Doctor Sax and the Metaphysical Geography of Lowell
Daniel Barbiero
July 2021
The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience. Of this,
A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet —
Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Metaphysical Geography
Every place is, in effect, two places: the physical place of natural and artificial features, and the metaphysical place. The physical place is the place as grasped in Stevens’ “eye’s plain version”: the things in front of us, the surfaces that meet the eye. The metaphysical place is the place as we exist in it, the place qualified by the “and yet, and yet” of our preoccupations and the variously colored lenses of our emotional states. If the physical place is the given of an external world that transcends us, then the metaphysical place is a complex of responses that transcend the brute fact of physical location. In a sense, the metaphysical landscape is a landscape pervaded by a particular atmosphere, a landscape colored by mood.
(“Metaphysics” can be a notoriously protean term. But here it simply means the deeper, non-apparent reality—the real reality beyond the eye’s plain version. Which is to say, the reality as discerned by what we might call the metaphysical eye: the deeper reality to be found in the structures of meaning underlying the plain real. These structures in turn consist of what Ortega y Gasset termed “affective preferences”—the relative pull things have on us when measured against the projects and pursuits that throw us out into the world to begin with. This reality of meanings is the reality of value, rooted in concrete, lived experience, as it transcends the empirical fact.)
To the metaphysical eye, the existence of something is more than what sensual experience discloses; the material fact may be a starting point and an essential one at that, but by itself it doesn’t exhaust reality as it is for us. There is instead, as in Stevens’ poem, a dynamic opposition between the plain town and the metaphysical town. The latter is the town as we reveal it through the preoccupations and projects that touch on it as we pass through. They rub off on it and leave something of themselves on it, an encrusted layer of meaning we retrieve or re-experience through recollection or revisitation. Consequently, the metaphysical world is the world shot through with meaning, the world as signifying, as the site and occasion of a network of significations. The metaphysical world is thus grounded in the way we experience the world that goes beyond the sensual, beyond the plain fact of the matter.
Metaphysical geography maps the metaphysical world. It is above all an interpretive map, a semi-transparent overlay whose key inventories and describes the affective features rather than the physical features of the place. Through the metaphysical geography we map onto a place we reimagine the physical location as a locus of meaning. A metaphysical geography isn’t simply a matter of an internal world separate from and contrasting with the external world; instead, the territory mapped by the metaphysical geography is one that bridges the divide between the external world of things and the internal world of thought and emotion. In a way, a metaphysical geography shows us where we always already are: outside of ourselves and engaged in a world that subsumes us as we subsume it, and thereby matters to us. In fact it is a map of the world as a world—not a collection of inert matter, but rather our world, a place made intelligible through interpretation and organized according to our beliefs and desires, our possibilities and capacities, our senses of fulfillment and disappointment. To that extent, the metaphysical geography stands between two different ontological orders, one of which concerns the place as it exists and the other the place as we exist in it. The former is the being of things, the latter is something particular to human being.
The relationship of the physical landscape to the metaphysical landscape is a complex one. The latter doesn’t supplant the former so much as it supplements it, extends it rather than substitutes for it. To the metaphysical eye, the brute fact of place isn’t the end of the story but rather the beginning of it—the brute fact of place is a provocation, a gambit eliciting a response that consists in a shift in perspective, a shift that reveals the plain place as the metaphysical place.
Beyond the Plain Town
Jack Kerouac’s novel Doctor Sax plots the metaphysical geography of Lowell, Massachusetts. Metaphysical Lowell is Lowell as Kerouac experienced it as a child and adolescent. Even allowing for the degree of fictionalization involved, Doctor Sax is, at one level, an impressive feat of recreating a time and place. Throughout the book, Kerouac is able to convey the textures of life in 1930s Lowell, at least in part through his recollection and description of the physical geography of the city and its immediate surroundings. The latter serves as a kind of cantus firmus over which the story is improvised; Kerouac’s metaphysical geography overlays physical geography like a semi-opaque transparency placed over a map of basic terrain. The metaphysical superstructure presupposes the earthy facts underlying and supporting it and shows how the metaphysical eye sees beyond the plain town to something deeper and of its own. As Kerouac understood, for meaning to attach to things we need to know something of those things. For Kerouac, this knowledge consists in a sense of the specifics of place—of the eye’s plain version as inventoried in exact locations and appearances.
