Jack Kerouac hit the road in the late 1940s. Back and forth across America, he and his hipster buddies went searching for IT.
Post-war America had become—in the minds of the Beat Generation—a dark age of conformity.
Kerouac and his crowd burned themselves out in a desperate search for an antidote to a culture of booming obedience and compliance. (Sound familiar?) Lambs to the slaughter, they wanted none of it.
To escape, Kerouac associated with mavericks, rebels, and contrarians: “The mad ones, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn.”
Jack went On the Road in search of big sky and space. Freedom, in other words. The essential IT. They looked hard without knowing if they’d recognize it if they ran over it.
But they had one thing going for them—they were desperate.
“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change,” said William Burroughs. “Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
Leave everything behind
Writers understand what Burroughs is saying. Fictional characters are necessarily trapped within the gravity field of beliefs and ideas. Or perhaps it’s a person or situation that renders their life not worth living. The best heroes escape such prisons.
From On the Waterfront (1954) to the latest Netflix series, The Kominski Method, protagonists are on a trajectory toward escaping themselves. To escape the darkness of the small container that is one’s private catacomb.
Maybe all good stories are escape stories. Likewise, is every well-lived life an escape from what’s wrong with that life? Alas, escape is not something easily orchestrated by oneself. But stories have always shown us how it’s done.
Stories are roadmaps to IT.
On the Road
The movie version of Kerouac’s On the Road offers a glimpse of that illusive IT.
Kerouac and his buddy park their old Hudson to seek solace in a dark and seedy jazz club (is there any other kind?). They walk in to find the tenor sax player playing outside the lines. The audience is mesmerized as the artist escapes the logic of the notes, as he breaks free of the form—as if the music were nothing but a set-up.
That’s IT!
The music was just a set-up, an opportunity to escape form, time, and space. It’s not the tune that counts, but the escape from it. That’s IT!
IT is the way out of the darkness of expectations and standards and conformity and obedience and compliance. Back in the big ugly city, everyone is trying to find the light without leaving the darkness behind. In fact, the light is already there, only obscured by the heavy curtain of our habits and beliefs.
The Beats, at least in theory, forsook the darkness of the small self. Because, then, in the words of poet Jim Harrison, “There is nothing to interfere with the luminosity of what is always there.”
Kerouac and his post-war generation felt ragged and beat-down. But also “beatific and beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.” Down and out, yes, but full of conviction to live life on the road in search of their greatest happiness.
Did he find it, ultimately? That’s grist for some other enquiry.
This is the 6th in my series of 8 posts on darkness inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf. Next week, I’ll examine “Positive Disintegration,” a theory of mental development that sees darkness as the key to evolving a more inclusive and compassionate psyche.
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