me want to live –to LIVE – to be out there and doing everything and forgetting all hang-ups in the pursuit of the thing that, if you listen to it, your heart will say, this is what you really want to do. It ain’t about drinking, roadtripping, being wild, mad, bebop, beat: it’s about THAT. Throw it all out the window and go go go – go for it, whatever the it may be. Roadtrip, travel, love, spirituality – whatever is your it. It shows you that all the shit things of life really are shit – boring ass shopping, paying the bills, living a life based upon making sure your stomach is always heavy and fat and filled: it don’t matter what your thing – it may not be no mad thing, no jazz thing, no road thing – “what’s your road huh? rainbow road? guppy road? holy madman road?” – but it’s whatever you truly want and love and dig.
    And, of course, for me, it transpires that much of what I want and love and dig is the road, travel, the it, and woman and expression and the word. So that’s why I dig it – and never, ever, whenever I pick up to flick through a few pages and end up reading more has it failed to fill me with that fever when in moments of comfort. The fever! That’s what I always say. And sometimes, even, “oh, my head RINGS” – laughing out loud (not really; a mere smirk and imagination of laughing out loud). Yes, I like the fever: the fever is good.
    But then, I read other Kerouac books – Desolation Angels, Big Sur – and it wasn’t quite there. There’s something in them – but it’s mostly sadness. No need to be a bum no more. Exposure to Buddhism but just thinking, hey, if I sit around passing bottles with my buddies and rap on Buddhist words like Tathagatha and form then I’m a Buddhist – instead of the necessary basic steps like, er, abstaining from intoxicants and working hard in your mind to go beyond anger, attachment, ignorance, all that stuff. The door was opened and the man said, no thanks. Same old deal of an author putting one great work out there and then all his other stuff that would never have been signed up as stand-alones – as submissions under some unknown’s name – following on because that’s business and it ain’t just merit alone that these things find their way into print. Poor old Kerouac: if only someone could’ve got through to him that, hey, this just ain’t that good; and the way you’re living ain’t that good either; and – slap! – shake it all out of him and wake him up and say, hm, perhaps practise a little of that Buddhism you spout but don’t know. But now I’m just typing and blathering and it’s all just lessons anyway, things for me to take on board and try and improve – for oft times our teachers don’t teach by their good example, but by their bad, and from that we say, hey, look where they went wrong, I think I’ll do the opposite. And that’s what the young and the impressionable need to learn from Kerouac and Cassady – they need to look at where that road led, at the bigger picture – at the effects their lives had on their families (read Carolyn Cassady’s Off The Road, for example) – and the sad old pre-aged ruined and twisted loners and losers they ended up: a dead body found by the railroad tracks in Mexico; a bloody exploded mess of a man pickled in whiskey and not even fifty. Not even fifty! Kerouac was a high school and university football star and he shoulda still been running around and enjoying the beauty of life and physical exercise in the human body way beyond the time when he was effectively a ruined old man. Not even fifty? I’ve played squash with – and had my ass right royally kicked by – guys in their fifties and sixties; played soccer with a man aged 72 once; seen septuagenarians agile and sprightly flicking their wrists on the badminton courts and giving swaggering young bucks what for. It ain’t no glorious pot of gold to pickle and cripple and miserably kill yourself when still in youth and prime.
    Live healthy lives, and pursue happiness above all else, I guess is what I’m saying. Getting drunk is never compatible with that, unless you really are young and are just experimenting with all the things that the world has to offer so as to know it for yourself. But normally it’s a running away, a hiding, a distraction and a mask. And what do we hide from? From nothing but ourselves. Our pain. Our discomfort. Our awkwardness. Our lack of self-love and confidence and loneliness. From our disconnection with our essence – our hearts and minds and souls. Our bodies no doubt tell us the truth of what’s good for us, when it revolts and pukes and says, get this shit out of me! But we don’t listen to our body or our mind or soul. Get to know them: that’s what I says. That’s what the whole thing is about.