But beyond his ability to remember the facts on the ground as realistically as possible, Kerouac saw himself as a metaphysical writer in the sense introduced here. As Gerald Nicosia notes in Memory Babe, Kerouac described his aim as a writer as trying to convey a “deepening of the facts that appear on the face of reality” (Memory Babe page 274; emphasis Kerouac’s). In “The Minimization of Thomas Wolfe in His Own Time,” a paper he wrote for Elbert Lenow’s class on the modern novel at the New School for Social Research, Kerouac contrasted the intellectual with the metaphysical writer. Kerouac clearly identified with the latter, whom he described as pursuing “the furthest possible reach of an idea, or image, the most basic, simple, possible way of evoking this feeling on the edge of the relative meaning” (Memory Babe page 263). It is exactly a “feeling on the edge of relative meaning” that gives a physical place the overtones that make it properly metaphysical for the person in communication with those feelings. And it is largely through feelings of that type that Kerouac renders his memories of Lowell.
The action in Doctor Sax takes place in various places in Lowell that the protagonist, Kerouac’s fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz frequented—on the fields and woods he haunted alone or with his friends; in and around the St. Louis de France church and school; in the replica of the grotto of Lourdes by the orphanage at Pawtucket and School Streets; along the Merrimack River and the Moody Street Bridge, where he witnessed the death of the man with the watermelon. This is the gritty Lowell of the 1930s and 1940s—an industrial town of textile mills, sandlots, dreary parochial schools and dark churches—the physical plant both supporting and weighing down on the working class Franco-Canadian-American community that the young Kerouac was a part of. Through the voice of Duluoz, Kerouac’s imagination and memory transform this physical plant into what are in effect metaphysical landmarks: places and objects that serve as nodes in a network of signification.
Doctor Sax is largely the remembered record of how the young Kerouac was actively engaged in laying out a metaphysical geography, one created in the service of a personal mythology centered on the figure of the mysterious Doctor Sax. Thus the mythology Kerouac knits together consists in a recreation of his childhood imaginings of a battle between good and evil in which the ghostlike figure of Dr. Sax, in his black cape (almost always described as a “shroud”) and slouch hat, attempts to destroy the Great World Snake that lives beneath a castle on a hill. Consequently, Kerouac’s metaphysical landscape is formed by the mythology of late childhood and its propensity to see mysteries—whether through the desire to see them or through a lack of the experience that would dispel them. Mystery transforms the plain reality of Lowell: a large house on a hill become a castle that serves as a meeting place for the plottings of Count Condu and his retinue; the forlorn figure of Jean Fourchette, a hapless local, becomes Dr. Sax’s secret assistant.
The characters and action populating Kerouac’s fantasies would be vaguely familiar to someone raised on the interwar popular culture of radio shows and pulp magazines—in effect, Duluoz’s Lowell is Lowell as transposed to the minor key of the radio play and pulp fiction hero The Shadow, whom Sax resembles. But Duluoz/Kerouac transforms this prêt-à-porter character into something that could only exist in the milieu of what Kerouac describes as his “early Catholic childhood in Centralville—deaths, funerals, the shroud of that.” Kerouac’s Lowell is inhabited by the dead and dying—by aspiring ghosts whose surroundings are painted in the morbid hues of a certain variety of vernacular Catholicism. This is the underlayer of Kerouac’s mythologizing—the metaphysics beneath the metaphysics. In this environment the vigilante crime fighter of the pulps becomes the existentially-fraught embodiment of mystery—perhaps of the ultimate mystery—as he takes his place as “the dark figure in the corner” keeping vigil with the deceased. And thus becomes Doctor Sax.
The River & the Snake
A metaphysical geography comprises places and features of significance: these places and features serve as metaphysical landmarks. Metaphysical landmarks blend the ostensibly objective with the ostensibly subjective. They provoke associations in us and these associations become their meaning, become a part of them in a sense. The dividing line between what they are and what we take them to be is hazy and porous. They may precipitate a response from memory, as when an object or place triggers an involuntary memory; they may arise by virtue of the emotional intensity attached to an event or person; conversely, they may result from the retrospective realization that a place or event thought at the time to be insignificant was in fact of importance, as subsequent developments made clear. No matter how the associative link is formed, these landmarks serve as signs through which we read our own meanings—reflected back to us. The landmark thus takes on an emblematic significance—an otherwise empty vessel now containing something it serves to remind us that we put there. In Doctor Sax one such landmark in particular stands out: the Merrimack River.
