Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
Subversive Orthodoxy is a podcast for people who sense that something vital has been lost in public life, moral imagination, and religious conversation. Many listeners carry fatigue with politics and ideological conflict, yet remain drawn to the depth and realism of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This podcast often resonates with listeners who no longer fit comfortably within dominant religious or political categories, yet remain committed to truth, responsibility, and love of neighbor.
The conversations on this show are largely shaped by the book Subversive Orthodoxy and the wider body of literature it engages. Episodes draw from theological, philosophical, and literary voices that take faith seriously as a way of seeing and inhabiting the world.
The podcast explores how an ancient faith continues to form human dignity, responsibility, and hope within modern life. Attention is given to formation rather than commentary, and to meaning rather than alignment.
Through conversation, reflection, and creative engagement, the show seeks to recover humility, restore attention, and re-humanize our neighbors in a distracted age.
If this way of thinking resonates, you are welcome to listen and join the ongoing work.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #16: Longing for God: Jack Kerouac, the Strange Solitary Catholic Mystic
The Saint of Holy Groveling, the Hungover Mystic, and a deep, aching longing for God
Jack Kerouac is remembered as the voice of the open road, speed, freedom, and excess, yet beneath the motion lived a deep spiritual loneliness. He carried an intense longing for God that pleasure, travel, and rebellion never resolved. The party always ended in sadness. The road always circled back home. Formed by Catholic prayer, haunted by sin and grace, and bound to his mother in a small house far from the myth, Kerouac lived as a strange solitary mystic, restless for God and unable to escape the ache of faith that followed him everywhere.
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
You know, what were the most spiritual conversations you've had with people, or when they confess to you? Or you confess to them and you say, you know, I really am sorry. I I didn't understand. I, you know, I misread everything about our relationship. And the other person says, Thank God you opened your eyes. You know, now I see you with new eyes. And Kerouac was trying to teach us how to see America through new eyes.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the subversive orthodoxy podcast. I'm your host, Travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete for maybe the very life-giving power we need to resist this distractive technical state we're living in for full of anxieties, depression continues to exist.
SPEAKER_02:He lived from 1922 to 1969. One life unfolded on the road. He traveled constantly, rode buses and freight cars, stayed up through the night in jazz clubs, and moved through friendships with manic intensity. This is the public image that followed him after the success of On the Road. The other life was quieter and more painful. Karouac spent long stretches at home with his widowed mother, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking heavily, writing obsessively, and wrestling with guilt and prayer, memory and faith. These two lives existed side by side and formed the inner tension that runs through all of his writing. Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Le Bri de Carouac in Low Mass to French-Canadian Catholic parents. French was his first language, and Catholicism formed the emotional and spiritual atmosphere of his childhood. The death of his older brother, Girard, marked him deeply. Kerouac believes Girard became a kind of personal saint, watching over him. This sense of unseen presence stayed with him throughout his life. His work returns repeatedly to the themes of innocence, loss, suffering, confession, and redemption. Even during his most reckless years, he carried rosaries, read devotional literature, and filled his journals with prayers. Although Karak became associated with rebellion and cultural rupture, he understood himself as a religious writer. He described his novels as confessions and saw writing as a moral and spiritual act. He believed attention was sacred and that to see people clearly and compassionately was a form of love. His spontaneous protesty grew out of his conviction. He wrote quickly and continuously in a attempt in an attempt to capture experience before it hardened into abstraction. The rhythm of his sentences drew heavily from Gias, but his moral imagination came from his Catholic tradition. Karak's literary influences reflected his his depth. He read the saints and mystics alongside Russian novelists. Dostoevsky held a central place in his imagination. Kerouac called him Dusty and returned to his novels repeatedly. He believed Dostoevsky revealed the moral drama of the human soul, especially the tension between freedom, guilt, and grace. From Dostoevsky, Kerouac learned that spiritual struggle belonged at the center of serious literature, and that a writer could expose his own weaknesses without disguise. Kerouac's cultural impact continues to shape American life. He helped define the beat generation and influence later countercultural movements. His influence can be seen most clearly in the generations that followed him. Bob Dylan credited Kerouac with shaping his sense of voice and freedom and poetic direction. Jim Morrison read Kerouac obsessively and modeled his understanding of the poet as public figure on him. Patty Smith described On the Road as a book that gave her permission to live as an artist. And Bruce Springsteen echoed Kerouac's vision of America as a landscape of yearning and motion. Beyond individual figures, Kerouac influenced memoir writing, songwriting, and the idea that a person's inner life could be laid bare without polish. His legacy lives wherever art treats restlessness and confession and spiritual hunger as legitimate subjects, rather than private failures. His vision of travel as pilgrimage and restlessness as a spiritual condition entered into the language of modern culture. Road trips, personal quests, memoir-driven fiction, and the idea of searching for meaning through movement all carry his imprint. Writers, musicians, and filmmakers continued to draw from his sense of immediacy and vulnerability. Kerouac never resolved the tension between his longing for holiness and his appetite for excess. His later years were marked by isolation, alcoholism, and grief. Yet he never abandoned his faith. Near the end of his life, he spoke openly of being Catholic and returned explicitly to prayer. His work endures because it captures a modern soul caught between freedom and belonging, desire and discipline, and wandering and home. Welcome, Larry.
SPEAKER_03:Hello, Travis. Good to hear you see you again.
SPEAKER_02:Good to see you. Yeah. You got a fun one today, Mr. Jack Caravar.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, yeah. I've I've tried to share my enthusiasm for Kerouac with uh all my Catholic and Buddhist friends, and it's a hard sell for some of them. I I gotta tell you, they they have a hard time seeing through his reputation as a wild hedonistic bad boy. So they don't really get that he was a serious artist. And uh maybe we'll change a few minds today. I'm hoping that we will.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think it's pretty evident once you once you unpack him that there's a lot more than what we what we know of him as a cultural surface level.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, the uh interesting thing for me was I was I was talking to one of my dad's friends, and he said, he said, you know, he used to be a he was talking about his religious faith, and he said, I'm a Jack Catholic. And I was like, oh yeah, well, I guess that's a term that people use, like I'm kind of like either a backslidden Catholic or I kind of go to church at Christmas or Easter. But I I was in the shower after that and it occurred to me about Jack Kerouac, because I was studying for Jack Kerouac, and I was like, oh, that puts that brings a new meaning, Jack Catholic. It actually builds upon it.
