by Jack Kerouac
“…where the sun is setting over black grimes and further entanglements and gatherings of steel that are lost in a rosy distance behind the sun…” is the same panoramic consciousness I study now with Tibetan Lama Trungpa…—“woke up just before dawn, dug the Mississippi again…thought, ‘This night has names’…”
Then I discover that I influenced him back. the “monkey image” was a robot fortuneteller in monkey plaster brown face that selected your fate cards on Times Square Pokerino chance-game arcade.
Sketches of L.A.—the memorable noticing of the “dishipped dis-loined” Jap & Mex kids…“over the sidewalk…spindly sexless ghosts…”—a nice classic Kerouac personal perception sentence of historic import, you see these thin gentle acid head kids decades later sexy & spindly legged playing Electric guitars in Omaha.
And even as I read this, May 24 1972 quarter century later new generation of Denver 15 year old shining eyed heroes from last night wander up Colfax in gangs looking for a place to eat spiritual food and consult the Old Man Redeemer, Paul with bright blond tough hair, Phil who can play Tibetan mantras on the guitar, a thin lawyer’s son who let himself be screwed by big funny fat Prexy of Denver Gay Lib, Tex on bicycle zooming off at 15 for a joint at home to bring us, 21 year old Dave who sat up all night high on acid on the Capitol steps observing stars over Ancient Denver, lightbulbs of Hilton where I jack off. Larimer Street’s torn down by mad businessmen beastly for money progress, a bunch of selfish stupid bums who cut the heart out of the city ignorant of what they were doing to history for the sake of another horrible Fascist 1984 insurance building air-condition-windows sealed so you can’t open ’em up to smell the vomit of the past or jump out into a sea of wine sloshing out of an old pawnshop where Cody’s father pissed in his pants. But it’s all those myriad new boys of Denver 15 years old and beautiful maybe they’ll even sleep with Walt Whitman & his grandmother still returned to the scene—defying History, Defying the Prexy, Defying Washington Congress, Governor Love, Vice-Governor drunken Vander Hoof—who cleft the Devil’s foot?—and sit up all night mystic vigil over Nation and Denver praying God for Unknown Peace, pestered by bumbs winos governors me & their own cops, crying for the world like Neal. Thousands of children now, millions of children now, orphaned in America by the War, crying for the United States to repent & love them again. While gangs of sheriffs line up their fat asses on the bench and listen to sick sex stories about kids fornicating in the mountains and prepare their tear gas for the July all saints Be-In Holy Guru Adoration American boys girls spiritual jamboree.
The Tape: a New Section of the Novel. Begins, if anybody doesn’t know, how could they? Neal telling Jack the story of what it was like Summer 1947 we hitched from Denver to New Waverley Texas, so N. is telling Jack about Bill Burroughs’ marijuana garden farm in E. Texas Bayou Country, that’s how the real tape maybe 4 years later begins in recollection, for the Great Rememberer.
Neal & Jack discussing my Green Automobile Vow. of course Neal wasn’t entirely romantically frank with Jack…it was just a moment of life anyway—We vowed to own & accept each others bodies & souls & trade souls & help each other into heaven, while on Earth. and the incident of the bed—which never did get told—dominates the next 30 pages of conversation—“the second or third or fourth time you tell about it or say something like that, why it comes out different and it becomes more & more modified until it becomes any little thing that you say…” Neal and I had no mutual bed to sleep together in, I was eager, so tried to build one out of 2 army cots with Hunke’s help, a miserable symbolic failure. “I couldn’t stand him touching me,” says Neal somewhere. He didn’t help build the Love Bed, tho I pleaded.
One section in mid-tape—Neal trying to explain the fragmentation (due to grass) of his thought speech process.
