Beat Space. Tommaso Pincio

      5.

      Everyone knows that the Void of Space is mute. It is an immense blackness of inconceivable silence and multitudinous Stars, and yet as numerous as they may be, they are unable to transmit the faintest crackle of light through the barrier of the inaudible.

      This is how Jack Kerouac passed Day 4: looking out into the muteness of Space as framed by the porthole of his spaceship. In pockets of his mind he thought he perhaps heard far-off echoes, they seemed to suggest the barking of dogs lost in the desolation, the muffled murmur of a river running peacefully beneath the shuttle; sometimes he could almost make out the tell-tale warble of a waterfall. Jack didn’t pay it much mind—he didn’t care to understand how his consciousness was unearthing these sounds. If he had, the mystery that presently buoyed him would have proved identical to his queries as a child, when, on summer evenings, he leaned out the window of his little room to peer into the dark, where dogs were barking and the river, sighing, traced its path toward the falls, when the leaves quivered, moved by the wind or roused by giant insects. These were the tragic and enchanting oddities that came to him in the night while the rest of his family slept.

      What’s there to say of Day 5? On Day 5 Jack Kerouac had an epiphany. He remembered when, at the age of six, he spent entire afternoons playing tennis against the side of the house. One time the ball took an unexpected bounce and skittered away. Rather than run after it to ensure it didn’t get lost in the bushes, he let it go. He imagined he was that abandoned ball and rolled along with it in his mind until it disappeared from sight. Then he was left motionless with the racket in one hand and an expression of confusion on his face that was, quite frankly, unusual for a child of six. You might simplify it by saying he was bewildered for a moment, but essentially he had lost himself. His name, his age, where he lived, what little he knew of the world, all of it had suddenly vanished, and for the few moments this sensation lasted, Jack floated in the Void. Nothing special: in the same way, children sometimes learn they have been brought into the world to know solitude. In the majority of cases, such a moment is simply a flash of insight the child is destined never to revisit, fading sweetly away just as the memory of his infancy fades away. But for Jack it was different—he remained entranced. Every time he saw something spherical come across his path, Jack lost track of himself. The heavy balls rolling down bowling lanes, baseballs taking flight off the bat, soccer balls skimming over the grass, billiard balls whishing off the cue and clocking into one another, basketballs swooshing through the hoop from above, little golf balls flung over turf in the search of improbable black holes: they were all mysterious signs, and Jack deluded himself that through studying their trajectories they would reveal some sort of solution, or, at the very least, a direction for him to follow. A scale model—albeit partial—of the universe composed of basket-Stars, baseball-planets and billiard-satellites rolling and rebounding in a hopeless attempt to escape gravitational attraction. A universe that was, in the end, quite similar to that in which satellites spun around planets and planets around the Stars. Ah, the Stars!—which instead thought only of pushing themselves away. Hadn’t it ever occurred to him—to Jack, that maybe the playing fields might very well represent Space, while sports with their arbitrary, if not bizarre, rules were all-too-similar to those two laws of Physics which disallow all hope?