From Becoming Kerouac: A Writer In His Time (Lyons, 2023)
THE SHOW OF THINGS
By October 1959, Jack Kerouac had maintained little contact with associates, friends, media, and readers. All that comprised Jack’s world by this point was his mother, Gabrielle. With and through her, he retreated into dreams, visions, and stories of his childhood. She was there as a living ambassador of his former life in Lowell; Jack was confident enough in her memories to use them as material for a slew of Lowell novels. One day he fed a long taped-together paper roll into his loyal Underwood, the same that his father worked on all those years ago in 1930s Lowell, and began typing:
“I was born in 1922 in March in Lowell Mass. at five oclock in the afternoon, they tell me, when the sun was red in a sudden thaw and the river was high. The first four years of my life was spent playing with my older brother Gerard, who had rheumatic fever.”
“Untitled Scroll” 1959 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library)
It was a novel he had been thinking about for the past year and a half. He would title this “childhood halo” Memory Babe, an epithet ascribed to his fabled prodigious memory. Except, lately, he was not remembering much at all. Battling alcohol abuse, various head traumas, and reckless experimentation with various narcotics had diminished this capacity to remember. Instead he was embroiled within his fevered imagination manifested through a plethora of dreams, visions, tics, and “pomes.”
He was Laocoön writhing in the folds of serpents.
By this time, Allen Ginsberg had fully embraced the ethos of the Beat Generation and was its eager spokesman. William S. Burroughs had warned Allen about becoming too political in light of his assuming the altar as High Priest of the Beats; Allen followed his advice and embraced the mystical, eager to place himself in the ranks of William Blake and less in the current political crises of the time. Yet, within the following two decades, Allen would place himself squarely into the covenant of the New Left, embracing such political hot-irons as gay rights, drug policy reforms, environmentalism, and gender roles.
In the fall of 1959, Allen swallowed yage and experienced the “whole fucking Cosmos” breaking loose around him. It was an experience comparable to his infamous Blakean vision he experienced in a New York City hotel room in 1948. Allen had ingested it to confront a fear of death, his “Shroudy Stranger.” Life was empty. The “death-fear” of death was mere vanity. What it accomplished for Allen was a way to explore his consciousness through psychedelics, to open his world up fully within the cloak of his poetry. He had found his place in the emerging drug consciousness that came to define Youth America during the 1960s.
Burroughs was goaded to write by the coaxing of an invader, the “ugly spirit,” a wrathful entity prompted by the death of his wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, by his hand in the fall of 1951. Now, this same Octo- ber, he was in Paris during the aftermath of an obscenity charge lobbed at his novel, Naked Lunch (1959). He had written “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” in response to the negative reception by critics and readers. In October 1959, Bill appeared at trial before three judges. After his lawyer read to the court the full text of Burroughs’s “Deposi- tion,” the exiled author was handed a suspended sentence and fined $80. It was a comfort. In 1950s America, the notion was that a dope fiend was a step lower than a killer. He had avoided drug charges in Texas and New Orleans, and was charged with reckless homicide in Mexico. Now, at forty-five years old, Burroughs opted for the life of a quiet Parisian exile. He was Nero watching Rome burn. Naked Lunch was his fiddle.
Ultimately, Ginsberg and Burroughs assumed an air of near-secular respectability. They were the High Priests of the Beats. The same cannot be said for Jack Kerouac.
In October 1959, Jack Kerouac was living with his mother, Gabrielle, in a three-bedroom suburban home at 49 Earl Avenue, Northport, Long Island. They bickered like husband and wife, as if Jack had assumed the place of long-dead father and husband, Leo. Gabe thought Jack drank too much (he did), though she imbibed gin martini “hi-balls” drink-for-drink with her son. She was aging (sixty-five), yet hearty. She was gregarious: a chatterbox with a sturdy frame, ruddied cheeks, graying hair, pinched no-nonsense lips, and shrewd brown eyes magnified under her eyeglasses. To her eleven-year-old grandson, she was Mémère (French-Canadian moniker for “grandmother”) and so she was called this by the entire fam- ily in her grandson’s presence. She was a living room fixture, guarding the front door against Jack’s encroachers like Cerberus. She gave him little privacy and forbade the presence of most women. Subsequently, Jack found it difficult to sneak them into his bedroom without her knowledge (“nothing gets past me but the wind,” she was fond of saying). This day, he was alone, and so he removed himself into his basement for isolation. She did not follow because she would not chance falling down the stairs. He wanted to trip in privacy. He popped a hallucinogen in the form of a “big red pill” into his mouth; it was mescaline.
