“When you remain in solitude do not think of the amusement in the town…you should turn your mind inwardly, and then you’ll find your way”
SUMMARY
In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.
sourced Penguin
EXTRACTS
CABIN IN THE WOOD- ISOLATION STATION
…but in my imagination dreaming about this retreat back home there’d been something larkish, bucolic all homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the dark.
Tho why after 3 weeks of perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange woods my soul went down the drain when I came back with .....I’ll never know.
I feel excited to be with the gang but theres a hidden sadness too and which is expressed later by Monsato when he says “ this is the kind of place where a person should really be alone, you know? When you bring along a big gang here it somehow desecrates it not
that I'm referring to us or anybody in particular? There's such a sad sweetness to those trees as tho yells shouldn’t insult them or conversation only” – which is just the way I feel too.
…but who cant sleep like a log in a solitary cabin in the woods you wake up realizing the universe namelessly: the universe is an Angel – but easy enough to say when you’ve had your escape from the gooky city turns into a success – and its finally only the woods you get that nostalgia for “cities” at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings’ll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordia; innocence of health and stillness in the wilds – so I tell myself “be Wise”
Epiphanies of Peace
and the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself ( not expecting what i‘ll do in 3 weeks only) “no more dissipation, its time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in the woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody. No more I ask myself the question o why is god torturing me, that’d it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters , walk around, not more self imposed agony….
…that wild stomp through the stage waiting for the moment when by pinching myself I prove that a though is like a touch”
“when you remain in solitude do not think of the amusement in the town…you
should turn your mind inwardly , and then you’ll find your way”
Breaking Down
All that night by lamplight we sing and yells song which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with ‘ the final horrors: again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping down here, its all caught up to me again whining “ why does god torture me?” – but anybody who’s never had delirium tremers even in their early stages may not understand that its not so much physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility. The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth….
What's in the City
….be in Frisco by nightfall for a big ball of wino yelling with the gang. I feel in fact Dave Waine oughta be back by now or Cody will be ready fir a ball , and there’ll be girls and such and such, forgetting entirely that only 3 weeks previous I’d been sent fleeing from that gooky city by the horrors- but hadn’t the sea told me to flee back to my own reality?
“One of the first of the new beat dandies” McLear told me a few days later “did you hear about that? There’s a new strange underground group of beatniks or whatever who wear special smooth dandy clothes even tho it may just be a jean jacket with shino slacks they’ll always have strange beautiful shoes or shirts, or turn around and wear fancy pants unpressed acourse but with torn sneakers.”
Lex the kind of guy shouldn’t hide on a ranch somewhere, powerful, good looking. Full of crazy desire for women and booze and never enough of either.
Pat and I are in a serious talkative mood and I feel that lonely shiver in my chest which always warns me : you actually love people and you're glad Pat is here.
Lust and Disaster with Women
Because he was always tremendously generated toward complete relationships with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellation and hotel rooms schemes and rushing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night, wow that madman
Because a new love affair always gives you hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of snake emptiness) when I took a deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hossannnah’d and raised up and the a sacred urn to heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love.
Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throught the world, never mentioned in the newspapers written about haltringly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristans und Isolde by Wagner and thing of him in a bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves.
“you were my last chance “ she said but don’t all women say that? – but can it be by “last chance” she doesn’t mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all gloom we’ve shared – can it be I’m withholding from her something sacred just like she says, or am I just a fool who’ll never learn to have a decent eternally minded deep down relation with a woman and keep throwing that away for a song at a bottle?
But what’s even ineffably worse is that the more she advises me and discussed the trouble the worse and worse it gets, its as tho she didn’t know what she was doing , like an unconscious witch, the more she tries to help the more I tremble almost realizing she’s doing it on purpose and knows she’s witching but its all gotta be formally understood as “help” dingblast it – she must be some kind of chemical counterpart to me, I just cant stand her for a minute. I’m racked with guilt because all evidence there seems to say she’s a wonderful person sympathizing in her quiet sad musical voice with an obvious rogue nevertheless none of those rational guilt stick – all I feel is the invisible stab from her – she’s hurting me! – at the same point in our conversation I’m a veritable ham actor jumping up twitch my head, that’s all the effect she has – “what’s the matter?” she asks softly – which makes me almost scream and I’ve never screamed in my life – it’s the first time in my life I’m not confident I can hold myself together no matter what happens and be only calm enough to even smile with condescension at the screaming hysterias of women in madwards – I’m in the same madwards all of a sudden – and what’s happened? What’s caused it – “are you driving me mad on purpose?” I finally blurt out
Drawn by Darkness
He is a tempestuous lost tossed soul
I see myself as just doomed, pitiful- an awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else. All, all of it, pitiful as it is, not even really any kind of common sense animate effort to ease the soul in this horrible sinister condition ( of mortal hopelessness)
“my old thoughts about the slit of a billion years covering all this and all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought “ only a silly sober fool could think it, imagine gloating over such nonsense” ( because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whoever it was “ the pathway to wisdom lies through excess”) – but in this condition you can only say “wisdom is just another way to make people sick”
“ you don’t have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking”
(Perry ) in fact is a tragic young man with enormous potential who’s just let himself swing and float to hell I guess, unless when something else happens to him soon….
A real dangerous character , in fact, Perry, because tho I appreciate his poetic soul and everything , I realize looking at him he’s capable of exploding and killing somebody for an idea and maybe for love.
– he sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin.
Feeling Like a Failure
I go in and sheepishly sit at the table like the useless pioneer who doesn’t do anything to help the men or please the women, the idiot in the wagon train who nevertheless has to be fed.
Books he Mentions
Stepenwolf by Hermann hesse
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Journey to the End of the Night by Celine
Author James Joyce, Faulkner, birotteau, satyricons, dantes
BOOK REVIEW
New York Times Review - September 1962 A Turn in the Road for the King of the Beats
by William Wiegand
Ginsberg'S Review
"Each book by Jack Kerouac is unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half XX century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonius Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker & Kerouac's own athletic sacred insight.
"Big Sur's humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished—others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur."—Allen Ginsberg 10/10/91
MEDIA APPEARANCE
Jack Kerouac at the Steve Allen show 1959
EXTRA
Film Adaptation of the Big Sur 2013
Documentary
add video of 90s doc + ny review?
Jack Kerouac was perhaps the last big literary rock star. The avatar of the Beat movement, he skyrocketed into success in the late 50’s after the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road. But, by 1960, Kerouac had fallen victim to his own success, unraveling into addiction, depression, cynicism and a jaded disaffection Beat culture. After a tortured attempt at spiritual revival in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, Kerouac wrote the gritty semi-autobiographical novel Big Sur.
In 2008, “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac and Big Sur,” a documentary about the experiences the book was based, on was released.
‘One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur’
director Curt Worden
writers, poets, actors and musicians, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Johnson, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, and Sam Shepard
Kerouac's sojourn to Big Sur is the subject of a new documentary by Curt Worden and a new album by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, both of which are titled One Fast Move or I'm Gone
full doc available link bellow
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