Last night, I watched the indie film "On the Road" as I brewed a batch of beer - which was entirely appropriate, given the drinking in the movie. And that is what it seemed like at first - a near constant party of booze, Benzedrine and pot involving young city wannabe authors who wouldn't know a real job if it hit them in the face. They did not end up wannabes, however - the title of the movie was taken from Jack Kerouac's book, in which he calls himself Sal, his buddy Alan Ginsberg, Carlos, and the writer's muse Neal Cassidy, Dean Moriarty. And subtly, the movie had a lot more going for it than drugs and sex (although there was also plenty of the latter, with typically beautiful actresses in the buff - impressive). What it evoked, somehow, almost magically, was what Kerouac was mostly about - freedom in general and the freedom to search for a higher reality in particular.
This coming as a 5 gallon vat of brew was being prepared, and spring, at last, was becoming inevitable.
That last is important for me, for always, spring calls me to travel, to shake off the austerities of winter and head out - out anywhere, just away. It is accompanied by the feeling of the quest, where it seems imperative, even achingly so, that I (that we) must shed our doughty reality to find its deeper meaning, before another winter - and death - impedes our search - again, as in winter, and perhaps again as in death. For myself, it is an imperative nearly as strong as the swimming of the salmon upstream. I have found, sometimes to my disappointment, that I am well within the bell-curve of 'average,' meaning that millions of others across the country must feel the same way in spring. Millions have gotten older and have buried that feeling, while millions of the younger do begin some sort of search - just as millions of the really older, the retired, hit the road in RVs or head out to a new territory from their old home. It is an urge that is wide spread and apparently doesn't end. It is the capturing of this urge in print that made Kerouac, and his more eloquent predecessor Walt Whitman, famous - and what makes this movie, as apparently discordant as it is, worthwhile.
As frequent readers of this blog and website know, I have published a book of my own, Dream Weaver, about my travels in the mid 70's on the road. I did not do it with any intent to copy or replace Kerouac - in fact, I never thought of him while writing. It was my own intensely personal journey, started this very month in 1975, and it is different in many ways from On the Road. It is not stream-of-consciousness, but conventional writing; and, most importantly, it does not end with a call to the wild, as does On the Road. Rather, as one harsh critic put it (a man who was once my friend, by the way, who I haven't seen in 40 years. God knows what he harbors against me. See the Amazon listing for comments), it ends in something of a whimper. This is not due to a fault of imagination or style - but rather was entirely intended because it was how I felt and because it was true.
Kerouac was young when he wrote his best-known work, one that was not nearly as well written as his first publication, "The Town and the City," but one that captured his youth and the changing environment of post-war America. Both aspects are important. In youth, we believe we are the first, the best, and the brightest, and that we can conquer the world. In this, the Beats were as guilty as any group of writers and artists since the Romantic era (in my humble opinion). Yet, like the Romantics, they had a real point - the Romantic era heralded, or rather lamented, the loss of agrarian innocence with the exploding industrialization of western Europe; while the Beats both heralded and lamented the opening up of America due to new technologies, as well as the changing of America to one of grotesque materialism. And it was true - the period of the Beats, from the late 40's to the early 60's, was indeed an era of tremendous change, although the cultural change was then happening underground - exactly where the Beats existed. Society would openly explode in the later 60's and early 70's, as we Baby Boomers well know - and that explosion would drastically alter society, from sex and marriage to the very idea, for many, of our place in society and our personal meaning within it.
Back in the 70's when I traveled the country for months at a time at the mercy of my thumb and the kindness of strangers, I, too, was young and I, too, believed that we would change the world, that we were unique and beyond all other generations. However, when I wrote the book, I was already around 50 years old and my perspective had changed drastically. We, the dreamers, had since lived different lives than our fathers and mothers, but none of us lived in the stratosphere of a truly unique and beautiful consciousness. Instead, we raised kids, worried about money and jobs, and got old just like everyone else - just as the Beats eventually did, or died before they could. Kerouac died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age (I recall) of 47,a broken and rambling man who had not had a book out for a decade or more. Ginsberg rode the new wave of the hippies fairly well as he followed another pioneer, poet Gary Snider, into at least the trappings of Eastern Mysticism. Many others- William Burroughs, Ferlinghetti - fell into hard drug dependency that sunk them into true sexual decadence, and Neal Cassidy simply died while walking on railroad tracks, counting, as Ken Kesey said, the ties until he dropped dead, probably of a heart attack from excessive use of speed.
But still, the Beats knew there was something in the air. By the 70's, it was already in the air and waning into a new normalcy, our current era - or, as the more cynical might put it, it was already being co-opted. Indeed it was, and has been. The transcendence that the Beats sought was found by the hippie movement, with the help of psychedelic drugs, and then almost immediately co-opted by the criminal fringe and far-left ideologues, who used it (and are still using what it) to break the old order and replace it with another old order - the materialist Marxist dream of the mid-19th century. This replacement is not transcendent, but rather, simply a replacement. In other words, the hopes and fevered dreams of the Beats and early hippies has been ground down into the dust of the old thin material plain, this time with an illusion of a bright and progressive future. Thus, in hindsight, I saw where the early 70's had been going - and in all honesty, had to end with the book with a shrugged "whimper" rather than a bang. But it was not really a whimper, just the acknowledgement that we still had a long way to go to reach the fabled "Age of Aquarius."
