Wildfire! Bloggers are Jack Kerouac's True Heirs: Remembrances "Written on the Run"

Blogging on the Run: Cedar Fire, July 27, 2012:  Marci and I were in town dropping off videos when we first saw Cedar Hill burning.  I'd been mowing the lawn earlier and saw a flash of light to the north, felt the thunder, followed almost imediately by sirens.  As I didn't see any smoke, I figured they had it out.  Lloyd, Rio and I came back later with the camera.

In describing his lifelong achievement in writing, Jack Kerouac wrote, "My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed" (Introduction to Big Sur).

Life and Death happening between blog posts.  Our second local wilfire this season.

Having less than a dozen published poems to my name and nothing else in print, it may seem a bit presumptuous to compare myself to Kerouac, but when it comes to writing, pompous I am, pompous I be, and pompous I do.  Anyone who knows me, knows that out of necessity I have plenty of humility in other arenas in my life.   Writing is my one and only claim to greatness, which I'll cling to, even after I die. 

Driven by strong winds, the fire quickly spread to the northwest. 

However, I only compare myself to Kerouac because of process.  Writers write.  Quality and rank is determined after death, sometimes hundreds of years after death.   And my affinity with Kerouac is probably also my greatest weakness. I had a professor once tell me, "Everything you write is about yourself; as good as you are, you need break out of the box and write beyond your own insignificance."  He then proceeded to steer me to a novel project that went nowhere.  It could only go nowhere because it wasn't about me.  And like Kerouac, I only write I.  In younger years, that seemed to work well.  Ann Charters writes that Kerouac was "more committed to the act of creating literature out of his life than he was to living it."  Even encumbered with shyness, I lived a Kerouac-like life, which although not necessarily good for the soul, none-the-less was great for the page.  In El Paso, I truly was a Dharma Bum.  Only the void I entered was null, a face-to-face encounter with death without the release of Nirvana.

Wildfire is the new reality of the West.  Our forests will not be able to recover at the rate they are burning.

And so I went home.  There was nothing else to do, but start over.  This time, I decided that I would be more committed to the act of living life and less committed to creating a literature out of it.  I developed a plan to overcome shyness, went back to college, met Marci, who saved me, got my degree, as well as a real career, teaching, which I loved so much that for five years I didn't even write.  Then, slowly, I found a couple of projects that sort of worked for my new life.  The first was a project suggested by my brother, who is an artist.  Nevada's Highway 50 has always had special significance to us, as it was the road of our youth and connected our two homes--our mother's home in rural Utah and our father's home in Reno, Nevada.   We would write an illustrated book together, Highway 50:  Loneliest Road in America to premier at his art show of the same name. 

He was diligent.  So was I, at least for a couple of years.  I wrote frequently in a new format I discovered, which wove together current journal-writing with remembrances of the five-day trip we took together across Nevada's U.S. 50 to kick off the project.  I was even lucky enough to find an audience at Dine College's monthly Night at the Library.  Having an actual audience encouraged me to keep writing.

But then something happened.  We moved.  My format fell apart.  Like this blog-post, the expository explanations of the life-transition killed the text for me.  What made the writing sing--that is was remembrances "written on the run" also killed it.  Some of the leaps we must make in life are significant enough that the text refuses to follow.  The only way to go back and bridge the gaps is with summary, the deadest of all forms of writing.

Recently, I started a novel that weaves together a fictional story of a literature professor discovering the streets and rails of Chicago with a fictionalized true-account of living in my in-laws basement in Page, Arizona and actual journal writing.  But, again, I fear it may suffer the same fate of Highway 50 now that we've moved to Dry Creek.  I hope not, because it feels publishable.

But if it can't make the leap, that's okay.   I think I have finally found my venue.  The blog.  What format could be better for literature "written on the run"?  As, I've shown here, you can even record two stories at once--the text narrative and the pictorial narrative--which don't even have to line up.  Blogging truly is versatile.

I hope this trucker is either a blogger or vlogger.  How many wildfires are unfortunately now part of his runs?

Can I make a living blogging my life?  Can I become a known writer via the blog?  Who knows.  I don't even care.  Here's what I've finally learned.  Live life by a plan.  Write on impulse.  Never confuse the two.  And don't let one rule over the other.  You don't have to starve to keep your art alive, but you do have to stay slightly hungry.  If there's no reaching, there's no art.  And for the artist, if there's no art, there's no life.  We slowly die without that irrational impulse to record life on the run and share it with some unknown audience out there--real or imagined.  That's what drove Chaucer, that's what drove Kerouac, and it's what drives contemporary bloggers, like myself.  So, to steal from Jack, I hope you continue to enjoy "the world of raging action and folly and also gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of [my] eye" because I'm driven to share that view with you whether you like it or not.

While our second fire of the season was still burning out of control to the north, the third fire of the season (and second in the same day) started to the south of Dry Creek.  Luckily, both were brought under contol that day.  These last two shots were photographed from the same location.  With two fires to fight at once, things could have turned ugly.

