Juggling Jack Kerouac: Attention and the Writer’s Gaze
[B]urn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…
—Jack Kerouac, On The Road
If you have ever tried to juggle, perhaps with those red Klutz Book fabric cubes full of beans, or with soggy tangerines, or with old tennis balls, you will know that the secret lies in where you look. If you look at your hands, you will fail. If you close your eyes, you will fail. If you look at the balls (or bags, or fruits—you get it), you will fail.
The secret is to not really look at all, which allows you to see. When you relax your eyes, letting them go “soft,” you will find your sense of peripheral vision expands, with its wonderful instinct for tracking objects, to fill nearly the whole of your view. The eye focuses by exclusion. Relax it, and you see the movement of the world. You see it all at once: your little sister across the room, her mouth agape (You’re doing it! You’re doing it!), your hands loose, like those of a marionette, and the slow-motion flights of the red juggling bags inscribing casual arcs through the air, neither rising too fast nor falling too slow, but arriving and departing from your palms on timely schedules, mimicking the celestial spheres.
Writing from one’s life is like juggling. The secret of success is to know how to really see. The flawed, obnoxious, brilliant recent master of this, the juggler of his own life with more verve and swagger and skill than any other child of his (or our) generation, the juggler of several hundred pieces of his own life at a time, was the absolute bastard Jack Kerouac. (Pardon my language; I am a little jealous.) Let us now wonder and rail at his talent and see if we have anything to learn from him about how to see.
At first read, Jack Kerouac seems, to me, to be a neurotic show-off. A performer. Pages were his stages. But who could fail to admire him? His artifice of language was so perfect that in its baroque corruption it achieved a sort of purity that, despite the infinite possible satires of the Beats, is even today effective. It is my opinion that this came from somewhere downright paleolithic in Jack. Had he been born into some pre-literate tribe, he would have been the bard, Duluoz. I imagine him incanting by the smoke-smudged wall of the clan cave. Duluoz!
The Duluoz Legend was Jack’s name for the overall corpus of his work. “Jack Duluoz,” a barely fictionalized alter ego for Kerouac, is the central figure. He seems to have intended something Proustian in the effort, with even his best-known works, On the Road and The Dharma Bums, featuring as part of the overarching self-myth. Depending on how one counts, there are something like fifteen books in the Duluoz Legend, a body of work that, mirroring the life of its author, seems both too much and not enough.
The fact that writing books was Kerouac’s chosen medium would, at first blush, seem like an awkward inconvenience. It is not the most direct means of performance. However, with a sort of obnoxious, fragile, dominant ebullience that is reserved for the Mozarts and Picassos of the world, Kerouac inhabited the natural constrictions of sentence and paragraph the way a hurricane inhabits houses. He filled them. He blew them open. He lifted off the roofs without the least appearance of effort and deposited them on some beach far away.
All this was deeply artificial. I am not saying that he was not authentic in his writing (whatever that means), but if he was, there was artifice in every bit of his authenticity. Or maybe, like the excesses of the Baroque or the Rococo, there was authenticity in all his artifice. He knew we were watching him. He was, among other things, showing off.
I once considered all this to be evidence of an absolutely monumental selfishness. Like, a selfishness so total, so innocent and joyous that it could rival the most galactic egos: toddlers, perhaps, or Walt Whitman. But as I have spent more time with Jack, I have found myself wondering if he was not doing something blessedly tricky, and as I have considered this possibility, I have come to believe that Jack Kerouac was gazing on something quite larger than himself with a gaze of well-disguised and beautiful humility.
Pardon this long quote from Dr. Sax, but it really takes the whole thing to see the juggle:
SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair— mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans— rakes leaning on meaty rock— and piles of paper and official Club equipments— It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop— the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails— While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up— my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels— we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special— with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain— We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea— but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs).
How does this even work? All the ingredients of literary failure are in the wider vicinity of this quote in Duluoz. Sentimental childhood minutiae, a cinematic conceit (really, a “Bookmovie”?), ridiculous neologisms that are laughable if pulled from their context (“grooking,” “inkydinky,” “flambastic”), and choppy “scenes” that do not recall cinema as much as they do the frenetic cuts of TV advertising. Yes, it should fail, should become a parody of itself and a caricature of its author. And yet it does not. It is wholly effective, even if you don’t like this sort of writing. Kerouac does not drop the pan, nor a single ball. This because he is looking at something else. His vision has gone soft. Now he can see. Now he has all the time in the world.
The Christian tradition is uniquely committed to the concept of the soul’s gaze. I am not sure whether to consider this sort of “seeing” wholly metaphorical or not. Perhaps that doesn’t matter. Whatever the thing in us is that can attend and know and love has some means of directing and focusing itself, of saying yes to some things and no to others. Simone Weil, in a quote from Gravity and Grace that you’ve surely read a dozen times, calls this attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” which, when “unmixed,” is the same thing as prayer. It is the giving of the self, and it is the core delight and work of the human soul.
This also is the great shaping force of the soul. Weil, noting that this positive attention carries far more power than the lower registers of the “will,” continues: “What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.” Like the juggler with “soft” eyes, Weil sees relaxation, not rigidity, as the means to success. Don’t look. See.
The concept that “we become what we behold” is integral to the tradition, finding its early and foundational expression in Plato’s Symposium as Socrates recalls the priestess Diotima teaching him about the nature of love, whose function, like a ladder, is to aid the soul’s upward journey toward its First Cause. This tradition, developing over centuries, found its highest and definitive expression in Dante’s Commedia, which united this journey uniquely with literature. In Dante, the contours of one man’s life—his desires, places, experiences, friendships, rivalries, his love—become the stuff of this ascent. Though the exterior structure of the book is narrative and theological, the interior journey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is populated by the specifics of Dante Alighieri raised, through the imagination, into the minor immortality of literature.
