Visions of Cody
Page 58
Thence Jack’s orgiastic description of tropical bugs in his shoe, the shocked American boy’s vision of a jungle gas station that’d make a “good Atlantic Whiteflash man go pale.”
As to Jack’s “political stance” visiting Mexico—“The Indians with hands outstretched expect us three galoots goofing in an old V-8 to come over and give them dollars; they don’t know we discovered the atom bomb yet, they only vaguely heard about it. We’ll give it to them, alright….” Sounds like Celine, except continues really sympatico, gentler.
But immediate recognition of the Biblical Patriarch archetype in the Fellaheen fathers—The Bible for Catholic Neal & Jack those days was the only immediate American Mind-entry to the Primeval earth-conscious non-machine populace that inhabits 80% of the World—“Jeremiacal hoboes lounge, shepherds by trade…I can see the hand of God. The future’s in Fellaheen. At Actopan this Biblical plateau begins,—it’s reached by the mountains of faith only. I know that I will someday live in a land like this—I did long ago.” Heartbreaking prophecy. and intelligent Neal’d said, “‘What they want has already crumbled in a rubbish heap—they want banks.’”
Ah! the Shrouded Stranger reappears again (he’ll be present in Dr. Sax).
* * *
Jack Kerouac didn’t write this book for money, he wrote it for love, he gave it away to the world; not even for fame, but as an explanation and prayer to his fellow mortals, and gods, with naked motive, and humble piety search—That’s what makes it a work of primitive genius that stands next to Douanier Rousseau, and sits well beside Tom Wolfe’s Time & River (which Thos. Mann from his European Eminence said was the great prose of America) & sits beside Tolstoi for its prayers.
No other author not even Tolstoi had to contend with the Decline of the West; the vision in the Cracks of the American sidewalk.
* * *
But the shrouded stranger’s his Mother, he’s smothered by the shroudy stranger’s “dress”!
Therefore the first Frantic exhilarated realization of social freedom different from rules & regulations posited as eternal in American Presumption middleclass grammar-school media propaganda—Taken for eternal Midcentury America was all along camp, shallow camp upheld onstage with a million dollar production number trying to pass itself off as old and traditional as the Pyramid imitated on the Dollar Bill; just a bunch of inflated Bucks in U.S.A. 1920-1950. An era that had to end, an era that died of its own shrunken-hearted wars, Korea taken for granted, Vietnam just beginning—remember that while Jack wrote this book the U.S. was paying France enough money exactly equal to the official French expenditure in its last selfish bitter hopeless egotistic murderous (corrupt! General Raul Salan organized clandestine opium trade to pay for unofficial French military activities) War against Indochina. What a Fraud, the whole of Western (and Eastern) civilization! “‘I’ve never, I never knew, anything like this!!!…in Denver they have mass arrests if girls and boys get together in big hot crowds like this—whee!’”—Yeah, 20 years later they did have mass arrests, & for exactly same reasons, as crowds of kids made love not war. Above Neal was reacting to first sight of crowded Mexican drunken dancehall night.
— So we see the end of the American road is the U.S. boy’s conscious discovery of the eternal Natural Man, primitive, ancient Biblical or Josephaic Shepherd or Khartoum Mongolian Gnothic Celtic, thus the magic political formulation idiotically stark sanely presented on p. 387—a quote from the mustached Vice Regent Consul of Cold War Empire & a quote from Jackey Keracky—
“False nonsense”—Acheson, 1952
“You’ve got to legalize the Fellaheen”—Duluoz, 1952
Another Vision of Neal: returned from Mexican Discovery excitements to get Bourgeois married in Bohemian Frisco 1950, seen in photograph healthy, & Jack’s paean to that image: “He’s an institution by himself. He has the strength of the bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat all at once, he out Marxes Marx, he’s a lad….”
A lovely passage follows, prophesying the children’s vision of their own daddys thru these photos, this Art. That mellow Prophecy’s already come true.
The mad road passage on America, lifted from here & placed somewhere in the text of On the Road—It’s a paraphrase of Crane, a Whitmanic heroic passage of prayers, still innocent in the America of our early lives. Perhaps one of the most perfect & characteristic in all Kerouac’s canon—complete photograph reference to the whole geographic & cultural nation—Could practically make a National anthem of it: “The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route…” Even Jack at first didn’t know why he used that tarpaulin adjective, it arrived like Shakespeare from his magic mind, but t’was the tarpaulin covering perishable lumber foods in the backs of haul trucks flapping he was referring to here.
That sentence was Jack’s own choice illustration of the Tightness of his way of prose, that it brought forth informational images in unheardof combinations (Burroughs later had to cut up prose pages with a razor & rearrange reassemble his sentences to get the same unexpected mysteriously logical exactitudes, like “wind hand caught in the door”—) the rational (“academic”) dumb or stupidly logical mind could never assemble from its storehouse of wisdom. “Tarpaulin power,” Factual, American, Shakespearean fast, full of Data, presentational & active, unexpectedly swift intelligence freed to discourse fast as mind itself—“plant your prisons in the basin of the Utah moon—…purl your Mexican rib neck, America. Cody’s going home, going home.”
