The following piece I wrote after seeing Jack Kerouac's scroll for On The Road and published in art magazine Garageland
The Scroll.
Institute Of Fine Art, Birmingham. 6 January 2009.
Searching for Satori, I find myself standing in the small room housing about 20 feet of Kerouac’s Scroll, unrolled. The original manuscript for On The Road. He wrote it, non-stop, over three weeks in 1951, in New York, the Benzedrine rush of writing apparently fuelled solely by caffeine and cigarettes. Over the years I’ve collected Beat literature, studied the period and count Carolyn Cassady as a friend. I’d heard about the manuscript even before I read the finished book, and now after all these years, like some latter day pilgrim looking for saintly bones I’m in the same room with it.
The actual writing aside, this is The Source. The birth of the Counter Culture. A stepping stone to our world today. Context is all and, though some of the book reads as dated, it’s a time-bomb from an age where The Man was installing onto a bland post-war cultural landscape his vision of how things should be. Kerouac saw the world as it could be. Freedom of the Self and, yes, the Soul.
He came to abhor the hippy revolution which came next. But in this one book he unlocked minds. Not just with wild, yea-saying tales of madness and kicks but with his knowledge that the world is a beautiful place and God (for want of a better word) lives within us all.
Just as Kerouac felt sad that nobody takes the time to describe early morning dew on top of a fence post anymore, I wonder which modern day tale is able to speak to us like On The Road? I imagine in centuries to come people will read Kerouac anew and marvel at how and why he did it. For now, this fragile document, splattered with his pencil notes, sitting in a university building in the middle of England, is a time machine back to the man himself, sitting in New York all those years ago changing his life and ours. Respect.
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