Timid souls tend to forget that Jack Kerouac was a profoundly religious writer.
This may owe to Jack's spiritual vision being so exuberant and inclusive, easily encompassing Catholicism, sex, drugs, jazz, drink, the suffering of Christ and the Bodhisattva, travel, true friendship, solitude, and most importantly: words.
It is no surprise that Jack did not want to be a jobbing writer, to write for prizes or money or acclaim. His aim and work were much more in earnest: to reach people in the deepest parts of their souls, to find a new spiritual vision that would refresh the soul of America.
As he says in the featured quote:
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
His Essentials of Spontaneous Prose includes the following:
Blow as deep as you want - write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
This is an important point: the deeper down you go, the more that everyone is the same. In what I call the Deep Heart and others may call the Soul. And that drawing your speech from these deep places - whether or not you write it down - will inevitably cause people to respond to your words in a powerful, visceral way.
The Book of Samuel contains an enticing fragment that makes essentially the same point, when King David is reported to have swayed the hearts of the men of Judah, as though they were of one man. [2 Samuel 19:14]
My own Hyp Prose "manifesto" picks up the same point:
Hyp Prose is the language of the unconscious, the sensibility of extreme and elevated states. Writers must go back to this source, then bring the Word back down from the mountaintop.
These are ideas that may resonate with admirers of Jung, although the mode of expression was less interesting to Jung than the ideas that were expressed, the archetypes and symbols swimming up from our collective unconscious.
In my own writing these two things are accorded equal weight: combining the style I call Hypnogogic Prose with the deepest human themes: love, death, love as stronger than death.
I think it is this same combination that is the basic rhetorical technique of scripture, the reason for the longevity of those particular writings, and their extraordinary sway.
P. Julian
9 July 2018
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