Bono & the Big Heat: Drought, Fire, Love and Marriage in the American West

I've been planning to post this poem for sometime, but not necessarily wanting to.  Drought and fire have become the norms of living in the American West.  This year could be 2007 all over.  Once again, we have spent a good chunk of our summer watching fires--both live and on the news.  This is new.  Forest fires were not a regular part of my childhood.  They have and will continue to be part of my children’s.

This is my best poem, which is why I wanted to post it.  But it captures tension in my marriage, which is why I didn’t want to post it.  Marci literally saved my life.  Back in November of 1994 I hit rock bottom for reasons I won’t go into here, reasons I’m not even sure I totally understand, and probably can’t explain.  Anyway, I spent Thanksgiving night 1994 drunk, wandering up and down Mesa Street in El Paso, screaming “I want to die” at the occasional passing car and cursing God for my life.  Somehow I’d become encased in a shell of shyness and couldn’t seem to get out.  I blamed God for my inability to be myself around others, especially women.

I woke up the next morning with this strong impression:  go home.  So, I made plans to move back to Utah after spending 12 crucial teenage and college years away.

Shortly afterward I met Marci, and overall, I’ve been happy ever since.  I have two versions of my life:  one of deep dissatisfaction and anger and one of general satisfaction and deep joy--life before Marci and life after Marci.  She literally rescued me.  But no marriage comes without tension.  This poem records that tension, and that tension is its strength.  However, it’s much easier to share unabashed praises to my wife, and I’ve written many such poems.  Yet, good writing often requires doing the hard thing.  I have no idea if I will ever become known as poet, but if I do, this is one of the poems I want to be known for:

The New West

7/14/07

Cicadas riot outside the window.   Everest on the cot at the foot of our bed sleeps silent.

It is a warm night after an intensely hot day.

Earlier we drove out to investigate the biggest fire in Utah history. 

Over 360,000 acres.  Deep, rutted roads through soft alkali soil.  Neither Lloyd nor I remember these roads this way.  You want us to turn around.  Winding between high brush. 

Finally, first black finger of fire.   The print, really.  Strikingly manicured, smooth as a golf course, black rolling undulations below craggy black basalt cliffs. 

Then a stand of untouched brush and a lone juniper.  “One Tree Hill,” you say  The Joshua Tree.  U2 standing stoic before the shockingly sparse American West, Bono sweating in a white, wife-beater t-shirt.  In different places, that album spoke to us.  The Edge’s fingers clicking the strings like cicadas in the night.  Suddenly searing sounds rip through the atmosphere, bulleting the blue sky.   Bono, a mad preacher, snake charmer, symbol of sex, God, America.  And you give yourself away, and you give… Until, like an Arizona monsoon, the thunderheads rolled on.  Somehow I ended up forty and married. 

At some point we stopped.  Lloyd, the boys, Darth and I hiked up a volcano.  It irritates me that you remain behind.  Love is that way.  I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. 

A spoiled brat I insist you meet me inside myself where it’s impossible.

One hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit.  Heat rises in thick waves off charred grass and heat-polished, volcanic bombs.

The lone, silt covered van sits with you hidden inside, the size of an ant, at the edge of a chalk-white stripe etched across a broad, black valley, two isolated fires still smoldering in the distance.

One wide, like a dust storm.

The other narrow as the funnel of a small tornado.

I can’t live without you.

7/22/07

Sunday, the day of rest. 

I nearly nap on the living room floor after church, dinner and a late afternoon thunder storm.

Cool evening.

I sit at a round table under the swaying colored lights of the patio of the Blue Door Bar,

which we made together, for me,

in memory

of wilder nights and days blurred like smoky dusk following a fire. 

Margarita glasses now filled with milkshakes.

Our boys sit at the black-tiled bar under blinking martini light playing cards with Elvis on the back. 

Lennon is on the t-shirt on the wall in his guerilla suit.

Crickets chirp.

I walk up the lane to visit Mom. 

Deep smell of cool wet woods. 

Afterwards, I grab a flashlight and walk down in the canyon loud with life.  Cicada, cricket.  The night breathes after a short, intense rain.

Tomorrow there will be heat, dust, struggle against drought again.

7/27/07

Cool shade of cottonwood,

Chalk Creek churning,

over worn stone, singing

the same song over thousands of years.

Sunlight on boulders the size of over-stuffed chairs down to the size of ladies purses.

Deep reds,

pale blues,

rounded by the roll of ages.

Turbulent creek-beds during spring run-off.

What if global warming ends the snow-pack,

ends the annual rock toss downstream?

No more high waters cutting into banks,

bringing down trees, piling up crud?

No more silt and shit

beautifully backed up behind log jamb

to fill in with meadow

and cottonwood

and birds singing?

What if the seasons of the west end

and the song of the crashing creeks

goes silent?

What then will be our song?—

You and I colliding

--Indian Mormon and White Agnostic Mormon—

Begetting children here

among these rattlesnakes and song birds?

Will our family go on here

after Dry Creek cuts

through our land dry forever?

© Steve Brown, 2012

Extra:  Click here for Video of U2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ye8GLPUVsM