The Merrimack River runs through Lowell and provided the power for the city’s textile mills. To the objective eye the river is of undoubted local importance, but Kerouac/Duluoz’s metaphysical eye inflates it into “a mighty Napo of continental importance.” The river not only powered the mills, but was the scene of drownings both accidental and suicidal; it was a generator of death as well as industrial power. As such, it fed the morbid emotional economy of Kerouac’s imagination.
One of the central events in the story is the coming to Lowell of the Great New England Flood of March 1936. It was an event that had a profound effect on Kerouac in real life: the flood destroyed his father’s printshop, as in the novel it destroys Duluoz’s father’s printshop; it was a loss which sent the father and the family into a downward spiral. Kerouac/Duluoz describes the engorged Merrimack River and its effects on the town—destroying property and mesmerizing the citizens as they watch from several vantage points, all of which Kerouac carefully and precisely locates. Lurking about throughout is Sax. Like a harbinger of some fateful occurrence, Sax opens the scene, watching the swollen river from a ledge. Sax’s presence crystallizes the metaphysical significance of the flood; he reads it as an omen announcing a mysterious “day of the Great Spider” and is prompted to return to his shack in the woods after searching for “spider-juices and bat powders”—the elements of the secret concoctions he will use in his attempt to defeat the Great World Snake. Later, we find Sax rowing along the river and being met by another portentous sign: a dove descending toward him, which he pockets as he boats toward the castle. Unknown to him, the dove prefigures the bird that ultimately will defeat the snake when Sax’s own potions fail.
If the river’s flooding brings the portent of Dr. Sax’s fateful reckoning with the Great World Snake it is at least in part because the river and the snake are somehow akin, like two terms indicating the same referent under different descriptions. It is a referent we can approach and anticipate but never can experience, because in its personalized form, it lies beyond experience. That referent is the impending nothingness of non-existence.
For the Great World Snake, like the Merrimack River, embodies the presence of death. Kerouac/Duluoz is in fact haunted by the snake as he is haunted by death; in an exchange of signs within Kerouac/Duluoz’s economy of meanings, the one becomes the emblem of the other. The Great World Snake is death as is the Merrimack, the latter winding snakelike through this city of shrines and rituals meant to address and somehow mitigate the realization of the inevitable—and thus to give it its due. As Nicosia suggests, the Snake, which moves toward its apocalyptic confrontation with humanity at the rate of one inch per hour, marks time like a clock marks time, counting off a limited number of hours. Time presents death as the necessary, approaching inevitability that haunts the future; through the consciousness of time and the way it relentlessly projects us into a finite future, death makes itself known to a being conscious of the possibility of non-being as its own given possibility, as something to be met in its own future. The snake curled up within the hill is the equivalent of the prospect of non-being secreted at the heart of being, hidden since the appearance of humanity but latent and waiting for its moment. (Kerouac/Duluoz describes it as “the ancient Snake that has been growing in the world-ball like a worm in the apple since Adam and Eve” (Doctor Sax, page 195).) In destroying the Snake, Sax would in effect destroy Time (Memory Babe, page 404).
The Metaphysics of Memory
Although Kerouac’s late childhood-early adolescent imagination was the crucible in which Doctor Sax’s Lowell was formed, it was through his memory that that metaphysical Lowell was brought back to life. Kerouac’s metaphysical geography was mapped in the retrospective light of memory: Places as known through the recollection of events or particular occasions experienced in the past. Memory is something akin to a tutelary deity for Kerouac/Duluoz.
Kerouac’s summoning of his memories of his Dr. Sax fantasy is akin to the ancient Greek poets invoking Mnemosyne, mother of the muses and embodiment of memory in its creative and recollective aspects. Through her intercession the poet hopes to recover what Jean-Pierre Vernant called the “primordial memory…of the original realities” (Myth and Reality, page 120) in which the past is grasped as the source of the present. For Kerouac/Duluoz these original realities don’t consist in the more universal realities of cosmogony or divine creation story, but rather in the realities disclosed by the anamnesis, or un-forgetting, of one’s past existence, similar to what was claimed by Empedocles regarding his supposed past incarnations. Through un-forgetting, patterns that signify the truth of a life would be revealed. By delving into his own past, Kerouac recovers the metaphysical Lowell and recognizes it as the source of his present—its storehouse of images and signs which point forward to a future for which they serve as touchstone and point of reference.