SPEAKER_03:I always thought Kerouac Catholicism should be a term that people would have to be Kerouac fans to understand how that how that connects with the faith in a serious way and is not just not just a subtext or something. A cliche. Well, Larry, why don't you tell us what you know his main works are, his notable works? Kerouac published a novel in the 50s, a very early realist work called The Town and the City. And it was it was kind of based on some of his early influences, like Thomas a Wolf, and it was a lyric book, and it didn't really go anywhere, and it really wasn't a very it was about his family and it didn't really take off. So it was, it wasn't until On the Road was published that he had found his voice and that he entered into public life as a major literary figure. And part of that was because Alan Ginsburg had the year before published Howl, and Howl was banned, and so that made it a nationally famous poem. And in the inter in the dedication to the poem, he mentions Karouac's five unpublished novels, and On the Road then was published the following year, and he became as famous, or even more famous, than Ginsburg, and appeared on the Steve Allen show and read sections from On the Road. So that was the breakout book On the Road. The Dharma Bones is the follow-up, is the sequel to On the Road, but it had already been written because, or was being in the process of being written when On the Road was published. And that was about his relationship with Gary Snyder and his discovery of Buddhism. Oh, yes. Now, Big Sur was one of the last narrative novels that he wrote after he had already become famous, after he had become a Buddhist, and then stopped being a Buddhist. So uh Kerouac was considered himself a Buddhist for about two and a half years, right in the middle of his um his fame, uh, but then uh uh left that behind and went back to thinking of himself as a Catholic uh writer. Uh but Big Sur was written about the period where he was trying to uh dry out from alcoholism, and he um he went to Lawrence Furlingetty's cabin up in Big Sur to try to sweat it out. And of course, what happened was the um uh people found out he was there, and a bunch of fans showed up and groupies and threw big parties, and uh Karouac couldn't resist, and he got drunk and he got uh uh sick. And when he woke up, he took a look at his life as a complete disaster. And the last part of that novel is where he comes face to face with his own stink, as James Baldwin puts it, and realizes that he is not gonna make it unless he can somehow get this monkey off his back. And um it's a very moving, powerful spiritual side of Kerouac that you see in uh Big Sur. Uh and then Desolation Desolation Angels is actually sort of written about earlier experiences, uh, where he served as a lookout on uh a mountain peak during the summer, uh, so he could live in solitude and write uh Desolation Angels, which is the book that came out of that. And uh that has a lot of spiritual reflections based on his Catholicism and his uh Buddhism, uh, as he tries to sort of sort out uh things in a sort of as a hermitage up there uh on the mountain in between Canada and the U.S. And then it and then the other the other explicit uh spiritual writings, if you're looking for you know, the language uh where he's talking about uh God and Dosyevsky's influence and spiritual writers, explicitly, uh you'll find that in the journals and in the letters uh more explicitly than you'll find it in the novels. Uh and also, especially um uh some of the Dharma, which is the book of uh that he collected of Buddhist wisdom that he also wrote uh uh his own understanding of Buddhism for Alan Ginsburg, because Alan wanted to know more about Buddhism, and Kerouac is the one who turned Alan Ginsburg onto Buddhism. And the way he did it was through this book called Some of the Dharma, and that contains a lot of Kerouak's reflections on religious matters as well as on Buddhism. So those are the places you can go to get explicit uh spiritual uh statements, but the spirituality of Kerouac and his his religious quest uh be is made most explicit in On the Road, and then all the subsequent novels and uh publications of the previously written novels that were never published. Uh those have a lot, they that has a lot of faith in it, the uh or spiritual issues in it too, because he talks about the death of his older brother and uh his uh family uh life growing up in a Catholic family.
SPEAKER_02:Um are you talking about Visions of Girard now or is that Yeah, Visions of Girard.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that was that's not listed as one of the most notable ones. But if you're interested in in Kerouac's um uh religious uh ideas and where they came from uh and his relationship to the church, that that's where you'll find them um in uh in some of those earlier novels before on the road that were published after On the Road.
SPEAKER_02:So cool. Yeah. Um I'm gonna go I'm gonna go through some fun and interesting facts about him because uh it's always fun to get kind of random, random overview at first. Yes. So that's taken.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So here's the 10. We're actually adding an 11th, which was uh the professor's added one. So uh number one, he wrote on the road on a single continuous scroll. So he insisted on attaching papers together, and he ended up with a 120-foot roll. Uh he taped together sheets of paper into 120 feet, so he wouldn't have to stop typing um at a time. So he believed interruption killed honesty, and the scroll became like his a symbol his symbol of like his writing style of this unerrupt uninterrupted flow. Uh, number two, he developed spontaneous prose as a spiritual discipline. So he believed the that fast, unedited writing was a way to get around your ego, yeah, get to what was real. So he thought overthinking it distorted reality and that speed preserved sincerity. That is yes, that is just so counterintuitive to me. I spent so much time like thinking and rethinking everything and never never just trying to write spontaneous pearls.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:He was a serious football player before he was a writer. He had a football scholarship to Columbia University, but an injury ended it. That's a shocker. It never held in football. Which redirected his ambition towards writing. Uh number four, he lived most of his life, or most of his adult life, with his mother. So despite being image as a freewheeling drifter, Kerouac repeatedly returned home to care for his mother. And their bond shaped his guilt and his dependence and his inner conflict. Makes sense.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. There's a song. There's a song by Ten 10,000 Maniacs have a song Kerouac. You heard that one? No. Yeah, uh, it's we could have used it for bumper music today. And one of the one of the opening stanzas has to do with his uh relationship with his mother, which I thought was uh very cool for the 10,000 maniacs to give a homage to his mom.
