I am reading Tristessa by Jack Kerouac; when slowly patiently my writing shifts to fruitless unpunctuated sentences, then words creep to become born of universe and I think about the Mother Womb Time Wormhole Big Wobbly Thing all at once, how dare did these midcentury writers write oh stream of consciousness, too long, "too long" I think to myself, "this is a silly way to write a blog entry" I think again, before taking a drag of my huge cigar and looking over at the three beautiful women I have my arms wrapped around in this eternal blue jacuzzi of life.

Tristessa means subjecting yourself to the unregulated thoughts of unhinged spiritual (Greatineffable&alcohol) high-loving Jack, whose train of thought runs on such monumental speeds that sometimes you yourself end up disoriented and giddy like you were really the one shooting up morphine (this is a clever lie because you have never taken morphine and Kerouac lies to you through style over contents, which is unusual).

Jack falls in love with life over and over again, devotes himself to it in fact. His love is so strange and big it is almost tragic - "Born to die BORN TO DIE" - he understands it but everyone else has already understood it long ago, yet he lies in his continued devotion of understanding Meaning like the uniqueness of life is his own hidden secret. Jack's love of Tristessa is a voidfull of desire and when she lulls a low note or breathes deeply the universe his child, his entire school of thought sits like a puppy between her palms. Lamenting woman, Tristessa what has happened to you for you to hurt this way, oh, but she is beautiful, is everything! Nirvana can wait for you, Tristessa.

Tristessa is full of smells and sounds and Virgin Mothers and bustling pictures but you the reader exist for Tristessa, yearn for her horrible flat and the sad lines that curve on her face when she says that vida es dolorosa, her unending Hope and her sickness - somehow she is still perfect. What saddened thoughts are behind her shiny eyes? What Things does Jack not know, understand, how does she see the World? Tristessa you are the World, but I do not know you Tristessa, tell me your name and I will love a different You, how a painting only draws on the moment and not the timelessness before and after, dear Tristessa you are infinite.

Her sickness is a sacrifice for vulnerable beauty, impossible to copy. And where there is no more beauty, only sickness? Jack sees Tristessa's sickness as religiously calculated - in his eyes she is a child whose wounds he must lick like a dog, never heal. Yet still he somehow manages to believe his love as the sun of her survival. But she is the one who pays for his drinks, for the stamps on her letters asking him to come back to Mexico. A man of religious zeal of possessive delusion - in other terms 'an ass'. But Tristessa, where is your love for the gifts of this universe!

The back of the book desrcibes Kerouac's female characters are "fully developed". Unfortunately I must disagree. From some other point of view I'm sure Tristessa is a fully fleshed human being, but Jack sees her as absolutely nothing else than just 'Tristessa' - the prostitute, the addict, the saddness, the sacrifice. Throughout this entire book the only time she is a 'woman' is when she is violent and dying. I don't think this was Kerouac's intention. Nonetheless the book is absolutely wonderful despite what an infuriating character Jack is throughout, lol.