I just thought I'd post the essay below, some of my friends may I guess feel it's a bit too philosophical but actually its pretty heart felt and does express a fair bit of what I think about life:
A Disembodied Aesthetic of Jack Kerouac
 
There’s a point in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: he’s not been travelling for that long but he wakes up in a strange motel room not knowing who he is. That is, it takes him a few minutes to come to a recognition, as to who he is or where he is.
       It’s not like ‘a lacking’, a doziness, a morning drowsiness, that loss of self, it’s closer to the true self than anything else we ever discover, uncover or recover. We find, we have thoughts, things flow through us.
       Most of the time we barely even consider why or where the thoughts have come from, except to say ‘I thought…’ this or that. That’s why reading has such a peculiarly strong pull on us. Why should it draw us so, thought in ink? We reflect, absorb and create, we play, we doze, we imagine, we are transported, to ‘far off places’ they say. But all places, from the page, are far off, all surreal in their existence. Why? Because we have to translate from another mind, transpose the inner of them made exterior, to the inner of us. That is a peculiarity, a specificatory element of humanity: story, word, thought, language. It makes us human through the generations.
       But so, this self, this Who-am-I?-asker, is already cloudy in their question. Far from the place of answer. Why, how even, can one ask, who oneself is? The question is full of paradox. You the speaker ask, who you the speaker is? Are you the voice of the question or are you the source of the voice of the question or are you beyond any voice?
       I will not go on too much about the being of the being, as Heidegger might put it. I get lost, I think, in the being of my being, being the being, beyond which I have being but am (or perhaps am not). It is beautiful in its meditative, transcendentalism. His work, his mind. But it’s outside of me.
       His words, circle likes eddies in a whirlpool, round and round and back again. They cannibalize each other, each thought, tracks back and loses itself (and you), back in and on itself. Its better… no it helps, to pause and try to think within one’s own thoughts, feeble as one might feel them to be.
       But they can’t be febrile because, in the end, they will tap into and contribute to the inner sanctum, of the eons old mind, that all of us maintain. The akasic record, the record of every human thought written on the wind, is recorded too, within our being. The Jungian archetype is me and it is you.
       The poetry of being, is a thing inexplicable to words. It is ineffable, unutterable. Words cannot explain what it is to see a herd of deer, unexpectedly, cross your path, whilst walking in the forest. The path of your life, led to this vision, the immensity of chance, fate, material force, brought you before the deer but that cross flowing of innumerable coincidences, of infinite past, that reaches beyond (not only) you; all that, can only be described, a hint upon the breath.
       Word ignites visions you have seen with those unseen. It reaches beyond the terrestrial. Logos has long been a god, part of a lower pantheon, but now it is a secular god in its own right. Though truly speaking, (writing) I think all gods are dead, not just the one singular God, as Nietzsche decreed. Seers and oracles are no more; higher beliefs void; prayer silent. The mystical higher self, is here, it is you. Nothing more is needed, the only philosopher alive is you. Not in solipsistic oneness, there is ‘other’ beyond the eye, it’s just, I think, that all being is equally powerful. Not, though, masterful.
       There are all kinds of masters and slaves, all kinds of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. All manner of subject and subjugation. But being, is mode beyond control, infinite in its existence, outside of time. This is not belief, some kind of faith, it is seen and so it is. It is and so it is seen.
       Proof, is not the body I have and truthfully, I just wonder if this is how it is. But I relate to that loss of self, have experienced it and have had conversations with others about it. A good friend of mine, just the other day said, late at night, she realized nothing held her up. Her existence was, as if it were, air, a light nothingness, a puff of cigarette smoke, twisting like a dancer to no tune. For moments together, she had the feeling that all her thoughts, all her disquisitions on Life, Art, Love, Politics, Food, Home, the Universe or whatever and whatnever, meant nothing. Everything was, as fragile and fleeting, as mist on glass, touching and not touching a hard reality.
       It touched her like a spectre, at least for a moment, she was afeard, frightened by its immateriality, its lack of it-ness, her lack of it-ness that is.
These moments of the abyss we do not live in. We exist, but we do not live. Like the dark, pallid vision, of the inner self of a zombie, we are undead, unlife. It’s as if we are floating in the infinite, the cosmos of void, we are filled with without-ness. But it is a twilight, an inner being holds us, pulls us back but we understand that being does not belong to us or rather we do not own it, it just is, without word, without explanation. Is-ness is. As Wittgenstein lamented, of that which we cannot speak of, let us be silent. Some take this to mean beyond what we can speak of is meaningless, others (including Wittgenstein) that only meaning exists beyond our silence.
