when the world brings its fire...

"We Have Always Lived in the Castle", Shirley Jackson, 1962.

Merricat Blackwood poisoned her family long ago. She strategically kept her sister Constance and Uncle Julian alive; everyone else had to go. In this sinister story themed around reclusiveness and resistance to mainstream culture, we have a villainess and heroine all wrapped into one person.

All's well, or so it'd seem for these outcasted ladies. Following a trial that set Constance free of being charged for murdering her family (you don't have Merricat confirmed as the perpetrator until halfway through the book or so), the Blackwoods live a life away from everyone. Constance never leaves, Uncle Julian can't, and Merricat only goes into town for shopping (and a side order of harsh ridicule).

Then Charles arrives. A mainstream main disguised as family, the girls' cousin, he infiltrates the their away-from-it-all world in attempts to assimilate. Unwittingly, he sets fire to the house with one of his pipes and burns the entire upstairs. Then the house is plundered and pillaged, the climax being the time where society attempts to crush the girls forever. But see them a few days later, the remaining portion of the house barricaded, with only their garden and tablecloths for Merricat's clothes, and on they go, to their own drum.

But is the drum sinister? Is Merricat's design to keep her sister down and subservient? Or has Merricat liberated what was left of her family and separated them and their useless fortune from the doldrums of normalcy? These are appropriate questions, I believe, and ridiculously hard to answer. I suppose that qualifies the books as challenging, morally speaking, and you almost feel pleasure out of not answering, simply pondering. I couldn't help but feel oddly hopeful in the last chapter as I heard of Society's hindsight horrible guilt as they left food for the girls who waited until late at night to retrieve it. Charity. Heavy consciences. And the girls, not needing, not caring, but eating it and living on the essentials of love, garden, and air. It's bohemian stuff. With some sick fantasy we've all had in our most bitter moments -- to be on an island with our families, and everyone, just everyone, lost forever -- if not killed, then just exiled.

Just be on an island.

"'The least Charles could have done', Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.'"

the garden of laughter

"Candide", Francois Voltaire, 1759

After reading Michael Wood's excellent and exhaustive introduction on Voltaire's satirical masterpiece, "Candide", I've got no cause to write some retread interpretation. Instead, I offer my exhilaration upon my first of many readings of this novel, and what it means to my own work.

First of all, I sit in stream-of-postmodern-conscious and reel out all my anxieties, and I call it writing (which it is). Yet, I see Candide and his friends, who have been beaten, torn to shreds, tending their garden, and I forget to tend mine. I see Voltaire tending his for 94 pages and shredding the art of philosophy he made his legend off of, and I forget to *laugh* as he laughs at humanity.

To see Candide go through the the horrors, lie on a bed of philosophy and hope, travel the lands only to find perfection and deny it by some strange nature expelling himself from a land not natural to himself, all in the name of refuting Optimism, may be of the darkest joys I have ever partaken of. Even as he comes about his lovely Cunegonde, she is exposed as hideous and he marries her out of duty -- and I like the thought that this is reality realized through the previous ideal of marrying Cunegonde, or the idea of her.

No character leads a pointless existence, no episode drags, the pace of writing is extreme and refreshing to my eyes. There is an inkling of sentimentality toward the end, an existential nuance amidst the absurdity, even if it's the absurdity of destiny (a stylized contradiction in my reflection only). I love that Voltaire can even tease himself through Pococurante, and his pickiness toward literature, which the melancholy philosopher Martin chides when Candide suggests he's happy for his ability to criticize ("Which is to say...that there is pleasure to be had in not taking pleasure"). I can't say enough of the two day experience in reading "Candide", and how it reminds us that 1) Everything is indeed not OK and it's OK to confront this, and 2) Laugh at it, it's absurd.

Perhaps then I write my satire. Or just read more of them. Or, at the simplest and most useful, I walk around town and remember to laugh, that it's chaos and no one knows what to do and, indeed, we are asses. And I just laugh.

PS: The packaging with the various comics including the front cover of the opening of the novel and how Candide is thrown into his horrors, as well as the maze to discover the origin of Pangloss's social disease, are awesome, as well are the apt appendices (including excerpts from Voltaire's philosophical encyclopedia, a poem on the earthquake at Lisbon and its use toward refuting Optimism, and an alternate opening to the Paris chapter).

PPS: I also learned what an auto-da-fe is: When heretics were publicly charged and invited to make an "act of faith"; though in the circumstance in "Candide", Pangloss was hanged and Candide flogged in this horrid world.

