For Jack Kerouac

Jack, it was the liquor that took you, and it was your gaze at me from the page of a book that made me believe it would take me too. If we, the creatives, the crooks, the crazies, are to live for our art and forsake all else, will we not then die for our art as well?
It was you who made me truly believe that madness and success come together in a package, wrapped in brown paper of chaos, with a shiny red bow of addiction to decorate. It was you who told me with your photographed face, with that sideways smile on that beautiful face, that it is possible, plausible, permissible, to write a book in three weeks with no revisions, hopped up on speed and mild diner coffee.

It was you who made me say I wanted to go into the mountains alone with no one and nothing to aid or protect me, and come face to face with God.

Jack it was you that urged me to take to the bottle, to fill up on whiskey before spilling my blood on the paper. It was you that whispered in my ear, "You can be great, you can be inspired, you can be a legend, if only you torture the passion out of you."

From you I learned never to rest in one place for too long. From you I learned to have no ties to my fellow humans. From you I learned that intoxication and belligerence lead to the highest art forms.

It is you I have been battling with, Jack, your beautiful mess I have run from, your artful insanity that has taken me to the edge.

I see your corpse at the bottom and wonder, Shall I jump?

What does it take to be a master of your craft?

It was the liquor that took you, and it may still take me. I live for this art; will I not die for it as well?

If You Must Know

If you are reading this, I’m going to assume that you are a human being. If you are a human being, then I know something about you that you may not even want to admit to yourself in the light of day. I know that you have wondered what it feels like to die.

This is the kind of trait that separates you from the other animals. Even the smart ones. Dolphins. Other primates. Your dog that you swear should be considered for personhood. You know that you are going to die. This is what gives you power. This is what gives you fear. This is what gives you drive and passion.

It will all be over soon enough.          

So you’re wondering, What does it feel like to walk through the valley of the shadow, and from what source does the light at the end of the tunnel shine? Where is God and why is he waiting? Will I be judged, will I see the beloved deceased, and will I kiss the ground or burn in a pit of sulfur?

It’s easy for me to answer these questions for you.

If you must know, dying is like the best kind of sex: Simple and pure, and without pretense. It starts slow, just a tingle in your flesh, working into your extremities, bringing light to the darkness in your cold fingertips, in the cavernous back of your throat, in the emptiness of your mind. At first, when you’re dying, you don’t know what’s going on. You feel…numb, not drugged, not thrown for a loop, but pleasantly anesthetized. You feel care for nothing, hope for nothing, desire for nothing.

            When you begin to die, for the first time in your life, you will know what it is to want for nothing.

            After the tingle begins the sting. Your soul is leaving your body. This can be painful. Everything in your flesh is objecting

            (the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak)

            and probably everyone in the room is objecting too. This doesn’t make it easy for your soul to take the flight that it was created to take.

            (We are all just born to die.)

            My personal situation was a common one. I was old and weak and good for nothing, dying of cancer in a hospital bed. My children were there, my grandchildren were there, my doctor was there, my nurses were there. They were all there when the machines roared to life in a flourish of beeps and whirs of catastrophe and impending doom, and all the while I heard the noises through the block of a coma and I was still completely and utterly at peace.

            If you must know, dying is like walking out of a really great yoga class or church service: Refreshing, but a bit of a slap in the face. You were so warm in there, and goddamnit it’s so cold out here, but the thing is that in that room nothing that you were feeling was real and out here everything is.

            If you must know, dying is like leaving a movie theater right when the movie is getting good: Never a feeling of resolution, always a perfect memory, in no way regret.

            When I died, and I felt my soul leave my body, I all of a sudden realized what I believe I had known all my life. C.S. Lewis was wrong about a lot of things but he was right about this: You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

            It’s not an easy thing to understand, when all you know is flesh, when all you know is hunger and thirst, when all you know is air and sunlight, when all you know is grime and sweat, when all you know is sex and desire. But when you die, you will understand. Your soul is everything, and none of this ever mattered.

            When I died, I walked away from the hospital in the best shape I had ever been in, and that was with no shape at all. I was without form and without weight and without breath or heartbeat, but I could feel everything like it was new, like I had just been born into the world and was seeing it with the shaded eyes of a newborn, feeling it with the twitching hands of a child. I walked out of the hospital, out the window, out through the street

            (with no need for a crosswalk)

            and up, up, up into the hills. I was wearing brown shoes and the clothes of my younger days when everything felt novel and fresh. There was a dusting of snow and my feet sunk and made prints in the mud on the hillside.

