#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

#309- Search By Night- Jack Kerouac

I wish I could write about Jack Kerouac as lucidly as Jack Kerouac wrote about anything. He is both candid and artistic, striping himself of the literary norms as only one writer in hundred years can do, he captures the mind and voice of the human heart.

As most Kerouac pieces, this isn’t true short fiction, but there being no way, and myself having no desire to categorize it, here it is. It is the night of December 7^th, 1941. The paper’s boldface headlines announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and this young man walks the street of a Massachusetts milltown trying to find clarity.

“Outside the window, in the yard between my house and my neighbors, there glowed the cold crater silver of a December moon in New England…and there was silence as of death, upon the cold hard ground. Frost decorated the window, Dickens-like. I looked out upon the winter night, was silent in the presence of a stupendous hush, listening for the sigh of our slumbering hearts.”

Kerouac was famously French-Canadian, often writing about the FC community in Lowell Massachusetts. He loved the language, calling it more of a verbal language than a written one. However, this story was the first example of his using it in dialogue. The French-Canadian side of him, gave him a unique voice, and the language mixed with English gave his writing, already steeped in poetic phrasing and musical shape, a cadence not seen anywhere else.

Notable Passage: “I was not alone. Walking down the street, seeing barren crater glow along the shabby length of its bedded route, I suddenly perceive the bobbing figure of another human being. Another footstep, quicker than mine, most fretful. It is a millworker returning from the ‘night shift.’ We pass each other in the night, moving along gracefully in opposite directions. My brother, yet I do not know him, I do not speak to him. We only exchange quick suspicious glances, mine is almost belligerent in its nocturnal frown and scowl. (Ah yes, I am a fool!)”

Rating: 10-8-9-10 Total= 37

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

#211 Go Back- Jack Kerouac

Although Kerouac really didn’t write traditional short fiction, he was prolific in pouring his thoughts on paper. Besides his novels and books of poetry, recently published collections of his notes and jottings have uncovered a few great clippets of planned novellas. Go Back is one of these short pieces written before his first novel, The Town and the City, was published.  Go Back, written in 1940, shows even this early where Kerouac was to take the form. He had a keen sense of the ethereal nature in all of us, but only wrote for himself, of himself, and from his own eyes, wide open, and sensing emotion everywhere.

His language was always poetic and rhythmic like the jazz and bop he got inspiration from. It’s hard not to stand up and read this aloud to the people on the bus next to me with their face buried in their phones or being deafened by over-produced music coming through their ears plugs drowning out the sights and sounds of real life right in front of them.

“Zounds, I say. Zounds! You hurry while I stand here, trying to recapture the past. And here you are., brushing it aside, the past of tomorrow, which is the present of today, you are brushing it aside as you stride along, intent on your cheap present practical and physical desires and comfort. You fool! Wait, don’t hurry.”

“I tried to sigh like they do in plays, but it was a fake one. I didn’t want to sigh, but I tried. The thing I really wanted to do was weep, but I couldn’t do that either.”

Has any group of writers—Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs—ever been so open, vulnerable, and emotive than these? It’s a shame that Kerouac remains misunderstood by so many, that in the eyes of too many, he seems more like a James Dean caricature of a rebel instead of what he was: a big ball of energy and wonder, gulping life by the ocean-full.  Even these tossed aside pages of his notebooks have genius not seen since.

Rating: 8-8-9-10 Total=35

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

A twenty year-old man is having an affair with an older woman. Neither of them are entirely sure why the affair exists, they don’t love each other, nor do they hate each other. Their love-making is cold and mechanical, but yet, it seems to have meaning.

“Far more meaningful than age differences, he felt were the different tendencies that each individual possessed. He couldn’t help thinking that this was an important key for unlocking the riddle of life.”

While they spend time wondering about seemingly important things, she cries often, and he talks to himself in poetic verse. These odd, personal idiosyncratic tics is what makes them unique. It’s in the others reaction of these traits that their own being becomes apparent. It seems that we only know ourselves through each other’s eyes. There can be something so apparent and germane about yourself to the outside world but it is something that we can only see through the help of others.

We often spend time worrying about the wrong things, things we have no control over, things that will go on ticking even if we had not noticed:

“…she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.”

Subtle and impossibly simple at first, Murukami can be utterly florid when we look slightly deeper. A point made by the following passage, that at first can seem like a cliché point, but when read in full context of this piece, sticks with you:

“I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Notable Passage: “She seemed to have lifted the edge of the world, and now she was loosening its threads little by little—perfunctorily, apathetically, as if she had to do it no matter how long it might take.”

Rating: 9-8-10-9 Total= 36