October in the Railroad Earth

Kerouac fever has been at a heightened pitch this year, which marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal Beat text, On the Road. Love it or hate it, everyone has an opinion. I notice that the true romantics still love Sal Paradise and more practical people can't give him the time of day. As for me, I’m ready to discuss any time, any place—you name it and I’m there. Spontaneous bop prose, word jazz, rhapsodomancy, OTR is like reading neon and I don't care if it now seems quaint to some or out of fashion. Does that matter?

Not at all.

Is Milton outré? Is Homer over?

I don't think so.

I love that Kerouac and company picked up the notion of Beat from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and writer who had picked up the phrase from carnies, small-time crooks, and jazz musicians in Chicago and who used the word to describe the “beaten” condition of worn-out travelers for whom home was the road. Huncke used it to explain his “exalted exhaustion” of a life lived beyond the edge. Kerouac took it one step further, saying, “I guess you could say we're a Beat Generation,” when talking to John Clellon Holmes, who used the quote in the New York Times Magazine. Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg further refined the concept as “beatific,” and containing a spiritual aspect, involving Catholicism, William Blake, and Buddhism, respectively. Toward the end of his life, Kerouac explained that he was really a just a Catholic mystic all along.

So, I ask you, who are we now? What generation of writers is this? Why has no significant movement happened since the explosion of the Beats?

This summer, I spent some time at the cabin in Big Sur where Jack went to reignite his muse, shake off the haze of alcohol, and escape the cartoon character he had become as “King of the Beats.” I could still feel him there, a mix of ecstatic fervor and DT sweats. As I walked the dirt road to Ferlinghetti's wooden shack, Cadillac SUVs blew past me, leaving clouds of dust in their wake. I wondered if they had any idea that there was a holy place, a literary shrine nearby. I fervently hoped they did NOT know, as they would surely want to renovate it.

Whenever Kerouac wanted to renew himself, he turned to nature. The Big Sur cabin made the perfect hermit hut for this mystic. Big Sur has a quality of light and sun like nowhere else in the world; it is the perfect place to call upon your muse, and Jack Kerouac had returned to this place he so loved, "off the road," in order to regain his SELF. Ironically, at this time in his life, he was experiencing his most intense "exalted exhaustion." So he was, at once, his most Beat, and was escaping that very thing.

Go here for pictures of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg at Kerouac's grave.