A Stream

32 “…his spontaneous prose style seems to insist that readers believe they are experiencing the text as it is being written, so Kerouac relies on a modified use of the suspension of disbelief; he welcomes readers to join him in the present moment. The Romantics, also masters of thsi technique, wished to create the sense of immediacy in writing as well.”

43 “le temps perdu” = lost time

43 “Peter possesses, as later Kerouac characters will as well, a pervasive sadness made more poignant by his inability to express it, to share his insights with others.”

44 “Francis, too, realizes that adults–and specifically his father–misled children about the nature of the world they would grow into.”

45 “Peter wants to speak with his fellow footballers and break through the tough, masculine exteriors they present to each other. He longs to express a common understanding they each shared, to bring them somehow to a point of spiritual and emotional camaraderie that would supplant the merely physical teamship they exhibit on the football field. Nevertheless, Peter cannot pierce the barriers of socially imposed behaviors.”

45 “Alex propounds the essential message that humanity is one great family and repeats a call to ‘the brotherhood of man,’ a transcendent socialism.”

58 “Jazz is the beating heart of On the Road.”

65 “Every joyous moment in On the Road ends up in disappointment and regret. Every big night precedes a painful “morning after.’ One continual refrain is the collapse that follows bliss, and so each event can be seen in its entirety as a fall from the Garden. Achieving ‘IT’ can allay the grief and forestall doom, but ‘IT’ by nature is ever elusive, like the ‘something’ that permeates The Town and the City.”

66 “One result of Sal’s empathy is that he moves outside mainstream American society and finds greater meaning in the singularity of those who do not follow conformist patterns. Kerouac once wrote that he was neither American nor European, instead he felt like an Inidan(sp) exile.”

67 “Tallman suggests that one way these outcasts cope is by giving up their egos and falling back not upon the mercy of society but into the moment, an existence entirely in the ‘now.’ To survive there, they must learn to ‘swing’: ‘To swing is to enter into the full alliance with the moment to do this is to triumph over the squares who otherwise run the world.’”

70 “Dean reaches perhaps his most acute insight when he completes the subject/object dissolution while driving high in Mexico: ‘this road drives me!’ Alan Watts writes about such a state in The Way of Zen. He describes the goal of Zen practice to be ‘a total clarity and presence of mind….Through such awareness it is seen that the separation of the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known, the subject from the object, is purely abstract. There is not mind on the one hand and its experiences on the other: there is just a process of experiencing in which there is nothing to be grasped, as an object, and no one, as a subject, to grasp it.’”

71 “extemporizing” = creating in the moment, improvising

74 “‘Why don’t you just sketch in the streets like a painter but with words…’”

76 “Kerouac must be involved totally in the moment, in the creative act, for his work to run with the frequency of life as perceives it; sketching techniques combined with jazz inspiration as Kerouac developed spontaneous prose.”

78 “In On the Road Sal is confident he will find ‘girls, visions, everything’ on his road of adventure. Sal feels a pain in his heart every time he sees a beautiful girl ‘going the opposite direction in this too-big world’. The narrator in Visions of Cody is not so romantic: ‘It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now–girls, visions, anything’. In fact, one major theme in Visions of Cody is Duluoz’s acceptance of loss.”

87 “Throughout Visions of Cody Kerouac mentions photographs and the illusion of order and stability they create. His prose record refutes the other and seemliness of the lives the photographs project.”

104 “The narrator sees each as having that sense of place for which he himself has searched. As does Neal Cassady, ‘a western kinsmen of the sun,’ these women represent an aboriginal, natural presence, and with this genuineness comes a kind of dignity, a regal sense of being themselves. Compelled to devote his life to writing, the narrator exchanges the possibility of an enduring love life for the necessity of art. As did Sal paradise in On the Road, the narrator of these stories–especially The Subterraneans and Tristessa–stores up experiences expressly for writing them later. This is not to say they the experiences were shallow because the narrator saw their potential use in books. The narrator is painfully aware of the trade-off he makes.’

114 “Leo’s constant returning to his mother and to his work separates him from Mardou, and a core theme in this book resides in Leo’s indecision over whether he would rather love Mardou and commit himself to her, or whether he would rather write about the affair. Mardou is aware of Leo’s split loyalty: she claims that women are the ‘essence’ of men’s desire, yet men persist in activities such as writing books that lead them from that essence. Leo confesses to his readers that ‘the thighs contain the essence’ and later thinks that the essence is Mardou’s womb, the goal of his desire and the source of life. Yet in a moment of doubt, Leo has a powerful epiphany: ‘I GOT MY OWN LITTLE BANGTAIL ESSENCE AND THAT ESSENCE IS MIND RECOGNITION’. Leo is split between discovering essence in a woman and discovering essence in his own mind, and for him the one precludes the other. Ultimately, of course, Leo chooses art, for otherwise no book would exist. As in Maggie Cassidy, dejection results in art, and the lost love at least yields a moment of salvation in the creation of the book.”

120 “Leo cries out at one point, ‘I’m the bop writer’ insisting that the bop scene is his material but also that he writes the way a bop musician plays. His ideas are just the starting point for extemporization and openness to new ideas that come along during his ‘solo.’

132 “Keroad wishes to avoid the trappings of telling a story in a predetermined form, a ‘literary’ form, that would rob it of it’s essential interest, which for him is the emotional impact of events.”

133 “One phrase in Tristessa was so important to Kerouac that he wrote it in capital letters and vowed to write it all over America: ‘BORN TO DIE.’ Impending death made no sense to Kerouac, for it seemed to negate or make insignificant all the labors and sufferings of life. Only a mystical, spiritual comprehension could counter the senselessness of the inevitable death oh humans; death is not life thwarted, for death and birth naturally arise together, as wet implies dry, or as high implies low. Kerouac offers in Tristessa a message ‘that recompenses all that pain with the soft reard of silent love’. The apparent senselessness of death and the message that alleviates the suffering it causes are at the core of Visions of Gerard. A biographer of Beethoven once wrote, ‘Few men have the capacity fully to realize suffering as one of the great structural lines of human life.’ Stephen Batchelor, who cites this line in an article on Buddhism, goes on to say that ‘as with Great Dharma, Great Art begins with an an unflinching acceptance of anguish as the primary truth of human experience… All are united by the terrible beauty of anguish.’”

137 “Duluoz imagines Gerard watching the dissolution of summer clouds that, in their immateriality, reflect Taoist principles. The people of the town and even the solid redbrick smokestacks–and Gerard himself– will similarly dematerialize. Clouds work as symbols of impermanence of reality since they seem solid, possessing color and shape, but no one can grasp them, and they disappear when observed for any length of time.”

150 “In spite of his realization that nothing lasts, Kerouac lives for the high moments, when he is with his friends and they are sharing joyful discussions of poetry, when they are, in fact, living life itself as a poem, and this is the flow Kerouac has re-created on the pages.”

156 “Like Moriarty, Ryder seems more authentic than the narrator, who again puts himself in the position who follows dutifully. Instead of escaping into the moment via jazz, dope, and drink, though, Ryder offers the opportunity to escape the spiritually stifling aspects of civilization by literally stepping out of it, into the wilderness where one can survive on cunning and woods lore.”