The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn ,burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes, “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?
Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Blogs, web logs, are supposed to be a bit like diaries, or so it often seems. Yet I use mine often to explore ideas. That may not seem very personal, though there is a healthy limit to how personal one should probably get in this public forum. When I explore ideas or talk about music or books, that’s me. An important part of who I am is my engagement with books, music, authors, artists, and ideas. I hope another important part of who I am, the more important part, are my relationships with people. But my relationship with books and ideas is more than a head trip, it is a part of my soul.

When I was in junior high school, I had an intense Christian, born-again, religious experience. I became part of a Jesus people church. I handed out Christian newspapers on street corners (this was before such newspapers had much political opinion in them). Somewhere along the way, some of the ideas I was hearing from people in that circle of my life became troubling. I heard people telling other people not to read certain things. Looking back, I think it was pretty innocent, but it bothered me. I drifted, drifted, in part because there were some other ideas I needed to explore. I did not walk away from my faith, but I set it aside for a time. In those days of wild exploration (if you consider browsing the library or finding quirky used book stores wild) I remember encountering Abraham Maslow’s work in my high school psychology class. I still find his ideas – his ideas and not some of the watered down versions – intriguing. And I remember thinking that if I am going to make some kind of religious commitment it might make sense to actually know something about the other religious faiths of the world. In that process I discovered Alan Watts, and through finding out a little bit about him, I discovered the beat generation writers – Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in particular.

Fifty years ago, in 1957, a young New York writer, Jack Kerouac, published his second novel, On the Road. It turned him into a celebrity. In a New York Times review, the book was compared to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Just as that book was the “testament of the Lost Generation” so was Kerouac’s book to be the testament of the “Beat Generation.” That was 1957 and I was not yet born.

In the late 1970s, while I was in college, I took a course on contemporary American literature. We read some Beat poetry. The professor asked the class, before we read some Ginsberg, if anyone had read him before. Only a couple of hands went up – mine being one. He asked if anyone had read any Kerouac – again only a couple of hands, and mine was one. The professor mumbled something about these writers losing their appeal or something. A year or so later, I took a class on contemporary novels. We read Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. It was the book the class liked least, in part because of all the Buddhist terminology in it.

So why was I different, and what did I like about Kerouac? I liked Kerouac’s poetic language and energy. I appreciated his sense of longing and searching and joy. I appreciated his sense of spirituality, that it is important, vital. I appreciated his humanity. So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (Kerouac, On the Road). I have not re-read On the Road in recent years, and may, like Sven Birkerts, find myself disappointed (“It is probably a mistake to go back to the decisive book’s of one’s youth.” Readings, Sven Birketts, p. 246). Still, I fondly recall the wonder and curiosity reading it the first time inspired in me.

Now Kerouac was far from a perfect individual. He died from alcohol consumption at age 47 in 1969. His explicit political views could be quite at odds with some of his own literary energies. He fathered a child and did little to care for her. To make the man a tragic figure caught in social forces that led him to drink and evade responsibility goes too far for me. He made some lousy choices along the way. Nevertheless, his work, and at least some aspects of his life, were a meaningful response to a world that seemed to be losing its soul. And Kerouac wanted very much to keep the soul in American life. He described himself once as a “strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic.” His friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, called Kerouac’s literary voice “his musical sound as American lonely Prose Trumpeter of drunken Buddha Sacred Heart.” In the late 1940s and 1950s when the economic engines of the post-War economy were working white hot and everyone was expected to find a spouse and a house with a white picket fence and become a factory worker or organization man, Kerouac sought to slow things down just a little and ask why and what for and where’s the soul. There is soul in the common life of most individuals, but it is also easily ignored, crushed, given short shrift or sold something. In the words of Robert Inchausti, “Kerouac set out to do nothing less than to narrate ‘soul’ perceptions to an increasingly soulless American middle class hungry for revelations of life’s everyday holy radiance” (Subversive Orthodoxy, 70). When I read him, I heard those “soul perceptions” and learned to pay a little more attention to them.

Inchausti goes on to write of Kerouac: The real question Kerouac’s work poses to us is “to what extent can life be experienced as a revelation of holy sympathy in the very midst of suffering? How far can we open the door to loving kindness, compassion, gladness and equanimity? And at what point must we shut down, and defend ourselves against the pain love commands us to endure?” (Subversive Orthodoxy, 73)

Because in the work of Jack Kerouac I discovered possibilities in literature to explore more deeply the human condition, including the human relationship to the sacred, I have gone on to other writers – some with more adequate literary styles, some who push me even further to ask soul questions. But I will always be grateful for what Kerouac inspired in me. In some ways, growing in my spiritual journey as a Christian will always involve paying some attention to my “inner Kerouac,” even as I lead a pretty traditional life on the outside.

“Rest and be kind.” Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

You, too, Jack.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

P.S. If you haven’t heard the new CD Instant Karma, I encourage you to buy a copy. Current artists have recorded John Lennon songs and all the proceeds go to support Amnesty Internation’s work on Darfur and other human rights crises worldwide. It is a good listen and a great cause.