VISIONS ON THE ROAD:
A Personal Odyssey
with Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton and Henry Miller
A Personal Odyssey
with Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton and Henry Miller
This draws on my experience of a sabbatical journey I made last year with a friend, driving from New York to San Francisco via New Orleans, commemorating a journey made 60 years earlier by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (et al.) and fictionalized in Part 2 of Kerouac's On The Road. (ontheroad2009.blogspot.com)
Although the original aim was to recreate that journey of 1949, it was apparent early on that this would be something very different. In part this was by design - we planned to make a number of side trips; in part it was by force of circumstances that demanded changes and adaptations as we went along.
What this presentation is about is what I learned (or maybe re-learned, or learned in a deeper way) through the process of undertaking this journey. In many ways this can be summed up as being about a way of seeing or simply vision. Hence the title: Visions On The Road.
This was the recurring theme in the reading that I was doing both on the journey and in the times of solitude and retreat that immediately followed; it was present in how I came to respond to the various circumstances and challenges that presented themselves along the way; and most strikingly the theme of vision manifested itself in the photographs that I took during this time - pictures that are literally a record of what I saw, the vision before my eyes, and that somehow may convey that vision to others. Though even as I say that, I am immediately conscious that vision, by definition, is subjective and that it is not possible for others to see what I saw, or how I saw, because they are not me, and they were not there. Just as what Sean and I saw and experienced is different from what Neal and Jack did all those years ago. What others will see is something different; nevertheless they will have visions of their own.
What I plan to do in the presentation at the library therefore is to present a number of the images as literal visions that arose out of this journey and weave these in with the insights that I gained in my reading, and the story of the experience as the journey unfolded - though not necessarily chronologically.
Along the way there were numerous unseen fellow travelers accompanying Sean and myself - Jack Kerouac of course, and his account of that earlier journey was often in our hands and on our lips and always in our minds; Thomas Merton whose home monastery we visited in Kentucky, and which was perhaps the place of conception for the most significant in-sight for me in interpreting the visions before our eyes - though Merton, like Kerouac, remained with us throughout; and Henry Miller who made his appearance only after we'd reached "The Coast" when Sean had flown home and I was alone, beginning to process the whole experience.
But there were others too - Martin Luther King on whose public holiday we left New York on the eve of the inauguration of the first black president of the U.S., and whose path we crossed again in Memphis, Tennessee; Elvis of course, also in Memphis, the echo of whose voice we heard - with tears - in the legendary Sun Studio on a sunny spring day, and whose ghost we glimpsed in Graceland, and whose place of holy birth we hallowed in Tupelo, Mississippi; other authors and poets and musicians who accompanied us across the country, and all the people we encountered on the way who gave us rest and hospitality, encouraging us on our pilgrimage.
I want also explore something of the "parable of the road" as a metaphor for the experience of life - the paradoxical nature of this experience that is conveyed in this picture from a twilight highway heading for east Texas:
The onrush of the road captured in a single moment; the paradox of living in the present moment in the midst of the unstoppable flow of time. As Neal said to Jack: "We know time."
Although the original aim was to recreate that journey of 1949, it was apparent early on that this would be something very different. In part this was by design - we planned to make a number of side trips; in part it was by force of circumstances that demanded changes and adaptations as we went along.
What this presentation is about is what I learned (or maybe re-learned, or learned in a deeper way) through the process of undertaking this journey. In many ways this can be summed up as being about a way of seeing or simply vision. Hence the title: Visions On The Road.
This was the recurring theme in the reading that I was doing both on the journey and in the times of solitude and retreat that immediately followed; it was present in how I came to respond to the various circumstances and challenges that presented themselves along the way; and most strikingly the theme of vision manifested itself in the photographs that I took during this time - pictures that are literally a record of what I saw, the vision before my eyes, and that somehow may convey that vision to others. Though even as I say that, I am immediately conscious that vision, by definition, is subjective and that it is not possible for others to see what I saw, or how I saw, because they are not me, and they were not there. Just as what Sean and I saw and experienced is different from what Neal and Jack did all those years ago. What others will see is something different; nevertheless they will have visions of their own.
What I plan to do in the presentation at the library therefore is to present a number of the images as literal visions that arose out of this journey and weave these in with the insights that I gained in my reading, and the story of the experience as the journey unfolded - though not necessarily chronologically.
Along the way there were numerous unseen fellow travelers accompanying Sean and myself - Jack Kerouac of course, and his account of that earlier journey was often in our hands and on our lips and always in our minds; Thomas Merton whose home monastery we visited in Kentucky, and which was perhaps the place of conception for the most significant in-sight for me in interpreting the visions before our eyes - though Merton, like Kerouac, remained with us throughout; and Henry Miller who made his appearance only after we'd reached "The Coast" when Sean had flown home and I was alone, beginning to process the whole experience.
But there were others too - Martin Luther King on whose public holiday we left New York on the eve of the inauguration of the first black president of the U.S., and whose path we crossed again in Memphis, Tennessee; Elvis of course, also in Memphis, the echo of whose voice we heard - with tears - in the legendary Sun Studio on a sunny spring day, and whose ghost we glimpsed in Graceland, and whose place of holy birth we hallowed in Tupelo, Mississippi; other authors and poets and musicians who accompanied us across the country, and all the people we encountered on the way who gave us rest and hospitality, encouraging us on our pilgrimage.
I want also explore something of the "parable of the road" as a metaphor for the experience of life - the paradoxical nature of this experience that is conveyed in this picture from a twilight highway heading for east Texas:
Heading for
"On the road into the warm mystic night, and the true west at last. We crossed the
The onrush of the road captured in a single moment; the paradox of living in the present moment in the midst of the unstoppable flow of time. As Neal said to Jack: "We know time."
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