Travelogue 986 – May 24

The Bebop Shaman

This spring has been a disappointment. Temperatures have been slow to rise, and it’s rained nearly every day this month. It’s been a further test for everyone who has waited for COVID restrictions to be eased. We have the opportunity to sit on cold and wet terraces and be served our coffee or beers, but we still can’t sit inside. And the wait continues for the freedoms that come with vaccination. I’ve had one shot now, which puts me into a kind of limbo. I can still get sick, and I still can’t travel. Further, like a well-aimed blow when I’m down, the shot made me ill.

I travelled as far as the neighbouring town of Schiedam on an errand a few days ago. I stood on the Metro platform in the central train station of Schiedam, looking longingly down the many train tracks. By and large, I haven’t suffered terribly from the claustrophobia that I know has afflicted many during the long COVID lockdowns, but this spring, I admit to some restlessness.

We go out. We do our best to fight these doldrums while staying safe. On our three-day weekend (for Pentecost), the family went out. We took the girls to the playground, wiping down toys for them, huddling under trees when the showers came. We took them for ice cream, huddling on damp benches outside the shop, shivering but defiant.

Any sort of travel would be a relief, even to a nearby town. Why does the psyche crave movement? Is it simply a hankering for variety, or is it something more profound?

Wanderlust is a quality often associated with my compatriots, especially Americans of the twentieth century. With “On the Road”, Kerouac took his place as author of post-war wanderlust. His friend Neal Cassady set the tone with his famous letter of 1950, and, as a character in the novel, Dean Moriarty, he took his place as shaman for the new movement, a cult of renewed Manifest Destiny. In this edition of the cult, Americans weren’t claiming land but Experience. The new man was a philosopher of action, all thought expressed in deeds, and individuality a kind of magic, best expressed in dance and music. Following Cassady the shaman, the Beats saw that action was libido released and that wisdom was instinct posing as Zen. There were a lot of words, but it was personality that counted. It was a literary movement that was impatient with words. It was literature that longed to be jazz.

It’s a different age. I wander what Ginsberg would have made of QAnon? I wonder what Cassady would have done with social media? I wonder what Kerouac and Watts would have thought of anime and Pokemon?

Travelogue 985 – May 14 

Aesthetics and Language

I’m in the process of editing a piece of writing. I’m under a deadline because I have an appointment to show someone what I’ve done. It would be better if I waited. Our household is living under a cloud because of the passing of my wife’s mother.

The proximity of death has a way of stripping meaning and beauty away from living things. In this state, looking at a piece of writing is like looking through skin to the bones. Beauty evaporates and one is left with a jumble of phrases, a patchwork of words hung sloppily upon the pretence of frame. Language is just an arrangement of pieces. Without aesthetics, they fit together rather arbitrarily.

I suppose every writer struggles with this dual sight. In a worst-case scenario, the writer can’t control the switch between levels. Suddenly, the lens of aesthetics falls, and language is stripped of order and beauty. If the writer can’t regain the original perspective, then the work dies on the vine.

I’m thinking of Kerouac and Cassady again. When Kerouac received the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” from Cassady, he was ripe for some bulletin about aesthetics. According to Kerouac, what he had found in that letter was a beautiful fusion between personality and style. Cassady’s writing was completely authentic, completely him. Reportedly, he returned to his work-in-progress, “On the Road” with new vision and new ambition. This is when he resolved to re-write the whole manuscript in one marathon session, typing onto one continuous roll of paper.

It was something more than style. The Beats were always in search of something religious, or at least ecstatic, in art. What Cassady had achieved was something like capturing the greater being that lived beyond the mundane, (the soul, the psyche?) inside the act of expression, merging being and expression of being. The Beats suspected, as many have in history, that madness and divinity, or perhaps madness and truth, were close cousins. This is a position common among mystics. Despite their pretensions, the Beats themselves fell far short of being real mystics, but they might have stood as weaker representations of the Renaissance- or Romantic-era identification of artist as seer or mystic.

The simple formula falls apart immediately. Whatever you may think of “On the Road”, it is apparent that Kerouac’s writing is of a different calibre than its inspiration, Cassady’s letter. It still required a writer to write. Kerouac marshalled the fragments of language into an often eloquent lyricism.