The entire tape section seems to be one set of nights on recently discovered grass (tea); and Exploring the mind blanks & impressions that tea creates is the subject, unaltered & unadorned, of the strange apparently fragmentary tape—
The halts, switches, emptiness, quixotic chatters disconnections, meaninglessness, occasional summary piths, all are a “slice of life” exactly reproduced significant because
1) Vocal familiar friendly teahead life talk had never been transcribed & examined consciously like Warhol 20 years later examined Campbell Soup Cans
2) Despite monotony, the gaps & changes (like Warhol’s Empire State Movie) (watching Empire State eight hours all nite all day with one Camera eye) are dramatic
3) It leads somewhere, beginning sorta boring nowhere
4) It is interesting if you love or know the characters & want their reality
5) It’s real
6) It’s art because at that point in progress of Jack’s art he began transcribing first thoughts of true mind in American speech, and as an objective sample of that, he turned attention to the taped actual teahead-high speech of his model-hero, and placed that in the center of his book as an actual sample of the Reality he was otherwise Rhapsodizing.
—He actually writes about writing, just as the subject of book is Visions of mind, just as the hero is real, just as the scene is an actual tape of the hero talking about his memories & visions, just as the actual hero-author tape-transcribed becomes a living scene of an art worked book in progress prosed; so part of that scene is author & hero explaining their speech & prose & mind to each other, so introduced here also is the book-writer writing a sentence of his book, in the scene of the book he’s writing—that’s one scene itself.
This was time of DeKooning, Kline & gesture painting, Abstract Expressionism as ’twas called just about to become famous in public Consciousness. Parallel consciousness of the materials (mind language) was here enwrit by Kerouac.
The style, emptiness and all, was simultaneous and later much explored, exploited artfully & gracefully & embellished as in N.Y. school, & Projective verse. This is as ‘twere breakthru & historic first incidence of that later-universal American style of “Anything we do is art.” Read Frank O’Hara on Personism.
The art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing, in the attention to the happening, in the sacramentalization of everyday reality, the God-worship in the present conversation, no matter what.
Thus the tape may be read not as hung up & boring which it sometimes is, but as a spontaneous Ritual performed once & never repeated, in full consciousness that every yawn & syllable uttered would be eternal—and here it is immortalized after all by the Great Rememberer and his Cast of Characters remembering themselves while still alive.
Dramatically, what’s interesting is that we catch Neal at a time when self-questioning and early exhaustion of lyric love, self-abuse, have dried up his expositional flow & he’s considering (as many do at his age) the futility & repetitiveness of most of his own talk. This at a moment when Kerouac is expecting Saintly Discourse; a moment frustrating for all. Also at a time early in T-consciousness in U.S. when Neal was smoking experimentally excessively, that is all the time, & experiencing such aphasia or language disconnection & emotional alienation as that experiment might cause, as well as awe at the emptiness of mind which simultaneous is both mystical Virtue, & psychological pathology. “Man I’m thinking. I’ve just spent the last minute thinking and I had a complete block.”
And the tape coheres with serious solemn discussion of their lives.
Also, note, early Benzedrine (inhaler tube) ingestion experiments. the beginning of amphetamine use, Neal’s real Madness & death. Wife Carolyn was afraid of the grass.
Considering the rarity of grass those days, here’s an exposition of early white grass manners; grass shortage, tiny roaches, burning your lips & fingers to conserve the least smidgen…
Incidentally, Neal spent several years in jail a decade later & lost his family type RR job as result of giving a couple joints to a car full of agents who gave him a ride. So he was an early political prisoner.
* * *
This book pays close attenti
on to the music, & the meaning or conversational personal intention of the musicians historically in what they’re laying down (here Coleman Hawkins & After You’re Gone).
After all the subsequent Paris Reviews, Playboys, Rolling Stones & underground newspaper interviews, Jack’s style of transcription of taped conversation is impeccably accurate in syntax punctuation—separation of elements for clarity…labeling of voices, parenthesizing of interruptions. a model to study.
* * *
Jack’s explanation of the prose of Old Bull Balloon to Neal in mid-novel, proves this “work in progress” was an incremental journal composed of fragments transcribed or scribed on the run, remembering events simultaneous with their happening (as if high on tea)—an instant passes into the past and in a second it’s deeply buried as a billion years, so the instant (replay) rememorization of the just-passed moment (high on tea) causes awe and is matter for high art.
