We left Albert Camus as he was dispensing of all the leap-takers — the philosophers who, instead of bearing the weight of existence on their own, found some shortcut to assist them (I’m referring to the previous post, if you missed it). The most frequent of Camus’s targets here was Kierkegaard, who was reportedly a mysterious character until the last installments in his body of work. According to Camus, his final words reeked of a religious attitude. “Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is…’the sacrifice of the intellect’” (p. 37).

Different authors took the existential line of thought in many directions, but as Camus pointed out, they did tend to justify the absurdity of life with some sort of claim to the eternal. Kierkegaard was probably the only philosopher connected to Existentialism who ever defaulted to a purely religious conclusion. But still, one can’t help but wonder how someone could pick apart all the layers, witness pure existence in its true form, and then justify it by concluding that there’s something that exists above and beyond our immediate life. You’ll recall that even Steppenwolf’s Hermine says all true actions live on in eternity.

This is what bothered Camus, and I think it’s why he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. As I said in the last post, it’s a very subtle change in outlook between the Existentialists and Camus’s Absurdism — but it is a change nonetheless. The Existentialists (as I’ve come to know them) were remarkably skilled at describing the “nausea” brought on by life, but they were terrible at suggesting what to do about it. Those with suicidal tendencies before their existential investigation were often left with even greater death-bound impulses. In short, Existentialists sought a way to live in spite of the absurd, while Camus, on the other hand, chose to live for the absurd.

“Living is keeping the absurd alive. […] One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. […] It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but wrongly. […] Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. […] That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. ” (pp. 54-55).

Those familiar with my rants may be thinking of Henry Miller. Back in March I wrote two posts (on Mar 11 and Mar 21) about Miller and George Orwell, after reading that Orwell had criticized Miller’s style of “protest.” To sum it up, Orwell’s style was to attack the governments that had swung too closely to totalitarianism. Miller’s style was more of a protest against all of existence — hence why I think it fits in with Camus’s suggestions.

I’ve only read three of his books, but it’s clear to me that Miller experienced more happiness in his life than most of my favorite writers. That’s just one of the reasons why he’s an enigma, why I can’t cross his name off and keep moving down the list…so to speak. Camus and Miller both understood that, though the absurd does seem to negate our natural tendencies in life, it in no way prevents us from adapting to its conditions. Human beings are the most adaptable creatures on this planet! And our imagination is more powerful than any other tool we possess!

Those who have come this far in the struggle are often compelled to write about it. I know not what drives a man to write — even looking at myself. I know I was bored, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, etc…and I was deeply inspired by the personal fiction of Jack Kerouac. But at the time, it just seemed like something that would be a worthwhile activity even if nothing came of it. Even if I didn’t get paid for it or become famous because of it, writing seemed like a purposeful way to spend my time. Now three years have gone by and — after an arduous process of self-realization — I still feel essentially the same.

In the concluding section of Sisyphus, Camus suggests that a life of absurd creation is, without a doubt, a life worth living:

“He must give the void its colors. [...] A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. […] A succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. […] But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he posesses” (pp. 114-115).

“The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality” (p. 115).

“In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. […] To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s own fate. […] There is no frontier between being and appearing. […] The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings” (p. 117).

But you see that creation is of utmost importance. To continue to create is a man’s way of revolting against the demanding and often unrewarding nature of creative activity. In other words, hardly anyone will ever become famous for writing. Most who realize this after hoping for fame will stop writing. Those who continue do so in an absurd fashion, because it will appear to bystanders that the writer is wasting his time. The absurd creator disagrees:

“He knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life…in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. […] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (pp. 122-123).

After two posts I still haven’t explained the myth itself. Sisyphus is a character sentenced by the gods to the underworld where he must roll a heavy rock up a mountain, whereupon it just rolls back down. This would drive most to despair (if not insanity), but Sisyphus is clever. His victory lies in his continued activity, which he performs without hoping that it will end. By simply pressing on, he revolts against the gods who devised this terrible state of existence. Camus said he prefers to think about the calm moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of the mountain — when he can take a deep breath, survey the land around him, and then stroll leisurely down the slope again.

