These sections were written in response to someone else's sections on a field somewhere right after reading On The Road; more or less stream of conciousness. (The fact that this is somewhat coherent bothers me..)
The city stands. The city is imposing and gleeful. It brings the mood to the people.
If the people brought the mood -- the other way around as it were, and as it should be -- it would be happiness, it would be zeal, it would be resentment and loathing of life and the exhuberance of mind.
It would be those things all at once.
Instead a dour visage masks an entire macroclave of society.
The mask falls on me, as it was designed to do, but I like to think that there persists an ever subtle trace of me beneath. One that every other person can see and find faith and steadiness in.
But I know that just isn't true because surely I would have found faith in someone by now.
. . .But these people -- these people! -- do have faith. They sob and they giggle and think and do everything to the left and right and they too think they have cracks to represent those things to me.
Fifty-nine dialogs and I understand them all. Not on any meaningful level, but on my own level where ordered thoughts on paper diverge into some melancholy exhuberance.
The cigarettes? Because I don't care enough not to enjoy Dean Moriarty's life and feel that some of that energy belongs to me.
I love that energy because it was there before the book. Outwardly. Though even before that it was inward and perverted. Just like you think, and -- and -- there's more.
But all I've found is life, and in 4 years of solid writing of everything that is me and that is life...
etcetera etcetera etcetera
...I haven't found anyone or anything except me. The world surrounds me. It surrounds me in mystery but it is me. I know the world through my own eyes and I'll listen politely to anyone else's vision, but before I believe it I'll know all things. I will have lived everyone else's fears and then will be absolved of my own. Fear isn't what I am, but I worry neither you nor I can shed it. It might just be a part of our race and all other pupils of the sun
and that makes me sad.
Heh, yeah. But trying to define yourself in the eyes of faith and fate is what brings fear.
Fate is tricky. Without it it's all on your shoulders.
I know a 50 year old woman whose husband left her. She works full time and earns minimum wage. She says, "for years I've been putting off getting my college diploma -- too busy."
Her cheery visage just highlights the loneliness and regret behind her eyes.
She'll gladly tell you of all the dreams she had when she was sixteen, nineteen, thirty-two... She'll make you see your own youthful and naieve ambition (and mine! and mine.) for a plateau of fallen hope. It puts a sadness and a regret for things I haven't even had time to leave undone and love I haven't yet lost behind my own eyes.
. . .With fate?
It's the fear of what next is in store for you. It's the lonesome hiding of my grandfather who knows he will die and he has only stagnant years behind him and dull and firey memories to keep him together. To keep him whole.
When will my health fail? When will I die? Fate is perhaps no different than accident, but we suckle at its irony and its betrayal -- giving to it more than it's worth.
To live without fear is maybe to walk the line.
If I find that line...
Just one more because. Because thinking is faster than writing. And repose is a good breakfast but also a feast of a dinner. Maybe Kerouac could write fast enough, or maybe he just thought slow, but either way he got the message accross.
Idealism falls in the face of obligation. Sign here, affix this stamp, and this label, and pee in this cup, and work work work.
Maybe this is ideal.
I say it is because I (and I use the word I a lot because it's all I am, but all it is is one little sound and three smaller lines
--- | ---
) am king of it all, and I too laugh and cry for this world but I know death is the end of all things but right now all I want to do is eat and drink and breath and write and ponder myself.
I'll try everything once and again and again before I croak. Sex, drugs, rock and/or roll, suits and ties and ceremonies and farming.
If I die along the way, it will be the end of everything.
And at least then there'll be nothing left to experience but nothing itself.
-_SMR 990603 on a feild with a 10 minute time limit.