In a few words, The
Subterraneans; not what I was expecting.
Perhaps the title inherits an expectation of a more group involved
focus, more of that party, smoke rooms and jazz meta-sex in spoken word, music
and explosive ranting that he is so famous for.
Sure these moments ARE there, yet it just doesn’t register that the
relationship he falls into is going to practically take up the entire 111
words. Still, this ‘not expectedness’
was not exactly disheartening, it never is with the vibrant jammed packed
Kerouac stream of conscious prose, even with such ‘downer’ subjects as
paranoia, alcoholism and relationship jealousy that tears love limb from limb, it’s
the way he writes that just brings the passion for life and dream philosophy alive.
For it is a book about the
heart. The most subterranean subject there is I suppose. Some of it will grate on the nerves, the way
that 15 pages will be expressing paranoia of his girlfriend supernova love
flame, Madou Fox, just innocently playing around with other poets and then two
or three about his depression on about how he fell into the paranoia in the
first place. Yet in the end between
these Kerouac consciousness tedium’s, tedium’s that are very real to many men
and women in the relationship sex-drug paranoia-underground wild-games anyway,
there’s something so raw spirited and wild, a vein to the ocean that is the
American-Indian/African aboriginality of this woman character in his life, a
balance that supersedes his ego and comes at the feminine aspect of his prose life
of love above the fields of prostitutes and groupies not present in any of his
previous books.
For it is with moments
such as explaining Madou fox’s ‘flip out’ running naked into the street and
sitting on a fence “She was in the alley, wondering who she was, night, a thin
drizzle of mist, … one slip in the wrong direction, endless space reaching
out…cities in one wash of sad poetry, with honey lines of high shelved angels
trumpet-blowing up above the orient-shroud Pacific huge songs of paradise”
indeed, the traditional rant Kerouac fan will not be disappointed with this
focus in this book, and the new fan might see his Zen-Buddhist metaphysical
poetry closer to the theories of ‘the other’ so objectified previously.
For a deep romantic he
really is behind all the wild superficial madness chauvinisms and alcoholism
that sure, eventually brings him down, but damn, what I’m saying is that if you
can read the flame of what he is saying behind it all, the sub texts of karma,
life directions, dream life and fate life, then you can appreciate this
immensity that he has put into words, the immensity that is ‘the ragamuffin
dusts in the little kid’s corner and he’s asleep in his crib now and I love
you, rain’ll fall on our eaves someday sweet heart” and the tragic…
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