Reflections on Kerouac

...my unexpected writing mentor

Photo source: Flickr

"Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich.” — Jack Kerouac

Six months ago, I wrote out that quote on a big chalkboard in the hallway of my hermitage. I have read it every single day since. It turns out, I have to, to find my voice again. 

I have found in Jack Kerouac a brilliant, fascinating, tragic mentor for my writing life. One of the founders of the Beat Generation, an Enneagram 4 like me, almost certainly, and a tortured one, especially in his later years. A devoted Catholic in his own way, a writer, and a brilliant mind. Icarus incarnate, who flew too close to the sun but couldn't reconcile his heart with what he saw. Tethered to Christ, but only as a Savior, not as a teacher or a lover or a friend. Not as Partner in his adventures. So it wasn't enough to hold him back from self-destructing. A mystic, monkish in his ways, married thrice but it never stuck (“It's not that I can't fall in love. It's really that I can't help falling in love with too many things all at once”). Oedipal with his mother, his own Virgin Mary, which was all massively messed up. I doubt we could have been friends. He preferred the unmoored, the ones who burned hot, the mad hearts, which to his mind meant the lost ones, the ones who had been rejected by the world, and so had rejected the world right back. 

"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 saw a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." — Jack

He somehow never understood that you can fly right into the sun and still be anchored in Something True, or rather, Someone. This has always struck me as peculiar. Christ was right there, standing, living, breathing, loving right there next to him. But he didn’t see the beautiful wildness there, or didn’t want to. We humans tend to only let in that tiny bit of God we think we understand. But where’s the wonder in that?!

Still, God spoke true to him in a vision from his childhood, and he was saved in the end. I'll meet him someday. In fact, I feel as though I am already meeting him now.

He said some brilliant things, things I read and recognize I thought that too, but have never dared to say it or write it down in any public way. This has always been my great battle, just say what I need to say, to really say it. Maybe Jack can teach me how to bring more boldness to my writing. I read and re-read On The Road and The Dharma Bums to learn what they can teach me about how I want to write. And I meditate on Jack’s many words about the writing life, to see whatever I may see through the light they shine.

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

"Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”

"Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy."

"If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?"

"Never mistake talking about writing for actual writing."

"You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration."

He saw the madness of the world, that's for sure, just as I do, and the Beauty too. But he couldn't seem to find a way to reconcile the two and so find peace. Yet I suspect some part of him must've known what I have discovered:

Everything is reconciled in the mad love of God.

Here are Kerouac’s 30 Rules for Writing, preserved in his own genius style…

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven