On the road again with Jack Kerouac

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road…” And off Jack Kerouac went, to begin the saga of one of the most influential cultural movements of 20th century: The Beat Generation.
     Of course, he didn’t do it by himself, because there are two other main perpetrators: Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, along with some other writers, artists and characters that have been considered to be of a beatnik persuasion along the line. But it was Jack Kerouac the most charismatic of all, and the one that would cause a bigger impact, with a following that would evolve into what we can call “the cult of the beatniks.” Kerouac was the handsome one, the athlete, the mystic, the stylish one, the compulsive writer with his spontaneous, free-flow style.
      The beatniks were the real fathers of the sixties counterculture; the ones that started writing more openly about drug use and experimentation; the ones who were open about alternative lifestyles --to include religion and sexuality, of course--; and the ones who, before Timothy Leary was able to enunciate the phrase that would become his slogan ("turn on, tune in, drop out"), had already withdrawn from the established society of their times. And, although I am not glorifying them --God forbid--, I want to acknowledge something about the beatniks that made them look real good in my eyes: their disavowal of the hypocrisy of conventional middle class mentality.
     Kerouac set out to meet his goals of hitching a cross-country ride, and write about it. He also made it a goal to meet some of his cultural idols, and that’s how he met Celine, his literary hero, and Salvador Dali, who said of Kerouac: “He is more beautiful than Marlon Brando.” Of which Kerouac thought that maybe Dali said it because they both had blue eyes and black hair, and according to Kerouac, “when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn’t stand all that sadness.” 
     Jack Kerouac’s writing style had the combination of three main elements: jazz music, characters, and religion (on both sides of the spectrum, eastern and western world converging); with the former at the core of his free flowing prose method. His experience on the road brought him in contact with places and people that would be essential part in the writing of his Benzedrine-fueled anecdote-testimonial accounts that could go from a sublime spiritual quest to the most mundane of pursuits, handled always with the same youthful candor.
     This year marks the 55th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, which is probably why I’m writing about it; or who knows, I probably am writing about it because I just wanted to feel young and energetic.