For Plato, anamnesis meant the recovery not of one’s own past but of the Ideas—universal truths one was brought to know in between lives. Like Plato’s anamnesis, Kerouac/Duluoz’s anamnesis involves the recovering of truths lost over time, but in contrast to the Platonic recovery of the universal Idea, Kerouac/Duluoz’s un-forgetting is directed toward the microcosm contained in an individual life. There is a truth to be recovered, but it consists in meanings latent in the particular experiences of the person, and their development through time. Memory functions in this regard as an imaginative un-forgetting that throws a light—sometimes dim, sometimes not–across an open field in a search for that lost thing or event that will somehow explain exactly how it is that we got here.
With its ability to link the past to the present and to foreshadow the future, memory embodies, in a particularly heightened way, one concrete experience of human temporality—the temporality of constantly transcending into a future that on the basis of a past that one no longer is. In essence the past is a nothingness, but it attains an afterlife in memory, which is to say, in imagination. Through memory the past becomes an image of itself, and one that signifies the essential limits of experience. By gathering in an image of the closed set of determinations that led up to the present and on the (only) basis of which I project myself into the future, memory, just as much as the understanding that somewhere in the future lies the non-transcendable limit to my existence, brings home the truth of my finitude. The past is a limit in that it consists in a finite set of events which, while making the future possible, limit that future by reducing the possibilities open to it to what is really, concretely possible. Memory is a reminder—literally—that that is so.
It may seem odd that we should look for the skeleton key to ourselves—dynamic projections into an undecided future—in the past. But it’s odd only if the past wasn’t itself a dynamic remaking of itself in light of that future. In a sense, the past has yet to be decided and in some ways remains as open as the future—because its meaning depends on the future. The future, in a sense, selects the past; in projecting myself into the future, I anticipate the meaning of my past. The paradox is that both of these crucial states—the past, which is no longer, and the future, which is not yet—are not. Which just leads to a paradox. The non-being of the future—the non-being of not-yet-being—and the non-being of the past—the non-being of the no-longer-being—are secreted at the heart of the constantly-vanishing present that we ostensibly inhabit. Both shades of non-being inform our experience of the world; it is through these kinds of non-being, alone and together, that the being of the present derives its meaning. Being, in other words, borrows its significance from non-being.
An Image of Continuity
When constructed from memory, as it is in Doctor Sax, a metaphysical geography is a map of loss, of what a place no longer has or of what a community no longer is—its customs lost, the reasons behind its holidays forgotten, its everyday traditions neglected. All of these things taken together make up what Wittgenstein called a “form of life”—the accumulation of local experiences that takes the form of habits and shared observances of a group of people. At a personal level, the recollected event has the kind of resonance that helps to burn it into memory in the first place. But at a less personal level, the remembered event stands for something else, for a world that has vanished.
If the metaphysical geography of memory consists in the recovery of the place as known through the recollection of events one has experienced in the past, the metaphysical geography of nostalgia is the place as reconceived or hypothetically re-experienced through a notion of what it was, or what it must have been. This is not necessarily an idealization, though arguably much nostalgia does involve that. Kerouac’s Lowell, as death-haunted and gritty as it is, isn’t idealized. Instead, the Lowell Kerouac conjures in Doctor Sax is a fantastic image of the city—quite literally, in that the Lowell of Doctor Sax is the Lowell of the younger Kerouac’s fantasies of a town caught in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Thus Kerouac’s nostalgia in Doctor Sax consists in a recursive reimagining of a world that originally was imaginary to begin with. And it is through this recursive reimagining that Kerouac, as a mature storyteller, in recovering the metaphysical town of his younger self’s fantasies, reveals the affective and imaginative continuity that, as a tone or shading of memory, is essential to nostalgia. For nostalgia depends in large part on the present recovery or re-experience of an affective state associated with the past; the sensation of nostalgia is the sensation of recognition—of grasping oneself in the affect-laden image of a no-longer existing world.
