“Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”: Jack Kerouac, creativity and academic writing

I just came across this wonderful list by Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, in the Beats anthology I’m slowly making my way through:

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 center 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

There’s a few points in here which really speak to the argument I’m developing for an upcoming paper about sociological writing, blogging and attentiveness. I’m not sure how, if at all, I could include them in the paper – something which actually neatly illustrates the broader point I’m trying to make in it. I’m having to abstract away from what I’m trying to express, as well as the terms in which I feel moved to express it, for the paper in a way which I’d never have to do on a blog.

But assuming that the form of the paper serves a purpose (it clearly does) and is not going away any time soon (it clearly isn’t) then the personal question becomes how to preserve the creative impulse from corrosion by the endless, sometimes imperceptible, acts of censorship and detachment which ‘academic writing’ unavoidably entails. I’m arguing in the paper that blogging can be an integral part of this, as part of a practice of cultivating attentiveness, though there’s no guarantee it will be so for any one person or for ‘academic blogging’ as a broader trend.