Be Crazy Dumbsaint of the Mind

Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

From a letter Jack Kerouac wrote to Donald Allen in 1958, here’s the wonderful “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials.”

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As Ever,

Jack

Jack Kerouac, “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials,” letter to Donald Allen (1958), published in Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, 1958, 1977, 1983. Reprinted in Evergreen Review, Spring 1959.

A free-write I did a few years ago inspired by these:

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind. Kerouac’s Beliefs and Technique for Modern Prose. Be crazy dumbsaint of mind. Crazy dumb. Crazy saint. Be crazy dumbsaint of mind.  Dumbwaiter.  Dumbass. Crazy dumbsaint of mind.  Bodymind.  Be crazy dumbsaint of mind.  Remember the holy contours of life, keep them holy, you are a genius, you are a genius, you are a genius all of the time.  Remember the dumbsaint of mind, keep it holy, remember the holy contours of life. We part the sea, part the sea, part of us is sea; the road, the road, the road, we are ships on waves, wedging towards horizons, coming through in waves, in waves; we come through and we rise. Be crazy dumbsaint of mind.