Jack, Sam, Me & Death - an essay

"Poetry is the revelation of higher truths." -J.W. von Goethe

"There are no truths - only stories." -Zuni proverb

After my cousin Sam's funeral in Fond du Lac on October 5th, 2009, I walked into a bookstore and bought The Dharma Bums. It was my 49th birthday and I wanted to commemorate the dual occasion, Sam's death and my birth, by getting a novel that would honor his memory and inspire me. A fellow Jack Kerouac fan, Sam had barely made it to age 30 when his mental pain became so unbearable that he killed himself. I understood that kind of desperate grief, having survived an overdose of anti-depressants. But I was luckier, or less determined, than my cousin.

Sam had chosen a remote location for his final act. In fact, it took a few days for searchers to find his remains inside the parked car near the marsh. I decided to bid the world adieu from a busy stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline. After riding a bus into downtown Racine, I managed to walk as far as the public library on Lake Street when I collapsed, unconscious, and was rescued by some good Samaritan. The hospital was nearby and so the emergency-room staff had time to defibrillate my stopped heart and filter my poisoned blood before brain damage had set in. Sam chose carbon monoxide poisoning for his duel with Depression. He left a wife and small child behind. His mother, at least, was spared the terrible news. Judy - Sam's lovely Mom, my sweetheart of an aunt - had already staked her claim on the grave. She killed herself six years earlier, by CO poisoning.

When I entered the bookstore on Main Street that sunny autumn afternoon, I was pleased to discover a new Penguin edition of Kerouac's novel on the shelves. I asked for a pack of American Spirits cigarettes, charmed at having found a literature store that also sold tobacco. I justified the purchase by noting that Sam was a smoker too. Then I started the long drive north to Oconto County, where I was going to visit my friend Wolf. Ironically, Wolf's only brother, a pharmacist and Vietnam combat veteran, had killed himself too, swallowing a precisely fatal dose of barbiturates in the winter of 1979.

As I sped north on Highway 41 in my little black Volkswagen, I passed Winnebago, where the state had institutionalized me for the second half of 1984. The treatment consisted of: (1) psychotropic medication (not unlike the stuff that had nearly killed me); (2) group therapy; (3) occupational therapy (art /craft projects); and (4) exercise, especially via sports (basketball, softball, tennis) and hiking. I had survived ECT, so nothing psychiatric scared me anymore.

I also recall reading a book during my 5-month stay at Winnebago Mental Health Facility, by the Catholic priest-philosopher-scientist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin. It may have provided some mental stimulation, but it certainly failed to convince me of God's existence.

Somewhere north of Neenah, I cast my mind back even further, to the summer of 1983, when I discovered The Dharma Bums at the public library in Portland, Oregon. I was living hand to mouth at the time, auditing lectures on Chaplin and Nietzsche at Portland State University and briefly staying at a skidrow flophouse where I got pubic lice from the bedlinen. I had hitchhiked to the Rose City all the way from San Antonio, Texas, where my meager bus funds had taken me from New Orleans. I stayed with friendly drivers or at less glamorous places along the way. In exchange for my staying awake to an hour of gospel propaganda, for example, some hospitable Christians fed and bedded me at their rescue mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

I was emulating Kerouac's hobo-inspired mode of living before I had read his road novels, which helped set off the Sixties "rucksack revolution." Like Jack, I had acquaintances on the West Coast who'd put me up for a few days. But mine were in dull middle-class places - San Diego, Burbank - rather than Jack's beloved bohemian San Francisco. And yet, as much as Ronald Reagan tried to turn America's cultural clock back to the repressive Fifties, my road experience could sometimes be weirder than Kerouac's. Jack, as far as I know, was never escorted to a gay bar in the Castro district by a Christian Brother high-school teacher. That highway savior gave me a lift from near LA all the way to San Francisco Bay. Afterwards, I was glad that I had not chosen the life of a Catholic monk.

Nevertheless, as a natural loner and habitual observer (so was Kerouac), I've always felt monkish. That inclination cannot be undermined by society's disapproval or people's suspicions. In his Buddhist days, Jack aspired to be a bhikku, a Zen monk who lives out a creed of compassion. He sometimes wanted to become a bodhisattva too, an enlightened person who renounces nirvana in order to show others a way out of their suffering. Like his nineteenth-century American literary forebears Mark Twain (an agnostic Southerner) and Walt Whitman (an impoverished homosexual), Kerouac saw himself an outsider.