"'What is Optimism?' asked Cacambo - 'Alas!' said Candide, 'it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.'"

broken hearted hoover fixer sucker guy

"Our Man In Havana", Graham Greene, 1958

First, it's been a month since I posted here. I've been in the doldrums of James Joyce's difficult "Ulysses", which I believe I understand on some levels (psychological, spiritual) but know I do not on others (cultural, literary), so I've recruited the help of "The New Bloomsday Book" to assist me. I got 461 pages in before I decided that, so the journey has been a rough sail, but I'm excited for the assistance, and strangely excited to go back through the book. I'm going to make it like a college course and study a few nights of the week, and will be an undergrad level "Ulysses" scholar by the time I finish the novel and its companion.

But oh, I've toiled.

Got to the point I had to read something else with it, and all knows Nietzche wasn't the one for it (figured that out tough) so after dabbling in "The Portable Kerouac" found in a Flagstaff used bookstore, I took Graham Greene's "Our Man In Havana", and up against the sometimes-impermeable "Ulysses", it was a fast, engaging read, even more readily appreciated because of Christopher Hitchens' intro, which at first I hated, and am now even more indebted to.

See, I tried reading Hitchens' "God is Not Great", but I find that he is far too in love with the sound of his own voice. Not to mention his writing is boring. However, this short essay on the ontological aspect of Greene's "entertainment" on Cold War Era espionage (from the British side) is right on the money. Greene's writing is clear enough in its purpose that the introduction serves only to put into words what we figure easily enough by reading -- that Jim Wormold, the middle-aged vacuum cleaner selling protagonist, was floating toward death and in need of an awakening from his luke warm state. The incompetent secret service in Britain was the just the thing to assist him, and before you know it, he was of sudden importance, and took advantage of it to rough consequence, before crushing both identities and living. There are risks and there are rewards in stepping out of your box; and as opposed to Kurt Vonnegut's impressive, dire "Mother Night", Greene goes for the lighter side and Wormold's world manipulates him juuuuuuuust right to get around the worst of fates.

The transformation of Wormold's being, then, is primary, and the events of the Cold War it premeditates are secondary, perhaps only an interesting and relevant setting for growth, and I'm sure for the time, an incendiary commentary on British incompetence. But it's really all about Jim, the pathetic man who sits late at nights with his only friend, Dr Hasselbacher, also old and pathetic, after his vacuum job. When the infantile, idiotic Hawthorne comes to see him at the bar and make him Our Man In Havana, Wormold sees the way to make some extra cash by creating fake agents under him and submitting numerous reports under these aliases, and using sketches of vacuum cleaner parts to pass as designs for bombs. The cash is, of course, to get him and his daughter, 17-year-old bombshell Milly, back to Great Britain, and away from sex fiend Captain Segura. Thus, he becomes, as Greene would say through secretary Beatrice, a successful, well-paid writer of bad fiction, who cares not about his characters. He's living on the edge, which would cost him his best friend, and his Havana world, but the consequences don't seem to outdo the ultimate rewards, and perhaps Greene is chiding himself early on for the inevitable death of Hasselbacher, who seems so easily disposed of.

Regardless, Wormold eventually outsmarts Segura, finds he is not a killer and delights in the moral standard he now owns and we realize the difference between the real and artificial in life, so we blame nottasoul when his ending sees him back in Britain with job, Beatrice as a girlfriend, and all the money he saved up to get Milly a better life. He crushes the old sad Wormold by finding an actual mission to live for (quite existential, the belief we are capable of satisfying a great objective), he crushes the new Wormold by standing up to his lies and seeing the incompetent crushed. And Christopher Hitchens might say this far better than I, but hey, this is my reflective spot. Being is being able to be something rather than simply floating. For Wormold, a traditional-minded, low-key, loving push-over father, the be something is naturally to provide and be there for his loved ones. In a quirky, fun, rollicking way, Greene presents his character study with great intrigue.

Thank all, too, that Milly drops the duenna face, too, and grows to be a woman. Her transformation is subtle, but it seems father and daughter are destined for a much closer relationship; and the entrance of Beatrice into their world, a non-Christian womanly influence on Milly, can only help bridge the gap between Jim and his daughter. The old silly Milly of Catholic mockings was, after all, crazy enough to get involved with Segura. Man, evolve!