       But we live with spectres of one sort or another all the time. The ‘What will I do?’ the, ‘Am I doing this right?’, the, ‘What have I done?’ and the, ‘I wish I could’. In fact, mostly we mix a little of all of them together in every thought and gesture. The fear of finding nothing at the bottom of our well, drives most of us, either to keep digging ever deeper or to dig more wells, and yet more wells, as a distraction, very consciously. We thirst. The problem of existing is, we thirst for the emptiness of being and return to being, only to thirst again. We can be every day, every day, but every day we know that every day, is more than every-day-ness.
       Why? Because you cannot, as Heraclitus said step into the same river twice: as you eat, the apple rots; as you sleep, the body ages; as you look, the cloud rolls. Can you hear the music or just one note at a time? Events as Humean bundles trundle past and time is just a construct of our Kantian minds: we make cause, fill event with meaning, beyond the phenomena, we hope the noumena.
       But probably we know as much as tree, leaf, twig, foot, ant, brick, nose, pike, felt-tip, gooseberry, angel, rhino, lampshade, dog, kneecap, tooth, elephant, rocket, lettuce. We are as knowing as glass, as dark as pitch, words spill from us like light from the sun but not much is illuminated, not much of what is.
       Being is not good or bad, living is. Do you own empires Adolf? Genghis? Nero? Is the cosmos yours Buddha? Christ? Muhammad? Is the sun conscious, the sea alive, the air delighted, the ground a holiness that smiles? Can you measure happiness, record a void, scale a vanished mountain, saddle unicorns? These are dreams that illuminate nothing much but occupy us, entertain us, in our existence.
       Jack captures this sense of things; it reads well, I think.

What follows is an initial foray, a first draft:

‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’
Albert Camus ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’
 
All family’s respond differently to suicide. The psychic being of the family is to begin with multifaceted like the crystals growing within a geode. Every family is different. This at least is what I imagine, I’m not a scientist or sociologist. The only entities I have studied are my friends, my family and my friend’s families, life studies. I have watched other human beings I have had Cartesian afternoons in the sun. Our similarities outweigh our differences only in number, the quality of the personal experience is what we search for in a conversation, the uniqueness of our interlocutor’s perspective. This original, Ur-speak, is what fascinates and resonates. We search in their eyes for what we understand and occasionally we see what we have not seen, experience what we could not have experienced. This is the wonder of a good tale, the story told from the heart, the fresh blood of newly felt pain.
I write in a moment in time when crimson drips gently upon every moment of the day. I smile and laugh with my child, whilst having the image of my dying mother play across my inner screen. I go from the inane and trivial to the question of why I exist in the blink of my red rimmed eyes. Funerals, wakes and the aftermath of a death, have this effect, on not just those close to the recently deceased. When we sit on the back row, watching the muted howling pain of the son or sister of the now absent loved one, we mourn with them but we also mourn for ourselves. Naturally at some point we think of our own mother or father, alive, dying or dead (we are driven to think of our own genesis and our ever present degeneration). Our own mortality has the light, the light that death gives, shone upon it. The light of death, is light within; sometimes dread; sometimes its subtle contrast makes life more vivid.
I have been lucky, I keep telling myself. Someone I work with, their mother died when they were twelve. Years of conversation, engagement and the debating on life, existence, death. I am rich in mother love, rich in thoughtful, teasing words. I had the lightest of Christian washes. The water from the fount splashed upon my head, standing, a young cub, with a banner of some sort in the nave, teenage internal monologues walking home from school where I heroically turned the other cheek. But my grandfather was a Mason, that strange bird, its plumage colourful, esoteric or more usually eccentric. He was not, I think, a deep believer, nor a regular church goer. His Masonic faith was more to do with commerce than a conversion to Christ. He married twice, the second time to a woman who had also been married and had children, both brought children into the new relationship and together they had children. Three of this family were ‘half’ and four ‘full’. The psychic being, the dynamic was complex and changing. Grandad, my mum’s dad, was much loved and loving, a sweet, generous and kind man, my grandfather, on one uncle’s account, was richly odd, liked to shoot flies in the backroom with an air rifle. The images and impressions are distanced and in all likelihood not always accurate, the emotions closer to the truth.