            So many of the changes that you see were not caused by the things of this world.

            I reached out my arms to the light, climbing the hill without feeling any signs of windedness, of wear and tear, of the smoke in my black lungs coming back to haunt me because I simply had no lungs, I had nothing at all. All I had were my arms that I reached out to the light, and the light drenched the hillside in gold and cast glitter on the snow, and I knew that this was the happiest moment I had ever experienced, just the effervescence of my soul

            (of all that I was and am still)

            and the ephemeral moment, the sun that would set and then rise again, the hill that would crumble one day after many souls had walked it, the world that I was leaving behind.

            If you must know, dying is like the change of seasons: It feels like you’ve done this before, yet something in the air is always new.

            When I reached the light that I thought was the sun, my eyes were blinded and my skin set aflame, and I had no thoughts, no memories, no hopes. There was no past, no future. There was only a moment, a long, long moment, where I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, but none of that mattered because there was no who or where but only here and now.

            On the other side of the light was beauty eternal, but if you must know, John Lennon was right and there is no heaven above you.

            If you’re reading this, you want to know, What is it like to be no more?

            When you get to the other side, I don’t know what you will see. But what I saw was a bus station in a grand, steamy sort of fog, and sitting on the bench at this bus station was a person, and this person was young and well dressed and just a dead soul just like me. I approached this person, and they said to me with the calmest demeanors, the kind of face that could weather a monsoon and not flinch, Are you a seeker of truth?

            I answered honestly and said that I had tried. All my life I had tried, and don’t we all, don’t you all, doesn’t everyone try for something? All my life I tried to understand the truth, search for the truth, speak the truth. I church-shopped and read too many books, pouring over the holy texts like I had been consecrated for it from birth, asking god where he was or where she was or where it was, and to whom am I speaking when I address this god?

            I answered honestly and said that I had tried.

            The traveler pointed to the other side of the bench, and there I saw what I had not seen before and what I did not then understand. It was a ball, a dense and tarry black, and it was floating in midair. Do you know what that is? the traveler asked me. And I shook my head, for I knew nothing.

            If you must know, dying is like going back to college as a senior citizen: You can’t see why not, but you can’t see why.

            That is the universe, the traveler said. That is the universe from whence you came. That is the universe that contains all of the murder, all of the rape, all of the fires and volcanoes and hurricanes, all of the hatred and domination and control, all of the abuse and wickedness and trials, all of the darkness and war and violence, all of the corruption and greed and malice, all of the lust and avarice and carelessness, everything that you have ever known and have known that you must hate. But. That is the universe that contains all of the love, all of the compassion, all of the generosity and kindness and gentleness, all of the joy and inner peace and harmony, all of the light and beauty and freedom, all of the art and creativity and inspiration, all of the passion and hope and friendship. That is the universe, the whole universe, in which everything seemed so big to you. And here it floats, in the midst of this.

            What is this? I asked.

            This is the Void, said the traveler.

            This is God.

            This is Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Brahma, Krishna, Buddha, the Great Spirit, the All, the One, the Divine.

            This is Love.

            If you must know, dying is like waking up from a nightmare: There is abounding gratefulness, but you can’t stop dwelling on what just happened.

            I looked around at the fog, at the dusty grey that shrouded it all, and I looked down at myself, myself in my clothes, myself with my young soul-body, myself so filled and yet so empty, and then I felt it.

            I felt the love.

            Have you ever fallen in love? Have you ever had that feeling of total contentment while looking into someone’s eyes, like you would change nothing about them, nothing about this moment, like everything in the world is right, so long as they are there?

            If you must know, dying is a lot like that.

            I asked the traveler why it was that some people claimed they had seen heaven when they died, and came back to earth to tell the tale, the victims of a heart attack but the lucky ones revived by a shock to the chest. And the traveler said, In life on earth and all the lives after it, people only see what they are ready to see. You were ready to see the truth.

            The traveler said to me once, Never forget that all the pain in the world will never compare to the love that holds the universe.

            That is all I wanted to tell you.

            On the other side, there is a great adventure, and at all times, on all sides, throughout your journey, you will be enveloped by the greatest love of all.

            If you must know, dying is like a beautiful life: You never want it to end.

            And it won’t.

            Don’t worry.

            There is peace here.