Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

by Taylor Ash

I began reading Jack Kerouac’s books the way that you should—in your early formative years, when you move to a new city alone and your head is filled with new delusions and desires. Nearly every year since I’ve come to Montreal, I find myself in a new apartment, and I realize how pointless—how painful, even—it is to own anything. I’m writing now from my shoebox apartment room, knowing that every one of my possessions stuffed under my bed will make it all the more difficult the next time I move. After five years in the city, I have responsibilities and people I care about tying me down here, and old connections pulling me elsewhere. No matter where I am or what I do, it never feels like it’s enough, like I’m in a race and I’m falling behind. 

Perhaps the only thing that I fear more than the future, is the fear of losing myself when I graduate next month, or losing myself in ten years, or thirty. Will I continue to write, have a career, and will I be satisfied? Will I retire into one of the millions of subdivisions sprawling out of the hearts of the cities? Will I crave the complacency of a quiet, fenced life? I’m afraid I’lll convince myself that I’m lucky, if I manage to get a house with a pool in the backyard. I’ll spend my time there in the summer like a fly to a sweet trap. I’ll disintegrate into chlorine, sterilizing the moral dirt under my fingernails, as news of the outside world passes me by. My thoughts will be drowned out by the dull buzz of electrical pool heaters and blinded by the day, blooming cancerous sunspots on my shoulders in fantastic mandalas. And when I’m bored, I’ll walk around to clear my head, down efficient rows of indistinguishable houses. Down the streets, until the sidewalk eats itself and I come to the end of the road. Looking out at the empty plots of land and the false promises of exponential growth, I’ll realise it’s too late.

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I know that there has to be more to life. And it’s this very hope that has kept me coming back to Kerouac all of these years. Similarly, his vision for The Beat generation was born out of an existential crisis, having seen the first suburbs built in the 50’s and the emergence of Middle America. When he was twenty, he dropped out of Columbia University to become a writer and aimlessly wander the underbelly of America. If I’ve learned anything from him, it’s that it’s extremely important that we “waste our time.” In a society that’s conditioned us to believe that every action must be productive or monetized, pouring your time and effort into creating art is an act of protest. It’s a necessary process for the sake of sanity. In his short life, Kerouac left us with an extensive body of work, written over a substance-fueled fifteen years of dedicated craft. Moreover, he gave us the thirty Techniques & Beliefs of Modern Prose, also known as the Beat manifesto for living. Of it, one such rule is—

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No. 20—Believe in the holy contour of life

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It seems that the contour of my life recently has been defined by what I produce. School has become a place of quantifying success, rather than development. I meet deadlines, get good grades, catch buses, clock in, clock out. I try so hard to maintain a sense of control, but I sometimes think of starting over. What would my life look like if I believed in a god or fate or this holy contour of life? If there was a higher power pulling me forward, like Kerouac had, I might have a reason to go where I liked. He was never just a writer, but a merchant mariner, railroad brakeman, and fire lookout. He used his fame to support his travels, and cashed his book royalties in traveller’s cheques, roaming by bus, freight train-hopping, and hitchhiking. He drifted to and from New York and San Francisco in On The Road. In Big Sur, he translated the sound of the waves through poetry. He attempted to reach Nirvana on a mountain peak in Desolation Angels. When he wasn’t with his beatnik friends, he retreated alone for months on end to write. There’s something so intoxicating about Kerouac’s will to constantly reinvent himself and find ways to carry on.

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No. 29—You’re a genius all of the time

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I’ve spent years believing that my life wasn’t worth writing about. When I did write, I worried about sounding stupid and that I had nothing to say, and so I often stopped myself before I even began. But reading Kerouac’s extravagant and electric prose, I could see that he wasn’t worried so much about complete coherency, as he was about the movement and connection of ideas. The very act of pushing through that mental block and writing, not knowing where your thoughts will lead you, has brought me such catharsis. It’s as though my words were a sickness to be expelled onto a page, then, in moments of sober reflection, I find revelations in the excess of my thought. To an even greater extent, Kerouac believed that his words and images  were imitations of some ultimate Truth or Ideal, which he let take their own form through spontaneous prose. His work is made up of raw, unrefined observations of everything great and mundane. As he traveled, he was enamoured by the world around him and cataloged all of the happenings of the people and the city, all of the sights and the sounds. Ultimately, this confidence allowed him to find meaning in his singularity. Whether he intended to or not, it heavily influenced the youth and subcultures of his generation.

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No. 19—Accept loss forever

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Kerouac himself believed in the Buddhist principle that perceived reality is an illusion, and in the ephemeral nature of the self. Maybe it had worked for a while, or maybe it was this philosophy of loss—of time, possessions, and people—that led him to his demise. He left behind a wife and child somewhere along the road. Near the end, he became so isolated from his old friends that he fell further into alcoholism and depression. He died in 1969 with an alleged 91$ to his name, when the years of alcohol abuse had caught up to him. He spent the last months of his life making a return to Catholicism. Maybe, he did it to save his soul from the destructiveness of his youth. He was controversial, a hypocrite, and he’s no idol; he certainly didn’t wish to be. In his novel Big Sur, he said himself, “I wrote a book about my fucked-up life, and people decided to worship me rather than condemn me.” 

I often wonder if he regretted it all, or if he ended up getting exactly what he wanted. I wonder what led him to abandon that delusional optimism, and whether I might fall into the same traps. I know that idolatry is a weakness that blinds the imperfections of the person, and so I’ve learned not to worship the man, but the road. So in a month’s time, when I’m thrown out into the world with structure, no plan, I know that I must never stop moving, never stop creating art. I can never let myself be afraid of starting over. 

Works Cited

Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. Viking Press, 1957. 

Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962. 

Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. Coward-McCann inc., 1965.

Kerouac, Jack. “Techniques & Beliefs of Modern Prose.” Evergreen Review, vol 2, no. 8, 1958. https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/