This process is easy to see in cases where clearly we are being invited by a writer to go “out and up.” The Psalms, of course, are the consummate examples here. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills. But very different is the writing of Jack Kerouac and the legend of Duluoz. This is a journey down, a journey in. Isn’t the gaze totally and completely into and of the self? About the self? Amid and across and along and among—and all the other prepositions—the self? How does this relate to Weil’s attention/love/prayer at all? Is this whole sideshow performance simply for the glory of Duluoz/Kerouac?
Or is there something more?
Perhaps jazz is the best lens through which to understand the relationship of the individual to tradition here. Kerouac, whose “spontaneous prose” is a fairly direct expression of improvisation when applied to literature, is nonetheless supremely concerned with—is full of—tradition. His work could never exist without a vibrant tradition on which to rest. This “modern spontaneous method” of prose writing took its cues from the jazz musicians—improvisations upon themes. Like jazz, Kerouac took for himself certain “standard” hits of literature (the Dying Child’s Bedside, the Memory of Mother, the Winter Walk in Snow, the Pilgrimage, the Miraculous Boy), and made those themes thoroughly his own. There were always theatrics (the cartoonishly long 120 feet of taped architect’s paper made into a single unrevised scroll that he claimed was the first draft of On the Road), and the Beats, in their quest for authenticity and threadbare honesty, were always only half a step away from becoming parodies of themselves.
The great weakness of Kerouac’s writing is already becoming manifest in this essay. It is exceptionally hard not to talk about him. This poses, potentially, a distraction from the whole point. The gaze upward—how are we to do this if we are looking at ourselves? We look at the juggling balls and cease to see. Soon enough, the balls begin to hit the ground.
Kerouac understood the bulk of his own work as the creation of a mythical version of himself, gathering his most important writings (autobiographical) under the umbrella project of his Legend of Duluoz. Duluoz, his own adopted pseudonym, was the center of this legend. The legend was effective, on paper and in life. Something of its energy formed the glowing core that, with Ginsberg and Burroughs, would shape the Beat Generation, moving the mid-century American counterculture to become the dominant force in popular culture within only a few decades. (Anyone who cannot see Nirvana’s Nineties commercial success as directly linked to Kerouac’s 120 foot scroll needs to think harder about it.) And even still I am talking about him.
What else is there to talk about? Well, that’s the question. In Visions of Cody, Kerouac himself linked his “experimental” writing process and the product thereof to a sort of desperate clinging to life:
I am writing this book because we’re all going to die—In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream…
The effect that great writing should have is to allow you to go right through the author’s work, straight to the other side, the place where ideas and images sit. With Kerouac, the density is so great, the juggling simply so impressive (even if, like me, the very fact of it annoys you) that you look at the performer. You watch, sucking little whistles of air, waiting for him to drop something. It’s all an act. It always was. Or is it? What is Kerouac’s gaze doing for himself? For us? What is he seeing to see? Who is he seeing to see?
It is my belief that this is the best way to understand Kerouac’s work as a writer. He lets us see, just for a moment, what it is at which he is gazing. Through all the whirling balls and bags, through all the circular motions and the sounds of typewriter bells and the smell of Nag Champa on the Dharma Bums, through the little dead face of Gerard and the French exclamations in the snow of the better part of a hundred years ago, Jack—Duluoz—is looking through death, through “the general despair,” and looking even farther inward than that. He is looking at the Lord, a look that is “supplication,” a look that is a prayer. He is looking in, but trying to see up.
And this gaze, though initially self-directed, is at the very core of the Catholic vision of reality and the work of literature. What Kerouac gives us is another view of the ascent to the Divine Beauty. This, like St. Teresa’s castle, is a journey into the soul, in which each inner room is larger than the one before. Sometimes the way out of the soul is going into it. In the details of his life, he goes up by going down, and it works.
At the height of On the Road, that section of the Duluoz Legend for which Kerouac would be best remembered, he experiences and communicates something that is the very definition of the Beatific Vision (though Kerouac complicates his theology with sentiments of reincarnation), complete with the blooming of heaven itself, recalling the climax of Dante’s Paradisio:
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds… I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die...”
It is this that cools my frizzled temper about all of it and brings me a feeling of affection, of admiration for this flawed and glorious soul. The sheer effectiveness of it all is due, in the end, not to cleverness or artifice or an imaginary tightrope, but to a sort of brilliant and all-encompassing honesty that is, oddly, a profound consolation. It is a desire not only to look but to see, not only to perform but to participate in the great Show, the play and frolic of Creation itself. This is how Jack Kerouac loved God: by seeing/praying/loving until living could not be separated from the flow of the will among the events and objects of life.
I don’t want to state the obvious, but I think I must. Anyone wishing to work “from life” in their writing must reckon with the juggler’s dilemma. Where do we look?
Through the intense and explosive specificity of Jack’s life, I am prompted to see my own life and writing in a similar light. I may reject his specific approach to prose and not even attempt (none really should, as it tends to induce “the cringe”) the imitation of his form. But through that form a profound freedom of insight and expression opens up for me as an observer of a great juggler, of an imagination of a world in which the balls in the air slow impossibly and multiply. Of a book where the words on the page are allowed to become infinite, in which the page itself is magically able to become infinite, in which we see through the whirl and motion of our own lives, through death, through that despair that is the incontinent lapdog of death and past all of that and all its chaos to the gaze of that beloved Face whose loving lines are, perhaps, even to be found in our innermost person, and to whose grace we, gaudy and exhausted jugglers though we are, may delight in the witness of it all, may make our lives one long and joyful supplication.
