Sometimes A Great Notion
Awhile ago I remember reading this article about Gary Snyder in the New Yorker (click here) and it got me thinking about Keruoac. Apparently, Snyder was the guy that Keruoac based one of the protagonists on in ‘The Dharma Bums’. Of course, like any pseudo-hipster I’d only read ‘On the Road’ and hadn’t really gotten into anything else from Keruoac. So I ventured over to Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago to pick up ‘The Dharma Bums’. Unfortunately, it was not there. But nearby on the shelf was the Kesey section and I noticed ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’. I’d read ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ while backpacking through Europe with Derek ten years ago and loved it so I figured I’d pick it up. Just an accident really.
I didn’t know what to expect. I suppose, based on my vague recollection of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, I expected some kind of jazzy whirling dervish, all scat and beat and hard to follow and pretentious. I guess like Ferlinghetti or something like that.
This book is not that.
It is a thing of great beauty to me and it pulled me in very quickly, into a tight little embrace, and that’s where I’ve been for the last couple of weeks. You can read the plot summary somewhere else. It is a story about a clan of loggers in Oregon in the 60s, their history, their struggles. It is also about a search for purity, for strength and for righteousness in an unrighteous world. But that’s making too much and too little of it. It’s also about how we can never understand each other. It’s also about logging, and drinking, and back-breaking work, and the woods, and the critters, and the ebbs and flows of a rushing river, and it’s also about rain and about being wet, and it’s about, you know, those unplumbed depths of the soul and the spirit. The why we do things and the wherefore it came from. Etc.
Certain books take hold of you. Certain stories. And when you think back on your life during those times, you remember not just the physical things you had with your or at your side. You remember your thoughts at that time and the pictures in your mind. And when I think back on this time, I’ll think of big tall redwoods and a green canopy of leaves blocking out the sunlight. I’ll think of the rain, misty rain, hard driving rain, wet soaking rain and the looming approach of rain when it’s coming over the hills and you’re dead in its path.
I’ll think of Hank and I’ll think of Joby and, I know they’re not real, I know, but it did feel like I spent some time with them and I respect them because it’s hard this thing called life. It’s a hard business. And it’s hard to do the right thing and many times we don’t know the right thing to do. And it feels good to do good work and have your body and your mind spent in its service.
The book is eminently readbale. Kesey spins a yarn. He enveloped me. The book switches narrator often and Kesey does it so effortlessly that it never feels forced. It feels real. And he clearly demonstrates how little we can know each other. How the same action from different perspectives can have such different interpretations. And how all of the meaning we might ascribe is coming from inside us as much as it comes from the thing itself.
It opens with a striking scene. Rainy misty morning. A bunch of drunk loggers standing outside their cars on the banks of a river. Across the river there’s a house. They’re all standing and staring across that river but not at the house per se. But at a severed arm. A severed arm, hung from a pole dangling out over the river. And it’s not just that it’s a severed arm. It’s that the severed arm is hung by its wrist but the hand attached to the arm and the fingers attached to the hand are giving the loggers the middle finger, telling anyone that watches that they can go f-ck themselves because it ain’t gonna be their way. It’s gonna be a different way. You see?
And then the whole rest of the book you have that scene in your head and you’re wondering, just who’s arm is it? And how did it come to be separated from it’s owner. And the story is told in flashback so you know there are bad things coming but you can’t discern which ones are which and how they’re coming exactly. And there’s a great uneasiness and also this inescapable tension and you grow to love the characters and you’re praying for them but you know that it can’t all turn out alright and nothing ever does.
After reading this, I have been doing some mild digging on the Internet and it’s been pretty unsatisfying. Most of Kesey’s life after the book (or, honestly, I don’t know his life but the parts I can find) seem to be about the Merry Pranksters and doing drugs and being part of the movement and all that. I don’t know. I’m honestly not very interested in that period. I don’t find most of the art particularly interesting and I don’t find the sentiments that are espoused compelling. I find the whole transitory period, the bus and the drugs and the bad art and bad poetry, I just find it kind of banal.
And then I get to thinking about how it doesn’t matter. That I don’t need to know Kesey or to celebrate him as a man. I don’t need to find out every fact about his life and act like I’m in love with the counter-culture movement. Because the book isn’t his anymore. It’s mine. And that’s how art is. We worship the creator. But it’s such a weird thing. Because the creator isn’t the thing, you know? The thing is the thing and how it speaks to each of us and that’s what makes art so strange because you can ‘write’ something but as soon as it’s out there it’s not yours specifically. It’s the world’s. So I don’t need to be best friends with Kesey were he alive. We might not stay up late into the night drinking tea and speaking of vast cosmic thoughts stretching out into infinity.
Because I have his book. And it’s my book in my way. And it can be your book in your way if you want it to be. And it is very beautiful. And that’s all a thing needs to do.
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Mike
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theflyingchange