The spiritually oriented know that the current trend is only an illusion. The real promise still lies there, ready for the necessary amount of people, or density, for this promise to become a reality at large. It is thus why I write in this blog - and why the Beats, and the movie that depicts their essence so well - are still important. In their time, they did not know what the new essence would be, only that it was there, ready to be taken in. They had the 'sense' - and awakened many others to this sense - just as the hippies actually lived it and found out what it could be. The discipline, however, was never there, and the old world of power politics came back in different garb with a vengeance. Yet the movie and the times - from the beats to the hippies to the current New Age - keep reminding us. Just as spring reminds us to turn our faces to the sun and makes us wish to be off, anywhere, to somewhere more perfect and beautiful than we are now. FK
This coming as a 5 gallon vat of brew was being prepared, and spring, at last, was becoming inevitable.
That last is important for me, for always, spring calls me to travel, to shake off the austerities of winter and head out - out anywhere, just away. It is accompanied by the feeling of the quest, where it seems imperative, even achingly so, that I (that we) must shed our doughty reality to find its deeper meaning, before another winter - and death - impedes our search - again, as in winter, and perhaps again as in death. For myself, it is an imperative nearly as strong as the swimming of the salmon upstream. I have found, sometimes to my disappointment, that I am well within the bell-curve of 'average,' meaning that millions of others across the country must feel the same way in spring. Millions have gotten older and have buried that feeling, while millions of the younger do begin some sort of search - just as millions of the really older, the retired, hit the road in RVs or head out to a new territory from their old home. It is an urge that is wide spread and apparently doesn't end. It is the capturing of this urge in print that made Kerouac, and his more eloquent predecessor Walt Whitman, famous - and what makes this movie, as apparently discordant as it is, worthwhile.
As frequent readers of this blog and website know, I have published a book of my own, Dream Weaver, about my travels in the mid 70's on the road. I did not do it with any intent to copy or replace Kerouac - in fact, I never thought of him while writing. It was my own intensely personal journey, started this very month in 1975, and it is different in many ways from On the Road. It is not stream-of-consciousness, but conventional writing; and, most importantly, it does not end with a call to the wild, as does On the Road. Rather, as one harsh critic put it (a man who was once my friend, by the way, who I haven't seen in 40 years. God knows what he harbors against me. See the Amazon listing for comments), it ends in something of a whimper. This is not due to a fault of imagination or style - but rather was entirely intended because it was how I felt and because it was true.
Kerouac was young when he wrote his best-known work, one that was not nearly as well written as his first publication, "The Town and the City," but one that captured his youth and the changing environment of post-war America. Both aspects are important. In youth, we believe we are the first, the best, and the brightest, and that we can conquer the world. In this, the Beats were as guilty as any group of writers and artists since the Romantic era (in my humble opinion). Yet, like the Romantics, they had a real point - the Romantic era heralded, or rather lamented, the loss of agrarian innocence with the exploding industrialization of western Europe; while the Beats both heralded and lamented the opening up of America due to new technologies, as well as the changing of America to one of grotesque materialism. And it was true - the period of the Beats, from the late 40's to the early 60's, was indeed an era of tremendous change, although the cultural change was then happening underground - exactly where the Beats existed. Society would openly explode in the later 60's and early 70's, as we Baby Boomers well know - and that explosion would drastically alter society, from sex and marriage to the very idea, for many, of our place in society and our personal meaning within it.
Back in the 70's when I traveled the country for months at a time at the mercy of my thumb and the kindness of strangers, I, too, was young and I, too, believed that we would change the world, that we were unique and beyond all other generations. However, when I wrote the book, I was already around 50 years old and my perspective had changed drastically. We, the dreamers, had since lived different lives than our fathers and mothers, but none of us lived in the stratosphere of a truly unique and beautiful consciousness. Instead, we raised kids, worried about money and jobs, and got old just like everyone else - just as the Beats eventually did, or died before they could. Kerouac died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age (I recall) of 47,a broken and rambling man who had not had a book out for a decade or more. Ginsberg rode the new wave of the hippies fairly well as he followed another pioneer, poet Gary Snider, into at least the trappings of Eastern Mysticism. Many others- William Burroughs, Ferlinghetti - fell into hard drug dependency that sunk them into true sexual decadence, and Neal Cassidy simply died while walking on railroad tracks, counting, as Ken Kesey said, the ties until he dropped dead, probably of a heart attack from excessive use of speed.
But still, the Beats knew there was something in the air. By the 70's, it was already in the air and waning into a new normalcy, our current era - or, as the more cynical might put it, it was already being co-opted. Indeed it was, and has been. The transcendence that the Beats sought was found by the hippie movement, with the help of psychedelic drugs, and then almost immediately co-opted by the criminal fringe and far-left ideologues, who used it (and are still using what it) to break the old order and replace it with another old order - the materialist Marxist dream of the mid-19th century. This replacement is not transcendent, but rather, simply a replacement. In other words, the hopes and fevered dreams of the Beats and early hippies has been ground down into the dust of the old thin material plain, this time with an illusion of a bright and progressive future. Thus, in hindsight, I saw where the early 70's had been going - and in all honesty, had to end with the book with a shrugged "whimper" rather than a bang. But it was not really a whimper, just the acknowledgement that we still had a long way to go to reach the fabled "Age of Aquarius."
The spiritually oriented know that the current trend is only an illusion. The real promise still lies there, ready for the necessary amount of people, or density, for this promise to become a reality at large. It is thus why I write in this blog - and why the Beats, and the movie that depicts their essence so well - are still important. In their time, they did not know what the new essence would be, only that it was there, ready to be taken in. They had the 'sense' - and awakened many others to this sense - just as the hippies actually lived it and found out what it could be. The discipline, however, was never there, and the old world of power politics came back in different garb with a vengeance. Yet the movie and the times - from the beats to the hippies to the current New Age - keep reminding us. Just as spring reminds us to turn our faces to the sun and makes us wish to be off, anywhere, to somewhere more perfect and beautiful than we are now. FK
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