The son of strict working-class French-Canadian Catholic immigrants, Kerouac also had Iroquois blood and a dead brother, Gerard. He didn't even master the English language until he was in his late teens, attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. Despite that chance at entering the nation's elite, he dropped out of the rat race instead. He dared to became a writer, turning his sympathies toward fellow outsiders, rebels and misfits.

Preferring wild men to tame ones, Kerouac celebrated in his writing the antics of personalities as diverse as the delinquent speed-freak Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in On the Road) and the scholarly Zen-poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums). Despite his embrace of adventure and exuberance, Jack's moods could turn world-weary in a heartbeat. Norbert Blei may be right in asserting that "there's a Kerouac inside every writer." Fortunately, not every would-be Kerouac drinks himself to a death by middle age.

There are many better - yet, admittedly, some far worse - ways to die. In a dark poem from Mexico City Blues (1959), recorded for posterity by Kerouac on Poetry for the Beat Generation, Jack seems fed up with this sad planet: "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven dead," he says in a deadpan monotone.

By the late Fifties Kerouac had written his best stuff. Arguably, he had accomplished the mission laid out for himself in a moving passage, set in September 1955, that opens The Dharma Bums. Here Jack (as Ray) describes his encounter with a timid old hobo, with whom he shares his wine, bread and cheese in a railroad freight car travelling from Los Angeles to San Francisco:

I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world . . . in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero of Paradise . . . The little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs by warming up to the wine and talking and finally whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures. [Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Viking Penguin, 2008 hardcover edition, p. 2.]

Kerouac then introduces the character who inspired the novel while suggesting what its title signifies:

The little Saint Teresa bum was the first genuine Dharma Bum I'd met, and the second was the number one Dharma Bum of them all and in fact it was he, Japhy Ryder, who coined the phrase. Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods . . . interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth . . . [He] became an Oriental scholar and discovered the greatest Dharma Bums of them all, the Zen Lunatics of China and Japan. [The Dharma Bums, p. 5.]

Whether unconsciously or by design, Kerouac summons the compelling power of myth by casting his literary alter egos, Sal Paradise and Ray Smith, and their buddy-protagonists in On the Road (Dean Moriarty) and The Dharma Bums (Japhy Ryder) as heroes enacting a sort of mythic quest across the epic landscapes of the West in nuclear-age America.

As Joseph Campbell notes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), mythological adventures are similar across all cultures, whether the hero is Prometheus, Gautama-Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Myths share this story-pattern: (1) the hero ventures forth from the common world into (2) a region of supernatural wonder, where (3) she wins a decisive victory, after which (4) she returns with the power to bestow boons on the community. Myths derive their power, Campbell says, from a kind of tough spiritual instruction, surpassing both moral didacticism and psychological drama:

Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself - which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgement shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless - suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered battling egos that are born and die in time. [Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1973 paperback edition, pp. 45-46.]

I suppose I was on my own kind of quest in the summer of 1983. Jack was an enthusiastic adventurer some 30 years earlier, but he grew tired of the road. Then fame really soured him on life. Travel, when done in a spirit of receptivity, is the perfect antidote to the soul-sucking tendencies of television and the Internet. Adventure-driven travel is active, spontaneous, liberating, reflective and real. Therefore, it can be dangerous. My travels throughout the 1980s and into the mid-90s were less mythic adventures than attempts at the old geographical cure. I was fleeing the feeling that I had become a hostage of depression. I was more fugitive than hero.

Sam drove to Nevada once, reportedly on just such a romantic geographical quest. In Sam I saw a kindred soul: a young man struggling to derive joy from a melancholy existence. He endured, putting up daily resistance to the seductive siren voices urging self-destruction. Death seems merciful when your own mind turns against you. Death, after all, is the ultimate egalitarian, a massive leveler. Death doesn't give a damn who you are. In the end, death embraces us all with the cold indifference of a Great Plains blizzard.

Jack Kerouac, at least, tasted the satisfaction that successful artists know. He left us a library of stories and poetry that continue to move and inspire millions. As far as I know, Sam left no suicide note. So I'll compose this epitaph on his behalf: Spend your allotted days as meaningfully, as intensely, as beautifully as you can. Bring back a boon of some kind. Share the fruits of whatever victory you manage to attain in this contentious world.

And, above all, dream harder.