It’s 2023 and here I am, finishing the last of an Irish Whiskey cake leftover from dinner last night. Perhaps I’ll be healthier tomorrow, but probably not. New year, same old self.
The myth of renewal when one year changes over is based in nothing outside our persistence in believing it. January 1, 2023 is just the tomorrow of December 31, 2022 and will be the yesterday of January 2, 2023. Nothing more, nothing less. But, of course, what makes the promise of New Years real is the strength in which we believe in it. A resolution is not a revelation, it’s just one more decision to see through (if you can) except if it becomes the decision–something like filing for divorce or quitting your 9-5 job to pursue art. But, this type of monumental move is often made once in a lifetime, if at all.
I once declared well-intentioned resolutions every year, but the only one I ever really kept was to moisturize more. Trivial but important as we all age. This tradition ended when I authoritatively announced (a little wobbly, after the clock passed midnight at Stookey’s Club Moderne) that 2020 would be the year I traveled more and regularly rode public transit! As you can imagine, that worked out great. And while I don’t put the same weight onto one year moving into the next like I once did, there is still something special about this time of year.
Maybe it’s the weather that encourages us all to stay inside or our communal decision to slow down around the holidays. As a society, it feels like we let each other have a break. In this spirit, I did a wild thing and took two whole weeks off starting on December 19th and ending tomorrow. It’s the first time I’ve put work aside to be intentionally unproductive since my father died in 2010. Grief makes you want to disappear into something. Some people shoot up, others drink, I worked as many hours of the week as I could physically bear so I wouldn’t have to be alone with myself.
We have an unhealthy commitment to overworking here in the United States, so it was fine that I dodged my grief by dodging myself like this. Ambition is rewarded, no matter how blind. In the meantime, I lost my grandmother (2013), my mother (2018), a beloved uncle (2019), the woman who launched my career (2020), and a surrogate mother (2022)–all but one to cancer. I lost my health (2013/2020) and let go of anyone who reminded me of what I once had as well as both childhood homes (2012/2020). I no longer had a foothold in Southern California, a place I’ve come to love more every minute I’m away from it, or a firm grasp on who I am as a woman of flesh and spine and memory.
In the meantime, I lost myself. So, I am work and work is who I am, because I am now unmoored and what I was is no longer grounded on this earth. What I was is buried six feet beneath the soil of five separate cities, none of which I live in.
So, I put down roots in San Francisco and bought a home in 2021 with what will always feel like money I did not earn–money my father earned and never had the chance to enjoy. In what I hope was the right move, I bought a single family home despite being childless to have room for everyone I lost, and have space for everything they left behind in my inheritance. I bought a home in which to host holiday dinners, despite the fact that I cannot cook (although am trying) and am a “single woman, not divorced”–a category I checked several times in my mortgage paperwork that would have been absent had a man been signing in my place. I bought a house so I could finally bring the people I lost above ground, introduce them to the living I am trying to keep close, and be at home with myself.
On December 25, 2022, I hosted a baker’s dozen for dinner in this Doelger home that was last sold in 1956. We cooked a 16-pound prime rib roast from an old-school neighborhood meat market called Guerra’s, drank all the alcohols, and laughed extremely hard about something I can’t quite recall now but know, for a fact, was hilarious. And after that, I only left this home for walks on the beach in between the rains. I read voraciously like I haven’t been able to in years, listened to records annotated in my mother’s handwriting, watched movies new and old, cleaned a house destroyed by holiday merriment, and spent quality time with my cat. I found comfort in silence, in stillness, with momentary breaks of chaos evoking that scene in Home Alone where the extended McAllister family has pizza the night before they leave town.
The last two weeks of being mostly alone with myself wasn’t part of a resolution but is hopefully part of an evolution moving towards…I don’t know what…contentment? I hope to be a person at ease with her regrets and failures, measured in context with her accomplishments and the realization that what she does can have impact but that she, in the grand scheme of things, does not matter. As Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail said, “I lead a small life–valuable, but small–and sometimes I wonder: do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
The person who will eventually cure cancer will matter. The person who, with an apron on and a cat in her lap, writes this blog post that a few people will eventually read does not and will not matter. So, you’re probably wondering, why write a blog post at all if nothing matters? I suppose it boils down to this: I release this as an act of courage but mostly as an act of writing. This remarkably productive unproductive time has allowed me to recapture a part of my life before loss that was, and is, elemental to who I am. I rejoined my life as a thinker instead of a doer, met myself as an artist and not a nonprofit administrator. I don’t have the audacity to think people will care about anything that is found here on Nostos Algos, but I do think that a single act has a greater chance of becoming a habit if it’s made visible. For someone to be a writer, they have to make a habit of writing–of synthesizing the things they see and read and and hear and feel by pouring it all into words with regularity.