There may be something inevitable in this way of grasping oneself—a way that informed not only Doctor Sax but much else of Kerouac’s body of work. It became a dominant theme in his later life, to judge from the recollections of those who knew him—“The Great Rememberer,” as Allen Ginsberg called him. What makes it inevitable is that the kind of affective and imaginative continuity with the past that is both the force behind and the rediscovered truth within the recollected Lowell in Doctor Sax –the motivation behind the novel’s mapping of Kerouac’s metaphysical geography—represents one way of confronting the basic fact of human temporality, for which non-being is the predominant mode of being. From the vanishing point of the present we have to realize ourselves in the future, at some specified time and under circumstances we can’t wholly predict or make arrangements for; our past is, at least prior to any real consideration, a finished state in which, to the extent that we fulfilled, failed at or simply abandoned whatever project brought us to that point, what we had to be and what we became met in a coincidence of identity—an identity that no longer is. All three hypostases of time—past, present and future—are, from the point of view of experience, pervaded by a nullity. In unforgetting the past we attempt to fill that nullity; the presence of the past, as the image of continuity, is thus one way of grappling with the absence of being that is the experience of time. What Kerouac seems to have understood is that the past—as the image of continuity—anchors the experience of time not only as a way to fill the lacuna of the present, but as the locus of the meaning of a life. With its nostalgic recreation of Kerouac’s early inner life, Doctor Sax embodies this insight in dramatic form. Thus the importance of the unforgetting of the consistent weave that connects the imaginative life of the young Kerouac to the older writer.
The Truth of the Past
To the extent that it entails a looking back to the past in light of the present, nostalgia is one way of grasping for oneself that human time is dynamic, a vanishing present rushing into a future that it has to be, while bringing along with it a past ultimately recognizable in the meanings it holds for both present and future. It is this imaginative unforgetting of the meaning of the past that nostalgia, when properly understood, emphasizes. Through this understanding the past is qualified as the non-binding frame of reference for the present and the ground of possibility for the future. (In its spurious or morbid form, nostalgia denies the present and future by drawing one back to something that isn’t. To the extent that it idealizes something that never really was, morbid nostalgia forecloses possibility by blocking the imaginative opening to the future that possibility requires.)
Nostalgic time is akin to cosmic time to the extent that both are retrospective types of counterfactual time, or time as-if—time as if the past could be retrieved, as if present events recapture and repeat some primordial example—as if time ran in cycles to be re-experienced rather than in one direction ending in dissolution and the nothingness of non-existence. In contrast to cosmic time, existential time is the time of a finite, self-conscious being moving relentlessly into an undetermined future illuminated by a past that is no more.
The truth of nostalgia lies in the void that opens up by way of the unavoidable discrepancy between the memory and the—actual, real—reality of the thing remembered. It is a discrepancy between a phantom presence and a real absence, which is to say, between two varieties of non-being, the one consisting in the nothingness of the image (as opposed to the reality it purports to represent), and the other in the no-longer-being of the vanished past. In Doctor Sax this discrepancy is made powerfully explicit in the hallucinatory descriptions of places, people and events. Even the prose, with its run-on sentences, phonetically-rendered transcriptions of speech and uncanny meetings of nouns and adjectives, foregrounds the unreality—unreal in an empirical sense, that is—of the recollected Lowell in its guise as the metaphysical town of the young Kerouac’s fantasies.
But in the absence of the thing recollected there is no objective correlate, no external criteria, against which to measure, confirm or refute the memory of it; at most one can compare one’s own memories against others’ memories. But there again, the absence of the object is the unavoidable fact of the matter. The meaning of the past as it is unforgotten in nostalgia, in other words, consists in a mode of being that is completely dependent on the non-being of its object, so much so that one might even say that there is no fact of the matter, strictly speaking. There is only an affective reflection of ourselves that returns to us through an imaginative act of unforgetting.
Works Cited:
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)
Jack Kerouac, Doctor Sax (London UK: Harper Perennial, 2006)
Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (London UK: Penguin, 1986)
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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases include Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass, Non-places & Wooden Mirrors with Cristiano Bocci and In/Completion a collection of verbal and graphic scores by composers from North America, Europe and Japan, realized for solo double bass and prepared double bass.
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Daniel Barbiero’s book As Within So Without & other essays will be coming out soon on Arteidolia Press.
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