SPEAKER_02:He remained deeply Catholic even during his rebellious you know lifestyle. He would pray, attended mass at times, and filled his journals with references to God, sin, salvation, and prayers. Maha he never fully abandoned the faith that that continued to haunt him. He was heavily influenced by Dostoevsky, which is so perfect for the timing. That's kind of why we put well, actually, he was here in the book, in the order. So Dostoevsky and then Kerouac and then Walker Percy's next. So he was heavily influenced by Dostoevsky, whom he affectionately called Dusty, which is really a lot easier to say than Dostoevsky. He admired his ability to expose the soul under pressure. And some is a writer who understood suffering and grace and loyal seriousness more than any other. By the time Kerouac, number seven, by the time Kerouac published On the Road, he had already composed over one million words in his journals and in published novels that were in unpublished novels that eventually were published. So that is an insane amount of words. For those of you who don't know, like an author thinks of a book in terms of words. So a small, small book would be 20 to 25,000, 25,000 words. Uh most books are probably in the range of 40 to 60, uh, most popular books, and then big, you know, textbooks are in the range of 100,000 or more. He was uh number eight, he was uncomfortable with fame and he felt betrayed by it. When on the road made him famous, he felt exposed and constantly misunderstood. He believed readers celebrated the surface of his work and ignored its sorrow and depth. Amen to that. Really? I didn't know there was anything to care whack until I read your book. Alcohol gradually number nine, alcohol gradually replaced the road as his escape. So his travel lost its power to satisfy and drinking filled the void, and alcohol intensified his despair and accelerated his physical and spiritual collapse. Number ten, his later writing grows darker and more confessional, and I think more religious too. Books like Big Sur abandon romantic wandering and confront basically yourself, isolation, fear, and mental breakdown. And number 11, he died young, worn out by the life he could not reconcile. He died at 47, which is how old I am right now, from complications related to alcoholism. His life ended quietly, far from the freedom of his books seemed to promise.
SPEAKER_03:Well, 47 is uh turning point age. That's the I think that's how old Elvis was when he died, wasn't he? 47. I don't know. Yeah, I think he was 47. And there there's several several of our famous rock star. Well, I guess he was 42, actually. Oh 42. Okay. Gee, five years younger.
SPEAKER_02:Well, a lot of the rock stars died at 27.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I made it way past that.
SPEAKER_03:There's an I'll we'll have to look up find out who the 47 one. There's another there's another uh figure that but was the same age as Kerouac. I remember running into that. Yeah. Well, well those are those are interesting factoids that that point to, you know, the misunderstanding that's associated with his work, you know, the and his frustration with with people not understanding that he was a serious writer and just looking for the the uh party scenes or the uh wild descriptions of Neil Cassidy and other sub characters and missing the whole thrust of what he's about.
SPEAKER_02:The uh perception I would have had of him is like, oh yeah, he was just a you know beat neck hippie, told weird weird poetry. Yeah. And I had no idea he wrote a million words before he ever got published. Um that's a serious writer. Yeah. He's put in hours and has Developed a style. And not just that. I mean, he was bringing a lot of depth into his writing too. So it's not what you think of a of a of a beatneck. You think of abstract poetry, really.
SPEAKER_03:Well, on the uh Steve Allen show, when uh Kerouac had become famous for On the Road and uh Steve Allen and he put out a uh record where uh Kerouac reads his poetry and Steve Allen plays jazz piano. And Steve Allen invited him on his show, and he said, Oh, okay, before you read from On the Road, I'm gonna ask you a couple of square, square questions. Uh the first one is what does beat mean? Because beat generation and and beat necks were the big thing in the 50s. And Kerouac says beat means sympathetic. And and Steve Allen didn't know what to do with that because that's sympathetic. Most people think beat stands for beat up, you know, or something like, you know, you're down and out, you know. That's that's a hunky's version of beat. And Kerouac thought beat was sympathetic. Later he'd say it was beatific, that it was looking for the beauty in life and sympathy for your fellow man and sympathy for the for the sufferings of the world. That's what generates beat literature. And um so it's interesting, you even Steve Allen, who d made a record with him, didn't quite know what to do do with Kerouac's self-characterization as somebody who's pursuing synth sympathy as the engine for his own writing.
SPEAKER_02:Uh there is a that's deep, that's like not what he was expecting at all.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And then the um uh Ethan Hawke famously said that that he was he was inspired by Karouac because Karouac made it cool to be a thinking person on a spiritual journey. And and that fits for a lot of those people you mentioned before, you know, like um Dylan, yeah, and um the uh singers and Springsteen and um Patty Smith and all those are all thinking people on a spiritual journey.
SPEAKER_02:As we go into the uh journals, if you want to start preparing any one of those journals, they're all they're all good in and of themselves for us to read. Foster had sent me some of these. Uh I didn't have the book, but there's a book. Is it a one book or a few books on his journals?
SPEAKER_03:It's the one that the journals that he kept when he was writing on the road and before, and just before he wrote on the road, and called Windswept World. It's published as Winds Windswept World. And it's um edited by David Brinkley, and he does a really good job at editing it. Uh, and and those are all the journal entries that he wrote to himself uh when he was 25 years old, and 24 and 25 and 26, right in there, where he was coming to understand himself as an artist and reading Dostoevsky and um Thomas Wolfe and being inspired by their kind of large uh canvas uh soul expressions, you know, where literature becomes transformative and uh uh and a writer's job is to speak the truth and and to have a sympathetic description of the world. Um it isn't a literature of hedonism, uh, and it isn't uh a literature of him trying to get you to accept a spiritual view of the world. It's it's him like Dostoyevsky throwing his faith up against the world and telling you what happens when you try to love it in the face of what really comes down in people's relationships and in the world that he sees in America at the time. And if you don't want to get on that train, uh then you might, you know, get misinformed and think that this is party literature or something. I know that On the Road was once described as the first rock and roll novel. It was it came out at the same time as rock and roll, and beat spontaneous prose has a kind of a rhythm to it that's that's sort of hot jazz, but uh that's not how Kerouac saw himself, you know. That was he wanted he wanted his jazz to be soulful as well as as uh uh you know multiple tempos and uh uh giving giving expression to the feeling life.