Tape continues with samples of conversations about what each was doing each year, “Neal—I know ’44 backwards & forwards”—as earlier Neal’d said that at age seven with Mexican boy going to Reform school he’d started complete sexual history account & it took all term to expound.
—And many more interesting fragments of Anecdotes—hero-legends which for some are public property, for long-hair historians if any history’s left to us after our massive bomb-annihilation War in Indochina—i.e. how Kerouac quit football.
Continues, a good sample of intense casual conversation, detail recall, filling in personal history, the oral tradition of History or Herstory—what happended way back when—who knew who how come who came?—How Jack met Huncke, Jack telling Neal how he met Bill Burroughs, his first Benny trip, his first blowjob with girlfriend early—the details of our own life, just like you tell your new love the whole history of your inner & outer lives—
Will a Concordance of Names be Done ever? Did Jack leave a final Concordance behind? Who’ll do it, even if we don’t know who’ll publish it?
And History!? as I heard Olson: “Private is Public: and Public is how we behave.”
—Neal who died of amphetamine decay telling how when exactly he first tasted that drug in form of Benzedrine Inhaler—Herodotean History.
And then Jack & Neal go deep into intimate conversation about all mutual concerns, their first meetings & first excitements, first blowjobs & drugs—this lyricism belongs to an age of discovery, to younger people checking up on each other’s consciousness-stages & growths. Once you fall in love five times & tell the story 5 times over it loses magic—unless as older person you fall in love again—then you sadly tell the story again, bemused.
* * *
“Alternate Rest & Labor Long Endure” and “If thou Desire Rest Desire Not too Much” chiseled on Denver Post Office Marble Rest-Bench: See Neal’s First Third recall of same.
* * *
Portrait of Ed (Gray) White—reading this book, some chapters are like excavating a tomb.
Continues, heartbreakingly light conversations about drinking, about “what are your good reasons for being lush?” After Jack’s announcement several pages earlier that he’d become a drunk, or lush.
Same preoccupation as present 1972 youth generation with Pop music’s soul is detailed for late 40s.
Hal King’s assertion “Poet is much more important than the philosopher”—confounded & expanded Neal’s mind—instantly—And Neal in great speech to Jack recapitulates universal adolescent philosophic mind-history, in brief, forever, and shows an escape into creation, Zen, reality, wit & death “…if you have to go through a thought again and again pretty soon it becomes an abstraction of the thought and you still follow the form and structure of it but…”
By now we see the beauty of the tapes that Jack cherished, that they are inclusive samples of complete exchange of information and love thoughts between two men, each giving his mind history to the other—The remarkable situation—which we are privileged to witness thru these creaky tapes transcribed by now dead hand—of Kerouac the great rememberer on quiet evening 1950 or 1951 with Neal Cassady the great experiencer & Midwest driver and talker, exchanging their personal histories & gossiping intimately of their eternities—Here’s representative sample of those evenings, and we can take as model their exchange & see that our own lives also have secrets, mysteries, explanations & loves equal to those of feeble seeking heroes past—another generation has perhaps surpassed Neal & Jack conversing in midnite intimacy—If it hasn’t discovered that “huge confessional night” then this tape transcript is fit model. If it’s surpassed and more coherent these days—I doubt it!?!—but then, this is ancient history—if History’s interesting now that America has near destroyed the human compassionate world still surviving as in fragments of bewildering conversation between these two dead souls.
* * *
So the tape, five nights of conscious talk, tells history between folk, and their friends—Neal’s wife Carolyn enters at last, Charlie Low & other real Persons from that year’s Frisco—and ends with radio Black Preacher calling Jesus in the night, an example of chanted speech which leads Jack’s prose artistry up to new level of creation: to Imitation of the Tape in Heav’n.
* * *
26 May, 1972, Denver Hilton
Continuing Reading Visions of Cody, 4 June, 1972. Babbs Montana (Cabin on East side of Glacier Park). Imitation of the Tape (in Heaven)—How does this differ from gibberish? It’s Kerouac’s gibberish, Kerouackishly inspired, full of gemmy little fragments of Literature—“…all our B-movies taught us what we know about paranoia…—get high on T, and go see them mope and murp & muckle in a mad dream?”