This is the nature of family lore where a single incident comes to be the representation of the character. Becomes the summation of a life. We are prey to much misrepresentation but then perhaps the romanticisation of our family, the striking detail, the anecdote, captures more than a thousand pictures. If we are told some ancient tale, it is after all the teller we read. The pages of this book are the tremor in the voice, the pause, the punctuation, the particular choice of word, the passion, the desire to persuade which is strangely detached from the audience. When we tell the tale - as my uncle stands before me, older now, than I will ever convey to my children - we are searching for self-affirmation in the far off, the nostalgic air is a resonance of self, of our youth, the breath of something long past, far off but not lost, not gone. This uncle will always be the uncle that tickled me mercilessly till tears spilled helplessly and whose tree trunk arms I swung upon. That is how I will recall him, the story I will tell my children.
So in her youth my mother had the sugar of faith. She absorbed some of that. At the time it was still in the blood stream but her family, her Dad, Percy, her mother, Winnie, the siblings, Mick, Heather, Phyllis, Johnny, Wendy and late addition Max, these were her pantheon. Her bedrock was not spiritual but human, here and now, person to person, familial, not built on faith. This I know because she told me so. Not in one conversation, not in detail, it was in the everlasting love, the timbre of her voice when she spoke of her father and her first family.
As a teenager and young man, when I argued all politics had to be spoken off, all suffering in the world looked at, railed against, demonstrated against and the philosophy of life examined, I knew only my first family. I didn’t recognise the family tree. Her father and mother yes, essences of smells, a few visions of their home in Woodford but nothing overly concrete, they were as distant as childhood holidays in Wales. There was an Aunt and an Uncle and even an ex-Uncle-in-law (who visited on his motorbike) but not much beyond that. Mum was mother, she was the centre of my foundation, the heart of my family, I couldn’t, certainly didn’t, conceive that I was the late comer. And the last of the latecomers at that, fourth of four. Her cosmos had had being, long before I. So when I insisted she talk about everything, not shy away from the great subjects, I did so in the great tradition, that of the naïve youth. The youth who knows little but feels much, whose passion gladly trammels over the shibboleths and taboos. Personality is plastic, we are not made but create ourselves, God is not only long dead but should be forgotten as utterly meaningless, history is simply a path to the future. Speaking of genital mutilation or the meaning of committing suicide was as easy as making the tea halfway through the debate.
Words, passion, politics, the wonders of science, books and more books, the archive of film, theatre, the museum, the art gallery, the field, mountain and river of experience these were primary, primal, they evoked, woke up the elemental within, the creative, the maker of Art. This, this was what needed to be expressed, the everyday was a bore or a working necessity that one should avoid and shun for a long as was possible. The fact that the conversation I was having, in the bright sunlit suburban front room, was underwritten by a working mother of four, only possible in fact because she (my father) worked. That was unimportant, that was a bore, that wasn’t a discussion about freedom, love, philosophy, sex and the other fundamentals that really mattered. It was like her first family, a distant template, of notional importance, but the notion wasn’t much of a thought, it was sand to concrete.
And yet. Even in our young lives we know half of what we say is bluster. It is a beautiful, pristine and, as yet, untouched innocence and it gives sustenance to our elders, in a manner we little realise. We don’t see how it may be, that we turn our head like a brother, smile, as he might have. As we howl at the manner in which politicians destroy lives, as our blood boils, as we kick against the pricks we have little understanding, if any, of the ripples, the echoes we are creating. We think we are making new marks, which is true but it is upon old bark. The family tree stands above us or below us if you like, we are branch or root, we are genetic essence, replicated, evolved and evolving from and to, both in a universal species way and in a particular familial way. Just one branch above me and I didn’t see that my mother had a family before I came along. My mother was a person before I was. My mother had believed in God and had lost a faith. My mother had had brothers and sisters, she had lived through a war, she had been evacuated. When we went to Blackpool, for the first time, it was not her first time, she had lived there before. Her father and mother had helped run a boarding house there. It was my first time not hers. It was the first time I had thought how ancient the planet was, how small the pale blue dot, how amazing the fossil, how deep the canyon of human dreams. Jung and Nietzsche had been in print for a long time. My mother had devoured Hardy, Dickens, Eliot and a hundred authors I’d never touched or even heard of.