SPEAKER_02:So that um as Eddie as we open up a few of his journal entries, uh sure. From Subversive Orthodoxy on Karouac. So um I'm just gonna read through a few of them in a row and uh just string them together because these are some of the parts that spoke to me about who he was and what it was saying about him.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:So um Jack Kerouac once called himself a strange, solitary, crazy Catholic mystic. Ginsberg called him that American lonely prose trumpeter of drunken Buddha sacred heart, who embarked on a spiritual quest for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering, the celebration of joy in the meantime. His life and his work were one long sustained experiment in the art of conjoining spiritual living to literary form. He believed that literature was a tale that's told for companionship, which is an interesting quote. Yeah, teach something religious of religious reverence about real life in this world. Um his style and worldview grew out of a neo-realist narrative aesthetic inspired by James Joyce. I saw I saw that one. And then um there's a part where you say, but I would go even further. So this this quote you're commenting on says um, in his quest to tell us everything that ever happened to him to bring him to his re to this revelation, he moved from romantic lyricism to ecstatic joy of pure being, back down to the void pit of the great world snake, to the joyous pain of armor amorous love, and finally descended into a Catholic Buddhist serenity of penitential martyrdom. Through his writing, John Clellan Holmes remarked, an open circuit of feeling was established between his awareness and its object of the moment, and the result was as startling as being trapped in another man's eyes. And you said, but I would go even further and say the result is as startling as seeing through your own eyes for the first time. And then Kerak set out to do nothing less than to narrate soul perceptions to an increasingly soulless American middle class, hungry for revelations of life's everyday holy radiance. And there's a part here you you said you said something here where it sounds like America's first world problems currently with like suicide and depression. A part that says right here human beings are not just organisms in environments or subjects within history, but individual souls working out their own salvation amid great worldly suffering and injustice. We all, as Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard well noted, possess transcendent longings that are inherently romantic, even often even antinomian, and make culture, language, and symbolic expression an inherent criticism of life, not just an illumination of reality. Literature, even at its in the best times, is never just the expression of universal truths or moral insight. It is also a tool for unlocking and disclosing the untapped spiritual possibilities inherent in one's time.
SPEAKER_03:So Yeah, yeah, well, that that that passage was in response to a conservative critic, uh Roger Kimball, who at the time had written some criticisms of the beats, some really strong criticisms of the beats uh beats, and especially Kerouac, for being nihilists and not appreciating the American dream and what it had done to lift people out of poverty, and that they were uh critics of America when America was fighting a cold war with the Russians and could use all the support it needed. And and of course, that criticism totally misses the point because Kerouac's not saying that he didn't love America. In fact, he was probably one of the more pro-American writers of the late 50s and early 60s, and saw all his books as a celebration of the American cultural experience. But but what he realized was, you know, affluence doesn't necessarily imply spiritual welfare or happiness, even, and that the the spiritual struggle goes on under any environment, you know, free or or not free. And it it's deeper than that. And so he he he addresses those problems.
SPEAKER_02:And so these these almost almost like he almost like he went ahead of the rock stars and found out ahead of time that hey, chasing chasing the dream actually ends up leaving you pretty depressed the next morning.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and and like the that new movie that's out now, Jay Um Kelly with uh George Clooney.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, Jill and I started it last night. I saw your uh review.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and that that's a that's a w wonderful example of somebody who made it to the top and realizes that that fame is more of a nightmare than it is a dream, and and that he had exchanged his soul for for all of these so-called smooth moves, and now he's having second thoughts. Well, what does it really mean? You know, where was I when I why did I turn all my friends into acquaintances? And why did I pick my personal success over my friends and sacrifice the meaning of my life for or the uh you know golden shekels? Well, well, what what what did I do wrong? And that's why they I think that's a very religious film, the the Jay Kelly, because it's a it's a religious quest film of a guy who finally saw through himself and realized that he was pretty much living in his own bubble of self-congratulations of other people who really weren't all that impressed with them if you if you looked deeply into their real attitudes toward the guy that they worked for, you know.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So uh and Kerouac, you know, he saw through himself very early, and he he was a writer who believed in honesty, like James Joyce, you know, tell the truth about your life. And so uh at one point in the 50s, and this is another reason why my Catholic and Buddhist friends don't sometimes don't share my enthusiasm for Kerouak, he he he said that oh, you know, I don't have anything to offer anybody but my own confusion. And they and they took that literally, you know, they took that as nihilism and they took that as sort of, oh, this is a guy just playing around with with languages and making myths out of his own experience. But uh that wasn't it. It was all I have to offer you is the confession of the confusion we all share, and and try to move through it in my own life and show you how hard it was for me so that you might know how hard it is for you is not just your fault. It's it's the human condition. And these are some of the lessons I learned on my way, and the people that I saw, and uh and the advice I got, and the advice I didn't listen to that I should have, and and the mistakes I made that I could have avoided. And all of this stuff is, you know, in the novels, in those sections after the parties and after the road trip, where he's alone with himself and his soul, and he reflects with you, the reader, soul to soul. And that confusion doesn't mean that it doesn't have content, right? That it doesn't, that it doesn't have a spiritual value. I mean, what you know, what were the the most spiritual conversations you've had with people, or when they confess to you? Or you confess to them and you say, you know, I really am sorry. I I didn't understand, I, you know, I misread everything about our relationship. And the other person says, Thank God you opened your eyes. You know, now I see you with new eyes. And Kerouac was trying to teach us how to see America through new eyes. And and not the new eyes of commerce and success and beating the Russians, but with the soulful eyes of the transcendental writers like Whitman and Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and Melville and all our greatest soul survivors. Mark Twain, though those were his heroes. And James Joyce also, because Joyce was the Catholic who chose art over priesthood. But he wasn't an American, so Kerouac had to tell the American side of that story, which is a little different than an Irishman's story of his relationship to his faith. So that's why Kerouac, for me, is really a useful person who didn't censor himself is not a creature of propaganda or ideology. This is this is serious literature.
