So, to kind of pull all this together, I'll show what I see as three aspects of Kerouac's writing. Forgive me for generalizing at all because this is a very particular artist, it's all in the details. But there are three areas of working that you can point to as being different from one another that he would hit into and then move between. The first one is what I call Blowing (as a jazz musician does) on Memory, or on the Subject of Image. As if you could blow present words swinging over key centers of memory. As if words could be the melody of image. Word melody over image chords, that way? What we're really talking about here is improvisation, which is a totally fascinating and endless area. I always look for statement on this from the great musicians. The latest one that intrigues me is Cecil Taylor's "Improvisation is the capability to talk to oneself." That's certainly what a writer does. Kerouac said in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," "blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image." And on page one of Doctor Sax, "and don't stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work." Plus the great one in the Paris Reviel interview where he says, "All of it is in my mind, naturally, except tha language that is used at the time it is used." All right.
Kerouac about Lee Konitz, who he said "inspired me in 1951 to write the way he plays." "He can take care of himself even though he goofs and does "April in Paris" from inside out as if the tune was the room he lived in and was going out at midnight with his coat on."
The inclusion of everything or the desire to have everything in there, so you get sections which are catalogues of things. This is maybe the simplest form of the everything impulse. Like at the beginning of Old Angel Midnight: "Friday afternoon in the universe, in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics ports parts pans pool palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha."
O Angel bring it to me THE MAGIC SOUND OF SILENCE broken by first-bird's teepaleep--
