An artist of the windblown world
Jack Kerouac, the icon of the Beat generation and author of “On the Road,” the 1950s cult novel written on a continuous roll of paper, was obsessed with the idea of suffering. His childhood might have something to do with it—when he was four, his 9-year-old brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, and this deeply affected him and his family (his father turned to alcohol and gambling). And when he was 22, Jack was arrested as an accessory to a murder. (His girlfriend bailed him out of jail provided he would marry her. The marriage lasted for one year.)
In an article (Parabola, Spring 2011), Neil Rusch wrote about the novelist’s musings about affliction being an integral part of existence, which he called “the circle of despair.”
Rusch noted that Kerouac first spoke of suffering in personal terms in 1947, when he wrote in his notebook the following:
Wednesday Jan. 28—Out in New York suffering—
Thursday, Jan. 29—(really this time!)
Kerouac was a Catholic. But he dabbled in Buddhism as well. Likely as not, the mishmash of these two orientations helped shape his opinions on organic pain. Rusch observed that Kerouac’s “moan for man extends to all humanity dwelling upon the earth and includes our earth in the scale of the cosmos.”
In a way, Kerouac saw the writing of novels, which he called “soul work,” as a way of breaking the circle of despair, of mitigating the anguish that he saw about him.
And yet, he asked, “What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save the something in our souls…”
This is a clear echo of what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
Peter’s comment occasioned this.
Jesus was talking about the sufferings he would endure at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he would be killed but on the third day be raised to life. Immediately Peter protested, “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” And then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
It is not as if anyone can escape the cross. Suffering lies at the core of life itself. And therefore this advice by Tennessee Williams, “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.”
But there is a unity of joy and sorrow, and this Kerouac realized when he observed the wild beauty of late autumn in New York. With a lyricism made accessible to him by spontaneous writing, his favored means of composition, he exclaimed:
“Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November!—and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and the night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! High and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winter, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double depths and sorrows and the grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world.”
Kerouac might have found the way out of the labyrinth of moans, of the network of suffering woven around life, when in his “Rain and Rivers Notebook” he wrote, equally wondering and believing, “To be holy is to be in touch with the other world, in a naive trusting way?”
What Jack Kerouac wanted to say, which I think is the best stance towards suffering, St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) might have put in these words, “Lay all your cares about the future trustingly in God’s hands, and let yourself be guided by the Lord just like a little child…”