But don’t be mistaken. Camus provides no manual, nor could there ever be one. Every man troubled by existence must imagine his own happiness. I haven’t quite accomplished it yet, but I feel a lot better about the process than I did before. And with that said, I may be moving on to the next phase in this process of inner discovery. As always, you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

Well ladies and gentlemen, apparently I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with these blog posts. I could make the argument that I have approximately three jobs right now, and that I’m only getting paid for two of them…but that’s a lousy excuse. And if I’m gonna slack on my blogging duties, the least I can do is leave you with something deep to ponder on your own time. But with the last two posts focusing on Twitter and Wife Swap, clearly I didn’t accomplish that either.

In case it hasn’t made itself obvious through my blogging (and writing — or lack thereof — on Supraterranean.com), I’m going through something of a transition. I can’t express it fully at this time. At the very least, I write much less frequently than I have throughout the past two years. The reasons are plentiful. I don’t have any regular columns, freelancing, or other sorts of publishing relationships. At the moment, it’s all about Supraterranean…but that’s only one of those three “jobs,” and the other two don’t involve writing.

As David Gessner suggested in his New York Times Magazine essay (which I discussed here last fall), the reading life is the writing life. So I’m first trying to get back on my regular schedule of heavy reading, and hopefully the writing will flow on its own. Maybe part of my transition has to do with changes in why I write. I first started writing on a regular basis in January 2006 when I started a music blog on blogger.com. I wrote to pass the time and because it was fun. I was drunk on Kerouac and stuck in a big city that seemed to hate me as much as I hated it. I got through it by going to as many concerts as possible and using the written word to organize my listening habits.

The foremost point is that I wrote for the sake of writing. Any time I start doing otherwise, I catch myself and try to get back to that original motivation. That applies to inane journalistic assignments that require me to sacrifice my creative impulses for the sake of a maniacal editor, but it goes beyond that. I’m sure every writer hits a wall now and then. I don’t just mean “writer’s block” — there are also projects that refuse to be finished. Usually I don’t let it bother me. I think of it as planting seeds. If I sit down and write 1,000 words on pure impulse generated from vague ideas, sometimes I shelf it and come back to it later.

A notable example of this is my essay “A Healthy Contempt for Journalism,” which I published on Supraterranean.com in September 2008. I probably started writing that in January ‘08, since the events discussed in the essay happened between Sept-Dec 2007. In other words, it took eight months to finish, but much of that time the project was totally inactive. In all truth, there was no way I could have written that whole essay in January ‘08. I needed time to develop a broader perspective. I had to learn more about the journalism industry beyond my narrow experience with one internship and a year of grad school.

Finally a time came when the pieces seemed to start assembling themselves, and the rest of the essay was more fun to write. More importantly, I was happy with the final draft. That’s another reason to write: if both the process and the product are fulfilling to the author. If you hate the act of writing, or none of what you end up writing is pleasing or inspiring to you, then chances are you won’t be a writer for long.

Of course, there are many other reasons that people write. In the 20th Century, many people made careers out of writing. I suppose some people still do it, but with the fall of the newspaper industry (and the subsequent drop in freelancing opportunities) it’s becoming much more difficult. Really any kind of paper publishing is more difficult. And yet that’s how all literary classics were born, especially in the 1900s. No one had the means to self-publish. Some publishing company had to invest in an author for the author to be exposed to the public and gain an audience. There have always been multiple avenues, but that “needle in a haystack” method is what sticks out in my mind. I always think about Kerouac trying to sell On The Road to publishers for something like eight years, and then becoming the “King of the Beats” practically overnight.

And that’s another reason that some people may try to write, to achieve fame. It’s the whole rock ‘n’ roller mentality that swelled to monstrous proportions at the end of the 20th Century. It’s a seductive idea in writing, the hope that one’s efforts will eventually be affirmed on a grand scale, thus justifying all the tireless research, endless typing, awkward sleep schedules, and/or damaged personal relationships. Even if a writer tells himself that’s not why he’s writing, it’s another thing entirely to consistently write just for the sake of writing.