    And then there’s Neal Cassady, who I feel somewhat closer to having read Carolyn Cassady’s book – although that, of course, is nothing but imagination, and I won’t even pretend it’s true. But poor old Neal, cursed always with his restless manicness and need for kicks and women. I wouldn’t wanna be him – but that he turns up having inspired Kerouac and therefore the whole beat thing right there again at the dawn of the hippy thing in amongst Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters is just wonderful and staggering and tickles me no end. Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Who dropped acid as part of some university program – the same acid that sent others like Richard Alpert off on mystical journeys to India where they found gurus and came back to the West full of glee and penned pivotal groovy hippy books like Be Here Now – and Tom Wolfe of course who wrote his sometimes awkwardly trying to be hip Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with once more looming large Cassady bouncing across its pages – and so much of my life seems wrapped up in all that. Reading Tom Wolfe while sitting on the street in San Diego as a dumbass unschooled twenty-year-old. Loving OFoTCN endlessly in my teenage bedroom on Betamax with my old still-friend Steve. Alpert and Altered State’s flotation tanks and my own acid experience and then of course Owsley and Monterey and Hendrix, who dominated my youth and spoke to me from beyond the grave, fifteen-year-old ears thrilled by his lyrics, fifteen-year-old eyes in love with his movements, his words, his playing, on Berkeley and Woodstock and the ’73 movie. And Berkeley and San Fran where it all happened – where Yogi Bhajan arrived – which I just skirted briefly. The road – the American road – Kerouac and Cassady zooming past corners and highways I recognised ‘cos I’d stood there and hitched. A whole line stretching out from their first beat post-war New York days through Road and Kesey and Alpert and the hippies and also stretching back, to Joyce and Pound and Wilde and Lee Miller right back to eighteenth-century rubbish bohemian poets swooning in their attics and bemoaning the world – and where did that line lead? All these things have brushed up against me as I’ve voyaged on my own straight line through life – haven’t sought them, have maybe just reached out and picked them like berries by the side of the path – but: where line go? Did it end? Did it reach maturity? Did it find flower in the breaking through and dispensing of hedonism, in quiet lovely lives spent in work and family and meditation and yoga as one imagines Kerouac and Cassady and ilk should probably have done? Did the line find balance? And I am on the line or if it?
    I don’t have much time for poetics: I find nothing of substance in Ginsberg. The man wanted, in my opinion, someone to say, hey man, you’re not making any sense: we know it’s fun to spout all wild and rap and play with words but perhaps calm down and see a therapist and get some reality. There’s a video on youtube of him and Cassady sitting in a bookstore smoking – there’s a signal right there: it don’t take much intelligence to know there’s something up if a man sees nothing wrong with sucking on carcinogenic chemicals which his body revolts and screams at but he don’t listen – and I defy any living person to make even one little bit of sense out of what they’re saying. James Joyce’s Ulysses? Don’t make me laugh. Your first loyalty is to your own sweet head and to not be mad. Although I’ll grant that silly expression is fun: sometimes I like to thrash my guitar and howl and gibber and so I suppose in that way I’m a hypocrite – though I don’t pretend there’s anything meaningful and deep about it, that it speaks something about the grand society, about the way people live, about what’s going down on this Earth of ours. Hell knows, I been mad myself: I know what of I speak. But transcend: go beyond: that’s the answer, I says.
    So where is the line? Have the answer? If so, would like to hear it. Is it in the art of Damien Hirst? The avant garde? Fuck knows: I know so little about all that stuff all I can do here is show myself as ignorant and stupid: though there ain’t no shame in that. Though I do know that while some good things may be weird and challenging, not all weird and challenging things are good. Who cares? All I want to know is where is the line, if the line’s still there? Or has the line died, submerged by the new world religion of buying stuff and having nice homes?