"If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone's global war" (Wormold)

dare you blush

"Native Son", Richard Wright, 1940

In a letter to one of his critics, Richard Wright wrote of his masterpiece expressing the oppression of the African American in the mid-1900s, "In Native Son I tried to show that a man, bereft of a culture and unachored by property, can travel but one path if he reacts positively but unthinkingly to the prizes and goals of civilization, and that one path is emotionally blind rebellion. In Native Son I did not defend Bigger's actions, I explained them through depiction. And what alarms [the critic] is not what I say bigger is, but what I say made him what he is." That sums up better than I can put into words what "Native Son" is all about, as well as the very small backlash against it.

In the three sections of Native Son -- "Fear", "Flight", and "Fate" -- a black man named Bigger Thomas, according to Wright, goes along the path constructed for him by years of dangling carrots before his kind and then telling them they are to remain quarantined with the rest of the inopportune of his ilk. There is a sense of fear and self-denial Bigger Thomas struggles with throughout the book, a stark internal monologue flowing through the pages which reveal him as undereducated, impulsive, and dangerous, yet not on his entire freewill, but via the machine that tolerates the creation of black souls to obscure them, pack them into unwanted sections of urban areas, and make them do the dirty work, while occasionally out of guilt having one of the privileged throw a bit of "charity" their way.

The defining act of the book is where Bigger unwittingly smothers Mary Dalton, the daughter of wealthy whites who hired him as a driver, out of the great fear of being caught in her room at night. He had encroached in the place no white man wanted him, shook with the fear when her blind mother came in to check on her, and held a pillow over her face so as not to end his job, his little hope of providing food for his mother and two siblings, one of the few chances he knew whites ever gave him, but through killing Mary this was an act of aliveness as he stepped out of order of things and did something radical even if he had not intended it. The ensuing cat-and-mouse he played with the police and reporters were his moments to feel what had long been stripped from him by white society: the chance to direct his own destiny.

Though he ultimately faces the death penalty, the most inspiring and awful moments of the book are when his attorney, they call him Max, a Communist who represents him for free, gives his closing argument to attempt to save the life of Bigger. He goes as far as to condemn the "charitable" acts of the deceased's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, and this is a big crux of Richard Wright's book as he takes on those who oppress then throw dry bones to their victims, as Max states, "The relationship between the Thomas family and the Dalton family was that of renter to landlord, customer to merchant, employee to employer. The Thomas family got poor and the Dalton family got rich. And Mr. Dalton, a decent man, tried to save his feelings by giving money. But, my friend, gold was not enough! Corpses cannot be bribed! Say to yourself, Mr. Dalton, 'I offered my daughter as a burnt sacrifice and it was not enough to push back into its grave this thing that haunts me.'" And throughout this lengthy speech, Wright indeed uses Max as his mouthpiece to articulate the origins of the problems facing the African Americans and what they, as a race, have become in the face of such tragic realities.

The structure of the book is that it flows from paragraph to paragraph with hardly any breaks, and Wright says he's trying to show the day-to-day consciousness of his character. His thoughts race, fear paralyzes him -- if I were to judge it I would say it's hard to believe a mindstate could be so stark, outside of a few spare parts at the end, Bigger rarely seems to believe in anything besides living and dying. But that seems to be the aim to Wright, to show us all that such a mindstate is exacted upon those who have been used for the purposes of the wealthy and white. Thus, the structure is effective and the book is difficult to put down because there is constant tension and you wonder often, What direction is this all going in?

Even in 2008, "Native Son" has to be considered essential reading for anyone yearning for a glimpse of oppression's mindstate, especially as our material culture intensifies in its influence over us all, including those who have little to no chance in attaining what is purportedly offers. Before we look to condemn, we must learn to understand, something we as a people seem to overlook time and time again.


[From Max's closing argument] "He was _living_ only as he knew how, and as we have forced him to live. The actions that resulted in the death of those two women were as instinctive and inevitable as breathing or blinking one's eyes. It was an act of _creation_!"

Will they never leave?

"Endgame" and "Act Without Words", Samuel Beckett, 1958

I became reaquainted with Samuel Beckett's absurdist one act play, "Endgame", over my holiday, remembering it strongly from the best introductory course I had taken in college, a Drama/Lit course at EMU. At 19 I found it about unintelligible until we started stripping down the essense of the characters, the tension between Hamm and Clov, the meaning of one's only being able to stand, the other's only being able to sit (or lack of meaning, exisitential, nihilistic), the secondary parents of Hamm in Nagg and Nell and the imagery of their being placed in an ashcan relying on the subservient Clov to give them their daily rations as they briefly recount nostalgically their lives together. Four characters and 80 some odd pages of script make-up this amazingly lucid act of human nonsense.

