On the Road

I recently re-read Kerouac’s classic, autobiographical novel On the Road, about young, intellectual, denizens of America's artistic fringe drifting back and forth across the continent in the late 40’s and early 50’s. When I first read it, the year was 1974. I had just turned twenty, and was in the middle of my own period of exploratory drift. I don’t recall that I picked up the book with a sense of identifying with its characters, though in many ways I suppose I was like them. I too was trying to become a writer, and had just left the world of the university. And I was exploring drugs, my sexuality and different ways of understanding myself and my place in the world, as I suppose were Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. And, I was in fabled San Francisco, my first time west, after hitch-hiking two thousand miles to get there.

But in 1974, the early fifties – when I’d been born – seemed like an awful long time ago. There was a vague sense in which I understood that the beatnik of that time was ancestor to the hippie of my own. But just as Kerouac doesn’t once in his work refer to himself or his running buddies as beats, or depict scenes of poetry readings in coffee shops with bongos in the background, I didn’t think of myself as a hippie (or a militant), and I wasn’t going to love-ins or communes, though I did attend the odd demonstration. And as blacks had appeared as peripheral figures in Kerouac’s book, I was only beginning to acknowledge whites as anything more than peripheral to my life.

My reaction to On the Road was that it was interesting, and that it described a group of young adults way less inhibited and way less purposeful than I was. They seemed oddly disconnected from the world that – I knew from history lessons as well as from my own growing up – surrounded them. I only recognized in a general way, as an interesting fact, that these characters represented Kerouac himself, and Alan Ginsberg, and the notorious Neal Cassady (whose alter-ego, Moriarty, I mildly disliked and resented, in the same, somewhat envious way I did those guys I knew who so easily slept with all the girls). Ginsberg was the only one of them I had any sense of as a living person (and in fact, the other two had already died, while still in their forties); and that was mainly from the odd tv clip depicting a lively and pleasant, bushy-faced and zealous spokesperson for perspectives I sympathized with, but sometimes felt to be naive and soft-minded. Looking back, it seems inevitable that I compared myself to them more than I identified with them.

The aspect of the novel I related to most of all was the sheer adventurousness of it: the willingness to pursue something unknown, and the contentedness to embrace it even as it remained so. I wanted for myself more of the daring and free-spiritedness that this book represented.

Forty years later, On the Road is a very different read. How can it not be? For one, I now read it as a sixty year old, and one who’s spent most of my adult years working with at-risk youth, some of whom aren’t so different from brash, irrepressible Moriarty. In some ways, I empathize with Kerouac’s idealized characters more than ever. In part, this is the writer’s side of me, understanding the desire to highlight the dream inherent in the road, in the pursuit of the ‘otherwhere’ that will reveal secrets that ‘here’ guards so jealously. And the restless mover in me understands how living can be a stand-in for art, and not just the other way around. (Yes. Ginsberg and William Burroughs and Kerouac all wrote their masterpieces; Cassady, the inspiring one, the envied one, he lived his). This time through, the book touches me. It moves me. It turns me back in on myself, but to share rather than compare.

But the other piece is that I experience the book this second time more as a creative artifact, coming out of life, than as life itself. (It astonishes me to recall how much more deeply I used to immerse myself in the fiction of a book, willing the realness of the world between its pages, to a degree so far beyond what’s possible to me now.) But this difference is a good one, because it brings the author to life in a way that honors his creation, and all the choices and deceptions and feats of magic it entails. It becomes more, not less, impressive to me, that Kerouac fashioned his book from actual friends and lovers and nights and rides and memories and notes, and of all the things forgotten that he then had to conjure, as a thread, to hold all the rest together.

During this read, I experience the poetry of this book. And its chief poetry lies in the celebration of the ordinary, of life’s passing; moments that catch us in stillness, when we forget who we are; the life that overtakes our over-tired intellect, to catch us with simple touches, inside of our hungers, just beyond the grasp of our needs. There’s an exuberance to Kerouac’s work that transcends all the small divisions and distinctions that once kept me detached from it. It isn’t so much brash, I now think, as it is innocent. It’s a book with very little judgement. Rather than a lesson on how to live, it’s a joyous and unapologetic confessional about living.

And then, there’s the film. It’s fairly new, produced just a couple of years ago, directed by Walter Salles, and starring actors I didn’t know in most of the lead roles. It popped up on Netflix, and last week I got around to watching it. Which led to all manner of new thoughts and speculations about the novel and its author, and about the reshaping of life in fiction. And that took me to Youtube, and to Google, reading mini-biographies, and catching segments of old television shows and interviews, being reminded of the second literary community to which Neal Cassady belonged, the driver of “Further”, with Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster’s, a dozen years after On the Road.

