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#2141 -
This issue features two original pieces: a
book review of Fading Toward Enlightenment, and
a column by Vicki Woodyard. Sandwiched between
those two writings is an article originally published in the Los
Angeles Times about a Jack Kerouac letter
to Marlon Brando which is being sold at auction; the article
speaks of Kerouac's attempts to move beyond novels, his
feelings for family and friends, and his snubbing by Brando.
Book Review
by Jerry Katz
FADING TOWARD ENLIGHTENMENT
by Wayne Wirs
http://fadingtowardenlightenment.com
Fading Toward Enlightenment is both a quality art
book with 79 fine art photographs, and a spiritual autobiography.
I like the way insight is brought to the author's journey. He
tells his story alternately in first and third person. It is as
though the author's life was filmed with two cameras. A third
camera, it could be said, was used to take the fine art
photographs of people, urban/town/country elements, and natural
settings. The pages are enhanced with perfectly selected one-line
quotations from a spectrum of great minds throughout time.
On each left-hand page is a black and white fine art
photograph taken by the author. On each right-hand page is a
brief biographical confessional told in first or third person,
and a one-line quotation. The book is divided into five major
parts reflecting the stages in the author's spiritual journey or
experience: Stone Cracking, Mud Settling,
The photographs are haiku-like, particularly conveying
esthetic loneliness, solitude, or sabi. The writing
could be called prose poetry. Here are two examples, one told in
third person, one in first person:
"No longer feeling in synch with the Solid world of his
peers -- he simply gave it up and walked away. He hoped to find
some way to stabilize those mystical glimpses."
"Alone I spent my days and nights. Alone I was most
often. Of all the deeper level of Hell, Loneliness must be the
darkest."
In the question and answer part of the book, the author's
voice becomes conversational. Responding to the question,
"Do you have to escape from the world, as you did, to find
inner peace?" he says in part, "I doubt it. I'm a
pretty introverted kind of man, so escape was the most
comfortable and natural method for me to get really serious about
my quest."
In a relaxed, non-dogmatic way, the author speaks of people as
falling into three categories of spiritual development: solids,
liquids, and ethereals. It is implied that most of us are solids.
Some of us can become liquids. And very few are ethereals, or
enlightened. He himself is a "liquid" who is sometimes
a solid and sometimes in the ethereal realm. "This is the
true story of my journey, from a very Solid, normal person, to a
very Liquid, fluid one. I am not enlightened, but I am no longer
normal either."
The different voices, the photographs, the one-line
quotations, come together to bring the reader a story that is
solid in its wholeness. The haiku-like photographs and the poetic
quality of the prose confer a liquidity or fluidity to this
autobiography. As for the ethereal, Wirs hints that it can be
known anywhere at any moment: "Emptiness here is the same as
Emptiness there." It is certainly manifest in many of the
photographs as sabi.
This is a concise, artistic spiritual autobiography. It is
also a book of photographs. He speaks of the journey from solid
to liquid. This book is sound, esthetic, pointed, and honest (the
author doesn't claim to be enlightened or to have all the
answers). It will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates fine art
photography, who is a spiritual seeker, or who enjoys reading
spiritual autobiographies. Whether you are a solid, liquid,
ethereal, or nothing in particular, you will connect with this
true story, this quest; it will flow toward you, and you toward
it.
http://fadingtowardenlightenment.com
If you order the book from the author's website he will donate
$5 to the charity of your choice. That's extremely generous since
the book cost only $24.95
Jerry Katz
NONDUALITY AND LITERATURE
Article published
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050509/REPOSITORY/505090325/1223
Kerouac's appeal to Brando on the block
By SCOTT MARTELLE
"Everything I write I do in the
spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to earth seeing
it with sad eyes as it is."
"I'm bored nowadays and I'm looking
around for something to do in the void, anyway - writing novels
is getting too easy."
By late 1957, Jack Kerouac was streaking
from frustrated anonymity to literary stardom. On the Roadhad
just been published, Subterraneans was due out in a few months
and journalists were clamoring for interviews with the novelist
who suddenly had become a spokesman for the Beat Generation.
Kerouac could taste the riches he thought would surely come.
And getting
"I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie
of it," Kerouac wrote, admitting he hoped to rake in enough
money to "establish myself and my mother a trust fund for
life, so I can really go roaming round the world" and
"be free to write what comes out of my head & free to
feed my buddies when they're hungry & not worry about my
mother."
While the previously unreleased letter doesn't contain any
major revelations - there was talk at the time of a possible
Kerouac-Brando pairing, which never materialized -the typed and
signed dispatch is likely to draw significant attention from
Kerouac collectors while confirming the beat of its author's
cash-starved heart.