Plotwise, it's like this: Clov can only stand, serves Hamm who can only sit and had apparently taken him in since he was a boy and makes him do every little menial thing for his pleasure. Clov has the notion to leave but is inanely bound to his monotonous routine, and the main tension is in whether or not he'll go and also, why the hell he doesn't just up and leave like *that*. Nagg and Nell are Hamm's parents, live in ashcans, and are a morbid bit of imagery honed-in on the unrequited promise of death. The characters banter back and forth, Hamm ordering Clov to get his toy dog or to move his chair to another position or to report the goings on outside, but everything stays the same, always. This is the ritual of the human existence.

We were told in class that this story was post-nuclear, that the characters existed to show us life after "the bomb" dropped, but apparently Beckett doesn't like this interpretation, and I only mention it to show what academics are teaching. The desolation of their existence does make this interpretation seem natural, especially as Clov describes the goings on outside as the same thing over and over and the apparent isolation of them in a supposedly post-apocalyptic world. However, I see why Beckett rejects this, because this work seems more timeless: I believe it gets more the core of the meaninglessness of human existence. The notion of master and slave, the inept ruling the inept, the same thing over and over, Clov's leaving to us is so essential because the possibility of removing ourselves from the monotony is what we so cheer for. And apparently he does leave, but in the darkest shadow of my heart I have to wonder how he'll survive, if he even remembers how to. Those are but a few of the contemplations that may cross the mind as I read this book.

The brilliance is major in the delivery. There are only vague moments of sentimentality as Nagg and Nell reminisce over bike riding in the good old days, but these notions are immediately blotted out, especially as Nell dies a most unceremonious death forgotten about as soon as it's mentioned, leading to an unseamly revleation, I must quote this part here:

Hamm: Go and see is she dead (Clov goes to bins, raises the lid of Nell's, soops, looks into it. Pause.)

Clov: Looks like it. (He closes the lid, straightens up. Hamm raises his toque. Pause. He puts it on again.)

Hamm (with his hand to his toque): And Nagg? (Clov raises lid of Nagg's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)

Clov: Doesn't look like it. (He closes the lid, straightens up.)

I must interject, quickly: This next part was apparently one of Beckett's favorites, too. As you can see there is no sentimentality nor sorrow, death means nothing as it would appear Beckett intended, just another person dying in their ashcan. Anyhow, the point we're coming to:

Hamm (letting go his toque): What's he doing? (Clov raises lid of Naggi's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)

Clov: He's crying. (He closes lid, straightens up.)

Hamm: Then he's living.

"Then he's living", the definition of existence in sorrow world. It's chilling to read, and so perfect, before Hamm nearly immediately moves to asking Clov, "Did you ever have an instant of happiness?", where Clov responds, "Not to my knowledge." The trapped soul of a slave to the world, at least that's how I see it. "Endgame" is ultimately open to many interpretations, but it's hard not to believe this is Beckett's sketch of human beings just moving through time ignorantly.

And so it goes: a captivating one act play on the state of things, Beckett plays the absurd disconnected meaningless card quite admirably with his "Endgame", and this shall spawn more hours of Beckett reading as I have on my shelf the trilogy of novels that would help him get his Pulitzer: "Molloy", "Malone Dies", and "The Unnamable". Oh what would we do without books?! Apparently, what we've always been doing.

"Clov: If I don't kill that rat he'll die"

stand down

"The Power and the Glory", Graham Greene, 1940

A life without the ability to believe wholly without worry, imagine. Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" is a stark tale of a priest living in "mortal sin", a so-called "whisky priest", addicted to the brandy, abandoned his child (he weren't supposed to have in the first place), still seeking to deliver mass and do his duty...but on the run from the authorities in a dystopian fascist state where religion -- tolerance -- free speech -- is outlawed in the name of a, perhaps, more truthful world.

As one who considers himself an atheist 67 years after Greene obtained his copyright, I probably approach this book with significantly different mindstate, one who doesn't yearn for religion to be outlawed, but perhaps to be minimized, I sit between the ideals of the whisky priest and the atheist lieutenant antagonist who goes to all ends to destroy, in a most vulgar manner, this pathetic sinful man, yet still priest. I connect to hardly anyone -- perhaps Coral Fellows, the girl who sheltered the whisky priest, naively tells him about morse code, she being outside the conflict of religion v. atheism, yes, but not outside the simple right v. wrong, deciding not to act with the state but with her own moral judgement, acting on Kohlberg's highest level. Coral -- a secondary character but the most important character, in my view, outside the priest, lieutenant, and the seeming Judas in the half-caste -- seems to be the only one capable of such action in the book, a break from the mold of New World v. Old World into simply doing what she believes. She's too idealistic for this book, so when the whisky priest escapes prison unwittingly for being picked up for smuggling whisky and seeks the help and asylum she had once promised him, she is gone, her family is gone, leaving behind only a pathetic starving dog the priest effectivly robs for its last meat.

