by Jack Kerouac
VIII
My poor father had to see me, while dying of cancer, come down to all of this from that beginning on the sandlot football field of Dracut Tigers Lowell when the ambition was to make good in football and school, go to college, and become a ‘success’. It was part of the war, really, and of the cold war to come. I can never forget how June’s present husband, Harry Evans, suddenly came clomping down the hall of her apartment in his Army boots, fresh from the German front, around September 1945, and he was appalled to see us, six fullgrown people, all high on Benny sprawled and sitting and cat-legged on that vast double-doublebed of ‘skepticism’ and ‘decadence’, discussing the nothingness of values, pale-faced, weak bodies, Gad the poor guy said: ‘This is what I fought for?’ His wife told him to come down from his ‘character heights’ or some such. He divorced her awhile later. Of course we knew the same thing was going on in Paris and Berlin of the same month and year, now that we’ve read Günther Grass and Uwe Johnson and Sartre and even, of course, Auden and his Age of Anxiety.
But this didnt jibe with my dying father’s continuing notion that people ‘should make the best of it, look hopefully to tomorrow, work, do well, make an effort, shake a leg’, all the old 1930s expressions that were so stirring, like cranberry sauce, when we thought prosperity was right around the corner and it sure was.
I myself, as you can see from this whole insane tirade of prose called a book, had been thru so much junk anyway you can hardly blame me for joining in with the despairists of my time.
Still, there were guys coming home from the war and getting married and going to school on the GI Bill who had no taste for such negativism and who would have punched me on the nose if they knew about how low I’d fallen from the time, maybe, when they had a beer with me in 1940. But I had goofed throughout entire wartime and this is my confession.
(At this time also, I let Johnnie my wife handle the annulment papers in Detroit, I was of no more use to her as a husband, I sent her home.)
IX
I took so much Benzedrine that year out of those cracked tubes, I finally made myself real sick, developed thrombophlebitis, and by December had to go to the Queens General Hospital (on the V.A.) to lie there with my legs up on pillows swathed in hot compresses. There was talk at first of surgery, even. And even there I’d look out the window at the darkness of the Queens night and feel a nauseating gulp to see those poor streetlamps stretching out into the murmurous city like a string of woes.
Yet like a bunch of kids, twelve and thirteen, who were patients there, actually came to the foot of my bed and serenaded me with guitars one evening.
And my nurse, big fat gal, loved me.
They could see in my eyes what had been there in 1939, 38, nay 22.
In fact I began to bethink myself in that hospital. I began to understand that the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody blood of the land and were just rootless fools, tho permissible fools, who really didnt know how to go on living. I began to get a new vision of my own of a truer darkness which just overshadowed all this overlaid mental garbage of ‘existentialism’ and ‘hipsterism’ and ‘bourgeois decadence’ and whatever names you want to give it.
In the purity of my hospital bed, weeks on end, I, staring at the dim ceiling while the poor men snored, saw that life is a brute creation, beautiful and cruel, that when you see a springtime bud covered with rain dew, how can you believe it’s beautiful when you know the moisture is just there to encourage the bud to flower out just so’s it can fall off sere dead dry in the fall? All the contemporary LSD acid heads (of 1967) see the cruel beauty of the brute creation just by closing their eyes: I’ve seen it too since: a maniacal Mandala circle all mosaic and dense with millions of cruel things and beautiful scenes goin on, like say, swiftly on one side I saw one night a choirmaster of some sort in ‘Heaven’ slowly going ‘Ooo’ with his mouth in awe at the beauty of what they were singing, but right next to him is a pig being fed to an alligator by cruel attendants on a pier and people walking by unconcerned. Just an example. Or that horrible Mother Kali of ancient India and its wisdom aeons with all her arms bejeweled, legs and belly too, gyrating insanely to eat back thru the only part of her that’s not jeweled, her yoni, or yin, everything she’s given birth to. Ha ha ha ha she’s laughing as she dances on the dead she gave birth to. Mother Nature giving you birth and eating you back.
And I say wars and social catastrophes arise from the cruel nature of bestial creation, and not from ‘society’, which after all has good intentions or it wouldnt be called ‘society’ would it?