Within an hour he was nauseous and trembling on his couch. Chills swept through his body. By 7:00 p.m., he fumbled his way upstairs to the living-room couch like a reclining Siddhartha. A Will Rogers movie flickered on the black-and-white television. Gabe was drunk and blank-faced watching it. She told Jack to eat if he was drinking and fed him rice and ragout as he lay on his side. Jack took several bites, and felt better. Then the television screen blew out white. Flashes. Crackles. He said “goodnight” to his mother and retired upstairs. He carried the thought of her with him. He got in bed with his jeans and shirt still on. He closed his eyes; the next wave hit him harder. His heartbeat acceler- ated. Flashes of light blinded him. It was late dusk. He lifted the window to let the cool autumn air flow in. The moon had risen, silhouetting the backyard trees. He closed his eyes. The “Show began.”
The Show of Things.
Trees shaped like women waved their heads in an oscillating dance. Many-armed Mother Kali danced before him. Goddess of sex and death. He fixated on her nakedness: “and I kneel in front of all the assembled saints of the world and start sucking on her beautiful cunt which snaps at me and wants to eat me back and as it does take back everything in the world.”
Mother Earth. Father Sky.
A woman in a shroud in her grave. Jack reached out to touch her eyelid and poked through “ever so softly into clean soft gray dust.”
“I must stop THINKING AND JUST LOOK,” he thought.
A headless torso adorned in purple turned to him: “the body of a Buddha.” Snapping “cunts” danced around like a witch’s coven. A golden light. Images of gods flew by at 100 miles per hour. Jesus’s soft kiss. Father Light from Heaven. Witches skulking in Jack’s moonlit yard. Neal Cassady became Archangel Michael. Gregory Corso became Archangel Raphael who morphed into the Errol Flynn of his dreams. Adoring angels. Dancing devils. The Virgin Mary in heaven rising to a lineage of mothers leading to Gabe who transformed into a beautiful brunette “with a snapping cunt.” Gabe was King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. He hallucinated the structure; she climbed his cock in his incestuous hallucination. He had an erection. His vision flickered from birth mother to Mother Earth to Mother Kali: “In thinking of eating cunt suddenly i was eating one that got all juicy and smoshy and started to disgust me and almost suck and snap me on, my mouth all flopped with shperm and i cried in my thoughts mother earth gets too juicy sometimes and now i realized why men die to fuck and suck and the next minute suddenly vacantly forget about it!”
After three hours the high had passed. He began typing in unflinching detail: “in dreams the long mountains and long caves, the skyscrapers, all the huge landscape is simply as James Joyce knew the very body of someone, yourself or a girl’s—so that everything is alright not because the communists believe in a better world for the body, but because everybody in their dreams already knows the eternal transcendental truth which i have just tried to describe in silly words.”
His drug experience was intense and revelatory. He discovered that he had a fear of women, especially his mother. However, it was the final proof that he was on the “right track with spontaneous never-touch-up poetry of immediate report, and Old Angel Midnight most especially, opening out a new world of connection in writing with the endless space
of Shakti Maya Kali Illusion.”9 His resulting text, “Mescaline,” is perhaps one of his more important writings because in it he has finally confronted the complexity of his neuroses and the soundness of his writing methods. In Jungian terms, it reveals his fear of women—even his mother—but also his reverence for them because they are vehicles of creation toward death (as he bluntly states in Some of the Dharma, “Pretty girls make graves, fuck you all.”) This is apparent when he reports of “loving cunt” before it transforms into a “snapping cunt” eating everything in existence.
Kerouac’s visions of Kali evoked his fear of impending death. Mescaline was the key to deciphering truth and eternity. The emphasis on the “mother” ideal was recognized as one of the chief forces in Kerouac’s life. His demise (physical, emotional, and spiritual) was imminent. Physicality and spirituality were interchangeable.
Gabe’s appearance in Kerouac’s drug vision manifested because she was not only his “mother” but she also represented the “Mother of All Things” as written in Lao Tzu’s The Tao Te Ching. Gabe was Kali; Kali was all women. Jack writes of the many faces of God. It was not simply a “trip.” It was a moment of clarity: God, Creation, Mother Earth, Suffering, Lust, Fear, and Death. The importance of “Mescaline” lies in Kerouac’s journey toward understanding the truth of his existence. He had left Plato’s allegorical cave with its shadows on the wall. In his hallucination, he experienced the appearance of the “Father of Light,” which induced a realization that God was everywhere at last. This, then, became his last true journey. It was not the road he had been raggedly following, literally and symbolically. Nor was it in his books; it was his true understanding of Self in relation to a visible and invisible cosmos. He had tapped into the source of all things that he had formerly tried to capture from dreams, visions, endless traveling, and furious writing.
And so, we must return to the source waters of his creative journey.
Paul Maher Jr. 