He is the last priest, it would seem, and his journeys only cast more furor in his pursuer, kidnapping and killing people in every village the priest receives help in. He is given martyr status where he himself knows he is undeserving -- the bloodthirst of the search for him, the hunger of the religion-deprived people to feel his mercy at confession, it all gives his otherwise sin-filled and pathetic life meaning and holiness. The foolish ruling class always gives unearthly meaning to those they persecute. The priest even pondered his piety a great sin at several points throughout the book. Unworthiness haunted him, but he still trudged on to do what he knew he must, and that was to deliver in the sacrements. I've read armchair interpretation that Graham Greene held these sacrements sanct and wanted to juxtapose the purity of such to this decisively impure man who was to deliver them; John Updike's introduction also talks ot an author coming to a state of conflict over his own religious conviction. I can see the truth in both strains on interpretation. The triumph of this book is its ability to show all unworthy men in the face of this odd hope religion lends through its pure points, and of course, from the stance of the atheist, I have my ideological quandaries with the text, seeing Greene deny all of the philosophical doublespeak of religion, but I'll save that for another high horse. Religion is a power wielded by common, sinful, desolate man. Greene shows what boundaries cannot hold it in, a powerful message.

The scenes he paints are probably his strongest point as a writer, at least from a reader's standpoint. Nothing is more vivid then when the Indian woman lays down the child among the picture of crosses tied jagged and at varying heights, a burial ground, and a point I never thought of but Updike states in his opening, the entrance to a godly state, outside of Mexico (he was coming upon the border -- and freedom -- though a freedom he knew would haunt him forever). Also the scene where the priest is finally betrayed, where he sits across the lieutenant and they begin hashing out their difference in a battle of wits of educated, staunchly idealistic men, in a small abandoned hut and makeshift seating, in the middle of nowhere, anywhere, it is perfect for the scale of destitute shown in this time and place where God has been driven out. And even the lieutenant is in internal agony as the last priest is killed -- the enemy defined him and now the enemy is no more. An interesting commentary on impressing your beliefs all over, for what happens when you are successful?

Without reflection and going over little bits and pieces of interpretation, I find myself strapped by my own state as non-believer when it comes to "The Power and the Glory" and Graham Greene's thought process as a believer, but as a novelist, and as a brilliant word painter of scenes. So while I have a hard time empathizing with either protagonist or antagonist, on an intellectual level I can see where both come from and the frightening possibilities of the fascist way, putting specific ideals on every single person. While religion exists far too purely, rarely and dismissively questioned (only one very secondary character seems to dig into the priest at all, but is painted only as a nuisance to be disregarded), I also know the frightening possibilities associated with such a view of religion, one where we assume ignorantly that its administering is possible as nothing but a pure act without ulterior motive, be it to get money or make the people subservient. But we know, because he has said it, that Greene was writing to separate the man from the act. In that, "The Power and the Glory" is an excellent novel regardless of where it comes from or how disagreeable the sentiments can be at times because it is written with such conviction, no matter how naive it may sometimes seem in a current America where religion is used as a shield, or worse, a sword, but not merely a way of hope and a path of good living. Perhaps in that dystopian Mexico, that by killing priests and making the act of sacrements taboo and unlawful, then and only then religion can be made into such a pure act, in the face of imminent destruction. A scary, morbid thought. It is good to see a man flesh-out the potential of such a way of life, of religion. Good and bad..."The Power and the Glory" got me thinking, and it won't stop after I hit Publish Post. I read it in three days, lazy bum days, too. I'll reduce it and close it out common-man glib style: It must've been a good book.


"'I'm not telling them fairy stories I don't believe myself. I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this--that if there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too.' He said slowly, 'I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all'"

inimitable he

"Visions of Gerard", Jack Kerouac, 1958

Of all the misadventured wild looking for IT of Mr. Kerouac's life, "Visions of Gerard" is that Duluoz Legend book that takes us on a trip in the memory, created visions n little tidbits of actual emotion drawn from the little kid remembrance of Gerard, Jack Kerouac's older brother who died at the age of nine. Kerouac admits his idealism and old-soul wisdom came from this oldest soul of a little boy who hated mousetraps and digging out the eyes of killers in the newspaper (among other things), who went to confession to purge every little bad detail admitting his sins puresouled, who yelled from his deathbed for his sister Ti Nin and little Ti Jean to go out and play and enjoy the day as his nine year old body expired.