It is, face it, a mean heartless creation emanated by a God of Wrath, Jehovah, Yaweh, No-Name, who will pat you kindly on the head and say ‘Now you’re being good’ when you pray, but when you’re begging for mercy anyway say like a soldier hung by one leg from a tree trunk in today’s Vietnam, when Yaweh’s really got you out in the back of the barn even in ordinary torture of fatal illness like my Pa’s then, he wont listen, he will whack away at your lil behind with the long stick of what they called ‘Original Sin’ in the Theological Christian dogmatic sects but what I call ‘Original Sacrifice’.
That’s not even worse, for God’s sake, than watching your own human father Pop die in real life, when you really realize ‘Father, Father, why has thou forsaken me?’ for real, the man who gave you hopeful birth is copping out right before your eyes and leaves you flat with the whole problem and burden (your self) of his own foolishness in ever believing that ‘life’ was worth anything but what it smells like down in the Bellevue Morgue when I had to identify Franz’s body. Your human father sits there in death before you almost satisfied. That’s what’s so sad and horrible about the ‘God is Dead’ movement in contemporary religion, it’s the most tearful and forlorn philosophical idea of all time.
X
Because we do know that the brutish, the mean-hearted, the Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it, as witness the mother cat (Mother Nature) how she washes and soothes her little kittens in the basket (almost said ‘casket’) and gives of her own milk of kindness without stint: we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love, charity, patience, gave Himself up without a murmur to be sacrificed. Otherwise we would have taken His example lightly. Seeing that He really meant it right down to the cross, we are impressed. Impressed so much that it comes to the point of being by way of a kind of redemption, a plucking from the sea, a saving hooray. But we cant be redeemed ‘unless we believe’, it says, or follow His example. And who can do that? Not even Count Leo Tolstoy who still had to live in a ‘humble hut’ but on his own lands even tho he’d signed over his ‘own lands’ of course to his own family, and had the gall then, from that solid earthly vantage point of vaunt, to write The Kingdom of God Is Within You. If I, myself, for instance, were to try to follow Jesus’ example I’d have first to give up my kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much (like I’m doing now in awful pain this morning), and so I’d go insane and go on public debt and be a pain to everybody in the blessed ‘community’ or ‘society’. And I’d be furthermore bored to death by the knowledge that there’s a hole even in Jesus’ bag: and that hole is, where He says to the rich young man ‘Sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and follow me,’ okay, where do we go now, wander and beg our food off poor hard-working householders? and not even rich at that like that rich young man’s mother? but poor and harried like Martha? Martha had not ‘chosen the better part’ when she cooked and slaved and cleaned house all day while her younger sister Mary sat in the doorway like a modern beatnik with ‘square’ parents talking to Jesus about ‘religion’ and ‘redemption’ and ‘salvation’ and all that guck. Were Jesus and young Mary McGee waiting for supper to be ready? While talking about redemption? How can you be redeemed when you have to pass food in and out of your body’s bag
day in day out, how can you be ‘saved’ in a situation so sottish and flesh-hagged as that? (This was also the hole in Buddha’s bag: he more or less said ‘It’s well for Bodhisattva sages and Buddhas to beg for their food so as to teach the ordinary people of the world the humility of charity,’ ugh I say.) No, the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it’s the laugh of a maniac. Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, ‘Be ye lamps unto thyselves’ – last words – ‘work out thy salvation with diligence,’ heck of a thing to have to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery. Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.
XI
Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality. I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes. I hope it will all turn out true. Madmen and suicidists see this. Also dying people and people in unbearable anguish. What SIN is there, but the sin of birth? Why doesnt Billy Graham admit it? How can a sacrificial Lamb of birth itself be considered a sinner? Who puts it there, who lit the fires, who’s the longnosed rat who wants to waft Lamb smoke to Heaven so he can stash away a temple for himself? And to what use the materialists who are even worse because of their clunkhead ignorance of their own broken hearts?
Like, silly behaviorists of the sociology and computer sciences today are more interested, mind you, in measuring the reactions to the pain of life, and in pinpointing the cause of pain on their own fellow humans, i.e., society, than in pinning it down once and for all on what it come from: birth. Even metaphysical gurus and philosopher prophets on the lecture circuit are absolutely certain that all the trouble can be attributed to such and such a government, a secretary of state, a defense minister (think of a ‘philosopher’, mind you, like Bertrand Russell), trying to lay the blame on such born victims of birth as that, than on the very metaphysical causes they’re supposed to propose to argue, that is, what comes before and after the physical, i.e., being born so that there can be dying.
Who’s going to come out and say that the mind of nature is intrinsically insane and vicious forever?
