Sunday, November 15, 2009

Jack Kerouac, The Diamond Sutra, and Blogging


Not only would Jack Kerouac have had a weblog, but he would have been blogging on Open Salon.

I feel that his writing techniques and contributions to Modern Literature are mirrored in the so-called “blogosphere” of today. I also feel that Open Salon is the only blogging-platform that is the home of artists of all stripes and the bastion of free expression in the mania of the web.

I would never go so far as to say that this little weblog here, that you currently reading, is anything close to what Jack Kerouac might contribute artistically to the community.

I only to seek to draw out that I am influenced, in part, by the same elements that influenced him to drive away from the cautious roads of standard-literature-procedure and drive boldly forth into the deeper forms of thought and real-life observation.

The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text teaching avoidance to the extremes of mental attachment, has long held deep meaning to me and I am returning to it again after many years to seek it’s truth once more. Every verse of The Diamond Sutra begins "Thus I have heard."

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Jack Kerouac defined his “method” of writing in way that also effects my own blogging efforts greatly in terms of raw influence:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your 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 the 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 your morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see your 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

This is the driving force of today’s cognitive-blog interlay system.

I am the Writer-Director of the Earthly Enterprises!

I struggle the stretch of the flow that never ceases, even as I command it to do so.

Pure crazy, pure declarations, pure honesty.

Not fear nor shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge.

--

There is only so much I take away from Kerouac, as I have made more clear in bold.

And to any thinking whatever I am doing is wise … This is not the case.

I believe “edgy” is the term that keeps getting ascribed to the end result of this practice.

That and getting banned from websites.

So I invite everyone who already was live-journal blogging to keep doing your thing because this noise over here is usually taken as throwing firecrackers at people.

Fair warning to the curious.

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