Someday somewhere we write something to someone, it's a kind of will carved in the wall of times. Jack laid his voice here, we took it for us now.

photo: David Blaikie

L'écrémé

En voulant dédire à toute à l'heure on dynamite une parlure.

En fonçant dans le dos du pas d'allure on entre dans son mur.

Rallonger ou rétrécir, bâtir ou démollir, ramollir ou se durcir.

elquidam

Lowell, Mass. – I came to Edson Cemetery this morning, a brooding day of thunder skies, and trees dripping on the shining grass, and I found the grave of Jack Kerouac, flat beneath the shifting clouds, the place where Dylan sat with Ginsberg all those years ago, in 1975, when Rolling Thunder was rolling through New England, and I was young, and far away, and Ginsberg asked how Dylan knew Kerouac, and Dylan replied, “Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.” And ever since that time I have wanted to come here and look myself upon the stone that says Ti Jean, John L. Kerouac, Mar. 12, 1922 – Oct. 21, 1969, He Honored Life. This morning was that day, with traffic rustling past the Citgo station on Gorham Street, and workmen in orange clothes tearing up the asphalt beyond the iron cemetery fence, and there was a Budweiser can on one corner of the stone and a pair of wet shoes on the other, and the Third Step Prayer in wet blue ink (from Franse) that said, ”Relieve me of the bondage of self … take away my difficulties.” And the workmen moved on while I was there, and I breathed the freshness of the rain beads and said thank-you. “I have been writing my heart out all my life,” Kerouac said. “I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes, and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: Avoid the Authorities.” And so he lived and so he died, and so his heart with all its aching is buried here.

David Blaikie - 8 July 2009.