SPEAKER_02:Uh well, I think he had his own. I I think what I'm what I'm picking up from the journal entries, from what I've read of um On the Road and from all the commentaries that he he saw there was something you just said about what he was kind of trying to do or whatever. And then there's another there's another aspect where he was trying to just see the see the you said transcendentals, yes. So he was trying to see the transcendent in everyday life, too. So yeah, that that unique angle where he's trying to not overlook normal living, right, but but trying to understand it through I don't know, holy eyes, I guess. Like trying to understand life and it's in its deeper meaning and not just flopping through it like drifting.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. There's a uh one of the things uh Thomas Merton said, Um well he was trying to explain uh sainthood, and he he said, a saint is not somebody who's famous for being holy. A saint is an unknown person who finds holiness in everybody else. And that that's in by that definition, Kerouac, you know, is looking for the saintly b behavior in everyone around him, and when he finds it, you know, it becomes a chapter in his book. And it becomes uh uh, you know, he could even see the positive side of Neil Cassidy that nobody else in the world could could see uh even at the time. Um but he had to admit um at the end of On the Road, which for me for most people is probably the more explicitly spiritual part of the book. And in fact, it's the part of the book that um uh when Kerouac was on Steve Allen, he combined one of the beginning chapters with the last chapter to give the reading more of a true uh uh trajectory for his novel. You know, you start with with all of this intense uh celebration of life, but then you end with a sober reflection on the ultimate lack of achievement at the end, that that the journey has to go somewhere. It can't just continue on to another journey. And if you stop and ask, well, what did it mean, that takes you in a into deep deeper territory that maybe the next novel is gonna is gonna address. Um, and which it does. Dharma Dharma Bums is a much more a reflective novel than on the road, in the sense of looking for the meaning for what do all these travels mean.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So one of these um journal entries, I'll read one and then you should read one. Okay. I'm gonna read the one that I'm gonna read the one that says um the riddle of all riddles. Okay, yeah. That'll be really liked, really liked this one. So there's a point where he's quoting Jesus, uh, Jesus before Pilate when he's about to get crucified, saying, My kingdom is not of this world. Uh-huh. They're just he just has that in quotes. This is a journal entry, everyone. Yeah. Right. It says, Here it's tremendous music. The music of thought, the dark music of dark thought. Of all riddles, this is the only riddle. The Alpha and Omega of riddles. I call it a riddle because it confounds the senses. So keep in mind he's talking about my kingdom is not of this world. Right. The riddle of life propounds in the souls of men a moral proposition to which they respond variously and at all times. All men are aware of the proposition, but most men ignore its meaning, a meaning almost invisible, and live vigorious, vigorous, absent-minded lives, and trouble not themselves. Other men who know the meaning of the proposition of fairness and unfairness in the enigmatic situation of life seek consciously to trouble not themselves, and would imitate most men for strength. Finally, some men suffer from knowing all this and almost die in life until and if they hold their sorrow well and seek strength to hold it more. Although speaks to his sympathy life that he was going for. There are a hundred ways of saying this. The brothers caramazov, and you can't go home again and say this. I wish I could say it with as much power and clarity. Moby Dick also says this, and Walt Whitman says it sometimes, some others. End of general entry. That is not how my that is not how my journals say. I wish I could say they did.
SPEAKER_03:Um yeah, that that is, you know, we should almost writing. We we should almost uh read that again, you know, uh because there's it was so rich. And it's dense. And if you're listening on the podcast, you could rewind and go at slummo. Yeah because you know that that's that's Kerouac in his journal. You know, he's 24. Nobody, nobody reads his public his novels, you know, or or publishes them. And you know, and this is the pri this is the stuff he's writing to himself, you know, to try to capture what he wants to write about and who he is and his relationship to. His faith and to Dostoevsky's great novels. And it it's you know, you don't get this is mysterious. I I don't know how many people check out Karowac's early journals from the library, but I don't think it's that many. I don't I don't even know if they have them anymore. It's not easy to find.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a lot of a lot of the subversive orthodoxy books I can't find in the library. Yeah, and but my my local library didn't have a lot of them.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and by by subversive orthodoxy books, you just mean any book that I mentioned in the whole book.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, like the canon, the canon that you're mentioning.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna read two. Okay, can I read two?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, this is from his early journals. This is you can also find some of these quotes in Hard to Be a Saint in the City, the spiritual vision of the Beats, which is a book I edited that has the spiritual side of the beat generation that has been maligned and misunderstood by misreadings and ideological critics who uh take things out of context and don't try to understand the source of the the the historical and personal sources out of which these ideas emerged. But here's here's one from his early journals about Dostoevsky, it's short, and then I have one on Christ that he wrote. These are both really uh nice quotes. The first thing that strikes me about Dostoevsky beginning any of his books is the nervous anguish that seems to have pierced the first page. The hero is always the same, comes to the first page out of eternities of introspection, anguish, gloom, just as I do every day. Hmm. Okay, that's when and then this is this is the what the the quote on on Christ. Christ, and for me, the modern gospel, has a religious as his religious fervor sees through the very facts and details of our everyday life, so that he doesn't have to concentrate his attention on flowers and birds like Saint Francis or on finances like Balzac, but on anything, the most ordinary things. There alone is proof about the sparrow that falls. It is the crowning glory of such a man as Spangler that he recognizes Dostoevsky to be a saint. The vision of Dostoevsky is the vision of Christ translated into modern times. The fact that he's barred in Soviet Russia implies the weakness of the state. Dostoevsky's vision is that which we all dream at night and sense in the day, and it is the truth, merely that we love one another whether we like it or not. We recognize the other's existence whether we admit it or not, and the Christ in us is the primum mobile of that recognition. Christ is at our shoulders and is our consciousness in God's university, as Cleo says. He is the recognizer in us, his idea is. The reason teleph television admin get drunk at night is only because the nature of their pursuits shuts them off from meek love of fellow man, which is what we all want. D. H. Lawrence is a mere masturbation of the self in all his novels. I guess he had to add a little insult on D. H. Lawrence, because he was probably a competing influence to uh to Karaway.