I want to be a writer who is seen as an artist free from her motives as a museum professional. When you’ve spent 12 years trying to disappear into ambition, visibility this naked is a revolution.
As I turned the corner to get my morning java fix, I saw a well dressed man of a certain age heading in my direction. Pressed jeans, collared shirt, and a clean pair of brown leather shoes–no scuffs. He and I both slowed seeing our shared destination, and I deferred to him as he led us through the door. He scooped up the last remaining table for two, and I strode straight into the small but substantial line, he to follow up behind me in a few.
I ordered my latte strong (to go), and he ordered his with small talk (to stay). It mattered not that the barista was in no mood; This Man of a certain age was here to talk, and talk he would. I stood aside and quietly waited for my morning salvation. He stood square in front of the sullen barista, and continued on with his talk.
“Pretty busy today, huh?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh,” says the man, with a gentle look down at the shuffle of his feet. “I guess I”m later than usual.”
[clears throat] “Did you walk here?”
“Yep. I sure did,” The Man said with eagerness. “I sure did walk here.”
“You on your way to work?”
“Me? Oh, no no. I don’t work. I’m just a caretaker for one cat. Just one cat and a garden. And a car. I take care of a cat, a garden, and a car.”
“Oh, ok.”
Silence and another look to the ground to see what his feet would do, and there was nothing more. The Man took his latte for here and sat by himself over there. No paper, no book. Nothing to distract him from the company that hadn’t come. Just another man who takes care of a cat, a car, and a garden sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco.
So love-starved that a look is all it takes for lust to leap up from its lair and be a presence once again–the dust falling in sheets from its dormancy.
A glance falling from that face, with eyes inspecting downward: eyelashes to lips, clavicle to shoulder tip, and down into desire.
One touch, that taste, these memories to keep through our hibernation–through the times when the No One and the Nothing are near, not even the outline of a thought.
A creative lightning bolt from a source that selected Nostos Nic: Nobel Prizer, Czeslaw Milosz.
I read for knowledge, I read for clarity, and the perfect paragraph(s) has always had the same impact on me as the perfect song–keeping in mind that perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Often, I’ll select a volume to read from my stacks of dusty books that were purchased and then forgotten for months and years. Why that volume strikes me then, at that particular time, I do not know because it picks me, and then one or two or three chapters in I realize it is the precise book I needed at that moment. The words cut deeply, the plot lines are too relevant, and I leave the book behind a little more determined in my course of action, a bit more comfortable in my world view: an energized person. If music marks moments, then literature (fiction and non-fiction) makes them through contextualization.
This has the case with Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes and every poem I’ve ever read by Charles Bukowski (as messed up as that sounds), and has happened most recently with a book by Czeslaw Milosz titled Visions from San Francisco Bay. In the first chapter, Milosz outlines his intention for the book and it electrified me so I thought I’d share the lighting strike. Hopefully it hits home for you too.
My Intention
I am here. Those three words contain all that can be said–you begin with those words and return to them. Here means on this earth, on this continent and no other, in this city and no other and in this epoch I call mine, this century, this year. I was given no other place, no other time, and I touch my desk to defend myself against the feeling that my own body is transient. This is all very fundamental, but, after all, the science of life depends on the gradual discovery of fundamental truths.
I have written on various subjects, and not, for the most part, as I would have wished. Nor will I realize my long standing intention this time. But I am always aware that what I want is impossible to achieve. I would need the ability to communicate my full amazement at ‘being here’ in one unattainable sentence which would simultaneously transmit the smell and texture of my skin, everything stored in my member, and all I now assent to, dissent from. However, in pursuing the impossible, I did learn something. Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks other will understand. There are, however, time when somehow we slowly divest ourselves of the shame and being to speak openly about all the things we do not understand. If I am no wise, then why must I pretend to be? If I am lost, why must I pretend to have ready counsel for my contemporaries? But perhaps the value of communication depends on the acknowledgement of one’s own limits, which, mysteriously, are also limits common to many others; and aren’t these the same limits of a hundred or a thousand years ago? And when the air is filled with the clamor of analysis and conclusion, would it be entirely useless to admit you do not understand?