The great Hunter S. Thompson was even guilty in that regard. As he started to build his reputation in journalism, he once wrote to a friend that he was having trouble working on fiction. He said that inspiration was hard to come by without any promise or potential for payback. To me, that’s really sad, especially because The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are two of my favorite “fiction” books, and I wish there had been more of the same from Thompson.

So writing for money is a bad idea. Is writing for fame just as bad? That question will now (and probably forever) return me to a conversation in Steppenwolf (discussed here previously), when Hermine says to Harry:

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

Those who know me well can see me striking through my main literary inspirations, and the only one left is Henry Miller. But I cannot disqualify neither Miller’s intentions nor his finished works. I’ve only read three of them so far — most recently Black Spring — but if he made one thing clear to me in the first three books, it was that he wrote for the sake of writing. I think Nietzsche would have called it (or did call it) feeding off of one’s own flame. (Wait, I’m confused — he said to consume yourself in your own flames.)

Before I lose track of what I’m thinking about, I want to express a few things about Miller. I keep telling my girlfriend that he is the most underappreciated literary figure in American history. What’s most compelling about Miller at the current time is my complete inability to express what’s so special about him. Yes, I’ve talked about his unique way to protest. Yes, I’ve mentioned his “first draft as final draft” and transparent autobiographical novel style. But no matter what I say about him, I’m sure I’m still missing the core of his being. I feel that I still have so much more to learn about this genius. I also have more to uncover regarding his importance to this generation of Americans (or Earthlings). Next I’ll probably try to tackle his reputed masterpiece, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.

In reality I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do with this blog post, and that was simply to list some quotes from Black Spring with minimal discussion. I had also planned on making some points about how Henry Miller would have loved to see the massive jump in creativity that is resulting from digital technologies and the Internet. That just goes to show that I haven’t written enough lately, or maybe it’s evidence that I’m slowly taking on particular traits of my writer heroes. One of Miller’s prominent characteristics was extreme attention deficit. If I remember correctly, Tropic of Capricorn starts and ends within a very small time frame, and everything in between is either a remembrance from the past or an exploration from his imagination.

However, I don’t take the blog format for granted. In this spontaneous, convenient writing environment, I often feel more productive than times that I write in Microsoft Word. But after 1,300 words of this, I think I will leave you with a passage which, since it was written in the stretch of 1934-1935 — before both World War II and some famous works from that era by George Orwell and Jean Paul Sartre — was a highly prophetic statement:

“I cannot forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away at the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time–a history of all time.

“If I was unhappy in America, if I craved more room, more adventure, more freedom of expression, it was because I needed these things. I am grateful to America for having made me realize my needs. I served my sentence there. At present I have no needs. I am a man without a past and without a future. I am–that is all. I am not concerned with your likes and dislikes; it doesn’t matter to me whether you are convinced that what I say is so or is not. It is all the same to me if you drop me here and now. I am not an atomizer from which you can squeeze a thin spray of hope. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots” (pp. 23-24).

If in the last post I gave off the impression that I’m anything but an ardent fan of George Orwell, please allow me to correct myself. 1984 is one of my favorite novels. But recently I’ve become more aware of the less-than-coincidental similarities between that book and the way the modern world is governed. Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) published 1984 in 1949; it directly followed the 1945 publication of Animal Farm. As C.M. Woodhouse says in the introduction to Animal Farm, the novel was presented to the public in the same month as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

A quote from Orwell in the introduction makes the purpose of both of these books very clear.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism” (p. vii).

However, I may have previously insinuated that, although 1984 was almost certainly intended as a protest against government, it might have had the adverse effect of teaching governments how to achieve an even greater level of control. In fact there’s an extensive section of that book in which the protagonist is allowed to read the guidebook of the government’s inner circle. It’s no cursory outline; it’s practically a working model for the American Empire from the end of WWII right on through the Bush era. What I mean is just that Orwell may have given more ammunition to the governments than to the oppressed citizens. According to Woodhouse, this was the exact opposite of Orwell’s intention.

