the stuff and the stuff

"Tristessa", Jack Kerouac, 1960

Now that I had read "On the Road", traditionally regarded as Jack Kerouac's magnum opus, I knew that it would be time for me to further get into what Kerouac himself called The Duluoz Legend, the books Kerouac wrote about his journeys. I went way off the beaten path to a slight and mind-fucking short novel, "Tristessa". Finally, finally I could see Kerouac's true prose unleashed in all their stream-of-consciousness glory. For the first 20 pages I thought I was high. For the final 74 I was just enjoying the magic carpet ride through the slums of Mexico City, visiting the sick people and seeing dead ends go dead.

This one is a two parter, the first being "Trembling and Chaste", and our narrator, presumably Kerouac himself but I never know, is going back to Tristessa's hole of all homes, and for the next 60 or so pages, we are immersed in the dank and solemn and uncut images of junkie life. He follows with his eyes the pigeon and cat and hen and people sitting around talking and doing morphine shots, while he drinks his drink. Tristessa, the apple of is high, is vividly described as he longs for her, but ultimately refuses her, and in this, reveres her, a common but beautiful junkie. Secondary characters are described, but if this is anything, it is rantings from the lovesick to the drugsick, trying to build bridges that cannot be forged.

The second part, "A Year Later...", tells of the return of Kerouac or whoever to Mexico City to reclaim Tristessa as his third wife. But she is too far gone. Old Bull, the man he used to live next to, who is now renting him a room, a true long-time junkie and the one who funds Tristessa's habit, he is the one, and as he so bluntly says, Give him a beautiful woman in one chair and morphine in the other, he takes the morphine every single time, it's all he needs. And it's all Tristessa needs. And it's not this fact, or this semblance of plot that matters, but the prose, the gut-wrenching pull at your belly and teeth prose, the straight-from-the-brain words Kerouac uses that brings it all home. It's total and utter despondency, and it's incredibly and sadly awe-inspiring.

If anything, the book is an experience. Every image is destruction. There is so much agony packed in, it will totally feed your angst as you read about the downtrodden characters of the underworld. Hope? Last line is, "This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours", no ending punctuation or anything. It was just a story, one of many, it would seem, so that's as much hope as there is. But the experience is, again, in the prose and the images. "I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery" is just too good to come off the top of his head, the ending of a long conversation about faith and what is and what never was, previously saying, "I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there." Sometimes he rambles and rants and longs so bitterly and it's tough, but you get to the luminous parts, and the true loveliness is in there, even if it's painful.

Another side of Kerouac explored, another part of the legend put to rest. I'd never tell anyone new to Kerouac to pick up "Tristessa" first, but it is an experience I wouldn't trade. It's poetry moving in line with two terrible sicknesses that will never be resolved, the lovesickness and the drugsickness. They can't be resolved, so what's your story?

"Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of."

stuck between stations

"On the Road", Jack Kerouac, 1959

Oh man, what do I do? In just over 300 pages of "On the Road", I read Jack Kerouac intimately describe journeys, maniacal, tough, rugged, intense, depressing, and gratifying journeys back and forth across the continent, in what is vastly considered a legendary and untouchable piece of literature, and really, nothing for me to do except reflect. Yes, that's the point of this blog anyway, reflection, but my mind is so blown right now it's incredible.

Sal Paradise is the narrator, Dean Moriarty is his wild-eyed and slightly insane friend, and they are representative for what Kerouac himself would term the Beat Generation. They are the twenty-something souls displaced by World War II, and so they journey and journey and run into dead-ends and brick walls and, of course, oceans, searching for life. Hard to say, by the end, that they found anything resembling what they set out for, but the adventure, the "kicks" as Dean so often referred to them, that's what illuminated what Kerouac so often referred to as a sad life. He especially liked the word sad. He used it to describe just about everything in the world.

Still, something radiates out in this story that transcends all of the sadness, and these boys strike gold in such unorthodox fashion that you must thoroughly examine the pages and penetrate the density of Kerouac's prose and the magnitude he could strike with even the simplest of language, and you have to see. There is so much talk of souls here, so much so it's trippy and it shines on you. If nothing else, Sal and Dean are sharing time and space to believe in the ecstatic. As they bounce back and forth, Dean like a pinball between his women and relationships and responsibilities, Sal between his limiting reality in New York and fantasies of the West, they talk madness and sweat and shake and do whatever comes their way, avoiding worry and avoiding following society's expectations. It's anarchic. For those of us caught in the jaws of regular society, you have to fear for'um a bit, especially as Sal, who goes from exuberant to weary and back every 20 pages, is shown in such obvious light that Dean Moriarty is not capable, truly, of being down for him with all that's on his plate, as he abandons Sal in San Francisco starving and barely able to fend for himself. But in the end, his loyalty to Dean runs deep and he knows this guy and his incapability to right himself and the limitations of his empathy, and in the end, his true madness, and he loves Dean for so many reasons, in this strange way that never fades, so remarkable and unconditional and so counter-cultural in a quid pro quo society, and in that, so majestic.

This will stick with me a long time. "On the Road" isn't just, as it says on the back, "THE NOVEL THAT DEFINED A GENERATION", it is a novel that defines the dreamers still. With a decent awareness of the context in which Kerouac wrote this beacon of post-WWII lit, one can relate to it now, the band of people searching beyond the blandness of our Subdivision Nation, beyond the dulling of intellect and, as always in every generation, the marginalization of radical ideas, until all we have are our own souls, with such a yearning to share them, and a sparse few out there who even seem to give a damn. The world, like that, can be pretty scary, but what's the sense of worry, as Dean Moriarty once said and I'll paraphrase, it's all passing us by anyhow.

"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."