Like a missing photograph or daraougetype in the family album he was no longer present but to some in the family, to this young mother, his image remained. I wanted to talk of the great questions of the blackness of ‘Fleur de Mal’ or the striking first line of ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. What did I know? Her brother had killed himself. I had not heard, she’d not spoken. All family’s respond differently to suicide.

Do you know they’ve just discovered a new continent? A seventh continent, largely submerged under sea, Zealandia, I wanted to tell my mum that.
I don’t really want to be here today, Mum. I don’t want to have to mourn. But I do want to celebrate your life, with your family and your friends. Wouldn’t she have loved this, everyone together.
Mum has been an extraordinary mother to me. She’d do anything for you, give you anything, whether it was advice, material help or simply a hug. She’s also been my best friend.  I had the privilege of also knowing her as a person who over years I have had endless beautiful, interesting and rich conversations with, read to, joked and laughed with, argued and debated with (nature versus nurture kept us going for years!)  but also grown with intellectually.
Back at 83 Quinton Drive, we’d talk for hours and hours, me, her, Humayun, Wendy, my family, her students and friends. I’d pretentiously give her my considered weltanschuuang (world view) and she, she’d tell me what the world was really like.
I never really understood Milan Kundera’s phrase ‘The unbearable lightness of being’ until today, it’s something like ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’. Saw her in a sunset the other day, the first one I’d really noticed this year, seeing her in everything actually.
She loved to talk, she was interested in you, in the world. If it wasn’t face to face over a cup of tea, then it was on the phone. I could have ended this oration by saying ‘Don’t think of her as gone, just engaged’
She had a rock hard intellectuality and curiosity that ran throughout her life, from the time, as a young woman, when she worked in the local library, and spent more time reading than working, to her years of battling away to her achieve her Open University degree in geology, which, with four kids in between, took 17 years, but that’s determination for you. She always wanted to talk about the big questions without forgetting that you need to look after and communicate with your loved ones.
I learnt from her that love, kindness and tolerance are the most important things. The only thing she couldn’t tolerate was intolerance and as paradoxical as Humayun and I argued that that was, we knew the point really, and she was right. Not something I used to say to her very often. But more often than not she was.
She was beautiful inside like a geode with its crystals. As hot and passionate in love and anger as flowing lava, and as complex and multi-layered as a desert rose. She was my rock [‘too Karen’ hearing Karen say this before my oration really got to me]: Igneous, Metamorphic, sedimentary any of them and all of them
The way she imposed herself into your life could be infuriating, she was certainly a great matriarch. Even if she got on your bloody nerves she only did what she did out of love.
She never lost the love of her own father [‘This is his football thing’ I said patting the football medal.] and still felt his presence. He was a kind, sweet man who wished harm on no-one, hated injustice and war and all the awful and stupid things people do to each other and felt life should be lived to the full and with love. She was most definitely her father’s daughter.
In the year 2000, mum had a health scare and I thought she was going to die, So I went to live in Spain with her for a year. Best year of my life. Best thing I ever did. She was a wonderful person to travel with, always up early and ready to seize the day. Mum believed in Carpe Diem, seize the day, seize the year, seize life because life is once, and that’s it, there is no God or afterlife but it’s a wonderful once, if you’re brave, lucky and make it so.
I thought I’d end this oration, with a quote from my Spanish journal: ‘Had a long conversation with Mum again, about many things but mostly about who we are, my feelings of negativity, her feelings of being attacked by everyone and the need to change old patterns, but with a deeper feeling, because we’re here. Being here has allowed or created an ability in us or no… it’s just we talk about things and have done a surprising thing, we’ve opened up little areas of knowledge about ourselves that we’ve never covered. It’s surprising because we do know each other so well already of course, yet this situation has allowed, subtly, a slight shift of the balance or in the tone or pitch. Slight and not very present or big, but something I think. Wish I could recreate the conversation or capture it, but it was born free, I guess and I have to let it go.
She’s always been there, like the earth beneath my feet, but the tectonic plates have shifted, and a new continent has appeared, my Zealandia, life without mum.
So I have to let you go now mum. We’re all here your family and your friends, and you will live on in our memories and in our hearts, and in the sunset
 I’ll love you until the day I die.