I have read many books, but to place all those volumes on top of one another and stand on them would not add a cubit to my stature. Their learned terms are of little use when I attempt to seize naked experience, which eludes all accepted ideas. To borrow their language can be helpful in many ways, but it also leads imperceptibly into a self-contained labyrinth, leaving us in alien corridors which allow no exit. And so I must offer assistance, check every moment to be sure I am not departing from what I have actually experience on my own, what I myself have touched. I cannot invent a new language and I use the one I was first taught, but I can distinguish, I hope, between what is mine and what is merely fashionable. I cannot expel from memory the books I have read, their contending theories and philosophies, but I am free to be suspicious and to ask naive questions instead of joining the chorus which affirms and denies.
Intimidation. I am brave and undaunted in the certainty of having something important to say to the world, something no one else will be called to say. Then the feeling of individuality and a unique role begins to weaken and the thought of all people who ever were, are, and ever will be–aspiring, doubting, believing–people superior to me in strength of feeling and depth of mind, robs me of confidence in what I call me ‘I’. The words of a prayer two millennia old, the celestial music created by a composer in a wig and jabot make me ask why I, too, am here, why me? Shouldn’t one evaluate his changes beforehand–either equal the best or say nothing. Right at this moment, as I put these marks to paper, countless others are doing he same, and out books in their brightly colored jackets will be added to that mass of things in which names and titles sink and vanish. No doubt, also at this very moment, someone is standing in a bookstore, and faced with the sight of those splendid and vain ambitions, is making his decisions–silence is better. That single phrase which, were it truly weighed, would suffice as a life’s work. However, here, now, I have the courage to speak, a sort of secondary courage, not blind. Perhaps it is my stubbornness in pursuit of that single sentence. Or perhaps it is my old fearlessness, temperament, fate, a search for a new dodge. In any case, my consolation lies not so much in the role I have been called to play as in the great mosaic-like whole which is composed of fragments of various people’s efforts, whether successfully or not. I am here–and everyone is in some ‘here’–and the only thing we can do is try to communicate with one another.
Jazz clubs on 52nd Street in New York City, seen here c. 1950s, were familiar territory to Miles Davis and Jack Kerouc, pioneers in their chosen fields of jazz and fiction.
While cruising across the Bay Bridge to San Ramon about a month ago, I caught a Michael Krasny interview with Marcus Shelby on NPR. Marcus Shelby–teacher, composer, bassist–is the heartbeat of the Bay Area contemporary jazz community. His deep-rooted understanding of African-American history is seen through his performance of songs such as “Harriet Tubman” and “Port Chicago,” which he uses as an exercise of cultural remembrance. The show aired on Duke Ellington’s birthday, and, after discussing the Duke’s influence, Shelby found himself awash in much deserved praise as Krasny opened the phone lines and caller after caller paid their respects. Then a caller asked him for guidance. This woman, whose name escapes me, had always appreciated, but found it hard to like, jazz, and she asked Shelby for advice on learning to love the art he had so skillfully mastered. Shelby immediately recommended Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.
Kind of Blue is a special kind of album–as approachable as it is quixotic, as revelatory as it is confounding. It might be difficult for modern listeners to understand the revolutionary concepts burned into the album’s grooves since we’re so far removed from its August 1959 debut. Since then, this type of jazz has been emulated the world over, and is now an accepted part of the American unconscious, present in our lives as music in movies and cartoons, and as the background to conversations in an elevator. But in 1959, jazz–particularly the form Davis pioneered here–was the cool subterranean art form that attracted hipsters like Jack Kerouac as well as traditional music mavens. Eventually it would transform popular culture in tandem with other revolutionary movements that prioritized spontaneity and emphasized the newness of roads less traveled.
An intimate look at the “Kind of Blue” studio session.
In studying art, I’m consistently impressed with how much preparation is involved in the construction of spontaneity. It’s not a false concept, but spontaneity does require skillful and thoughtful craftsmanship in order to result in artistic genius. Before hitting the studio for his Kind of Blue sessions, Miles Davis had been experimenting with “modal” jazz which emphasized soloists over a background of one or two scales, or “modes”, instead of what jazz typically emphasized–busy chord progressions. With a few compositional sketches in hand, he gathered a group of young innovators to round out his crew: John Coltrane as tenor saxophonist, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley as alto saxophonist, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on the kit.
