Drizzly Comfort In The Duluoz Legend

It’s been a rough week. For me, some, but mostly for people I love who were more emotionally affected by the recent election than either of us could have predicted. I don’t usually speak with so naked a voice on here, but I’m moved to.

When I was a teenager Kerouac changed my life. That might sound like a cliche to some, but in my little world I was one of the few (and at one high school ONLY) person I knew who not only read him but even knew who he was. I read On The Road and then I quit the football team to become a full time teenage poet.

His wild joy cracked my heart open, of course. But that wasn’t it, it wasn’t just the kicks or the dope or the miles logged on the road. It was his search for paradise – his imagining of paradise, occasionally inflecting and piercing the brown domestic moments of home and family – that I recognized my own spirit longing to experience. I like his little books more than his big ones. I like Tristessa more than On the Road. I liked Maggie Cassidy more than The Dharma Bums. I like his work that was more obviously spiritual.

And so I picked up Visions of Gerard again to read for the first time in maybe 15 years or so. It’s about Kerouac’s younger brother, who died in childhood. Mournful and elegiac, it’s also as sweet with longing as any prayer:

It was only years later when I met and understood Savas Savakis that I recalled the definite and immortal idealism which had been imparted to me by my holy brother – and even later with the discovery (or dullmouthed amazed hang-middled mindburnt waking re discovery) of Buddhism, Awakenedhood – Amazed recollections that from the very beginning I, whoever “I” or whatever “I” was, was destined, destined indeed, to meet, learn, understand Gerard and Savas and the Blessed Lord Buddha (and my Sweet Christ too through all his Paulian tangles and bloody crosses of heathen violence) – To awaken to pure faith in the bright one truth: All is Well, practice Kindness, Heaven is Nigh.

Photo credit: Jack Kerouac – Tom Palumbo – CC BY-SA 2.0