Windblown World.

I do really enjoy Kerouac's journals though. I read bits and pieces from this compilation called Windblown World for a report a couple years ago, and I keep meaning to pick up a copy so I can read the rest. This was part of one of his entries, and I adore it:

If all our greatest writers had been men who were constitutionally unhappy and constitutionally defeated in the world, we would have reason to despair of all knowledge and imagination, or if not that, despair of the utter lack of responsibility in imaginative talented men. But there are great writers who were true men in every sense -- Mark Twain is one. An uncomplaining man, a man who did not believe that literature is a constant tale of sorrow and nothing else. What does the gloomy sophomore write in his melodramatic tragedy? -- certainly not the whole truth. Mark Twain piloted steamboats, dug for silver in Nevada, roamed the West, 'roughed it', told jokes with other men, hunted, worked as foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, lecturer, and was a family man -- and yet, he did not have to sacrifice all that to his 'art,' he lived and wrote, he was a full man and a full artist, equally happy and whole as unhappy and unwhole, equally gregarious as he was lonely, equally, healthily, simply all things, and I believe he asked that his work not be compared to 'literature as it is known' because he wasn't doing 'that kind of thing at all.' He was just writing, not what he thought 'literature' demanded of him... Let's have another man who lives his life in the world, complete, and also writes great books.

It's easy to look at someone in retrospect like that, and idealize his life. I'm sure Twain wasn't as content with that constant struggle between being whole and unwhole, as Kerouac makes him seem. That's the thing though: it's such a terribly wonderful balancing act. Here's from another entry, which I also enjoy immensely:

The flesh has ceased to mean anything to me. What does it matter whether I gain the meager satisfactions of the penis or not? What has that foul, insuitable, lame worm to do with me? – even if it fills at the sight of a thigh? So no? The sun goes up, the sun goes down – so? The sea is golden; does that make me golden? does that make me salt
What’s me? Me is that which want to be amazed without natural cessation, in an eternity of ecstacy.
Rules? Laws? To me, what?
I am free to want what I want.
I want uninterrupted rapture. I believe this has been made manifest to me in dreams, and in music, and in the pages of Dostoevsky, in the lines of Shakespeare, in sexual joy, in drunkenness, in being high on tea. Why should I compromise with anything else or with the “Bourgeois” calm of the backyard lawn, The Edgar Guest concession wild, wild happiness.
On tea I have seen the light. In my youth I saw the light. In my childhood I bathed in the hints of light; I hankered, eager.
I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else? After all, I’m no cabbage, no carrot, no stem! a burning eye! a mind of fire! a broken goldenrod! a man! a woman! a SOUL!
Fuck the rest, I say, and PROCEED!
(This is what I want to write, not stylistic crap!)

Some of his phrases are just so perfect, I can't even stand it. The way that only a handful of commonplace words just seem to belong to each other, it's like they burst from some secreted, unreal place, and just flowed forward and came out together. And the imagery is so vivid, I can see this whole flash of color and light and darkness when I read these simple combinations of words, and it takes my breath away. That sounds so ridiculous, but it's true. It's exhilarating. I love it. It's so...raw. Perfect.

----------------
Now playing: Wilco - Misunderstood

Application of Kerouac's 'Belief & Techniques.'

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

Hypocrisy alert: I've never read On the Road. I got about 50 pages in and never finished because I couldn't tolerate the indulgent nature of Kerouac's "spontaneous prose." I admire it in theory but actually trying to read it and then decipher it gives me a headache. However, I have no problem applying his techniques myself and writing beyond stream-of-consciousness in his "spontaneous" way. So if this gives you a headache...sorry. You don't have to read it or make sense of it.

I do feel a bit better having written it though.

all I want is everything, to snatch and catch and grab and squeeze all of human experience, everything there is, the highest highs and lowest lows, the deepest of emotions and oceans of love and hate and pain and peace and tragedy and ecstasy and madness – especially the madness – and oh the LAUGHTER, and capture it, hold it for a moment in the palm of my hand, in a fierce orb of pure life
and then RELEASE it.
unchain unbind the tiny microcosmic cosmic blast and watch in slow motion as the most dangerous fearsome weapon and greatest most powerful healer expands across the universe in an unstoppable unreasonable irrational force beyond all reckoning
flowing like lava, a nuclear holocaust flattening, washing over everything in its path but killing nothing and everything at once blanketed in whiteness icier than snow and warm in its grasp, not wrath, but true clarity
exposing the distance between us, the mere inches centimeters millimeters that feel like miles and the darkness that exists in the in between that pushes us apart like electromagnets fueled by the ungovernable blinding blackness in which it lives no exists like a parasite feeding off our doubt and pain and hunger
our hunger to devour, to express, as we starve desire yearn for everything contained in the LIFE released in that moment and chase it down like it’s the only thing that can save us and maybe it is, maybe that’s all that matters is the race, the chase, the pursuit that ensues when we awake and see and realize that what we feel is real RIGHT NOW and even when tomorrow comes and nothing is real any more, it doesn’t matter, so long as we keep on fighting the good fight in the neverending struggle that consumes us
and then time resumes and that fleeting life vision vanishes, the ephemera become phantasms and disappear in a flash, but liberated I saw it with my own mind’s eye, reflected in your eyes, because all I want is everything and everything is you is me is us is one is all. right now. forever.

----------------
Now playing: Stars - Ageless Beauty

19. Accept loss forever

- Jack Kerouac
Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

I like words.

These are some of my favorites:

- mad
- quibble
- conundrum
- illusory
- nebulous
- ephemeral
- clarity
- flee
- vast
- dusk
- transient
- inhibition
- lingering
- anguish
- spectrum
- whirl
- sacrilege
- consecrate

- intrinsic

And of course

- absurd.

Restraint is more painfully tragic than the most emotional explosion, and the most heartbreaking words are the ones not uttered.