Jeez, Jack, some rich cat bought that great long Wall-of-China scroll of yours for two-and-a-half million bucks. But back then in ’51 nobody wanted the thing. Well, okay, there were a couple of cats at publishing companies who wanted it, but—the nerve!—they wanted to edit it. Make it into paragraphs, divide it up into chapters. Your baby, Jack. They wanted to slice up Big Bop Prosody Baby. Aw, they just didn’t dig what you were into, Jack, King Ptolemy of the hallucinated brain-jangle geography. You, who were gone into the Holy Night in V-8 vertigo, pushing the speed limit of thought-per-second interiority in the plush interior of your automindmobile, that chrome-plated, shark-finned prairie schooner in search of a ghostly Moby Dick. How could they ever dig the onward-rushing word-blow that was the love-of-everything-in-itself in the pure Nowness of the moment: "Oh, smell the people," yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. "Ah! God! Life!" And, still, there was that endless need of the brain, the wanting, wanting to get everything in and then the high, baby, where where where the the the the words words words swing swing swing in their syntactic orbits, man, like whole self-remembering worlds. The world-word thing—I know you dug that, man, the jewel-eye center of the holy word, like an archaeology of the mind itself. Some days you can look into a word and fall all the way way way down to some bronze-age maniac watching fire dance in the wind and mumbling a little poem into existence that is that word.

Dher-³ To drone, murmur, buzz. 1. Germanic *duran- in Old English dore, fly, bumblebee. draen, male honeybee, drone. 2. Greek threnos, dirge, lament, threnody.

The word as poem. And your novel as all the unwritten poems that spool out the mysterious lives of roller-skating waitresses and all-night gas station attendants in the white light of highway signs. And all the vastness and moment-to-moment, thought-to-thought, interior brain-child-chant had to fit into that one word: AMERICA. That’s why it had to be a scroll—it was a map of the expectations of the New World itself, what had happened to all those mid-Atlantic longings and everything that was lost in America—the Sioux and the Blackfeet and the Buffalo and the crazed courriers du bois paddling through a mad dream of delirious vegetation and annihilating snow. All that America could have been through some malign enchantment had turned into the highway, the Holy Road. The only thing to do was to go. Get hip to this kinda trip, get your kicks on Route 66. CUE Track 2, England’s Newest Hitmakers, goes something like this: "Well, if you ever plan to motor west, the tracks ain’t my way, that’s the highway, that’s the best…it winds from Chicago to L.A., more than 2,000 miles all the way…." Nature magic of the buffalo-grazing endless plains, of 1,000-year-old redwoods, fantastically transformed into neon and honky-tonks, as if in the process America had turned itself inside out and now you could see its micro-thoughts pulsing, flashing, blinking, and luring you in like fluorescent Sirens of the Night. I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night? And you and Cassady, the true "hallucinated Indians of the New Frontier" driving through it like Ishmael and Captain Ahab. And the whale? The whale is us, baby. The whale is a ’49 Hudson, man—probably stolen. Probably? C’mon, Jack, get real, where’s Neal gonna come up with the bread for a new short, man? Put your life in crazy benzy-driven Dean Moriarty’s hands. What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. That’s the fictional Cassady (on the scroll), but the real Neal was just as out there: We should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re REALLY not worrying about ANYTHING. This was before the fuzz got hip that cats who talk in capital letters and chicks who rake lizards off dead trees ought to be investigated. And driving on and on—Jack (who never liked to get nekkid in public) throwing it all to the winds and sitting there in the front seat with all the three of them—LuAnne in the middle, between them—with no clothes on, the wind rushing through the rolled-down windows and truck drivers cutting across the white line as they look down, pop-eyed, on the children of the new Eden. Finally, they get to the edge of the world: "No more land!" Dean yelled, "We can’t go any further ’cause there ain’t no more land!" And once you run out of road, there’s only one place to go: Xanadu, baby, where Alph the sacred word-river runs through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. And that’s the reason, O, my brothers and sisters, for the long and winding scroll. I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my flesh, and I had all the dreams. The yearningness of anyone who hears—in the soundtrack spinning endlessly in their head—the fitful voice of what Kerouac called that inscrutable future Americans are always longing and longing for.

[Jack Kerouac, On the Road; Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation; Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Jack Kerouac: a chicken essay]