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PoeForward Events: KEROUAC BIRTHDAY

EVENTS: Poe Funeral Goth Poe Poe Humour Kerouac Bday

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VISIONS OF GERARD

Jack Kerouac

Gerard Dulouz was born in 1917 a sickly little kid with a rheumatic heart and many other complications that made him ill for the most part of his life which ended in July 1926, when he was 9, and the nuns of St. Louis de France Parochial School were at his bedside to take down his dying words because they'd heard his astonishing revelations of heaven delivered in catechism class on no more encouragement than that it was his turn to speak -- Saintly Gerard, his pure and tranquil face, the mournful look of him, the piteousness of his little soft shroud of hair falling down his brow and swept aside by the hand over blue serious eyes -- I would deliver no more obloquies and curse at my damned earth, but obsecrations only, could I resolve in me to keep his fixed-in-memory face free of running off from me -- For the first four year of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me to pay attention to his goodness and advice -- Summers he'd lain afternoons, on back, in yard, hand to eyes, gazing at the white clouds passing on by, those perfect Tao phantoms that materialize and then travel and then go, dematerialized, in one vast planet emptiness, like souls of people, like substantial fleshy people themselves, like your quite substantial redbrick smokestacks of the Lowell Mills along the river on sad red sun Sunday afternoons when big scowling Emil Pop Duluoz our father in his shirtsleeves reading the funnies in the corner by the potted plant of time and home -- Patting his sickly little Gerard on the head, "Mon pauvre ti Loup, me poor lil Wolf, you were born to suffer" (little dreaming how soon it would be his sufferings'd end, how soon the rain, incense and teary glooms of the funeral which would be held across the way in St. Louis de France's cellar-like basement churhc on Boisvert and West Sixth). For me the first four years of my life are permeant and gray with the memory of a kindly serious face bending over me and being me and blessing me -- The world a hatch of Duluoz Saintliness, and him the big chicken, Gerard, who warned me to be kind to little animals and took me by the hand on forgotten little walks.

EVENTS: Poe Funeral Goth Poe Poe Humour Kerouac Bday