Springtime In The Void: Mesaroolying With The Microbes

Revving the engines this morning for a trek up to Lowell where I’ll be tossing my two cents in with a panel on Kerouac’s Scriptures of the Golden Eternity. Strange how these things happen. Barbara Gagel, a New Mexico artist originally from Lowell has been painting great resonances of Golden Eternity canvases. She gets an art show back home during Jack‘s 90th. Somehow I get wind of it and an invite to be on the panel. Bob’s your uncle.

It’s all part of the ’ants merlying' and 'mesaroolies microbing in the innards of mercery’ thing Kerouac dug, which is what making the scene is. Synchronicities, convergences, and materializations -- great tragic opportunities of blind luck fortune and hastily conceived miscalculation.

In them all 'realities for you and me,' says Whitman.

It's the great road trip. The crazy seriousness of working men on scaffolds painting white paint. Going for a walk with friends among O'Hara's hum colored cabs.

David Amram calls it ‘hangout-ology.’

So I’ve been boning up on the Golden Eternity and it turns out I haven't had to look far to find resonances with Jack’s ideas about transience, impermanence, etc.

Everywhere I look, the whole simultaneous duality thing people like Derrida, Levy-Strauss and Gilles Deleuze talk about -- binary oppositions, happening/not happening, illusion/materiality -- a great unity in the middle of nothing which is everything.

Keeps popping up -- like weeds in spring, really. Rumi. Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. Great Zen Koans from Japanese antiquity.

And deeply intuitive utterances among our contemporaries in the poetry world. Heck, just last Sunday night I caught Claire Nicolas White getting to the nut of it in a flash, with her “Time’s emptiness makes the day swell…"

Kerouac brings his own take on it all. The sweet sad tragedy, the persistent emphasis on compassion. The sublime sense that our shared springtime in the void is a magic and holy goof to be experienced with a wry grin.

Reading Kerouac these perspectives happen by turn. At one moment he digs the street of life, celebrating those who “burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” At the next, he is contemplative, tranced out: ‘the perfect little No Clouds' keep popping up 'in the deepening afternoon blue’ of San Francisco's Embarcadero.

It's springtime in the void again, boys and girls. The center is everywhere and if you're somewhere, you're everywhere.

It's fine by me if we’re all ‘pretending at playing the magic cardgame and making believe it's real,’ like Jack says. OK if it's “a big dream, a joyous ecstasy of words and ideas and flesh, an ethereal flower unfolding an folding back, a movie, an exuberant bunch of lines, bounding emptiness.’

Sound to you like a good night out on the town with poet-friends? Maybe you’re ready to go mesarolying with the microbes too!

rat tat tatting the pure pictureless liquid of mind essence

This weekend Lowell Mass and LCK! celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac, who has been safe in heaven dead for approaching half a century but remains a palpable presence in this raindrop we call existence -- his bop poetics irrepressible, his youthful vigorous search for kicks undiminished, his vision intact, even in the middle of the holy goof which he understood so well and which is our all lot. Not bad for a guy who in his own way and in his golden mouthful of eternity reminded us that, as that good old Greek philosopher Empedocles put it, “there’s no substance to anything that perishes, nor is there any cessation of them in death.”

I won’t be making the scene this weekend in Lowell, I’m headed up mid-week for a panel on Jack at Barbara Gagel's art show. But I figure that, as long as all them in Lowell are having a great time ringing their bell in the empty sky for Jack, the rest of us ought to get busy and do something too, in our own way and wherever we are, even if it just means ‘rat tat tatting the pure pictureless liquid of mind essence.’

What I'm saying is why not let’s all just find a jazzed up moment this weekend, and suture ourselves to the beautiful, crazy, sad, spontaneous music of Jack Kerouac’s consciousness.

I don’t know, I think Jack would’ve wanted us to do that on his birthday. Like Rumi said, when you’re somewhere, you’re everywhere.

which stars to pull from the gum line

"High on Laughing Gas....I've been here before......the odd vibration of the same old universe."-Ginsberg. I started thinking about the Ginsberg poem, "Laughing Gas" as I was getting my root canal and it didn't numb out the pain or the grind of the drill peaking.  I've often thought that if Ginsberg didn't become a poet he would have become a dentist analyzing every tooth and what it bit down upon.  I've often thought that if Ginsberg didn't become a dentist he would have become a poet analyzing every truth and what it bit down upon.  I'm a little spacy right now and can't really tell what it is that I'm trying to say here but here is a thought, before you read any of Ginsberg's poetry you better have  dental insurance and plenty of laughing gas because the universe is a big metallic drill and the stars line up like cracking teeth only to feel the hot breath of breath cascade from your lips into that odd vibration providing the universe with options on which stars to pull from the gum line.

Aimee Herman and how she never uses the door

There are some poets out there who think if you say the words "clitoris" or "fuck" they are being different and controversal.  When Aimee Herman does it it's necessary.  There is a difference.  There are sex poems and then there are poems of the body and Aimee certainly falls under the category of the body.  I've been to readings before and a poet will start getting very explicit and sexual and the crowd gets all into it but there is no art in it, might as well be writing Hustler letters or something.  With Aimee those kinds of innuendos are necessary because there is art involved and a unique voice.  Now Aimee's poetry has alot more layers than sex and the body but you can tell they are interests of her's.  She has a new book of poetry coming out called "To go without blinking" and she'll be premiering poems from it this friday at Side walk Cafe at 7pm (Ave. A and 6th St.)  You won't regret seeing this wonderful poet perform.  She almost makes you think she's talking about your body, which in a way she is, but she's got nothing but her body on the mind which is why she is such an important artist, she lets you in without showing you the door.