“This personal enemy was no single individual or government—it was the system of the world capable of producing and using atomic bombs” (p. vi).

Furthermore, Woodhouse argues that Orwell saw the utmost importance in words and language — not an uncommon trait among professional writers. Woodhouse therefore poses this question: was Animal Farm the first instance of the pen being not only mightier than the sword, but even mightier than the bomb?

“The pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have” (p. vii).

I want to return to Henry Miller, but first I’ll discuss this story some more. For those not familiar with it, Animal Farm is a tale of revolution in which farm creatures overthrow the human farmer and set out to govern themselves. The pigs take charge since, unlike the other animals, they can read and write, and at first Napoleon and Snowball lead a sort of democracy together. They scrawl the Seven Commandments on the barn wall:

“1) Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2) Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3) No animal shall wear clothes. 4) No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5) No animal shall drink alcohol. 6) No animal shall kill any other animal. 7) All animals are equal” (p. 33).

And then everything falls apart. The deterioration is well-calculated and many steps are predictable; the supposedly unalterable commandments are, one by one, edited and/or erased, for the benefit of those in power, to the great disadvantage of the other animals. There are traces of every violent, corrupt government that existed in the 20th Century, especially the Soviets. And as Woodhouse points out, “all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling…” (p. xi).

On that subject, Woodhouse spends a large portion of the introduction examining the book’s subtitle, “A Fairy Story.” As he explains,

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit” (p. x).

“Its message (which is by no means a moral) is that of all the great fairy-stories: ‘Life is like that—take it or leave it’” (p. xii).

Now perhaps you can see why I got sensitive about the criticism of Henry Miller. If Orwell’s longest piece of literary criticism claimed that Miller’s greatest fault was being passive and complacent, then how can the point of Animal Farm be, as Benjamin the donkey puts it, “life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly”? What’s the point of writing only against totalitarianism and becoming nearly synonymous with the word “dystopia,” if Orwell couldn’t devise anything better? What’s so wrong about the idea that some kind of utopia is possible, even if it’s just inside the imagination of an individual mind?

That’s one way of describing what Miller was after: a utopia of the mind. Or at least he was seeking perfect expression. It’s very evident throughout Animal Farm that the animals cannot revolt against the powerful pigs because they lack the means to even form rebellious thoughts. Also, because they cannot write, there is no written record of the farm’s history. Napoleon and his propagandist Squealer use this fact to manipulate the farm animals, altering history however it suits their agenda. I don’t think this should be taken lightly. Miller understood that the freedom and pursuit of expression were some of the most important things in life. This leads me to wonder if expression, or “the pen,” is really what will put us back on the track of progress. And there’s also the fact that all history will now be recorded and disseminated over the Internet (that’s a topic I’m currently sculpting into a longer essay).

I’m willing to staunchly defend Miller because—as he himself said of Goethe—he was a beginning, not an end. Miller made himself into a platform to build upon, a bridge spanning the void of modern humanity. Orwell was a terrific writer and his most popular works show us how not to operate the world. But if “how not to operate the world” is the same as “how the world is actually operated,” then what do we have? We have nausea, I suppose—but that’s another story (one I’ve also discussed here).

This was one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written on this blog, and I think that stands as evidence that these are not easy topics to tackle. If it’s still questionable, let me say clearly that I think Orwell was a genius. Instead of a list of quotes from the book itself, I’d simply like to share my favorite passage:

“As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak… Instead—she did not know why—they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes. [...] She knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Jones, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the human beings. [...] But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled” (p. 85).

