On the Road, Jack Kerouac

 

9^th October 2018

 

I was in Leeds train station, WH Smith 2006, headed to Manchester, then Crewe for a weekend spent drinking and smoking weed, the last embers of the last fag of the last term. I was 25, a ‘mature’ student. The course was over, I’d graduated. I didn’t have a clue.

It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s

That was across the back of the cover, Bob Dylan. Good enough for me. I think it was about 8 quid. I just fell into it – the vagueness of the opening paragraph, the ‘…which I don’t want to talk about…’ the idea of the excitement of Sal/Jack, bored at home writing, desperate for adventure, women, booze. The absolutely everything of it. I fell in. I wanted to meet new people, and meet the old ones again. I started using the term ‘dig this guy’/’dig this girl’ in my head every time I passed someone in the street (I eventually shared this with my wife-to-be in Buenos Aires in 2017, rereading the book for the 20^th or 25^th time – she wasn’t impressed and actually stopped me saying and thinking it for a while). I wanted to wander everywhere and write about everything I knew and every new word or glance or curse. I thought about whiskies with the auld man at 2am, our spoken words unspoken and unspoken ones communicated, about Candice – at the time – and the ocean we crossed to be together. I wanted to be Jack, jumping from one car ride to the next, bumming cigarettes and money, stumbling through the days across states and crowds and people, eventually sat lonesome, all the emptiness and impossibility of the world under a dark sky, forever moving, chasing, wandering across the lost earth beneath his feet. I wanted to throw off the shackles of everything I knew about myself and everything I wasn’t, everything I’d learned to value and hate and reject in those 25 years. The book was everything: it was every failure, every wrong word, all the consolation of the moments spent outside the world around me, the hopelessness of always having to return, return, return.

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?

I thought of Gemma White, of nights spent whispering to one another, of all the hopes and dreams, forgotten, lost but still there, somewhere, once uttered and ever-existing. I thought of the barman who hung himself in The Buccleuch, his mother and sister racing for a knife before cutting him down, lifeless, to fall into the earth. I wanted to go: I wanted to see everything, I wanted pages and towns and women and music to flow past like this train journey racing through these 248 pages, the endless chase into the night, morning always ahead, no time to sleep or take a turn back when everything ahead keeps changing, evolving, and all you can do is race and jump to see it. I just wanted to go.

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

I even found Dean Moriarty – my Dean Moriarty – in a bar in Jakarta. I stayed 3 or 4 years longer than I should have – 7 in total, just to try and prove, like Sal/Jack, that everyone was wrong about him, that he wasn’t what they said, that there was something he knew – some understanding – that transcended the ideas and petty principles they clung to. There’s just too much in the book – it’s too sad – it makes me so happy to be alive, just to read it. Every time I every feel the need to feel that urge – when life gets comfortable – the go, the go, then go and never grow.

 

 

Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh

 

8^th October 2018

 

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.

 

I first read those words in West Lothian College Bathgate. It was 1998. My sister had passed me the book, I opened it and read it and there it was, the world – my world – reflected back to me through Renton and Sick Boy and Mickey Weir and shoplifting and everything else I’d never considered could be ‘literature’. I recall sitting in the café, next to a vending machine, no money for a can but no bothered, sat all afternoon reading and rereading the pages. I was no reader – I was actually confused at the shift in point of view from Renton to Sick Boy early on, nearly but no quite phoning my sister to have her explain – but I couldn’t put the book down. That was it: I wanted to be Renton and I wanted to be Irvine Welsh. A week later I wrote a story about a couple of gay lads living in Edinburgh and submitted it to my English teacher. She didn’t believe I’d written it until my sister – the same sister – phoned and said she’d watched me write it. They submitted it as part of my portfolio for the Scottish Higher and I got a B. But it didn’t matter. The sweat wis lashing oafay me just thinking about this world of words and writing and all the books like this I didn’t know – hadn’t been told – existed.

 

So, according tae Tom, it’s nae good telling us that ah’ve done well in ma exams, or got a good job, or got off wi a nice burd; that kind ay acclaim means nowt tae us. Of course, ah enjoy these things at the time, or for themselves, but their value cannae be sustained because there’s nae recognition ay the society which values them. What Tom’s trying tae say, ah suppose, is that ah dinnae gie a fuck. Why? So it goes back tae ma alienation from society.

 

This is maybe halfway into the book, Renton in counselling having escaped jail time for shoplifting, poor Spud sat inside. This was the moment, the elevation in my mind – and heart – in my love of the novel – from the original surge at just reading about these characters and a world not-too-far displaced from mine, to a Hibs-following anti-everything waster (in the eyes of the misunderstanding) breaking down his own mind, fears, anxieties and rejections through Welsh’s words. I read those pages hundreds of time – I’ve bought the book a good dozen times and still read them on occasion now – and in all the writing I’ve read since nothing’s ever bettered the sense of being encapsulated – lifted – in the writing.

 

This shite muddies the waters for us; confuses rather than clarifies issues.

 

The entire book sustained this level of engagement – for me anyway – throughout. The moment Begbie and Renton stand by the train station – the titular episode I suppose, made me want to understand people better. The ‘there is a light that never goes out’ entry created a sense of displaced nostalgia, entirely true and at once imagined. I’m still 17 when I pick up that book. It takes me back to the moment I opened it – confused, lost, neither a boy nor a man, kicked out of school and trying to avoid the factories, unsure where to turn or to run from. The Acid House, Glue, Porno and Filth had their moments – the fella can write – but nothing was ever the same as Trainspotting.