His life is his prose. Volcanic, explosive, devastating. And he speaks to the rhythm of the jazz notes of Charlie Parker, interiorization of a time of rebellion in American society, which sprouts sparkling from the driven and tormented soul of Jack Kerouac in his most shared book, on the road:
The only people that interest me are the ones who are crazy, the people who are crazy to live, crazy to talk, crazy to save themselves, wanting everything at the same time, the people who never yawn or talk about commonplaces, but burn , burns like fabulous yellow rockets exploding like spiders among the stars…
Overwhelming prose that infects the blood and feelings of an entire generation that became fiercely critical of traditional post-war institutions: the family, marriage, materialism, consumerism; It defended experimentation with drugs, sexual freedom, the equality of the female condition, an approximation to Eastern religions, the validity of love and peace, and questioned the hegemony of technocracy.
If something defines the existence of this American, of Canadian parents, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922, it is his immense desire to live and feel; he would say that his anxious haste to be his, his inordinate desire to look inside himself through experience and approach, increasingly irreverent, the concealment of the reasons that science gives us with conviction and technology:
All the things in life, all the faces, crowded into the same room… I never understood why I liked too many things and I get confused and bewildered running after one shooting star after another until I sink…
He was a multitasking man in dozens of performances and he did them all well: typist, firefighter, librarian, merchant marine, arm wrestling expert, excellent football player —which earned him a scholarship at Columbia University—, railway clerk and forester. The only thing he could not stand, with which he demonstrated his rebellious spirit and his refusal to take orders, was military life, which he renounced feigning madness, for which he was forcefully discharged.
Leader of a generation with his most emblematic work, In the path, with Allen Ginsberg, with his poem Howl; William Burroughs with the naked lunch; Neal Cassady, co-star of Kerouac’s novel, and John Clellon Holmes, who is credited with first using, in a 1952 New York Times article, the name of The Generation Beat (beaten) without feeling part of it and rather acting like a theoretician, with a more conventional life than the rest.
This cultural and literary movement, which flourished in the 1950s in the United States, although not very broad in terms of followers, had a significant influence and left a deep aesthetic and cultural mark on the youth of the world, who this year, A century after the birth of one of its most representative leaders, it once again brings to the fore the scope of its attempts to humanize life and strengthen spirituality in the world.
Kerouac, with his spontaneous prose, an American version of automatic writing, an expression of surrealism that André Breton would proclaim in France in 1924, would become with his book an indispensable reference for the beat generation with considerable influence on the avant-garde movements of the period, from bebop to rock, pop and hippies, that shook the behavior of youth in the second half of the 20th century.
His influence on a group of musicians and intellectuals, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Ray Manzarek, David Bowie and bands like The Byrds, The Doors, The Beatles and King Crimson, is undeniable. .
For María Geralda de Almeida, in an original essay titled The poetic lyrics of Jack Kerouac on the road, Kerouac’s narrative style is overwhelming, like the uninterrupted flow of an avalanche of words, images, promises, visions and discoveries. He is configured as a bearer style of libertarian freshness of a proto-pop imaginary. His text is vertiginous, irrepressible with revelry and colloquialisms, capturing the sound of the streets, of the plains, of the highways of the United States.
Kerouac himself confessed, to defend himself from the weight of criticism for his spontaneous prose:
I spent all my youth writing slowly, making revisions and infinite and cyclical speculations, discarding things, but one day I discovered that I was writing sentences that had no feelings.
Her spiritual song and without grammatical conventions constituted a substantial contribution that led to a force of social liberation that acted as a catalyst in the movements for the emancipation of women, for the defense of the civil rights of blacks, for the reunion of young people with nature. , free love and the preservation of the environment and peace, in the case of the hippies.
According to Hugo Savino, Kerouac was possessed who bet on the future of his accentuation. He hated laboratory modernity… He clochard light blue (Kerouac) it came from life. It was the sound of the family brooding, of the street, filtered by the lyricism of her voice. For him to live From silence, to gesture, to breath, to silence, to meditation, to song… He hated the words revolution and religion. They are just words. The only words that are worth, whatever they are, are the words you think of when you see a butterfly fly…
The epicenter of his work is the fascination for traveling the paths of his country, in an eager search for identity. Long journeys of two young Americans trying to find themselves: Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac).
In some of the dialogues, one asks the other, on that long journey, the initial one, along the legendary Route 66, from Paterson, New Jersey, along the entire east coast of the United States; the second, from Testament, Virginia to Washington, on the 301; the third, from Denver to San Francisco, and back to New York; and from New York to Mexico City:
–What is your way, Man?
The path of the mystical, the path of the crazy, the path of the Rainbow, the path of the fish, any path. There is always a way anywhere, for anyone, in any circumstance.
Kerouac and the beat generation envisioned and lived many decades in advance of globalization and the effects of the digital revolution on the mobility of young people in the world, their reluctance towards commitments, marriage, home-based work, hierarchy, the discipline that castrates, bureaucratic immobility, conventional leadership and suffocating norms and protocols.
Kerouac’s voice again:
We are going to get going and we are not going to stop until we get there… life is the way.
Kerouac, announcement with his song, In the path, to the centaurs of a new civilization, who, intoxicated with feelings of freedom and justice, presaged changes and who also knew that they would not come in the future from artificial intelligence, but from very tender human beings who had set the new technologies on fire in great piles that yesterday made them slaves.
Also read on Change16.com:
Thanks for reading Change16. Your subscription will not only provide accurate and truthful news, but will also contribute to the resurgence of journalism in Spain for the transformation of consciousness and society through personal growth, defense of freedoms, democracies, social justice, conservation of the environment and biodiversity.
As our operating income is under great pressure, your support can help us do the important work we do. If you can, support Cambio16 Thank you for your contribution!