In the introduction to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, C.M. Woodhouse points out (in a 1954 London Times Literary Supplement) that, in Orwell’s criticism of other authors,

“his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, written in 1940 on Henry Miller; and he called it ‘Inside the Whale’ to illustrate this same point that Miller had failed in his duty to protest, had ‘performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting” (p. viii)

I stopped reading the introduction around this point, with the intention of returning later, because Woodhouse had begun — as many book introduction writers do — to give away too many elements of Animal Farm that I preferred to learn on my own by reading the book. However, I have already read 1984, and I know how Orwell felt about modern governments and their leanings, especially in the early-20th Century, towards totalitarianism.

And Orwell was far from alone in espousing that sentiment. Hermann Hesse’s great work Steppenwolf comes to mind, in which protagonist Harry Haller learns to shape his life into one of constant and unending revolt against the world. The Beats were a definite incarnation of this mentality in America in the ’50s and ’60s. But this idea of constant rebellion, with recurring attempts at revolution, reminds me of two recent posts on this blog: one about David Foster Wallace and his discussion of institutionalized irony; one about Adam Curtis and his documentary The Trap, which addressed the problems of a Western world that has rejected positive liberty for the safer, more stable negative liberty.

I don’t need to double back on those previous posts; I only hope to bring up the point that successful revolution against any vast power in this post Y2K world seems impossible. As The Trap states, negative liberty allows institutions to imprison people, though the people remain under the impression that they are free. Likewise, government and society in the West has become more static and difficult to change.

Curtis concludes by stating that the world is no longer run by ideologies. This makes sense, considering how exhausting it is for a modern individual to remain idealistic for longer than a few years. Anyone can begin a lifestyle of constant revolt against tyranny, but all who do will eventually feel like a shadowboxer, fighting against ghosts and making insignificant progress. And naturally that leads to the classic novel Don Quixote, and the resulting adjective quixotic. Wikipedia (via the Google define tool) defines it as “a person or an act that is caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals. It also serves to describe an idealism without regard to practicality.”

Of course this probably deserves a deeper analysis of the types of revolt, ranging from internal (i.e. – individual psychology) to a governmental coup. However, this still relates to a question a Spanish friend asked in the fall, regarding the fact that Americans should be protesting constantly in the street, when in reality they never do. The first conclusion would be that they’re busy watching TV and playing video games, but I think it goes deeper than that (thanks to Curtis for clarifying the situation). Americans can sense that there is no effective target for their revolt. For example, even if Bush had been impeached, Cheney would have taken over and the situation probably would have gotten even worse. But I digress…

I don’t think that Miller’s style of writing — or of living, for that matter — can be written off as anything but brilliant. I would even go so far as to suggest that Miller’s first two books, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, would more appropriately have been called How to Live a Sane Life in a World That Has Gone Mad, parts I and II. Either that, or How to Live in a World Where Successful Revolution Has Become an Impossibility.

Yes, Miller spent more of his adult life in France than in his native country of America, where he probably could have done a lot of good. But he valued freedom of expression above all else, and he recognized that America was about 30 years behind the curve in that area (Cancer was published in Paris in 1934, but, because of obscenity laws, wasn’t published in America until 1961). Yes, Miller seemed to preach passivity and indifference over constant worrying and revolt. But no, this should not be interpreted through Orwell’s method.

Miller did speak of floating down the river of life and taking things as they came, but this was simply his way of making peace with the terrifying nature of life and the world, following the acknowledgment that one person can only change so much, especially through direct physical action. Miller did do more than his share of protesting, but he only did it on his own terms — in a way that would echo through time in an invincible manner. As a result, Miller’s works are almost more useful than Orwell’s, because Orwell wrote from a stance that could be manipulated by governments and institutions. Anyone who has read 1984 wouldn’t doubt that the scariest governments in the world today — including the American government — have probably used the same tactics that Orwell warned against.

Miller called his first attempts at writing “a phantom struggle”:

“It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let go” (p. 283, Tropic of Capricorn).

If you want revolt, Miller provided it by the ton:

“Any primitive man would have understood me…only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. [...] The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life was indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? [...] No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. [...] Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer” (pp. 287-288).

I’ve pulled these quotes almost at random, but one further down the page seems key:

“Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. [...] Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. [...] By the very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example” (pp. 288-289).

