“The Holy Contour of Life”: Channeling Kerouac for Inspiration

February 24, 2011February 25, 2011 / Elizabeth Gaucher / 8 Comments

When I was in college, I earned my one and only A+ grade on anything I did in those years for a paper I wrote for a class called Modern American Thought and Culture. The paper was titled something like “On the Road: The Life-Giving Search of Post-War America.” (That’s not exactly it….but it’s close enough. It’s around here somewhere.)

Doing research for this paper was when I discovered Jack Kerouac, and neither I nor my approach to writing has ever been quite the same. For those gearing up to write an essay for Esse Diem, as well as for anyone else seeking inspiration, it doesn’t get much better than this from the Road Warrior himself.

Yes, there is not much doubt that Jack consumed a tremendous amount of alcohol, and I can’t exactly advocate for that. But the man was true to himself, and that I can whole-heartedly recommend. Some of these lines I just want to carve on my heart.

List of Essentials

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever,
Jack

Post reference/source: Creative Writing Exercises to Cure Writer’s Block via StumbleUpon. I’m not personally a big fan of “writing prompts” but I found this on my first foray into StumbleUpon and I have to say I’ll be back! Consider www.languageisavirus.com as a new bookmark.

Writing About “Place” – The Power of Geography and Metaphor

February 22, 2011February 23, 2011 / Elizabeth Gaucher / 2 Comments

For those of you considering writing an essay for this year’s Essays on Childhood: A Sense of Place, I wanted to share an excellent example of how only a few words in a literal place description can have a powerful double impact as both metaphorical and literal reality.

Silas House is the author of the novel Eli the Good and a co-author of Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. He is, as they say in elite circles, the schizzle. Consider what the man does in these few words from this February 19, 2011, piece in the New York Times, My Polluted Kentucky Home – NYTimes.com:

Graves, 25314

As a child I once stood on a cedar-pocked ridge with my father, looking down on a strip mine near the place that had been our family cemetery. My great-aunt’s grave had been “accidentally” buried under about 50 feet of unwanted topsoil and low-grade coal; “overburden,” the industry calls it. My father took a long, deep breath. I feel that I’ve been holding it ever since.

In the NYT piece, House is writing about the toll that coal mining takes on not only the land, but the people who are so intricately and intimately a part of that land. We don’t know anything about his great-aunt, his father, or even exactly what he is seeing. But the layers of pain are palpable in the image of a family grave literally buried in waste from an industry that dismisses such action as collateral damage.

In this image, and these few words, we understand quickly that his great-aunt, this woman who was a member of his family, is being lost a second time to her loved ones. The cost of this grief is a ripple effect of a tightened chest in the next generation below her, and now in the author as the third generation. All are suffocating and suffering from the legacy of certain mining practices on sacred family ground.

As you consider your essay, think about things you have seen in the landscape, house, fairground, school, play yard, or other place that had a strong influence on your childhood. Do you have a particular scene or memory of a physical reality that might serve to inspire your writing about your childhood? How do the emotions that rise when you “see” this place serve to generate adjectives, verbs, and nouns that may flow from your pencil and eventually become an outline of your story?

Image credit: Elizabeth Gaucher, small grave sites at the corner of Bridge and Loudon Heights Roads in Charleston, West Virginia.