This morning, one of our graduate students complimented my use of a Kerouac quote in my email signature and asked if I had seen the exhibit on Beat Poets at one of the libraries on campus. I said I hadn’t but wanted to go. He said it was pretty good, so I decided on my lunch break that I’d head on over and check it out.
It’s going to take several trips over there for me to ingest it all. It’s not a huge exhibit but there’s a lot in it that I feel a connection with, and get this: City Lights has its own panel. All of the photos are old but just seeing them took me back, especially when the panel described how the bookstore has expanded several times but has never moved from its location in North Beach. I, of course, became a bit melancholy and homesick. I miss sleeping in the park and smelling the ocean and hearing the blare of car horns.
When I began reading Kerouac’s journals last year, I found myself overwhelmed by this strange ache. It burns a little, prickles in my bones, and makes me very, very exhausted. After a few minutes in the exhibit, I began to feel it, so I moved through the cases pretty quickly. Someday soon I will go back when I’m not on a tight schedule and spend all of the time I want looking at the manuscripts and books and journals.
How did it make me feel? Void. Much like I am not yet living. I’m jealous of the passion they exhibited, jealous of the beauty that poured from their fingers. Maybe I’ll find it? I’m not sure. It hurts to be so dependent on my day job for security. I wonder if I took two months off to rest if it would help with the exhaustion so I could write again.
I just don’t know. I do know, however, that I would give just about anything to be in North Beach right. now.
I need my words to matter again.
