Sunday, October 19, 2008

on the road with beatification

I think of Dean Moriarty...
I've finally read those final touching words from Kerouac's contextual masterpiece On The Road. Holy molasses, was it a long, persevering endurance test to get there. From when I first cracked the book to when I finished, I read two Saramagos (Seeing, Gospel According to Jesus Christ) & went a couple chapters deep into Last Unicorn & a Ho Chi Minh biography. Capote called On The Road typing. Not necessarily a harsh reduction, but an creative innovation missed & misunderstood on Capote's part.
On The Road & The Beats revolutionized, or rather socialized, the expressive form of writing, helping to channel the Self, loosening it from the grips of privileged, hierarchical modes & systems.
It was visceral, immediate, unabashedly autobiographical. It was wide-eyed, sloppy, fervent, had a devouring curiosity & tragedy, it saw us as eternal brothers, had the search of empathy at its core. It was also a precursor & the opening in which postmodern semantic deconstruction of rhetoric and semiotics slithered through to find us at superfluous dribbles & purposelessly excessive word counts; It was fast, loose & instant. It trampled concisely meditated prose, but was necessary to the movement. This is also to say, I will probably never read another Kerouac novel again, but that doesn't mean his contribution was any less admirable.
The thing is, like a hyper-explosion, The Beats in literature blew communication into smithereens, and we've only gotten faster, more brusquely so, since. But it's about moderation, compromise. In this case, slow down but sustain those big-wondering eyes, be cool but be intimate & engaged, loosen up form but don't lose form, be autobiographical but deliberate it a bit. The Beats were one of our prophets, one of our direct mystic providers, they asked us, their future nephews to find equanimity, to fill that emptiness that ached them & embody sincerity, to become, to arrive. And like the eternal Law of the Universe, they delivered us the tools to blunt something they themself helped create & diminish all at the same Time.

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