Monday, 1 June 2015

Letter to Jack Kerouac (in a sentence)




Dear Jack,


By being the "crazy catholic mystic" that you were, you were meta-YOLO even before the Instagram age: When On the Road was published in the late 1940s, you gave America its great Western story, written, as you'd have called "spontaneously" with a bulk of collective insights amassed over the twenty years of high times spent with the rest of the gang- what the road did to you, you maniacally typed on a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that were cut to size and taped together, as quick as it's short of breath to read along in fast, punctuated, rhythmic sentences; what I would like to know, was how long it really took for God's chair to warm you up to such speediness, deftly stringing recounts after recounts of the vivid expressions you single-handedly captured- on the "scroll"- like the "three weeks" as I've later learnt in your reply on the Steve Allen show (though, rebuked as untrue, since, in three weeks, I'd still be reading On the Road, and again if there were some parts of America I would like to revisit in your novel); from Denver, to Hollywood, California, to the "dirty fag" part of town that New York played center stage, wherein most of your debaucheries found its way to the heart of the novel, I'd like to know if you invented the Beat, or did the Beat invent your characters like a cautionary tale every "Aunt Sally" would pander to; that the Beat also became the main event, overrunning every other character written by young adult fiction writers: Dean Moriaty, the protagonist whose manic episodes witnessed his rolling down the abyss in a torrent of self-destruction has become a summary of the romance we've had with being lost; Marylou, a loveliness that met with a quick demise by the maniac of her boyfriend, Dean Moriaty, whom she associated too cloyingly with, like the anima to our deep longing for love; and Sal Paradise, whom you've made him as you'd make us want to live just like him, such with the long winding snake roads that have connected the rest of the Beat life's forlorn disciples to the landmarks you've made sacrilegious, where all of them are but profane, relatable, in which nothing is holy except the unholiness you've inspired; only if you'd Google Maps then, perhaps too, your mystery novel would have been truncated to two pages long, as living on the road could have been told in those selfies you would have taken; those hashtags that millennials operationalize, which you would have corrected them over because drinking on a school night pales in comparison to what you were spearheading then; those couple of tweets you would have thrown in- #RIPME Marylou is askin’ for a 3some, get some, #YOLO- whereby everything would have gone south, instead; or have you speculated all that already? 

Best Regards,
TJ






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