Jack Kerouac's List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life

“No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language and knowledge.”



 Jack Kerouac — cultural icon, symbolism sage, exquisite idealist — with his list...



Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:



Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Try never get drunk outside yr own house

Be in love with yr life

Something that you feel will find its own form

Be crazy dumb saint of the mind

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

The unspeakable visions of the individual

No time for poetry but exactly what is

Visionary tics shivering in the chest

In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Like Proust be an old teahead of time

Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

Accept loss forever

Believe in the holy contour of life

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

Book movie is the movie in words, the visual American form

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You’re a Genius all the time



Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored and Angel in Heaven

The list was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem “Howl” was written — which is of little surprise, given Ginsberg readily admitted Kerouac’s influence and even noted in the dedication of Howl and Other Poems that he took the title from Kerouac.



As Charles Eames might say, “to be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”








With items like “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge” and “Accept loss forever,” the list is as much a blueprint for writing as it is a meditation on life.
 

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Jack Kerouac's List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life | Brain Pickings