Uncertainties of voyage- Kerouac mental pilgrimages and the concept of beauty

Who has not plunged in his thoughts and intimate reflections during a long trip or a journey along a green or sandy landscape or a seaside starring at the light blue waters? Today our generations, I guess, are more involved in this topic than the past ones, in which it was a rebel trend or habit due to a quirky inner globetrotter nature or to an impulse of escape from reality. We are scattered at the four corners of the earth for any ordinary exigence, for work and personal, sentimental and routine reasons. A travelling addiction influenced by the change of nowadays social system, more interactive, dynamic and with any sorts of boundaries. This is the era of the great challenges in which we are called to get up from our sedentariness and routine habits to kick off moving to work and to live away, often for a short while, here and then. That’s why a revival of beat generation literary and art works style is on the stage, becoming one more time popular. We can’t avoid to evocate authors as the ‘50s American writer Kerouac, of, it-goes-without-saying, French Canadian origins, people of immigrants, pioneers and explorers other than great liberal democrats that have idolized values as democracy and diversity as the greatest symbols of freedom and mottos of a free multicultural country.

Kerouac is the author of “On the Road” with his famous insight on “Route 66”, based in USA, focused on the pilgrimage of beat characters in search of new hitch-hiking experiences. This autobiographical novel is the “Beat Generation” Bible, whose expression was coined by himself to identify an attitude of escaping from contemporary conventional society just to find nothing at the end of their journey.

It is an attempt to record the details of daily life and the spontaneous enthusiasm for insignificant objects and events, introducing “hip language”, slang and colloquial words, abolishing syntactical rules and allowing free mental associations. Similar, but characterized by more spiritual connotations, was “The Dharma Bums”, that highlights the discovery of the truth or dharma through Zen Buddhism. He represents the mystic anxiousness and wish to make of daily life an endless discovery of new wild experiences. They live of “kicks”, as they describe those moments of intense experience and pleasure, free from all social and economic restraints to overcome the sense of void and fears. Beat generation explores, first of all, the nudity impulse and unrestrained sexuality, pushing their senses beyond the limits of understanding, sometimes taking hallucinating drugs to explore any possible landscapes. The Beatniks often attract for their attention to strange informal dresses, worn-out jeans, old t-shirts and sandals, long hairs and sometimes personal cleanliness. They advocate pleasant escapism and create an underground culture characterized by spontaneous flow and freedom of expression, poetry and oriental Buddhism, their keen interest in music, strangely also including jazz which was also highly appreciated.   

Based in lands where the myth of American Dream is still alive, these values are then embodied in bulwarks as Philadelphia, town of the famous Jefferson Declaration of Independence and its slogan “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, all rights recognized “for right of nature”.

Turning away from the cultural dependence on contemporary stereotypes, Kerouac used imagination as a mean to give expression to emotional experiences not accountable to the reason, exploring the endless possibilities of humankind and penetrating subconscious levels through dreams and drugs representing the world in a new undetached interpretation, not twisted by a new, often too much ticking, nowadays sense of civilization. He expressed emotional feelings in a continuous attempt of mediation between man and nature, giving voice to the ideal of beauty, truth and freedom, not disregarding reality, appreciating the naturalism and the descriptive richness of elements present in landscapes, often mirroring his moods and feelings. Nature, then, as a “living force”. He also presented a pantheistic vein in his writings, believing it could express a universal language overflowing from inspiration and a triggered stimulus to thoughts, being a source of comfort and delight for the observer, sometimes conveying spiritual intuitions.

This romantic subjects of the beat generation are deep-rooted in poetry authors as William Blake, Keates and Whiteman, that identified bucolic sceneries with subjective moods, slightly upsetting, shacking and splitting them off because of the mysterious sense of unknown. The concept that beauty resides in what you see is the central theme of Keats poetry, especially inspired by the classical Greek world. The expression of beauty is the ideal of all art forms and it represents a never-ending joy. It proceeds from senses, concrete sensations that he discovered in the colours the nature displays, in the sweetness of its perfumes, the curves of a flower, a woman, a butterfly, all reproducing an afflatus towards eternity. It’s easy to find in the beat generation odd traces of romanticism and is beyond any doubt a rejoice of imaginary. In Keat’s view, the poet shouldn’t be identified as the source object of inspiration or the place where truth resides. Denying this capability is the basis of human knowledge that spontaneously leads the reader to the beauty and truth unleashed by poetries.

The assumptions that voyages fertilize imagination was already well exalted by  William Blake in his declamation of the pursuit of happiness and pleasure beyond any restrictions of morality and religion. This was on his turn inherited by Diderot and Voltaire and Swedenborg with who he shared his belief in the illuminating powers of visions. In fact, poet was essentially conceived as a visionary prophet, and the possibility of progress relies in a tension between opposite states of mind, in taking our own personal certainties at stake, not in a predominance of the undebated supremacy of one over another. He considered that a broader thinking perspective, not simply perceptions, although inspired by them, as a mean through which man could better learn the world signs and directions, riding “Divine visions” that let you look further the mere reality. This theory was also followed by Edgar Allan Poe that saw even in madness a higher level of awareness and put in evidence the dichotomy between beauty and death, creation and destruction. He highlighted that an exceptional acuteness of the senses, as a result of an expanded consciousness, can make you lose your sanity, in certain conditions and if strictly attached to a narrow perception of life.  

Boéhiamians were also witty observers of reality and were focused on which is the sense of beauty and the beauty of senses. They were plunged into the masses and proletariat to which they conveyed their ideas and with which they didn't stop to compare, while dandies displayed bourgeois art as a cult of beauty that could prevent the murder of the soul from ugliness of decay, in a classist interpretation. However, Beat Generation, Boéhiamians and Aesthetes together conceived man as an alien in a materialistic world where beauty can rescue people and it's eternal.