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{Jack Kerouac spur. Interview here: https://youtu.be/oaBnIzY3R00}
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You open your mouth;
I'm in a clay pigeon game –
to break what you shoot.
Curling up a smile full of spit;
I'm a joke, and I want you
with me: be ridiculous.
We're on a stage and there's
an audience – you spent
10 minutes on the part
in your hair. I don't care,
sweating off Brill cream. You
are a hazy, handsome slave.
They can smell me
through the camera lens –
I'm brilliant when I'm sober.
But here, light can't walk
the line to my tongue.
It goes dark. Bulbs cool. Shh. Are
we over?
Spurred by watching Jack Kerouac in a 1968 episode of William F. Buckley's Firing Line, discussing the "Hippie" movement. It was a shit-show, in which Kerouac clearly could have been the voice of sage insight – explaining hippies as an extension of the Beat movement, itself a modern re-imagining of Dionysian “beatitudes, pleasure in life and tenderness … order, tenderness, and piety” – but he sullied the interview with interruptions, interjections, noise-making, infantile mockeries, giggling and self-indulgent joking, so much so that the discussion became the mockery he treated it as.
ReplyDeleteAnd at the end, when Sanders gives his naïve closing encomium of nonviolence and pacifism {“If you are nonviolent like I am, if you believe in pacifism, you will attempt to create a body of love and light so that that [violent] things can't happen; that there will be so many loving people there, that you will have a festival of life and all its effigies. ...”}, and the Catholic-raised Kerouac responds, “Beware of false prophets who come unto you dressed in sheep's clothing, and underneath they are ravening wolves,” … one can't help thinking that, if shepherds like Kerouac had stayed sober, perhaps fewer young sheep like Sanders might be wandering so unwittingly and self-assuredly into those perilous an impenetrable woods. – JK, 8 April 2014