"He lived in great poverty until On the Road came out and
he started making money," said Gerald Nicosia, author of the
1983 Kerouac biography, Memory Babe. "He had clearly been
struggling for years and had been dodging his wife for child
support. He had great hopes."
The letter is among Brando's personal
belongings - he died in July at 80 - going up for auction June 30
at Christie's in
Other mementos to be auctioned include an annotated script
from The Godfather, with Brando's notes on playing Don Vito
Corleone; a letter from author Mario Puzo urging Brando to take
the part; various acting awards, including Brando's Oscar
nomination certificate for 1954's On the Waterfront (his first
Oscar win); and idiosyncratic items including his personal
foosball table, childhood yearbooks, American Indian artifacts
and a variety of bongos and harmonicas.
But the Kerouac letter is perhaps the most intriguing, as
Kerouac might have been money-hungry,
"He thought it had a lot to say to
Ann Charters, who edited two volumes of Kerouac's
correspondence, said the letter reflects Kerouac's concern for
the well-being of friends and family, particularly his mother,
with whom Kerouac lived in the late 1950s and 1960s until he died
of alcoholism in 1969 at age 47.
"The celebrity status of both Brando and Kerouac means
that it is a major letter," said Charters, a
Kerouac wrote to Brando about adapting "On the Road"
for the screen by truncating the novel's crisscross travels into
what he called "one vast round-trip." He envisioned it
filmed "with the camera on the front seat of the car showing
the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal
and Dean yak."
The second half of the letter encapsulates Kerouac's soaring
hopes and ambitions for literature, theater and cinema through
adaptations of "The Subterraneans" and "On the
Road."
"What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in
America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of
'situation' and let people rave on as they do in real life,"
Kerouac wrote. "That's what the play is: no plot in
particular, no 'meaning' in particular, just the way people are.
Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an
Angel returned to earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is."
Brando never responded to the letter, and the two icons
apparently met only once at
"Kerouac was mad at his agent because he thought he had
queered the deal by asking too much,"
Kerouac finished the letter by urging Brando to visit him in
Orlando, Fla., where he was living in a small one-bedroom
apartment with his mother (she had the sleeper-sofa), or during
one of his trips to New York.
"What we should do is talk about this because I prophesy
that it's going to be the beginning of something real
great," Kerouac wrote. "I'm bored nowadays and I'm
looking around for something to do in the void, anyway - writing
novels is getting too easy."
------ End of article
By SCOTT MARTELLE
Vicki Woodyard
So Angry I Could Spit
I am so angry I could spit. On a gut level I know that I am
a writer
and a darned good one. But I cannot get organized. I
opened a file on
the computer years ago with some of my best essays but I cannot
get them
organized. They represent my life...or does my life
represent them? I
keep forgetting. What is essential cannot be lost but it
sure escapes
categorization. My writing runs the gamut from serious to
silly and I
can't be bothered with living life in order. Chaos doesn't
seem to work
any better. No matter how hard I try, I keep tumbling off
the cliff
into the rapids far down below. The water is always too
cold and the
rocks too hard. I am so angry I could spit.
Who said that the character by the name of Vicki Woodyard had to
suffer
so damned much? Did I write my own script? Main
character marries a
guy she had known since grade school. Unwittingly they had
both already
started on the spiritual path. Had two children, one of
which died
young. Then the guy has the nerve to write a script saying
that he,
too, would die just like his daughter, of a rare and fatal
cancer. This
will give his wife plenty of time to practice the craft of
writing while
taking care of him as he dies. I am so angry I could spit.
Her writing never quite takes itself seriously and usually ends
up
mocking her at some strategic point. Meanwhile, her words
have fallen
on fertile ground in some readers' minds and they tell her that
she is
on the money when it comes to describing heartache. Well,
duh! See,
there it comes....the point where the writing turns on her.
Of course,
this exposes her vulnerability, which endears her to some readers
and
alienates her from others. What does she care? The
writing is not hers
to begin with, anymore than her husband's cancer.
I have been tossing and turning all night for some reason.
I got up
before dawn and ate oatmeal cookies with hot chocolate. No
sleep leads
to good writing. I need to catch it before it turns stupid
on me. Words
tend to do that...they degenerate into just more of the same old
same
old. Life lived mechanically is life lived dully and
writing is no
different. How shall I repair the damage of a wasted
word. I can't.
Words are what books are made of and life is what people are made
of. I
am so fragile I could break. Don't believe that last sentence; I
was
just throwing you a curve ball lest I become predictable.
Vicki Woodyard
Written too early, before the mind got up.