Travelogue 984 – May 8

Grief Again

COVID has left this kind of scar, this kind of legacy. It’s ugly and corrosive. It breaks the spirit. What the virus doesn’t destroy itself, it inspires humanity to destroy. It wasn’t enough to suffer the anxiety and grief of runaway pandemic, but we had to fight among ourselves over childish pseudo-ideologies. Trump’s bleach moment will probably go down as the low bar of human response to crisis in our time, primarily because it’s funny. But I believe more insidious and more emblematic is Tucker Carlson’s recent rant against masks, during which he called on his viewers to call Child Protective Services if they saw children wearing masks. That clip probably won’t survive. It’s not as satisfying as watching Trump make an ass of himself. Carlson is repulsive (even as he calls wearing a mask ‘repulsive’,) whining miserably and staring at the camera like the stunted man-child he is. But his performance is a snapshot of our worst selves.

Was anything like this sort of posturing ever necessary? How advanced is this species, after all? No doubt history will emphasize the (eventual) response and the (very compromised) successes more than the suffering. But we must remember what Nature wrought and how we made it worse.

COVID has taken my wife’s mother. Every day we live with the loss. We were not able to go to the funeral. The government in Ethiopia pushes for same-day funerals. We had no time to travel. The family in Ethiopia never got to see her during her final days at the hospital. This story is all too characteristic of the times and this disease.

Every day we live with the loss. Perhaps that’s the most salient experience of grief, the relentlessness of it, day after day, waking up to the realization of loss over and over. I’ve written about grief extensively in my book, “Careful So”. I don’t want to write about it now. My wife’s grief and her family’s grief come before mine. I have to respect it with silence.

Travelogue 983 – May 6

Shocks

Deaths come like earthquakes. First came news of Bruce’s passing, and it shook the room, knocking things off the shelves and leaving a bit of a mess. But then came a more serious shock a few days ago, when COVID took my mother-in-law. That shook to the foundation, even as I was still tidying up after the last quake, breaking things and leaving cracks in the floor.

Repairs and re-thinks are necessary now. What happened was unsettling – in the way that death raises questions about life, life in general and the life of the deceased. There’s something unjust about the timing, and it rarely leaves a neat close to the human story. Illness, in particular, never seems fair. In the case of my mother-in-law, there were so many variables in the course of that disease, and so little information. I think this is a common feeling in the wake of COVID.

Sometimes the quake requires deep renovations. Sometimes it’s excessively painful to know that this is what Nature has wrought. It’s one thing to know that all things must pass; it’s another thing to come to terms with the cruel randomness of how they pass. It seems unkind.

Our girls don’t understand what’s happened yet. They partake of Nature. They are random themselves, random in their blessings and random in their trials.

Little Ren, my youngest, has reached a peak of cuteness at her age. It’s so lovely, and it aches because stages pass so quickly. That’s not how I should think, I know. I should enjoy the moment.

“It’s night!” she told me, taking my hand and guiding me to the window to point out at the darkness. She was concerned. Menna and I had been out on a desperate errand to a dentist in Amsterdam, while a baby-sitter watched the girls. I’m facing years of serious work on my mouth, and I wanted a second opinion. We got home from Amsterdam late, and Little Ren wanted us to understand that we that we had been too late. She took my hand and brought me to the window. “It’s night!”

Travelogue 982 – May 2

A New Sure Doom

Being young is finding something to care about, many things to care about, and to care about them with power and with whimsy. Not just with devotion, but with abandon and with irony, because youth has an abundance of energy.

My small group of associates cared about art and politics, and that’s no surprise. Those have been the concerns of youth since Orwell? since Byron? since Rousseau? Our politics were fairly shallow, though it was a serious time, being America’s first experience with neo-con rule. We preferred literature. And for critical few years we were enamoured of the Beats.

People roll their eyes at the Beats now, and there’s a lot to roll eyes about. We laughed at them then, even as we loved them. Their virtue was their exuberance, their well of youthfulness, which overrode the abundant rhetoric about suffering. They talked about troubles the way young people do, with heartbreak and wailing that is delivered with such vigour that it’s ultimately unconvincing.

I’ve been breezing through the famous “Joan Anderson Letter” by Neal Cassady, credited by Ginsberg and Kerouac as a primary inspiration for Beat prose and recently re-discovered in someone’s attic. “I wake to more horrors than Céline,” he writes, “not a vain statement for now I’ve passed thru just repetitious shudderings and nightmare twitches. I have discovered new sure doom ….” This was the rhetorical position of the Beats, an embrace of trouble, a conviction that they were more powerful than their pain. It was a language of salvation, the language of a generation rescued from annihilation. Remember that Ginsberg, Kerouac and Cassady met only two or three years after the German surrender and Hiroshima.

Here we were, picking up the novels and poetry decades later. It should be noted that we were closer to the time of the Beats then than we are to our own youth now. We actually met Ginsberg himself in the East Village, when he performed Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. It was all still alive. 

We read “On the Road” and we realized we had Dean Moriarty in our midst. That was our friend Bruce, fresh from Texas and hungry for life.