SPEAKER_02:But this one on the uh powerful stuff. I mean, I mean, this is like this is not what you think if you think Karaway.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and you know, if he if he had published it, you know, uh Billy Graham would have ripped it apart, you know, uh in the 50s. Somebody would have taken this as heretic and used it as an excuse to flail about their own superior ideology, or in our culture right now, certainly that would be the case, from right and left. So when you get when you get words from the heart from anybody, it's worth paying attention because you don't get words from the heart often, except very private moments, with people who you've you've taken years to build trust with to talk to you with this kind of soulful speech. And to make that your vocation, to say, I don't care if anybody publishes this, I'm gonna write a million words of soulful speech to the coming generation so that when their hearts ache, they can go to a person that talks to them and not a chatpot, uh chatbot who gives them the generic world reduction of inner speech. Not that chatbot doesn't have its uses, but it's not this. It's not this kind of talk.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you can't come up, can't come up with this, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_03:It's not and well, there's no person behind it. There's no agency. There's nobody who's gonna say, I'm betting my life on these words.
SPEAKER_02:That's what's so special about this podcast is because this is talking about soul.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:The AI cannot imitate that. I mean, it can imitate l language about it, but it can't, it can't, and it cannot does not have a soul, so it cannot come up with anything.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's original. Right, and it can't bet its life on it. You know, it can only bet its its capital on it or its its influence on it. The these writers, you know, were gambling with their human existence. You know, Burdeniev, I mean, literally, you know, the those Russian social critics, my God, they they were risking their lives with with every word they wrote. Yeah, every word they wrote. And and Kerouac, in a way, is too his psychological life, his his soul, his spiritual life, his health. I mean, he's he's trying to win, win back his life from his alcoholism. And, you know, when he was writing, there were there was no 12-step yet. I think 12-step was just beginning. And and there weren't a lot of uh clinics dedicated to helping people, you know, uh cure addictions. In fact, the Brad Pack appeared in Las Vegas with a mini-bar on stage, and they would drink, you know, Dean Martin and uh Frank Sinatra would drink highballs as they were singing, and that was considered American culture, American pop culture. Nowadays they'd be banned. I would be, or I don't know if they'd be banned. I guess they still do it in some some ways in Vegas, but Kerouac was in some ways trying to break out of that. Big Sur shows the last gasp of that dream or that that novel. You know, it's kind of his version of kind of the great Gadsby, you know, not being able to live the American dream of being, you know, the big mucky muck of having it all and and being the envy of everybody, uh sort of like Jay um Kelly. Yeah, he becomes everybody's ideal, and yet in his when he's true with himself, he realizes he's nobody's uh ideal, and it's kind of time to come to Jesus, if we can put it that way.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So transitioning into on the road. Okay. I personally been reading it. I'm not all the way through it yet, but you told me if I've read a good short good chunk of it, I've I've kind of gotten the the vibe of you know what he's doing, how he's writing. And and my observation was, you know, like where's the spiritual Karouac? And you know, I had to dig around a little with you and online a bit to just kind of figure that out. And it turned out turns out that the answer is that, you know, he's his spiritual faith coming through and on the road is not is not that much in like talking about God directly, although he makes mention, he makes um profession I talked about. It's like you he would uh have a big experience, like a whole chapter, and then you get like two lines at the end of the letdown after the chapter, how he just is not finding what he's looking for. And I'll show you, I'll share with you guys a couple that I underlined that were really cool. Once I saw him again, I underlined them because I'm like, oh, there it is. There's like what we're talking about. So one was um one was in a chapter called or no, it doesn't have names for the job, it's chapter nine. Um he's in Colorado in a town called um Central City. And there's like a whole bunch of stuff that went on. They got in a big abandoned building and partied with a bunch of girls, and some young frat boys came in and took the girls away, and they went out to the bars. They went out to the bars. It was like an abandoned, it was like an abandoned mining town. I was having a blast. So this is kind of just to give all you guys kind of the rhythm of the book, it's pretty pretty fun. Um he's he I think he's in a bar. Uh Rollins gave him a shove to make room. He turned and snarled. Rollins handed me a glass and knocked him down on the brass rail with one punch. The man was momentarily out. There were screens. Tim and I scooted Rollins out. There was so much confusion the sheriff couldn't even thread his way through the crowd to find the victim. Nobody could identify Rollins. He went to the other bars. Major staggered up the dark street or up a dark street. What the hell's the matter? Any fights? Just call on me. Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what here's where he makes a little interesting comment after all that. I wondered what the spirit of the mountain was thinking. I looked up and saw jack pines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the divide, this night was this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared, and on the other side of the divide was the great western slope, the big plateau that went to steamboat springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado Desert and the Utah Desert, all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America, and all we could do was yell. I guess across the night, eastward over the plains, there was somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the word and would arrive any minute and make us silent. And the word is capitalized, so I don't know if he's referencing like a preacher or God himself walking up with Perry.
