Safe in Heaven Dead

I saw a documentary on Kerouac last night that painted him in a way I had never quite seen. Or perhaps my opinion of the man and his work has matured out of adoration to genuine analysis and critique. Reviewing some of his words, I still find them uplifting in the most profound way something can be. Exuberant in joy to the point of suffering for it, post-modern anguish to the point of joy.

What I saw in him, and heard from those who knew him and some that were around when the cultural bomb of On the Road came out, was that he held in his hands the dual traumas of wanting nothing more in life than to be taken seriously as a writer and the refusal to accept convention. He could, say his contemporaries, "write in any style you want". He choose to write exactly what he wanted with no capitulation to expectancy or form.

His slide into the alcoholism that would eventually contribute to his death was a result of his impossible success. He was trying to kill himself the only way a good Catholic can. There was nothing left to do.