Jack Kerouac and the Butterfly Effect

When I was a very young boy, I was frequently exposed to a group of artists, musicians and eccentrics who were close friends of my parents. Beatniks, many called them. Hipsters from the 1950s; a motley collection of painters, poets, iconoclasts and philosophers who conscientiously ran counter to the prevailing culture of the day.

Media hyped the "Beatnik" image.

The term “Beatnik” was actually something of a manufactured label, a stereotyped caricature of beret-wearing, bongo-beating coffee house bohemians meant to corral and categorized those who defied categorization. Originally coined by Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the word “beatnik” was an amalgam of references spanning an entire decade of cultural references. It incorporated author Jack Kerouac’s phrase “Beat Generation” (originally conceived in a conversation with fellow writer John Clellon Holmes in 1948) along with the Russian suffix “nik,” an allusion to the Soviet “Sputnik” satellite launched in 1958. 

My father, the jazz musician

Considering Cold War sensibilities, the term was possibly meant as a stigma, a verbal tar-and-feathering of those who failed to fall in line, perhaps insinuating some sort of pinkish, un-American tint.
My father was a jazz musician. He had kicked around with many of the greats in his day, including Cal Tjader, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. My mother was an art major at San Diego State College. While others her aged listened to Elvis and pursued a Norman Rockwell reality, she was listening to Dave Brubeck and contemplating the more surreal boundaries of Salvador Dali.

My mother the art major

When the two of them moved in together under one roof before getting married, the family considered it “shacking up.” Neighbors frowned and family members whispered behind many a back. Peer pressure and societal norms were a confining, restrictive force to be reckoned with, and artists, musicians and eccentrics were among the few brave souls to question the rules and challenge authority.

Many who define “beatnik” associate it with the liberal use of drugs, and while it is true that my parent’s beat friends smoked and drank excessively, that’s not what made them stand out. Everyone carried a cocktail and a cigarette in those days. By 1960s, alcohol and tobacco were mainstream vice, embraced wholeheartedly by the establishment. Socially aware professionals, from journalists and physicians to actors and politicians fell pray to a certain cigarette chic and even helped to promote tobacco’s cool, sophisticated image. Edward R. Murrow smoked on air. Doctors were featured in cigarette ads. Everybody from Lucille Ball to Ronald Reagan was lighting up. Folks fell into convenient categories that identified with and were identified by their smokes. The Terryton crowd would rather “fight than switch.”

If there were two defining characteristics that set the Beat Generation apart, it may have been the rejection of materialism and the search for some deeper spiritual truth. It is almost chic today to reject the suburban ideal and eschew mainstream religion. Ah, but in the Eisenhower era, any criticism of tract homes, upward mobility or Jesus was practically tantamount to treason. You have to appreciate the rigid conformity of the day to fully grasp the price of rebellion. Consider the ripple effects of McCarthyism and Communist witch hunts; ponder the persecution (and prosecution) of homosexuals and the legal lash back against prurient or erotic literature. 

"Howl" launched an obscenity trial

Suffice it to say that the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark work, “Howl” a modern icon of American poetry, resulted in a pivotal obscenity trial.  The Beat Generation was courageous in advancing personal freedoms and liberties well in front of the hippie movement of the 1960s.

And what about Jack Kerouac's cultural infleunce on the 1960s, the decade that pretty much shaped me, my values and my sense of culture? To explain his profound impact upon my generation, let's talk for a moment about the Butterfly Effect. The notion suggests that minute variations present at the germinal stages of a dynamic system may become profoundly magnified at the system's maturity. The poetic nature of the phrase alludes to the idea that a butterfly's wings might impact miniscule changes in the wind that will ultimately give rise to a hurricane in another hemisphere.

Are you following me?  Let me see if I can make the concept slightly less abstract.  If it weren't for Jack Kerouac, there would have been no Jim Morrison. That is quite a hypothetical postulate to ponder, but think about this for a moment: "If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry," said Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. "I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road -- that's what I wanted in my own work."

Jack Kerouac's novel, "On the Road."

OK, now think of Tom Wolf, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and other literary giants who emulated Kerouac's confessional, stream-of-consciousness approach to literature in the 1960s. Were they part of the generational hurricane that Kerouac set in force?  Picture Kerouac breaking out of the 1950s mindset like a psychedelic butterfly struggling from his cocoon, the faint vibrations of which would ultimately set the whole 1960s counterculture movement into motion. Rejecting his football star status, instead choosing to write poetry with "fags."

Super star of the Beat Generation, slightly before my time. More my mother's scene. Coffee house hipsters quoting Ginsberg's Howl; hanging out at Ferlinghetti's book store; rejecting convention and blazing a wild path into youthful oblivion. Teen-age rebels dying amid gruesome carnage of torn flesh and twisted steel in the time before seatbelts. Prototype for the hippie ideal; wandering tribesmen of restless dream in a world that pre-dated rock music. Charlie Parker was the sound. Going up to Harlem  to hear Miles Davis and puff some grass.  Driving across America on Benzedrine and coffee in large-engined gas guzzlers from the Golden Age of Detroit. It was still a way to Height Ashbury or Woodstock, but Kerouac was steering the nation in that direction while many of us still slept in our mother's wombs.

Tragic figure, Kerouac. He died a tortured artist, a "rock and roll suicide," to quote David Bowie; an alcoholic martyr in the mold of other beautiful losers such as Dylan Thomas, Mickey Mantle or Butch Van Artsdalen. Some might dismiss Kerouac's life as a wasted one. Natalie Merchant talked about the fascination with human train wrecks such as him an Marilyn Monroe, when discussing her song about Jack. I've heard others describe Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in the same terms, but I don't fully agree with that perspective. 



Human train wreck?



As humans, we need to be free to experiment and fail; we must have the liberty to indulge if we choose, to take life right up to the edge and stare right down in to the abyss. To deny that right is to mandate seatbelts for life itself, to place proverbial training wheels upon the bicycle of existance. It is to clutter up our human affairs with so many bumbers and air bags and rules and regulations as to stifle the joy, the thrill, the randomness and sense of wonder and adventure that is life itself.