The wrong path

“There was no doubt she was overjoyed to see me, her eyes said so.  It was as though the gesture of self destruction had, in her mind, equalized all the guilt.  The courage of committing the act seemed to have justified herself to herself.  This action on her conviction, no matter how neurotic, had called for all her strength and she was now released.  Free from the urge, since the will-for-death needs a strong concentration of pressure to fulfill itself and once accomplished via attempt, is defeated until another period of buildup is gone through; unless, of course, one succeeds in reaching death the first shot, or is really mad.  Gazing down on her, with a grin of artificial buoyancy, I sensed this and felt an instant flood of envy.  She had escaped, at least for some time, and I knew I had yet to make my move.  Being a coward I had postponed too long and I realized I was further away from commitment than ever.  Would hesitancy never end?”

Neal Cassady, in a letter to Jack Kerouac

The woman in question had been a girlfriend of Cassady’s, who had tried to kill herself, apparently by slitting her wrists and losing quite a bit of blood.  He had abused her emotionally, and was–after briefly promising to be faithful, and after a generous working class couple offered them free lodging for a time–to abandon her again and finally for the flimsiest of reasons.

He is speaking here about his own desire to end his own life.  This underlies everything he does, and he is arguably the single most important influence on the work of Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, themselves sort of the progenitors of the counter-culture, with of course a number of others.

Beat means beat.  Done.  Finished.  Kaput.  There is nothing to admire there, nothing to emulate.

And Cassady died, really, an ugly and pointless death.  He wandered off in the cold–and I think the rain–after a party down in Mexico, having taken a large quantity of some drug, and seems to have died of some combination of exposure and the drugs.  They found his body some time the next day.

This is a pointless and stupid way to die.  But he had been rehearsing his own death for some time, and based on Kerouac’s account, drove somewhat suicidally every day.

The leaves turn many brilliant colors in Autumn, but this does not mean they are more alive.  Burning leads to extinction.  We should not admire it. We should admire those able to walk long distances with patience, skill, and grace.