SPEAKER_03:Well that you know that's that's what you read in Karouac for to get to that section, you know, to go They just they just hit they hit they hit hard once you notice them. Yeah, and you're and you're in the bar and you're you know, your buddy punches out some guy and he hides in the group and all that stuff, and then and then you get this line.
SPEAKER_02:I wonder how the spirit of the mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw Jack Pines in the moon and saw ghosts of old miners and wondered about it. That line, I was just like, oh my gosh, there it is. Yeah, yeah, very eerie, very eerie and very pensive, you know. Yeah, and it's there's one other part I want to read. Yeah, okay, yeah. It's it's they're back to back. So that's chapter number here's in chapter 10. Um there's some girl he liked and he wanted to wanted to sleep with her. Uh and then what happens after that is pretty pretty cool. Yeah, and I went to meet Ellen. I was telling I was reading it to my friends last weekend. They go, that was a little rapey. So I was like, oh man, that's interesting. This is definitely a different time. Yeah. Um, when I went to meet Rita Bedencourt and took her back to the apartment, I got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. So there's comedy.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:She she sighed in the dark. What do you want out of life? I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. I don't know, she said. Just wait on tables and try to get along. She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together, saying that and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad. Yeah. We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad. Yeah. Just bam, after like a quick sex scene.
SPEAKER_03:Well, and his life's so sad. Well, you can you can see why Kerouac didn't survive the uh uh the increased awareness of uh male sexual uh violence and uh uh uh insensitivity to uh uh that it was pretty sexist world he's in. Uh and and the sexism is inexcusable. I think Karowac should have known better than that. But you're right that he tries to at least ask the the question, you know, what what are we doing here and what what is this all about, you know, in the big picture. But you know, some of the there are in Dostoevsky there are parts like this too where where the protagonists uh reflect, you know, uh attitudes of their time that are that are not laudatory in any means. In fact, they're they're kind of self-convicting. But in an on another level, the fact that he owns up to it is kind of more honest than if he had pretended that he was a more sensitive lover than he uh really was. That's what makes the literature confessional in a way. That's yeah, that's why and that's why we go back to Dostoevsky as well. It's those characters are confessional. It's somebody telling you their secrets. And it's not like you know, lessons on how to live your life. It's more like lessons on how life was lived and the and the sorrow and the thoughts and the feelings that come with those kinds of choices, as well as what he's learning about himself, so that when he gets back to San Francisco, you know, he'll and they they want to go out to some wild party, he'll he'll stay home and and read or write or do it do something like that, having had enough on the road, you know. So yeah, that's a that's a very interesting quote you read, and uh and also raises those more critical questions that we have to admit.
SPEAKER_02:Something that I really appreciated in in kind of the analysis of what what he was doing with on the road was this line here that or it's a it's a quote of Kerouac. He says he's he said people or people accuse him of glorifying hedonism, and to that Kerouac responded, people think on the road is about being a beat and kicks. It's really a story about two Catholic boys searching for God.
SPEAKER_03:Uh yeah, that's and that's our thesis, baby. That's our thesis.
SPEAKER_02:And the theme theme was failure of the road just out of Swab's soul, basically. Exactly. Yearning left over after the thrills. It's such a crazy lesson to hear from a beat, you know, from the the 60s. Yeah. It's like you cracked the code right as is happening. Yeah. Oh, that's right. No one caught no one caught on. That all this all this thrill, thrill life is not gonna be it's not gonna pan out. And you know, if if all the rock stars had died at 27 could have could have grasped what Kerak was trying to say. The theme for me that resonates real really well is the idea of longing.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:I felt that in my soul like my whole life. Like that's I've been the driving riding of keeping me in my faith, I think, through a lot of ups and downs and and philosophical questions and ultra church questions, but the longing for God and God's longing for us was always kind of like such for me. And it's like it seems to really come through with Kara that that like melancholy ache.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. And and then where he sees it in other people, you know, where when he picks it up from that girl. Uh-huh. And then he picks it up from his his buddy who got in the bar fight. And and uh the sheriff who's trying to make his way through the bar fight. And and it's and so when he says, Well, what's beat about? Well, the meaning of beat is sympathetic. I want to sympathize with the humanity of all these people that I see on the road. And uh, my friends and and uh the people that I meet, and that's what I'm I'm recording. And and so that that gives you half of the story because you know it's great that he has these longings, but then the other half is you know his his struggle for some sort of uh ultimate, you know, beauty, ultimate salvation or redemption, and and never quite achieving it, you know, always having this sort of monkey on his back with his addiction and and then also you know trying to put it into words and trying to talk about it. And that's why Buddhism was for him a fascinating thing, because it sort of talked about the same longing. The sort of like in Buddhism, it's sort of like well, make your peace with the longing, and then you're okay. And and he understood that, but then it wasn't enough for him. He couldn't really make his pace, his peace with the longing as not having. a lover back you know something loving back in the universe in the same way that that Christ loves back in the universe and so that was always you know so he can't he comes back to his Catholicism but he but he brings his bottle with him and there in therein lies the lies the tragedy of Jack Haraouac and makes him for me just such a touching and powerful figure. Yeah and and you know a lot of our saints a lot of the saints you know were tragic figures. A lot of the saints were martyrs so it it isn't surprising that we we would have one who just drank himself to death at the height of his own fame well I think it would I think it was well put in that section you read on on uh on the teaching of Jesus that he wrote in his journal when he was 25 you know that the um the enigma of life his uh kingdom my kingdom is not in this world can consider that just one more time it's the most ringing sound of all human time in a way Kerouac's saying that too right i love I love this world I find happiness in this world even in the most unlikely places in a bar fight in some obscure town in Centralville Iowa Montana uh with my crazy friend Neil Cassidy who's you know just looking for sex but that's not enough you know that there's I think I think he's very um Kierkegaard too in being yeah yeah and the paradox the paradox of it you know when you think you found it you haven't found it there's always more you've it finds you when you're not looking you didn't know it found you that you've always been found and when you find that out you know there's such a grace in that moment but then you forget and these are the stories of living you know and being young in America you know all these false promises all these promises all this uh uh how everything's gonna turn out hunky dory and then you then you realize you know the real victory is inner victory my kingdom is not of this world and Jesus taught me that and Keroux taught me that and he's pointing his finger at that and he's giving me the story of his search and how troubling and difficult it was and he never really survived it.