Keep in mind that this was first published in 1938, thus preceding not only the U.S. atom bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but also this whole post-war mess that America has seen over the last 50 or 60 years. Seen from this angle, I would argue that Miller’s duty to protest has been more successfully fulfilled than Orwell’s.

During grad school I was drawn away from Kerouac, not out of disinterest, but just simply because I was so damn busy. Now that I have some more time and mental energy, I’ve jumped back “on the road.” Every time I read one of his books, I find it simultaneously challenging and rewarding. There are always slow parts, as well as some repetition of themes and events. But then there are passages that glow and make the whole thing more than worthwhile. I think this is due to Kerouac’s method of writing. He wanted a style that would mimic the improvisation of jazz, the confession of his Catholic upbringing, and the concept of not revising what you have written. The third element — not going back and second-guessing your first impulse — may have come from some of his literary inspirations like Goethe, or it may have been more clearly expressed by Henry Miller, an American writer who reached literary height in the early 1930s.

The first time I saw Kerouac clearly outline his own style was in Desolation Angels, when he made it especially clear that most of his books were written with little to no hope of ever being published. In fact he was writing for the sake of writing, because he believed that was the reason life was bestowed upon him. But that’s not the topic I mean to address here. For those not familiar with Angels, it’s a very long novel for Kerouac — about 400 pages — and it’s roughly divided into two books: “Desolation Angels” and “Passing Through.” A section in the first book called “Desolation in Solitude” basically contains his notebook writings from a summer spent on wildfire watch atop a mountain in Washington State.

I was actually more fond of the “Passing Through” parts, since they contain some of his most straightforward writing, in comparison to his more poetic, abstract work. One of the most interesting sections in Angels came a few pages from the end, when he talks about his friend Cody Pomeroy (the fictionalized name of his good friend Neal Cassady). The section points to why Cassady was so influential in Kerouac’s life:

“He is a believer in life and he wants to go to Heaven but because he loves life so he embraces it so much he thinks he sins and will never see Heaven. [...] You could have ten thousand cold eyed Materialistic officials claim they love life too but can never embrace it so near sin and also never see Heaven. [...] They sin by lifelessness! [...] Cody had a wife whom he really loved, and three kids he really loved, and a good job on the railroad. But when the sun went down his blood got hot:—hot for old lovers like Joanna, for old pleasure like marijuana and talk, for jazz, for the gayety that any respectable American wants in a life growing more arid by the year in Law Ridden America. [...] He filled his car with friends and booze and pot and batted around looking for ecstasy…” (pp. 405-406).

This passage got me thinking about what we perceive to be normal and abnormal when it comes to behavior and lifestyle. In many ways the Internet is making weird things — like indie music, for example — more commonplace. But are unique people and things actually being molded to fit within the status quo? Is there even a real Outsider in America anymore? Or have we all be corralled into our homes, discouraged from embarking on roaming adventures, turned on to comfort and technological luxuries, and told to live quietly and obediently? I haven’t decided yet. Maybe we’re just learning to vent our weird behavior at the correct time and place, such as at a music festival. After all, they have become extremely common as this decade progressed — and now even Michigan has Rothbury.

My next Kerouac project will be to read Visions of Cody, a book that I’ve heard Kerouac would have preferred On The Road to be like. It’s supposed to be an alternate take on his travels with Cassady, transcribed in part from tape recorded conversations between the two.

Firstly, I’d like to apologize for my inactivity of late. I just underwent a move from Traverse City to Ann Arbor, and then a switch of apartments with my girlfriend. It’s been a very hectic four weeks, but — other than the fact that I’m still unemployed — I’ve mostly settled down now.

Recently I realized  that it would be very difficult to write consistently on here about fiction and philosophy. Not only would it be exhausting, but I’m just not sure that I have those kind of resources. For this post, I turn to a sort of nonfiction reference book. I caught wind of Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale on a trip to the MSU Computer Store circa Spring 2007. A girl working at the counter set the book down to assist me, and I couldn’t help reading the cover when she went into the store room.

