I had a notion I would acquire some speed and turn this into a novel in a period of several weeks, but received negative reactions from friends when I shared this plan.
I saw the movie on Tuesday. I woke up at seven and made it to elementary school at eight to substitute teach 1st grade. I went to the farmer's market in Monterey. I talked to an artist who gives away books every Tuesday and shared a vision with him that I had in February while in an outdoor soaking pool at Doe Bay on Orcas Island, that I would write his biography that would double as a retrospective on his works, and that I would write it at Hawk's Shadow, his cabin on top of a ridge down toward Big Sur. He was into the idea, but, since I had left town in January, someone had began renting the cabin and moved in. But he was himself in the process of creating his own retrospective. Then I went to the movie theater where I used to work, was bought a coffee by the proprietor of the café, and watched On the Road. I hadn't eaten dinner and I hadn't had enough sleep the night before, but a "second wind" pulsed through me, and the drugs that inspired the sequences of the film were captured in the scenes and entered me like placebos and I left the theater high, knowing that I was not ready to stop moving, that I needed to write as much as I could in my parents' garage, I mean my french-canadian aunt's spare room, knock it all out so I could be ready to go the next time Dean or Neal or Carlo or Marylou came to get me or called for me. I would type and stare at the maps on the walls and postcards of far away places, but I wouldn't smoke cigarettes and sip whiskey as I pounded at my typewriter. My typewriter is broken and, besides that, outmoded, to say the least. I have a stack of books and a thousand dollar vocabulary and clear and meaningful things to say, but no publisher beyond kinko's and google.
* * *
I have been hammering out the words and am happy to be here no matter much I would prefer to be back in transit. And I owe much to Kerouac for getting out what he did so I could know what lay at the end of that road. Days have passed and I have done everything from spontaneous prose fueled by blaring music on the stereo in front of me to piecing together patiently a bibliography while listening to All Things Considered turn into Marketplace turn into The World turn into Fresh Air. And the road has sat on me as I sat on it as my feet literally touch the cement of the garage floor that becomes the cement of the driveway and the street and the greater street and the California local highway 68 to the 101, the great 101 that once took one to Mexico before the interstate introduced the great behemoth named FIVE that tapped out US 101 in LA long ago, but it still holds strong north along that royal road—el camino real—which sounds like the real path, through Salinas, over the Golden Gate, as we discussed before, until the coast runs out and is forced to curb itself east and outline the grand Olympic Peninsula and then become US 101 south, that which was north and became east until it gets eaten up by what else but that great behemoth name FIVE. My feet touch the real path but I stay still, for this, for this...
The first time I took the great trip north I was 14 years old and we had a volkswagon vanagon that my mom drove all by herself with myself, our black labrador, and a furry white mutt intended for my aunt in Seattle as cargo. We aimed to stay as far west as possible, a noble aim, an impractical one, a beautiful one, and my mother insisted I keep a journal, that I catalogue this epic journey. What a quixotic notion I was introduced to at such an impressionable age. When we arrived at our northernmost destination, the bottoming out of our hero's journey, my uncle explained to me the interstate system, that odd roads changed your latitude and the evens took you east west, like a graph, x and y. The evens, the xs, began above the zero southern border, with the EIGHT, taking you out of San Diego, through the desert off and on, off into the unknown, on the road, the TEN that I knew so well, the epic LA-traffic nightmare that mirrors the origins of 66 in the beaches of Santa Monica and goes like that Hudson that famously jumped on it, and the FORTY that is now that 66, that gives you the historical perspective on the phenomena of that story of a highway, you look down on those grounded cadillacs instead of up, you look down on all of it, like irony the FORTY pulls you away from the earth and lets you look at it on the other side of the passage of time, and the EIGHTY, I knew the EIGHTY, it was the bay bridge that took you from the bay to the capital out of the state on and on until Wyoming where I once found it as a younger child where I realized where it corresponded with the maps I studied so hard, and the EIGHTY-FOUR, further north that I met years later when I lived in Portland and would go east to the mountains on whims or the time I took the Greyhound from Lincoln, Nebraska to Portland—but it was called something else out there—and the EIGHTY took me to Salt Lake where we found the EIGHTY-FOUR and I found an America previously unknown to me, and then I knew there was a NINETY somewhere up there...and the ys, it was a beautiful coincidence that the California ONE road the great western periphery of our continent for much of its land's end drama, but the truly furthest west interstate, that took one from state to state, was the FIVE, that which ate up the 101 which ate up that camino real which ate up those native trailways that I can't claim to know anything about for the names don't linger