While your correspondent is not the biggest Kerouac fan, he acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the Beat Writers for the gifts they gave him of Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg's Howl & Kaddish, and Burroughs' Junky & the Cities of The Red Night trilogy.
Kerouac always seemed to be an apologetic drunk to me, making literary excuses for his addiction - however these lists and the basic tenets of his philosophy do have a lot of truth in them.
We have a choice how we live - that much is true, we can walk around in the gloom of capitalism's gasping dying breaths, or we can find a way to take a breath of our own. I particularly am moved by 'Be In Love With Your Own Life,' from this list. To do that for real in these narcissistic times.
A Joycean YES to that.
# Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
# Submissive to everything, open, listening
# Try never get drunk outside yr own house
# Be in love with yr life
# Something that you feel will find its own form
# Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
# Blow as deep as you want to blow
# Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
# The unspeakable visions of the individual
# No time for poetry but exactly what is
# Visionary tics shivering in the chest
# In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
# Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
# Like Proust be an old teahead of time
# Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
# The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
# Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
# Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
# Accept loss forever
# Believe in the holy contour of life
# Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
# Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
# Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
# No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
# Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
# Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
# In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
# Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
# You're a Genius all the time
# Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
# Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
# Submissive to everything, open, listening
# Try never get drunk outside yr own house
# Be in love with yr life
# Something that you feel will find its own form
# Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
# Blow as deep as you want to blow
# Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
# The unspeakable visions of the individual
# No time for poetry but exactly what is
# Visionary tics shivering in the chest
# In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
# Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
# Like Proust be an old teahead of time
# Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
# The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
# Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
# Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
# Accept loss forever
# Believe in the holy contour of life
# Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
# Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
# Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
# No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
# Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
# Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
# In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
# Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
# You're a Genius all the time
# Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
2 comments:
Since I've always enjoyed expressive liberation, I have to say my favorite is: Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.
I can't claim to agree with every bit of this but it does seem to have been scribbled in his more sober moments.
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