As this group of musicians entered the studio, Davis laid out the parameters: the focus would be on first takes. Beginning with the opening track, the tone is set for the album as Chambers takes the lead while Evans keeps us engaged with unorthodox chords from which the rest of the music takes its cue. This is a bold choice, leading with the bassist and refusing to follow a linear path, one that validates the song’s title, “So What”–a musical call to arms in its brash repudiation of the jazz norm, and a sign of what’s to follow. “Freddie Freeloader,” actually the first track recorded during the 1959 sessions, momentously extends the swinging vibe of the first track and beautifully showcases Kelly’s contribution to Davis’ sextet. For me, the album is weighted in the center with “Blue in Green”, a song aching with simmering mood. Often described as “meditative” by jazz pundits and music theorists, the cycle of chords for this song was hashed out years before entering the studio when Davis slipped Bill Evans a piece of paper. Having written the musical equivalent for “G minor” and “A augmented” on the note, he told Evans, “See what you can do with this.” “Blue in Green” was born. This song is noirified, sultry and conjures so many clichés: dimly lit boudoirs in black and white, smoke curling around a billowing curtain, and the butt of a cigarette falling, wasted, onto a dampened empty sidewalk as its user turns away into the night.
As with all game-changing works, Kind of Blue struck a chord with an audience ripe for its message. Postwar America was searching for an identity in the 1950s as the country was entering the Cold War. Living under the perpetual threat of annihilation, much of American culture proverbially stuck its head in the sand. Families proliferated, moved to the suburbs in search of a Leave-It-To-Beaver lifestyle, and focused on the acquisition of goods and services pushed by advertising agencies in magazines and on television. There was, however, a subset of the population that remained disaffected by the Second World War–so much so that they found it impossible to distract themselves with taglines, products and the promise of a glittering American life.
Jack Kerouac circa 1950s.
Individuals in the subset I speak of were young, and they were Beat. To quote the author Jack Kerouac:
“The Beat Generation…was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg…of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way–a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America–beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction…it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization–the subterranean heroes who’d finally turned from the ‘freedom’ machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the ‘derangement of the senses,’ talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation…”
Kerouac was a sensory addict, a lover of music who frequented hot jazz clubs in New York’s Harlem and San Francisco’s Fillmore Districts. He would write perhaps the best known Beat novel, and for this reason he became “King of the Beats”–the unofficial Beat mascot as identified by the mainstream press. This Beat novel was liberally autobiographical, called On The Road, and provided insight into a subterranean community that shunned traditional society in searching for more authentic experiences; it emphasized spontaneity and a new mode of literary thought, just like Davis’ Kind of Blue. Published in 1957, it follows the misadventures of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) and the classic anti-hero Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) as they mine for meaning in the American miles between San Francisco and New York City. The pair immerse themselves in the urban bowels of these two cities, where a simmering counterculture is on the brink of a full-blown boil in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
When Viking finally found the cojones to publish this epic novel, Kerouac’s importance as a postwar author was immediately evident not just for the content of his narrative prose but also for his method of delivery. As explained in his quote above, the concept of “Beat” was a communal creation based on existing concepts so, in that respect, the source of the novel’s message did’t make his literary voice unique. What did elevate his prose above that of his peers’ was a narrative style that Allen Ginsberg later termed “spontaneous bop prosody.” This style was heavily influenced by his Canuck heritage that blended French with English, his second language, but was most evidently the product of converting jazz cadences into phonetic words and complex sentence structures. The tempo of Kerouac’s writing embodied the frenetic force behind his perpetual travels–the movements that found him the figures who would inspire his content. As jazz was and is peculiarly American, his passion for the genre and its integration into his writing lent his words a unique force that paired perfectly with the rusted red, white, and blue landscape he so painstakingly painted, as well as the avant-garde characters he knew intimately and immortalized in fiction.
Just like the music of Miles Davis, Kerouac’s work was also predicated upon a “first take” ethos underwritten by a dedication to craft and persistent preparation. The problem with Kerouac scholarship is that his interviews were generally misleading, since he often drank rotgut booze to calm his nerves and enjoyed playing with his own mythology. Later interviews with the people he knew are also circumspect since they’re clearly self-interested and memory is a fuzzy, moving target–one that might be even fuzzier for a group of known drug users and jovial alcoholics. What we do know is that Kerouac told reporters he wrote On the Road in a three-week, benzydrine-driven “ball” on a single scroll of teletype; this news spread quickly, and remains a beloved creation story. Unfortunately for admirers of this myth, his official archive reveals multiple revisions of the famous novel that include wildly different characters and plot points written on traditional sheets of typewriter paper with his trusty Underwood or scrawled in his own hand. In fact, Kerouac spent most of his life obsessively developing his craft as he agonized over word choice, sentence construction, and character development. His “three-week ball” was actually the product of a lifetime of practice.
