Confirmed: Jack Kerouac is still dead.

Well, one of them is.

Steve Matuszak, the head teacher at Dharma Field Meditation and Learning Center, my home zen center, published a piece in a Minneapolis lit zine, Rain Taxi, about Jack Kerouac on the centenary of his birth. “Genius Gives Birth” (pictured above) surveys the current state of Kerouac lit-crit. He takes the title from one of Kerouac’s more quoted quips:

“Genius gives birth. Talent delivers.”

Steve argues effectively that one Jack Kerouac, the personal version, was born in March 1922 a few miles from my new home in Massachusetts, and Jack Kerouac, the legendary version, was born in October of 1969 when the first one died apparently of the physical consequences of sustained heavy use of alcohol as an intoxicant.

You will have to pony-up $5 for a copy of Rain Taxi to read the piece, as I did, but it was worth it. I am now a subscriber. Thank you, Rain Taxi, for treating writers and their work with respect.

I was nine years old in October 1969, and if I remember Jack Kerouac at all from that time it was as someone my parents didn’t take seriously as a writer. They regarded him as a kind of the writer version of a circus clown performing for stoned hippies and communist sympathizers.

53 years later, as someone who could be described (however unkindly and incompletely) as a stoned hippie and a communist sympathizer (I certainly understand why humanity has made multiple sustained attempts to govern that way), I wonder if they had ever been to a circus. They never took me to one

In any case, when it became clear to me that this particular corner of Eastern Massachusetts was to be my next home, I resolved to punch-up my knowledge of Kerouac. Like many of my age, throughout my young adult years I had the proverbial beat-up copy of Dharma Bums that I kept around to justify my slacker lifestyle and distinguish me from the pop culture zeitgeist. I carried it in my hip pocket.

I was really interested Jack and Neal and Alan as an homage to something I felt I unjustly missed out on by being born too late, a pursuit of literary meaning in, from, and around the thoughts running through my head (my performative cosplay which I secretly mocked then turned out to be genuine, but that’s another story). If I read Dharma Bums back then (I think I did) it wasn’t with any sense of trying to engage with it, I wanted mostly to be able to tell other people that I had read it as I inhaled deeply on a clove cigarette.

I am making up the clove cigarette part, I love the way they smell, but I doubt I could have ever learned to smoke them.

But it was more than just me. I have friends whom I’ve known for decades that see Dharma Bums as a How-to manual for life, and they’ve backed that up with their actions. I have friends who have actually unhooked from society in much the same way, making contact consistently only at those few points that are necessary to maintain government ID, bank accounts, and contact with beloved. They’ve done this for decades, leading a life they find meaningful and worth the effort.

That was never me. I am pulled to a more social existence. I chose a career that is literally working on people. I like being connected to a place. While I enjoy solitude more than most, I definitely want mine punctuated by periods of being around others.

The city of Lowell helpfully publishes directions to Jack Kerouac’s grave. I decided to visit just as the Edson cemetery opened on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t exactly sure where the grave was, but I thought, just as when I visited James Baldwin’s grave, that if I waited long enough someone else would point it out to me.

Sure enough, a photographer showed up with a big backpack full of camera equipment. I found out later he’s working on a project that involves taking daily photographs of Kerouac’s grave.

I spent my time wandering around the grave in the plots adjacent to Jack’s while he got out a tripod and a large-format still camera and worked. There are lots and lots of stories to tell out here. You can learn a lot from family graves. No one knew that better than Jack Kerouac, and his remains ended up in a place with a lot of stories.

It is a lovely, large, quiet, working-class cemetery. The air was breezy and temperate, the sun warm, insects and birds created the audible backdrop as I walked over to Jack’s grave after I thought the photographer had finished. He got back out of his car and greeted me as he saw I was taking the picture at the top of this post.

Turns out he also takes pictures of people taking pictures of the grave (see the photographer’s website for more info about his project) and he wanted my permission to do that. By that time, another pilgrim had arrived, an amateur history buff from Maine, and he had a lot to say. So, I listened to him tell us trivia about Jack while the photographer snapped pictures of us both.

My eye was caught by these gold cuff-links that were left on the grave. I wonder what the story is about them.

What was most satisfying about this was that I found exactly what I hoped to find: a modest marker in a modest part of a modest cemetery. Nothing special, no postmortem idolatry in the form of huge monuments or gaudy markers, just a flat marker lovingly surrounded by tokens of meaning left by the pilgrims.

Then I got back on the road.