I was often inspired by the story of Jack Keroauc, and how he wrote his famous book, “On the Road”. I never read, “On the Road”, although I had always meant to. I do remember vividly listening to a friend describe Jack’s writing process. On a cloudy and milk-neutral day I was on a bus with a good friend and she told me that Jack had written “On the Road” all at once. In one fell swoop. On a single roll of paper that stretched out for hundreds of feet. What inspiration, I remember thinking, what drive. This man had it. Was it due to some inherent nature, some basic and fundamental aspect of his character? Did he unwind the story from his inner tissues like a spider drawing out a glistening strand of silk?
Or was there some specific environmental variable? In other words, was there something special about the time or the place? Some calm breeze that blew from the West and carried with it the essence of ingenuity? Or, and this was my personal favorite, was it perhaps a song he heard? I imagined Jack cruising down the highway in a beat up Plymouth with the windows open, passing some forgotten dusty town wherefrom within the haunted bowels of a shimmering saloon carried forth the mystical notes of a banjo or fiddle. A folksy and earthy and intoxicating answer to life’s impenetrable riddle. And that melody hit Jack square in the face and made his nose bleed and when he came back to his senses the world was rushing and roaring around him in violent and unending fury and he was compelled, no, forced, to write down this transcript of his journeys. This was the sort of catalyst that I imagined appropriate for such a powerful eruption of literary catharsis.
As much as I’ve tried, I’ve never been hit by that kind of melody. I’ve struggled my entire life to express myself as best as I could, but I never managed to get…quite…there. I think the problem lay not in ability, nor in source material (for it is a universal truth of mine that everyone possesses an awe-inspiring imagination). No, the problem was simply one of inverted priorities.
Inversion. How simple an idea. Flipping something upside down.
