Paula Marvelly: Jack Kerouac

There’s something deeply poignant about travel; removed from habitual surroundings one is transported to another land, alien and unfamiliar, rendering senses more alive and open to passing sensory and aesthetic, even phantasmagorical, phenomena.

I remember driving along the coast road of Northern California back in my early thirties, making my pilgrimage to Big Sur, the bohemian centre for artists, writers and poets, with the warm wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean through my hair and that delicious feeling that I was immortal. And then standing on Stinson Beach back at my motel, the iambic rhythm of spume and surf lulling me into a quiet ecstasy, like feeling the closeness of the breath of a lover.

I also remember reading my way through the books of Jack Kerouac during that time: the big, open spaces immortalised in his prose; the existential, poetic voice that would stay with me all these years.

Jack Kerouac (1922–69) (or to give him his rightful name, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac) was an American poet and writer. Together with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, they formed part of the artistic group known as the Beat Generation, taking inspiration from Eastern philosophy, jazz music and hallucinogenic drugs, spawning a countercultural revolution, the effects of which are still with us today.

The above short film was inspired by a recent trip to the sea (the Sussex coastline to be precise) and is a meditation on death, life and the immortality of the human soul, and of course, my humble homage to Jack Kerouac.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.

I could hear an indescribable seething roar, which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the Intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water.

I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled.

I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac