Side Trip To The Beats

I have an advantage that is fairly recent. I wrote and published, such as it is, within hours, sometimes within minutes, of the events I wrote about. And it was all event reporting, even if the event in question is an intangible insight. Otherwise what is there to write about? So I captured my events immediately. Jack and Neal waited and percolated and shifted lenses and added lenses before they wrote spending a good deal of energy recapturing the to me distant past during the process of composing. Jack’s contribution to world literature being the rigorous stream of consciousness, and rigorous it was, which recreated the sense of the event actually long after it in time, but somehow traveling back to within the event spiritually and that was a heavy discipline indeed. I don’t have the chops. And I never will, so that cannot be what I am doing here. I understand that.

I do have photos, which is what I have learned to call my pictures, and a tiny bit of video. Now the question is how this stuff captured in the exact moment of its occurring relates to the spiritual stream captured so truly by those guys with their rigorous discipline?

Alcohol killed Jack Kerouac. Bloody and dead. In my view it killed his life long before it killed his body. Then I have to wonder what good are exact spiritual portrayals of a spiritual suicide destruction, exact pictures of a bloody disaster?

Crank  killed Cassady. No doubt about it. Neal’s gift was a trick he had of giving you the exact internal stream, expressing in the moment. I’m no expert, I’m uneducated but I have read these guys and talked to their friends and I, so to speak, read books. I’m sorry but Neal Cassady, as thrilling as he was, was a talking horse.

Crank will kill me. I haven’t touched it in eleven years and I am likely to never touch it again, but in the end it will be the long term effects of methamphetamine abuse that puts me under the ground. Probably liver cancer or liver failure when the cirrhosis turns what’s left of my liver tissue into rotten oak. Hepatitis C. It might be pathetic but it won’t be bloody or sudden when it happens. I will doubtless have plenty of time for regret.

This isn’t what I started out to say , but it might be worth saying anyway. If you go on the road and you write about it you have to deal with these guys somehow.

I give you some near-time reporting and a few pictures and you can work out the spiritual experience for yourself.