On the road

I have been reading a lot lately and the latest book I completed is this gem of a work called 'On the road' by Jack Kerouac. His language is strangely evocative and his stories glow with the sad eyed glimmer of unachievable freedom, they are resplendent with the strange sounds of gay abandon. Underscoring his amphetamined recollections of jazz, bars, girls, drugs, and travels in the bleary swathes of 50's America, what shines clear and foremost is his zest for life, humanity and the country he loved so much. But more importantly, on a personal level, it is yet another reminder to me that it is the ugly, depraved, debauched, and irreverent (not in a hugely antisocial way) side of man which is infinitely more interesting and pregnant with creative possibilities than the law abiding, sheltered, devoid of any worthwhile experiences side. Kerouac describes it as,

'But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

His prose, at places, is positively fabulous. Words follow each other with nonchalance while magnificent, almost tangible ideas and visions take shape in the background. And the result is an image which is not just supremely beautiful but also seems like the only natural image for the situation. It's, for example, not just the description of a carpet but the carpetness incarnate. He describes the view from Golden Gate in SFO as,

'There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast with the great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour it would come streaming through the golden gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men;'

It is a peaceful, even a contented vision. A vision he is able to conjure not by being blatant about it but by the repeated use of 'white', a color that is automatically tranquil. He ends with the beautiful lines,

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty.'