on the signs of this coast's great thruways, the FIVE that followed the California aqueduct through the central valley and intersected with those lateral lines that we just mentioned, the definition of quixotic, the intertwining duo of modernity that is the most boring thing to drive, torture in the summer, a potential tragedy in the fog, boring, straight and consistent, all the way through the manmade Shasta Lakes to the semi-passing excitement of the cascading Oregon border, and on, and on, the most dramatic view of Portland, high above the Willamette, where the EIGHTY-FOUR ends and begins, depending on how you look at it, and then the Columbia, that flooded glacial carving, and on along the green and watery contours of Washington until Canada, and the FIFTEEN just east of that, that I met in San Diego county where my mom's family's from, that broke from the five heading east as it carved its path north, it ate the 395, my mom told me, the 66 of the north-south (that gets no reputation because it don't go east where reputations are made), the old 395 that my other uncle, the brother of the one who explained to me about the interstates, told me we would be on, the modern road that inherited that comparatively ancient trajectory, the day that I started Jack Kerouac's On the Road for the second time, are you ready for it, Andrew, there's a sign around here, look out for it, do you see it...there it is, history: US 395! We saw it, 7 in the morning on the way to Mexico at the end of a journey that at moments felt could never end, FIFTEEN that took Los Angelinos to Las Vegas, that held the dead body of a character in a Brett Easton Ellis short story, a dead body picked of its joints, this is what I remember, these are the basics of these roads that are the canvases of life and movement in America and my uncle explained to me the logic of them when I was 14 and my mom drove me and our dog north as far west as we could go while still remaining on the continent that we take for granted, that rests beneath the concrete my feet touch that leads to my driveway and those roads that lead to every other road.
Like I said, I have been experimenting with spontaneous prose for the first time since I first read Kerouac in high school and realized you don't have to be a degenerate to smoke marijuana, that, on the contrary, you could be smarter than most people that you met, and maybe that's part of the reason you smoked, but then the joys of analytical deconstruction of the words that describe our reality took precedence, and thought, and pre-ordained structures comma and self-conscious writing. How can someone write something without deciding beforehand exactly what is to be written? How can one let words escape and let them exist, apart from awareness, what is so special about the moment that creates the words that one can't do it again with a bit more of an idea of what it is that should be put across? This is why Kerouac faded out of favor and is why I ignored him altogether in the end—he wasn't afraid to sound dated or even silly, he let inspiration and the moment create his writing, not periods of contemplation and the passage of time and the awareness that goes along—spontaneous prose. This is the importance of jazz, of performance, of the ability for a moment to shine through in his art.
Unfortunately books hold things forever, they don't care about the aesthetics that produced them, the beauty of the moment. It sits on a bookshelf next to James Joyce and Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein and if you pull On the Road it doesn't stand the test of time. A Jackson Pollack painting is there, but seems like a tombstone to a moment you could never appreciate unless you were there. If you listen to a jazz recording it is a bit more reserved and put together—timeless—than a live performance, but if it is a live performance you have an audience hollering and celebrating and letting you know this is a moment, that this moment is happening and mind-blowing and that, although there is a recording of it, it can never be reproduced, it can never exist again, and the fast-living, drug-fueled lifestyles of its artists assured that.
And this is why the movie On the Road works so well.
The life that created the material for the novel, the dialogues that led to the ideas of the novel, and the writing of the novel itself, everything that led to the existence of these words on those pages was a performance, a series of artful actions and improvisations and experiments and philosophies and the movie gives this infamous performance a stage, and it is a beautiful stage. The passage of time since it was written makes its story a period piece and a certain self-awareness comes from just the costuming and the antiquity of the cars, the natural ironic distance that comes with time makes it all a performance and it is not just palatable, it is good.
When I found my father after the film I raved about it with the sentence patterns of a manic episode and he said he wanted to see it and look over the novel before hand, so I loaned him a book that wasn't mine to begin with and tomorrow we see the movie, me for the second time. I said I would be happy to see it again, the first time as an emotional experience, the second as a more critical summation of the film. Eight and a half years after I traveled four months straight and watched a Walter Salles movie twice about voyaging I have finished six-odd months of travel and prepare to watch a Walter Salles movie for a second time. And this riff is done as my dad turns 65.
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