XII
What to do meanwhile? Wait? S’posing you’re a soldier who gets the diarrhetic runs just as the enemy is attacking and you’re supposed to crawl up already smelling of death in your pants to take a look at somebody else’s poor pants, do you blame that on society? Do you blame it on society that a seventy-year-old woman lies in bed paralyzed as if a great stone was on her chest even after ten months of hopeful waiting and perfect care from her children? Blame it on society that a New Bedford fisherman is caught in ice-cold water in raging seas afloat in his life belt in the night, crying to God, to Stella Maris, forgot to bring his razor blade in his watchpocket (as I’d done throughout the sea war) so he could at least let the blood out of his wrists and faint before choking, before choking like my German boy, alone, forsaken by his father in both ways, weeping for mother mercy that aint there in your brute creation sea?
No, blame it on poor hunks Springtime Bud with the rain dew on it. Blame it on the ‘sticky little leaves’ that Claude said was the first thought that made him cry in the reformatory.
XIII
So, partially well, I went home and, in the general vanity of Duluoz, I decided to become a writer, write a huge novel explaining everything to everybody, try to keep my father alive and happy, while Ma worked in the shoe factory, the year 1946 now, and make a ‘go’ at it.
But slowly he withered before my eyes. Every two weeks his belly became a big bag of water and the poor Jewish doctor had to come to the house, wince with compassion, and stick a long stabbing tube right into his belly in the kitchen (away from mother and son) to let the water pour out into a kitchen pail. My father never yelled out in pain, he just winced and groaned and wept softly, O good man of my heart. Then, one morning after we had an argument about how to brew coffee, and the doctor came again to ‘drain’ him (O Nature go drain yourself you evil bitch!) he just died in his chair right in front of my eyes and I looked at his face in pouting repose and thought ‘You have forsaken me, my father. You have left me alone to take care of the “rest” whatever the rest is.’ He’d said: ‘Take care of your mother whatever you do. Promise me.’ I promised I would, and have.
So the undertakers come and dump him in a basket and we have him hearsed up to the cemetery in New Hampshire in the town where he was born and little idiot birds are singing on the branch. At one point the bluejay mother throws the weakling out of the nest and he falls to the foot of the tree and thrashes there dying and starving. A priest tries to console me. I walk with my Uncle Vincent Duluoz after the funeral through the little streets of Nashua and understand, from his silence, why he was always considered the ‘mean’ and ‘uncommunicative’ Duluoz. He was the honest one. He said ‘Your father was a good boy but he was too ambitious and proud and crazy. I guess you’re the same.’
‘I dont know.’
‘Well, in between. I never disliked Emil. But there you have it, and him, and I’m dying myself, and you’ll die someday, and all this, poof, ça s’en vas [all this, poof, it goes].’ He made a Breton Gallic shrug at the empty blue sky above.
Of Uncle Vincent you could not say that he was a victim of the vanity of Duluoz.
XIV
But I still was a victim, went back to Ozone Park with Ma, she did her spring housecleaning (the old man gone, clean the house, drive the Celtic ghosts out) and I settled down to write, in solitude, in pain, writing hymns and prayers even at dawn, thinking ‘When this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and substance and crap of everything I’ve been thru throughout this whole goddam life, I shall be redeemed.’
But, wifey, I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked thru 1,183 pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah’d, went on, did everything you’re supposed to do in life.
But nothing ever came of it.
No ‘generation’ is ‘new’. There’s ‘nothing new under the sun’. ‘All is vanity.’
XV
Forget it, wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow’s another day.
Hic calix!
Look that up in Latin, it means ‘Here’s the chalice,’ and be sure there’s wine in it.
By Jack Kerouac
The Town and the City
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Some of the Dharma
Old Angel Midnight
Good Blonde and Others
Pull My Daisy
Trip Trap
Pic
The Portable Jack Kerouac
Selected Letters: 1940–1956
Selected Letters: 1957–1969
Atop an Underwood
Orpheus Emerged
POETRY
Mexico City Blues
Scattered Poems
Pomes All Sizes
Heaven and Other Poems
Book of Blues
Book of Haikus
THE DULUOZ LEGEND
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax
Maggie Cassidy
Vanity of Duluoz
On the Road
Visions of Cody
The Subterraneans
Tristessa
Lonesome Traveller
Desolation Angels
The Dharma Bums
Book of Dreams
Big Sur
Satori in Paris