SPEAKER_02:Um so that's what I think is is interesting about him and he's and Dostoevsky is very similar you know he was addicted to gambling pretty much his entire life and uh um it wasn't until you know he he wrote his masterpiece and he and he didn't really didn't get to write part two of the masterpiece because he uh died before he could do it but the half finished story is enough you know yeah uh obviously we're teaching the class for 25 years uh right it's it's enough and and Kerouac is kind of a half of the story kind of thing you know uh I think I think I think the sacrament if there's a sacrament that Karouak brings to the table um it's that that of longing and like being uh that that value he had on the immediacy of his train of thought was uh hit it his way of getting around the ego so he thought that's how you be real it's there raw raw honesty and I do see I do see like that that Kierkegaard about being real and knowing your true self is it sounds like that's what the that Kerak was trying to do there and finding his true self allowing his true self to speak rather than doctoring it up with time thinking about what he's trying to say. Yeah and then that deep longing and that sad melancholy is also just being honest.
SPEAKER_03:So there's kind of like a there's a little AA in him even if he didn't have AA yet raw honesty and confession yes yes it's a value that's an important um asset to our cult to our to humanity yes and and what what's i i is it is it uh step one you know I admit that I am I am powerless uh to solve my own problems and and commit myself to uh the higher power um and then I have to go make amends with all the people in my life you know uh that's Karaouac and it's uh he was sort of um groveling his way toward his own 12-step program it would have been wonderful had he had found it and instead of some of the Dharma we had some of the 12-step book too where you know it's it's amazing that that in order to get there you know he had to go through uh uh uh decline of the West and and all of Balzac and and Joyce and to write over a million words to get him on the road to his own recovery which he never could manage on his own and because he was too famous and people loved him for the wrong reasons. They didn't love him as sober. They loved him when he was Jack you know um lyric Jack uh uh improvising poetry you know in a in a cavern somewhere he also was must have been so frustrated by that and the fame being being liked for the wrong reason yeah misunderstood in his writing that they weren't even getting him the real chance and then obviously a life of frustration with the alcohol that must have been a rough and you just said the word groveling yeah so maybe a theme of him if I put the two together is holy a life of holy groveling oh that's a great praise you know the the uh Jay Kelly is a little like that too where at one point um he's talking to his agent Adam Sandler and Adam Sandler says you know why are you so hard on yourself you know you you and I built this great uh career you know and and uh we've had all the success and everything and and uh the cloney character says that's not me and I'm just beginning to find you know who I am kind of thing uh and Kerouac must have felt that same disjunction you know being being celebrated for the act he was playing and not for the person that he was and and for you know I'm sure that he probably thought that book that he wrote for his brother uh on Girard was one of his best books because it was one of you know his only sort of saint story because he sort of conceived of his his his brother that died as kind of a saint figure. But of course like he turned into an angel yeah uh but of course that wasn't the one people read and and some of and some of the Dharma was never published until you know 50 years maybe after he died or not 50 years probably 25 years after he died. And it just looks like a notebook of of his sketches which are are really you know his attempts to turn Buddhism into a literature I at one point he said and this is also a great quote from Kerouak that I think is is never recognized is where he said that in the West literature is the tantric yoga uh the tantric yoga of the West is literature and and by that and by that he meant you know that tantric yoga is a technique for uh for yoking with the uh absolute you know it's it's a a search for enlightenment and for for Kerouac literature was the tantric yoga of the West it was our language of connection that he was trying to uh use to to make that um uh to heal him you know he was looking for redemption all the time um and sometimes he found it and sometimes he didn't and that's kind of the ups and downs of the of his novels. Looking at Kerouak you don't you don't have to love him for everything. Maybe he's the beginning maybe he's the end maybe he's the longing that is no longer longed for or maybe he's the beginning of a longing that has been lost along the way the longing for soul the longing for God the longing for spiritual completion.
SPEAKER_02:And maybe when we get to Walker Percy we'll see someone a Kerakardian who had a uh a different take on on how he might find uh what Kerouac is looking for you know yeah in that in that quote he said later artists will one day weave into a great unity yeah like that's kind of what you did with your subversive orthodoxy book well i uh amen my brother well to end us i'll I'll read your last quote in the Karouak section by Karouak it's a great ending all I want to do is love Karouak wrote that God will come into me like a golden light and make areas of washing gold above my eyes and penetrate my sleep with his bomb Jesus the Son is in my heart constantly thank you for listening to the subversive orthodoxy podcast I hope today's conversation stirred something in you whether you're a skeptic, a believer or someone on a deconstruction journey come with us as we keep exploring what it means to seek meaning in a dehumanizing age guided by prophetic voices who wrestled with faith and doubt, paradox and nihilism, because the prophetic imagination rarely speaks from the places we expect.
SPEAKER_01:It doesn't stay locked up in pulpits or seminaries. It breaks through in novels and poetry, charity and art, through the strange and the quiet and the overlooked margins of culture. Thank you for listening. If you love our podcast or find it meaningful here are some ways you can connect and share. Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. Please follow us on Instagram at subversive orthodoxy. You can email us at subversiveorthodoxy at gmail dot com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack being travismulin dot substack dot com. Thank you spiritually I want to jump off a cliff without a parachute like I'm high cannabis naked like I want to if I could drift or if I could drift through it dance a groom on my undernight this has been a subversive orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor oceanic scenes they're not a human being with a smile unseen grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills after a rain after some rain