Dreamways

Title: Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)
Author: John Leland
List price: $23.95
Amazon price: $37.22

"Beneath its wild yea-saying, On the Road is a book about how to live your life.“ This idea guides John Leland‘s exeptionally readable and stimulating look at Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, Why Kerouac Matters. Leland demonstrates that what continues to be riveting about Kerouac and his fellow Beats is their passionate quest, in living and in writing, to create a meaningful life. Or, to put it another way, they were intensely involved in creating a Dreamful Life, where all forms of dream inform how a person creates his days and the ways that allow him to experience a life worth living.

 

Life is, as the title of Kerouac’s most famous novel says, a process of being on the road. It is a journey of growth. Leaving behind a child’s daydreams and finding robust goals and ideals is the point. Leland writes of Sal, the main character of On the Road: "He must leave behind the boyish certainties of books and learn to improvise, play the changes – diversify.“ He quotes Sal from the novel: "It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across American instead of tyring various roads and routes.“ To engage in one’s life, to find meaning requires a commitment to explore, but initially Sal "is only partially on the road, still attached to the dreamy notions he formed before leaving home.“ As are many of us.

The journey through life is by no means easy. Life on the road is not a sunny, sparkling and sanitary skip through Disneyland. On the Road‘s Sal muses: "Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.“ The journey of life involves us meeting with all sorts of manifestations of Darkness and figuring out how to negotiate them.

Leland asserts that Kerouac challenged the banalization of The American Dream. "Throughout On the Road, Sal distinguishes between authentic work and the things people do so they can buy more stuff. He rejects upward mobility as a plot to make men do pointless things, turning them into parodies of the American Dream.“ To move out of the pointless stupor of the material dream is a goal of Dreamfulness, focusing on the real values of mind, heart, body and soul.

The American Dream as lived in waking life is not as it purports to be. Sal says, "I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.“ The cherished and ballyhooed American Dream as it was and is played out, is a senseless nightmare road. This, ironically, is definitely not the world of Disney, no matter what the ads say.

Sal articulates his insights after having completed a lengthy car trip across the U.S.: "I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness … of New York with it millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream – grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.“ This is clearly not a life worth living.

The journey through life shows the traveler the dark aspect of life, but it also allows for clarifying what is worthwhile and beautiful. The authentic life that the traveler himself envisions, one that moves outside the norms, is, in Sal’s voice, worth the journey: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‚Awww!‘ "

The goal of being on the road is a dreamful life that feels worth living. In Kerouac's words: "More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself – a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo. Night, like a balm, soothes dumb wounds of prickly day-dark & rainy night!“

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