I found the book used on Amazon and started reading. For someone who hasn’t had an English class since 2001, this was a hefty undertaking. This feeling was increased since, on more than one occasion, I disagreed with her suggestions. For example, she seems to prefer third-person writing to first-person without question.

“In today’s culture of confession, many writers prefer the first-person point of view. Unabashed subjectivity may be fine for ever-popular memoirs on incest and inside-the-Beltway intrigue, but the third-person point of view remains the standard in news reporting and writing that aims to inform, because it keeps the focus off the writer and on the subject” (p. 36).

She’s correct about focus, but some of the greatest literature — especially in American history — has been told from the first-person view: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, etc. Plus (as if I haven’t already made this clear), the authors that got me to write were all using first-person: Kerouac, Thompson, Miller. I would even go so far as to suggest that third-person writing is a way of hiding behind other characters, instead of facing the story head-on. Or maybe I just can’t understand the concept of omnipotence, or pretending to know what dozens of characters are thinking and feeling, let alone saying out loud.

Hale progresses through three parts: Words, Sentences, and Music. Each subsection (i.e. – Nouns) features both Cardinal Sins (what to avoid at all costs) and Carnal Pleasures (what to work hard at developing). One of her Cardinal Sins is the way that journalism copy editors remove interjections (short words or phrases intended for strong effect more than meaning), leaving the writing stale and sterilized.

How she omits Kerouac — one of the most poetic prose writers of all time, who infused jazz into his words in amazing ways — from the Music section is beyond me. But regardless of my opposition, the book is still worth reading.

I want to return to Into The Wild to discuss the author himself. Jon Krakauer waits until the third act of the nonfiction book to discuss his own life, but doing so adds a lot of depth and context to the story of Chris McCandless. Krakauer is a climber and avid outdoorsman, and he has been in some hairy situations throughout the years. Some feats sound more taxing or reckless than anything that McCandless ever did.

Krakauer brings up his own life to demonstrate that many young men are driven into some sort of wild place, whether that’s a mountain, a desert, or even the middle of a huge city. Much of Krakauer’s drive was related to his father. “Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please” (p. 134).

The older Krakauer was a doctor who put loads of pressure on his children to succeed, particularly in the field of medicine. “I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations” (p. 148).

“He had built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage” (p. 149).

His father eventually suffered a mental collapse and, after a failed suicide attempt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital. This forced Krakauer to evaluate what that father/son relationship really meant. “The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit” (p. 150). (That pursuit, if you’re not familiar with him, is renowned journalist and nonfiction book author.)

Krakauer has a deep understanding of the way people try to run from their problems, only to find that path to progress and healing lies within. “I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing” (p. 155).

The author isn’t trying to discredit McCandless’ travels. There is value in travel, especially the full-fledged, total-immersion type of travel. But when you wander, all you really find is yourself. This concept echoes true through American literature, from Emerson to Henry Miller. As a result, I keep thinking of that random saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.” McCandless did come to similar realizations, if only too late. I won’t give away that part. You have to read or watch for yourself.

Welcome to Supraterranean.com Blog! For now, this space will be used for random thoughts, reading suggestions, news about the site, and the like.

I recently finished Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I feel that it was the missing link in my literary inspirations, particularly as a precursor to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. On one hand, I can’t believe that I didn’t hear about Miller until 2008. On the other hand, I can understand why he would be misunderstood and looked over by many modern readers.

One section towards the end of the book seemed especially useful for Supraterranean.com.

“What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when the night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster” (p. 250).

Most things that seem huge and scary to us are really, in the grand scope of the universe, minuscule and unimportant. We should lead humble lives, strive toward rediscovering our collective past, and work together to uncover our greater destiny.

Miller understood this, and that’s why he’s one of my new favorite authors. He was one of the most unique minds I’ve ever encountered. And exposing the contents and capabilities of unique minds is what we’re all about here at Supraterranean.com! What’s inside of yours?