This much before an era of TV inspired camp; Kerouac began the nostalgia for King Kong, reinforced by Cassady’s mantra “King Kong plays Ping Pong w/his Ding Dong.”—but that T passage is a perfect innocent early recognition of a sense of Pop Camp human end-of-World Nostalgia circa 1952 that snows the world even Montana 1972.
* * *
“AT THIS POINT IN HIS DREAM DULUOZ WOKE UP” by now the author K.’d obviously gave up entirely on American Lit., on Town & City, on On the Road, on Himself & his history, and let his mind loose. the resulting book is full of charming sounds & jokes, he didn’t think he was Finnegan’s wake; but some American Mouther Fucker.
Presenting Art Rodrique first baseman for Phila. Pontiacs—a parody of his own serious American style (as he had parodied “energetic girl seen around poolhalls of Denver”) “…Art Rodrique, who, in drowsy afternoons when the clouds over Massachusetts floated past the upper panes of my window…” Same panoramic consciousness revealed—that same sensation in Eternal stillness as T.S. Eliot’s Dust-Motes thru sunlit windowpane…The Idyl Idyllic Drowsy Afternoon of musing & masturbation sleepy consciousness.
Continues, with musings on his own imaginary Little League Universe which, a densely articulated preadolescent fantasy, intelligent Jack preserved completely for posterity—as a reminder of Typology & exquisiteness of youthful U.S. Consciousness circa 1930s—
An aspect of the total theme itself’s announced as “a great essay about the wonders of the world as it continually flashes up in retrospect…”
Here’s an analysis of his fall from College Window innocence, & American innocence too—Where the “alienation” is now obvious & Frightful filled with Jelly Bombs Nazi Vietnam Monsters—back in 1951–52 Jack saw it as a change of insouciance going into a bar…something subtle as that “…there’s no sense of neighborhood any more”—and that’s the Town & the City’s tragic theme. “Beyond this old honesty there can only be thieves” and that means Nixon & Bebe Rebozo. So that “looking at a man in the eye is now queer.” a perfect expression, in Whitmanic terms, of what went wrong when two American males muscles biceps tensely meet on the street: Low panhandler homosexual dopefiend mugger communist, Paranoia.
The book’s a book, also of Fragmentary Essays, American & autobiographical—the sketch of Mark Van Doren contains Jack’s only novelistic record of his i
maginary epic on the Chinese “Giggling Lings”—a pre Han Shan Zen laundry Sunday flash.
And many simple just historical perceptions—a grab bag!—like the note on NY culture & the Luce influence parenthesis (“this is what you hear in New York all the time, this week’s Life, last week’s Time, their concepts are all bought up…well, that was pretty neat I must say”) talking maybe about intellectual circle John Clellon Holmes & Alan Harrington, or else friend Hal Chases’ Vision of Ed Stringham’s N.Y.—or Burroughs.
There follows a Vision of Floating down the Mississippi smoking corncob pipe of marijuana, a sort of literary readjustment of perspectives on the American Prose Vision scene from Twain to Hemingway. Lots of Room to move around, rambling Jack, age 29 years ten months & 29 days when he wrote that. and he died in his old October too.
June 4, 1972 Reading Visions of Cody
Looking out wood Window
Hot windy afternoon in Montany
Horse standing in dandelions
Blue jeep dusting uproad
Magpie flying over gas station.
But his conception of generations was there all along—“I just thought, like the little blubbery gubbery guy in the movies with the goopy lip and bald head and wet eyes know him? now think hard Americans of my generation! ahem, eek!” even! combined w/Movies’ W.C. Fields. and a hot, burbling communicative eagerly talking confessing hipster American too. (As he pointed out in Origins of Beat Generation discourse half decade later.)
There’s a lot of play—the key is the exaggerated Shakesperian or Victorian-Rhetorical sounds, sometimes insanely witty. as far as mind piercing sentences are concerned, English professors, a lot of this book is addressed to serious English professor Prose Writers, “…in the vale, a child’s melted ice cream, extreme, lies flogibating in the wet hot pavement of the afternoon upon which housewives angularly stalk with knockkneed dispairs…”