The 130 pages are divided up into small vignettes expressing the soul of Gerard as Kerouac pieced together from distant feelings and memories, and I'm guessing from old stories his mother would tell him. The first half contains many recollections of Gerard, summed in, "My own brother, a spot of sainthood in the endless globular Universes and Chillicosm." Right down to when he first became sick and told the nuns at school of his visions of Heaven, you'd be surprised he wasn't isolated by his earnest wisdom but he drove awe into the hearts of the adults he touched, and no one more so than Jack Kerouac. The second half contains some of the more stark and stumbling images as we see Ti Jean's father, Emil, milling about town hit hard woebegone as his son lays on his death bed begging to see the birds which come to his window, HIS birds he wishes so badly to come to him and sit around him (not understanding their fear, having no fear even in certain death). When the death comes we are hit with the immense sorrow of child death despite Gerard's intense wishes to be gone to Heaven (even when he was well he cried of why people can not have what they want--he wanting Heaven).

Naturally, all this naturally, but the revelations of imminent death, the world being death, the somber realizations are what "Visions of Gerard" are about past the shots of heart-breaking idealism. For Ti Jean, Jack Kerouac, this was his first experience in death and we see him confused over the moping, crying, knowing Ti Gerard was in Heaven, as the adults cry and moan, as mom screams, "They took him off to Heaven!--They didnt leave him with me!--Gerard, my little Gerard!" It's a sobering view from a child of 3 now grown into a soon-to-be legendary poet and novelist. Death has always been a played-with subject of the Duluoz Legend, but in this book it takes center stage with all its promise and dire promise brought out, danced around. Yet we still have the words of what can be DONE before the death takes over, the impenetrable heart of perhaps Kerouac's own personal savior, Gerard Duluoz, someone who taught Ti Jean to be kind as he stabbed out the newspaper eyes of the murderer woman--"We smooth the ruffled paper, stroke the paper lady's eyes, brood over our sin, rectify hells, fruition good Karma for ourselves, repent, go to confession--" This sort of innocent heart, not sentimental or nostalgic, just understand of the sanctity surrounding him, he died for certain with no hopes like adult hopes but with some sort of alien heart for the good of all men.

This all not to say how Kerouac's words dance dance dance the page amazingly and elegantly the story of his brother. His progressive style of punctuation and short episodes lead to a clear, penetrating look at Gerard and his family structure. As Gerard returns form confession, Kerouac remembers his exact place and time, you have to be jealous over his ability to describe unabated, "I'm sitting stupidly at a bed-end in a dark room realizing my Gerard is home, my mouth's been open in awe an hour you might think the way it's sorta slobbered and run down my cheeks, I look down to discover my hands upturned and loose on my knees, the utter disjointed inexistence of my bliss." All over the return of the boy who'd bring him intense love for the world, word, and the heart to tell it. Then this leads to the internal understanding, "None of the elements of this dream can be separated from any other part, it is all one pure suchness." Simple, elegant. The book is--not crammed 'tis still airy--but laden with such description and wisdom, vivid, illuminating, gut-wrenching in a butterfly sort of way.

"Visions of Gerard" will raise many questions in the mind, the BIG QUESTIONS, as we see a saintly boy expire n go to where he always begged to go, as he posed the simple boy questions of why are men so mean(?) and so on. This is key in the Duluoz Legend as Kerouac runs all over creation searching for IT (which I always say was ENCRUSTED in his trips to begin with), though it appears IT was something Gerard had internally, and Kerouac, in this book, looked to dig it out of him before telling the story of his inevitable end to his rheumatic heart. It's heartfelt, in a way tender, never bitter, pure Kerouac in simply another way, pictures painted bright golden then stark never-seeing nights (behold the scene Gerard runs out to get his mother aspirin in the blistering windy cold winter night and revelates that God did not make the world for men in its pure darkness with a light only showing the darkness but not illuminating). The making of a literary icon in the visions of his brother who perhaps was greater than He.


"In bed that night he lies awake, Gerard, listening to the moan of wind, the flap of shutters--From where he lies he can just see one cold sparkle star--The fences have no hope."