Three pieces of video in particular intrigued me. First, there’s Kerouac being interviewed by Steve Allen, telling how he wrote On the Road in three weeks, speaking matter-of-factly of the fabled, 120 foot long roll of paper. The interview is conducted with Kerouac standing in the arc of a grand piano, while Allen sits at the keyboard, casually tickling the ivories. Kerouac then reads from the text, including the final passages, still with this unusual accompaniment. A strange but somehow satisfying interview; one it’s impossible to imagine taking place today.

The second and third videos are more poignant. First, there’s an episode of the show Firing Line from ’68. It’s hosted by the quirky but brilliant, conservative champion of that day, William F. Buckley, and a panel assembled to discuss the curious phenomenon of hippiedom. The panel includes a musician/activist/pacifist, an academic sociologist, and an obviously drunk, and none-too-happy Kerouac. One oddity about the show – from today’s vantage point – is the respectful way in which it all unfolds. The pace is comfortable and unrushed, no one shouts or speaks over another, despite some obvious strong differences of viewpoint. And Kerouac’s intoxication is politely ignored, despite more than a couple provocative, annoying or even outrageous statements he makes. Watching, it’s hard to accept that this is the same Kerouac/Paradise of his stirring book.

The third video is a clip of Alan Ginsberg as he describes the Firing Line episode and the lead up to it, as well as another occasion on which Cassady arranged for Kesey to meet Kerouac. This piece of film makes it clear that the relationship between Ginsberg and Kerouac was as intimate and tender as that between their younger, fictionalized versions, as depicted in both versions of On the Road. But it’s most interesting for the way that Ginsberg interprets his friend’s actions and statements, in light of his past, his character, and his vulnerability.

I’m halfway through watching On the Road – the film, for the second time. And just last night, I picked up the novel – just to check a reference in its opening lines – and I was thirty pages along before I could pull myself away.  A blurb on the paperback edition I recently read, called the work, “The novel that defined a generation.” A deserved accolade, perhaps, but I hate that kind of hyperbole. This book gave voice to a tiny, creative fragment of a generation, albeit one that punched way above its weight class in terms of cultural influence. But to my mind, this isn’t the unified voice of a single generation, but rather a timeless expression that resonates throughout the ages.

This saga is the uninhibited embrace of life, but also much about a kind of loneliness and detachment, about seeking and not finding, about dreaming and insistence on believing the dream. This is a melancholy that characterizes much more than merely the discontents of a particular time. It’s a melancholy that speaks to many generations of Americans, and I can’t help but believe that it reverberates far more broadly than that even. If it has something to do with the age, then it’s a recurring age, one that a great many of us must traverse in our own time. Isn’t this same melancholy given voice by Kafka’s K, who drifts through the Castle seeking answers, and by Twain’s duo, riding the currents of the Mississippi? I think it’s even present in the Norse myths, as Thor and Loki wander through the land of the Giants, seeking adventure, even as they know that there is a desolate future lurking that they cannot change. It doesn’t stop any of them from seeking, from greeting the dawn, or at least hoping for it.

Hope and resignation are always pulling the pendulum of life in opposite directions. They endure and are endlessly recycled in literature as in life, right up to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with its bleakest of landscapes endlessly calling for another day’s journey. If nothing else, the road endures. The road is forever.

On Incompleteness & Missing Pieces

           Over the last few weeks I’ve amassed a number of drafts of pieces that never made it into my blog. They are all pieces I wanted to post, but which fell short is some way or another, most often because they are incomplete.

          Incompleteness, I’ve come to recognize, is one of the unavoidable – and annoyingly common – aspects of life. I’ve written here about my frustrations with time, how there never seems to be enough of it, my struggle with finding balance, so as to keep up on all the important commitments and interests in my life. But this focus on time and balance, as though there were some skill set that would eliminate incompleteness from my life, is a false hope, a distraction from the reality that nothing in life can simply be captured, contained or managed in a complete way.

          So much of the great literature is about this essential incompleteness, isn’t it? The Brothers Karamazov, Macbeth, The Foundation Trilogy all take a view on this. Perec's Life: A User’s Manual presents an achingly beautiful view of the incomplete jig-saw puzzle that life is. All of those books that present a character who has it all figured out, or with a vision of attaining “the perfect life”, such as The Mosquito Coast or Invisible Man, or Crime & Punishment end up exploring the failure to contain or control life, or incompleteness.

          At this point, I recognize that few if any of my ‘drafted’ blogs will make it to post. And so, rather than leave their content totally unexpressed, I’m aiming here for a kind of distillation, one I hope will manage to unite them thematically in some way, and thereby, take us almost in the opposite direction from incompleteness, toward gestalt, that other beautiful and inescapable characteristic of reality, namely, that a whole will amount to more than simply the sum of its parts.