    No – the line goes on: the line broke off into spirituality, into religion, just as it always threatened to do with Kerouac and his boys. Wasn’t there a chap called Alan Watts? Didn’t he meet Suzuki? And didn’t they frown on him and let him stumble back to his kicks that once youth had passed were really no longer kicks at all but sad staggerings and tears? Cassady, for his part, got into Cayce, dipped a toe into the New Age and karma and wanted to see where all this stuff came from: past lives and present life hang-ups in upbringing or lack of it. Psychology: all the stuff we’re into now. The dinosaurs died and the line entered the hippies and birthed them – and from that, beyond flower-power and pot, there came the real blooming of Westernised Eastern spirituality – as imported by The Beatles, Alpert (now Ram Dass) and also exported by Yogi Bhajan and Rajneesh and all those other Indian gurus who flew over and saw a nation ripe for evolution and also awash with pretty young sexually-liberated girls. We got into yoga and meditation and Vipassana happened and grew and grew and we said: this is better than booze, than kicks, than running around wild not really doing anything; better than self-destruction and stupid mad expression; better than drugs and random fucking and materialism. We got high on that, and for a time we loved it and thought we’d found the It – it was all wrapped up in soul and heart and connection and tenderness and a different kind of expression and being healthy and happy and holy – but then we transcended that too, having realised we were once again bonkers, lost in visions of Mayan 2012 apocalypse, everybody channelling angels and pointless profound messages at each other, paying charlatans to get our reiki and get our DNA fixed, going mad seeking out all our past lives and inventing them as we went along with everyone we met; staring for hours into one another’s eyes, bliss the new drug, thinking it better, natural, that we only get higher and never come down, not understanding that that too is addiction and that, yes, there is a comedown too; and believing everything under the sun, having emptied our minds thinking them the enemy so that all our brains and intellect and discretion had fallen out into a big mushy pile on the floor that we sufi-danced on in our heart-filled madness because we had made it, man, universal enlightenment and every man a Buddha or a Christ, and everywhere we went in the outside world too – real or not – confirmations of that reflected in the eyes of equally starry and lost young maidens high on yoga and all deluded together trapped in a hall of endlessly reflecting infinite mirrors until one day someone went – SMASH! – and the whole thing fell crashing down around us. Oh, we said, it was just mirrors – and wept amongst the shards for a real long time, having seen the nature of our delusions. But then, looking up, we saw there was a world beyond the mirrors and the world was called BALANCE and the world looked not unlike the world we had left behind back during the revolution – the world had trees and people and supermarkets and food. The world had jobs and work and we decided to give them a try and found that the jobs and work did us good. The world had families too – the families we’d run away from, sought therapy to exorcise, studied and looked at from every possible angle – most of them abstract – and once taken apart jettisoned because everything is our mother – but we gave them a go anyway and found they too were good. This world was like the old world – but it was better. The foundations were stronger. It was built on more pillars. And the pillars were called MATERIAL, FAMILY, SEX, WORK/MONEY, CREATIVITY, EXERCISE/PHYSICAL and SPIRIT. The old world was lacking some of those: the mirrored world too. And the new world’s pillars were all shiny and new, having been buffed and repaired during THE GREAT WORK which had taken place: wherein men stopped beating women and learned about their feelings; wherein we all stopped poisoning ourselves and came to finally treasure our human bodies; wherein we understood the value of the material world but didn’t make ourselves slaves to it; for also we understood the true treasure was in the befriending of our souls and spending a big chunk of our time playing with them – and playing, even, the games they wanted to play. All the pillars are universal – they are everywhere and everywhen – and we realised that some of our old pillars – half-pillars; they supported nothing – were merely but passing fads, never universal, particular only to one time or place. We tossed out all that was not universal, that was not beneficial – that, in a nutshell, didn’t work – and what worked became our guiding principal. We pushed aside certain things – like booze, like madness, like anger, like bitterness – not because they were morally wrong but because they simply didn’t work for us anymore – we could find as much satisfaction in them as a teenager could find in a baby’s rattle. We did what made us feel good – as all are doing always, of course – but the things had changed. We were born into the new world where work and family and spirituality and pursuing one’s own heartdream could all exist in compatibility, and we treasured our bodies and the things our bodies could do because we knew the body was life, and hurting the body was hating life. We no longer wanted to hate anything: even that for which we felt disdain we no longer hated, realising that the hate would still be ours, and hate paints an ugly spread on anybody’s face. We went beyond all we had previously known.
    Is that the line? Are those just words? Is it happening? Is it real? And where me in all this, shrouded as I am still by my own lackings in upbringing, by my own unwillingness to engage with the world and with life? Or is it enough merely to speak the words of the person who I may well be next lifetime but who, no matter how much I struggle and strive, and despite understanding with my brain and sometimes reaching out to touch and even feel, I simply always fall short of embodying and being? My vision is beyond my reality: ‘tis the nature of vision, I suppose. And even here an opportunity to relax, let go, smile and bring a light heart, for all is unfolding at correct pace and even though we do it never a real reason to get down on oneself: no purpose.
    So: shine a light.