In addition, the novel would never have happened without a little help from his friends. Although a consummate devotee to the tedious work of writing, Kerouac was still searching for his literary voice which later combined a Wolfean narrative scope with the jazz constructs that dominated his journals long before he felt comfortable including them in published work. After years of approaching fiction traditionally by emulating the writers he most admired (Thomas Wolf, Ferdinand Celine), he unlocked the key to his success through an exercise called “sketching.” He came to this approach on the recommendation of Ed White, a friend who told Jack “sketch in the street like a painter, but with words” as a means to cure his stagnating depression. This allowed Kerouac to transcribe his “interior music” and gave him, as Joyce Johnson points out in The Voice Is All, “a way to write passages in which he could seize the peak moment of initial inspiration and ride it through to the end, without interrupting the flow of imagery.” This dissolved the “barrier between poetry and prose” that had frustrated him, and when Lucien Carr suggested Kerouac substitute a teletype roll for traditional sheets of paper, well, the last barrier to On the Road‘s writing was removed.
This understanding of events is directly contradicted by man historians, biographers and cultural critics point to a letter Cassady wrote to Kerouac in 1950 as the spark for On the Road in its current form. I believe that gives Kerouac short shrift and over-emphasizes Cassady’s influence on his writing. Sketching enabled Kerouac to release himself from “fiction and fear,” and helped to focus him on writing the truth with Neal Cassady, his muse, at the core of his entropic story. Writing Neal as he was instead of fictionalizing a Kerouac-Cassady hybrid for the main character, as he did in unpublished versions of novel, was the breakthrough he had resisted as a young writer struggling against an instinct to write from life when he believed the best writing was pure fiction. In the character of Dean Moriarty, Kerouac captured the reckless spontaneity used by Beat writers as an antidote to the numbness felt by a generation wasted in war, either dead on the battlefield or dying inside an over-regulated postwar society. Cassady may have been the essence of spontaneity, but it was the intrinsic freedom of Kerouac’s jazz-informed prose that enabled 1960s fee love and expression, and has continued to resonate with readers in successive generations.
I am one such member of those successive generations who found Kerouac as a teenager, and have loved him ever since. I read On the Road in high school on the recommendation of an English teacher, David Soltis, who was probably the greatest influence on my early aspirations to be a writer. I was instantly hooked, seduced by the realm of possibility inherent in Kerouac’s prose and drunk on his words like only a sheltered teen can be. I purchased every book on him or by him, and also collected recordings of Kerouac because to hear the author read his own words aloud beautifully reinforces the lyricism behind his craft. Although it would take me years to understand the import of Kerouac’s contribution to American culture, I immediately felt a connection with Kerouac’s restlessness. My teenage lust for this dead poet compelled me to wear a beret, write poetry that was bad but then got better, and reroute my family vacation to Lowell, Massachusetts so I could see Kerouac’s hometown and visit his grave.
This lust also drove me to jazz–straight into the arms of Miles Davis and his Kind of Blue, an album that continues to inspire me even while On the Road has, well, been relegated to role of a First Love. The novel’s lyricism and Kerouac’s devotion to craft continue to influence me as a writer and as an illuminated hipster hell-bent on preserving the magic of our disappearing American landscape. But as an adult woman I just can’t ignore the presence of sexism in his work (a topic for an entirely new article) or the perverse relationship between Kerouac and his mother–a relationship which ultimately formed his opinion of women as wives/mothers meant to be barefoot, pregnant, and subject to his will. This sexism taints his work form me as a 21st-century woman and writer in command of her own voice, but I still credit Kerouac’s role in my ongoing development as an artist, and, perhaps, even in my choice of men (also a topic for an entirely new article).
The Kerouac poster that hung next to my bed (next to the obligatory Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt posters) as a teen is long gone, but my vinyl copy of Kind of Blue is still a vital part of my record collection. And I’m not alone in this reverence; Kind of Blue continues to be the best-selling jazz record of all time, and is cited by many current artists–musical or otherwise–as an influence. First editions of On the Road sell for anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000, and it continues to be a contemporary pop culture presence with a movie adaptation that premiered in 2012. Teenagers will always want to read/listen to/wear something that is innately rebellious, and Kerouac will always fit that bill. Despite his many unsavory characteristics, I find myself reflecting on the last paragraph of On the Road time and time again–the one that explains his vision of America, his understanding of life:
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing od, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
Kerouac lived by one credo: the voice is all. And when an evening of writing begins to fade away, in that moment just before the coming of complete night when I’m finishing articles like this or maybe jotting down a poem (or two), I think of Jack Kerouac, I think of the power of his prose and his ornery addiction to his craft, I think of Jack Kerouac.
The author on board a Virgin American flight to Seattle with Jack Kerouac by her side, May 2014.
Nostos Algos 