RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,096
(jack kerouac comes home)
When I lived in Columbia Crossroads
it would sometimes snow for days.
The white-out factor was always
pretty cool - I'd know there was
a field there, or a barn there, in
whichever direction I may have been
looking, but they were not always
visible in the long view. You had
to get up 'close' to things to see
them. I found it was much like
that with everything else too. The
vapid conjecture that was the world
demanded close-ups for clarity.
Even atlases and maps had what
they called 'insets' - which were
magnified and detailed squares that
highlighted one particular aspect of
the area. A lens/scope always had a
'close-up' setting. The world was,
otherwise, pretty much a generalized
blur into which categories, terms, ideas,
and conclusions were thrown.
-
Consider any street in NYC, back then.
The sameness that pervades things now
has ruined all that - everything now has
those curved fabric/plastic awnings with
their business names on them. The old
streetscape has been obliterated; that of
small shops and single signs, often done
in unique and eccentric styles, for the
particular business. A person could scan
a street, and, as an 'inset,' concentrate
often on the most miraculous and singular
sights. Now...it's a mere bubble-blur of
awkwardly colored, curved tops - mass
produced commercial signage announcing
nothing so much as the dearth of anything.
-
Worlds pass and things dissolve. Often,
after dropping in to one or another spot
for coffee - or The Villager, say, to visit
with the people there - I'd sit at the
counter and watch the passing parade,
like a sniper, in waiting. There was a
movie place across the street - to watch
the film-snobs enter and leave was fun.
It made Woody Allen, in character, seem
like one of the characters I'd see - low
to the ground schlebs (Yiddish has
three great root words that were
always current in NYC usage: schleb,
schlep, and schlab, each of which
I willfully misuse), going on about
plot, camera angels, lighting, sound, or
expounding on some crass remnant of
what they knew about an actor or actress.
They'd take a table in the diner and, behind
me, at the counter, continue all that talk
while wolfing down game-bags of food.
Most movie-talk is gossip anyway, and
I'd have my fill of it. A white-out of
words and information, all useless, and
all about as developed as an embryo.
Yet, the student-class - all those NYU
and New School forms of life - seemed
to thrive on it. Talk, talk, opinion,
opinion. By the 1980's it all got totally
worse, as VCR and video-tape rentals
and the rest took over most every
street-corner, leftover edifice, each
offering what they called 'Lifetime'
membership in their rental club, which
'lifetime' was usually gone in about
six months. In such places you'd
really get the cream of the movie crop;
those take-home types who'd endlessly
watch The Seventh Seal or Hester Street
so as to minutely dissect, and tell about,
each scene, view, angle and line. It
was their 'business,' even if it lasted
but three weeks.
-
I never enjoyed any of that, though I
enjoyed, certainly, my non-enjoyment.
All of that life (around me) seemed
somehow to be my inset, my own
close-up into the affairs of men. It was
a funny thing; the strange detachment
needed to observe, as a writer or artist,
kept me always five steps back from
what it was I was 'seeing.' Had I been
a deaf-mute, it would have been much
the same; though, I'm told, my 'senses'
would have been advanced. Hmmm.
How anyone knows that, I never know.
-
It has been said of Jack Kerouac (who
is certainly, now, one of the literary
world's lesser and most twisted-by-
interpretation characters), that he
was 'always' conservative and that
his views never changed, but that
'people' interpreted him as they saw
him envisioned in their own ideas
of his writings they read. 'He was
always the same. It was sort of a
double-think. In one way he was
a Buddhist with this expansionist
viewpoint, and on the other hand
he always had the most conservative
political opinions.' [Wm. Burroughs].
Much like 'living in an inset,' Kerouac
got smashed by his own white-out.
He certainly embodied what I'd seen
as that 'world' of hi-tones around me;
and I kept away from that. Art-world
schemers, flatulent flatterers, and the
usual fake-publicity hounds making
things up about themselves. Jack
Kerouac acknowledged, in fact, his
'dual mind' as early as 1943! He was
torn, he wrote, between his 'normal'
and 'schizoid' sides, the intellectual
friends versus the 'rowdies' he'd
drink and carouse with. On one side,
he said, he had the 'Raskolnikov' side,
the bent and brooding figure sneering
at a world of mediocrities, complacent
of ignorance and bigotry; the introverted,
scholarly side. The alien side, And on
the 'other' side, he said, was the social
Kerouac counterpart : 'the football
halfback-whoremaster-alemate-scullion-
jitterbug-jazz critic side, the side in me
which recommends a broad, rugged,
America.'
-
His white-out, I guess, was his being
mixed up with his 'characters' - which
was all people chose to see; the made-up,
mostly fictionalized, ideas which were
piled up and amassed to make a 'person'
who, in most respects, was not that at all.
Like someone sitting home now, tinkering
with links and references, to make themselves
out to be grandiose achievers of the most
mundane. Kerouac said: "I decided I am
not one of the hipsters, and therefore I am
free and objective thinking about them and
writing their story. Nor am I Red Moultrie,
so I can stand back and scan 'him.' I am
not even Smitty; I'm none of them. I am
only describing evidential phenomena
for the sake of my own personal salvation
in works and the salvation and treasuring
of human life according to my own
intentions. What else can there truly be?"
-
I searched high and I searched low: Bakeries,
cauldrons, kilns, leather and hide tanners,
car mechanics, wagon-workers, horse and
buggy ride tenders, machinists, fabric and
garment workers, metal-men, carpenters,
sailors, seamen, laborers, addicts, drunks,
and servile servers too. All I found was my
own white-out. All I ever concentrated on
was my own sets of insets.
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