Even though I’ve been sober for ten years now, I still look up to my early hero Jack Kerouac. I love his open writing style, and I’m fully taken in by the way he transreally merged his fiction with his mythos. I choose not to live like him so I can be sixty and relatively serene and still out there hitting the word-surf, but even so I’ll forever view Jack’s ways as romantic and cool, even though I well understand the nastiness of the actual reality details, it’s like this high-school crush I’ll always remember fondly, my introduction to divine poesy, a memory of an enchanting but lethal land. I'm grateful for every fresh day I spend outside of that land. But I still think Jack, who's buried there, is a great writer and a hero to admire. Does that even make sense? Well, who says people have to make sense…
Sylvia and I were in San Francisco for the day, and I took a nap in Washington Square Park as I like to do, my way of merging with Jack, also I love napping in city parks, it's a deeper form of tourism, you're touring the astral plane of the area.
The connection here is a scene in Big Sur when Jack Kerouac napped there in 1960, aged 38, on his way to drinking himself to death. I used Amazon’s “Search In Book” feature to find the page of the novel (search for “161”) and then worked out where that is in my printed copy; it’s in Chapter 30. Here’s a long quote from that.
[Begin Big Sur quote.]
So Ben Fagan [poet Philip Whalen] now sees I’m going overboard crazy and I need sleep — “We’ll get a bottle!” I yell. But end up, he’s sitting in the grass of the park smoking his pipe, from noon to 6 P.M., and I’m passed out exhausted sleeping in the grass, bottle unopened, only to wake up once in a while wondering where I am and by God I’m in Heaven with Ben Fagan watching over men and me. And I say to Ben when I wake up in the gathering 6 P.M. dusk, “Ah Ben I’m sorry I ruined our day by sleeping like this” but he says: “You needed the sleep, I told ya”—“and you mean to tell me you been sitting all afternoon like that?”—“Watching unexpected events” says he …
”What happened while I was asleep?”—“Oh, people went by and came back and forth and the sun sank and finally sank down and’s gone now almost as you can see, what you want, just name it you got it”—“Well I want sweet salvation”—“What’s sposed to be sweet about salvation? maybe it’s sour” …
I feel good because I’ve had my sleep but mainly I feel good because somehow old Ben (my age) has blessed me by sitting over my sleep all day and now with these few silly words … It’s been the only peaceful day I’ve had in California, in fact, except alone in the woods, which I tell him and says, “Well, who said you werent alone now?” making me realize the ghostliness of existence tho I feel his big bulging body with my hands and say: “You sure some pathetic ghost with all that ephemeral heavy crock a flesh”—“I didn’t say nottin” he laughs … “What are we gonna do with our lives?”—“Oh,” he says,” I dunno, just watch em I guess”
[End Big Sur quote.]
As a bonus I found something amazing in Chapter 13 (search for “flying saucer”) of Big Sur. Here’s the quote:
“But on the way to Cody’s [Neal Cassady’s house] my madness already began to manifest itself in a stranger way…: I thought I saw a flying saucer in the sky over Los Gatos — From five miles away — I look and I see this thing flying along and mention it to Dave…”
Jack saw a flying saucer over my home town of Los Gatos! How perfect.