          Among the things I’ve draft-blogged about are: the comical nightmare of political life in Toronto, under our bobble-head, buffoon king mayor, Rob Ford; the overzealous application of political correctness when a white school vice principal dared to costume himself as Mr. T., using blackface; and finally, the injustice faced by a young couple I work with, whose child is in the care of the Catholic Children’s Aide Society.

          But, before I try to concoct this mixture of themes, a final word on “Incompleteness”. I first came upon this quality as a subject for serious study in Douglas Hofstadter’s absolutely brilliant book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal, Golden Braid, written in 1979 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize. On one level, this is a book about something not even remotely hinted at by its title, that being artificial intelligence. On another level, it’s a philosophical game book, that pulls you inside of a wonderful medley of musical play, zen koans, Aesop’s fables, and surrealist art. But fundamentally, it’s an exploration of Kurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”, which tells us that no system or science or tool that seeks to offer a complete explanation of the world will ever succeed. And further, that the place where this system or tool’s failure will be most evident is where it attempts to explain itself. Well...something like that. (I confess that the mathematical sections of this book lost me, but DON’T LET THAT DETER YOU FROM READING IT. Just skip over the hard parts, like I did!)

          There have always been arguments about the dangers of taking very precise, scientific notions and applying them broadly to social, cultural or political areas. Witness the ways that ‘social’ Darwinism has been used to justify racial hierarchies, or the way ‘relativity’ theory has been used to excuse all sorts of behaviors. So yes, apply with caution. But, for me, a recognition of life’s essential incompleteness has served, not unlike Solomon’s “I have seen everything under the sun...and all is vanity and striving after wind”, to comfort and reassure me. Yes, I am human, my reach is small, I will die...so don’t be so hung up about not finishingd that short story!

          Now onto my ‘draft blogs’. But I’ve spent so much time on this introduction, I now feel that I’ll have to be brief about it.

          What a bit of nonsense, suspending a vice-principal and initiating an investigation, because he appeared at a Halloween function dressed as Mr. T. and in blackface. Now, as a fifty-nine year old, Black, American male who grew up through the civil rights era, I can surely understand that the very mention of blackface will give one reason to pause and consider. But after considering, what then? Is some item or act, because once associated with a hateful system, always to be despised? I don’t think so. Dressing up as other people is what happens at Halloween. I don’t see that there’s anything offensive or embarrassing about Mr. T., such that masquerading as him is racist.

          Then you have Mayor Rob Ford, who, if a high school vice-principal would’ve been fired long ago, for any one of dozens of acts and statements, including his public drunkenness, admission to buying and using illegal drugs while in office, and any number of questionable comments. I wish Ford were gone. I’ve never felt that he was broad or deep enough in his understanding of social issues to be a good leader for this city. And as much as I fault Ford for his very selfish refusal to step down from office, there is a small degree to which I applaud the theoretical separation of a person’s human frailties from their ability to competently hold a representative position in government. The facts of him having addiction issues, being cartoonish, or making embarrassing, personal statements should not, in and of themselves, be grounds for removal from office. (And I actually find it as ridiculous as the overreaction to blackface, that some people referenced his comments about eating pussy as obscene or misogynist. Come ON, people!)

          The couple I work with, that is trying so hard to get its now 5 month old child away from Catholic Children’s Aide, is another instance of misapplied standards. These are such invaluable months in the bonding and development of a child. And this couple would likely never have come under scrutiny but for the SIDS death of their first child a year ago (for which they were deemed not responsible after investigation). Now, not only are they victim to the achingly slow legal process involved in demonstrating their worthiness to parent, they are also being held to standards far beyond any that can be considered reasonable in this day and age. Such as, that the father, a practicing Rastafarian, be tested as free from marijuana use for 3 and a half months, before they can have their son in their care. Were this standard to be applied to all parents, I suspect that we’d have more than 30% of kids in Children’s Aide custody.

          Threads that these items share are the ways in which we judge and are judged by others. And it relates to the broader theme of incompleteness in that few, if any of our judgements are rendered with complete knowledge. We try to stay on top of things, to make decisions and judgements that uphold our deepest values and that support health and respect and well-being. But so often, our judgements come down to guesses and feelings and biases. Referring back to the young couple again, it seems certain that the Catholic Children’s Aide Society is testing their readiness to parent with such fervor because it has been knocked severely in recent months for failing to identify abusive situations in which children suffered.

          I hope this isn’t a depressing piece. I didn’t intend it to be. But it does represent a kind of surrender. I’ll not manage to write here about all the things I’d like to write about, even if at times I feel my well has run dry. And what I do take on won’t be covered exhaustively. It will merely represent a pulling together of some of the thoughts and impressions (maybe even a fact or two) I have in a moment in time. And even that passing moment will defy any containing or explaining. I find this an almost liberating view. It points to the fullness and richness in things. This “incompleteness” isn’t something in the world, really. It’s just a reminder of how huge and wide and miraculous the world really is.