Next read the great essay on Lester Young, Mississippi & America, another magnetic magnificent purple passage ending “…muddy news from the land and a roar of subterranean excitement that is like the vibration of the entire land sucked of its gut in mad midnight, fevered, hot, the big mudhole rank Clawpole old frogular pawed-soul titanic Mississippi from the North, full of Wires, cold wood and horn,” Such beautiful energy (this only the Coda & end of the sentence-passage)—such breath—as the Lester Saxophone chorus he’ll go on to describe—that one invention, one word-association, succeeds another, accepted, recorded, polific strung together logical, mouthed & vowlic, successful as Mantra, extensive as mind’s changes & recalls, generous and powerful both, extravagant for free, excellent as excelling Duty and giving more, All. Such prose no American had imagined, such Bodhisattvic kind king mind intention—Precisely a so unPure mind-stuff that has vowed release & illumination for all sentient Americans (such is the language, as of U.S.A.)—“New Buddha of American Prose” a precise characterization no mistake no error. Prophecy comes because it comes from the heart—Om Ah Hum Ah La La Ho!
Thus Kerouac’s own homage to Charles Atkinson translation of Spengler’s poem Decline of the West—for the long germanic sentences’ continuous energy.
Neal came back, in NY third time to collect Jack—“old buddies of the night grown sad, just like once exuberant basketball quintets meeting in sad maturity hotel lobbies with their shamefaced wives (in Worcester).”
And why this paean to Neal—? It is a consistent panegyric to heroism of mind, to an American Person that Whitman sought, among large magnificent healthy persons—The opposite of the sometimes slothful sometimes active selfish conspicuous-consumption Birchite Junky that has run America into a grave like Nixon and all our lost Presidents & their supporters—What Whitman wanted, Kerouac celebrated. Someone large-minded as the Tetons and green valleys of Wyoming, one who appreciates the Land Nature gave us (or we took), not an exploiter who wants to sit in an airconditioned office skyscraper trailer shuffle papers and sell America down the polluted river as real estate, as America was sold What do the pine trees think of that, standing in snow-silent armies on Rendezvous Mountainside? Oh the tears of it all! all the Deaths for Used Car Salesmen, suffocation of Souls for the Pentagon abuilding whilst this Jack’s book was writ.
Not to forget the books’ intuitive historicity—yes all the scattered passages mentioning the construction of Pentagon in Arlington. Jack mistook it for a southern dra
wl US township.
“The holy Coast is done, the holy Road is over.” Jack thought Neal’d gone back to California marriage would settle down be silent & die of old age—little he knew the psychedelic Bus, as if On the Road transported to Heaven, would ride again thru America, the Great Vehicle painted Rainbow colored as Mahayana Illusion with its tantric cool-aid & celestial passengers playing their Merry Pranks “Further” thru the land, “A Vote for Goldwater is a Vote for Fun” sign painted on side en route south U.S. to find sad drunken Jack withdrawn into Northport L.I. “sorrows in a house.”—Neal then drove out to get unwilling surprised Jack, enthusiastic but speechless high bring him back to acid apartment on Park Ave. crowded at midnite with 50 pranksters bus passengers all cynically expectant & starry eyed worshiping—The old red face W.C. Fields Toad Guru trembling shy hungover sick potbellied Master tenderly came back to the city afraid to drink himself to death—a Park Avenue apartment the Great Union Reunion Kerouac Cassady Kesey & Friends all together at last under unofficial mock but real Klieg Lights with microphone reverb feedback wires snaking all over the electrified household living rom floor 86th St. upper east side—An American Flag draped over the couch, on which shocked Jack refused to sit—Kesey respectful welcoming & silent, fatherly timid host, myself marveling and sad, it was all out of my hands now, History was even out of Jack’s hands now, he’d already written it 13 years before, he could only watch hopelessly one of his more magically colored prophecy shows, the Hope Show of Ghost Wisdoms made Modern Chemical & Mechanic, in this Kali Yuga, he knew the worser death gloom to come, already on him in his alcohol ridden trembling no longer sexually tender looking corpus—Anyway, O clouds over Tetons, great Rain Clouds over Idaho, lowbellied cumulus over Grosse Ventre, Rain!—the conversation in that brilliant lit apartment in Manhattan 1964 was sparse halting sad disappointing yet absolutely real, & thus recorded on tape as Jack already did, as well as (new era technology 13 years later Spenglerian Time) on Film! O Rain spoils’t thou mans toys & images? Washest Time? and then the Bright Vast bus on the Magic road went honking up to Leary’s Millbrook Tantric Mansion! What Eras’re ushered in on us?
The last pages, “all America marching to this last land.”
The book was a dirge for America, for its heroes’ deaths too, but then who could know except in the Unconscious?—A dirge for the American Hope that Jack (& his hero Neal) carried so valiantly after Whitman—an America of pioneers and generosity—and selfish glooms and exploitations implicit in the pioneers’ entry into foreign Indian & Moose lands—But the great betrayal of that manly America of Love was made by the pseudo-heroic masculines of Army and Industry and Advertising and Construction and Transport and toilets and Wars.
Last pages—how tender—“Adios King!” a farewell to all the promises of America, an explanation & Prayer for innocence, a tearful renunciation of Victory & accomplishment, a nameless highest Perfect wisdom, a humility in the face of “the necessary blankness of men” in hopeless America or hopeless World, or Hopeless Time Heaven, Hopeless Deva Loka, a compassionate farewell to Love & the Companion—Adios, King. Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi, Svaha!
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* Scheduled for publication by Viking Penguin in 1995.
By Jack Kerouac
The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde and Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap
Pic
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940–1956
Selected Letters: 1957–1969
Atop and Underwood
Orpheus Emerged
POETRY
Mexico City Blues
Scattered Poems
Pomes All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
THE DULUOZ LEGEND
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveller
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris