Burley Coulter's song to Kate Helen Branch (possibly from the night Danny was conceived, as suggested by Laurie Lewis)...
Burley Coulter was the most (or only) "mad" member of the Port William Membership. He and Jack Kerouac may have understood one another, maybe even tolerated each other, at least under the influence. But I don't know that Kerouac and Burley would have agreed about what it means to be apart of a membership, and be responsible to it. and i wonder if Wendell Berry wasn't conscience of that in his development of Burley.
and for many of us that read Berry's novels about Port William, we also tend to identify with and think well of Burley, even in his most rebellious phases in life. We like the contrary way of being. and his rebel nature is of some comfort in "Nathan Coulter", which remains my favorite novel thus far, because of the overt dysfunctional, vulnerable nature of the Coulter family and farm during the Depression. Despite the grief and abusive nature of the relationships between the Coulters, they remained.
Kerouac, like Burley Coulter, had only one child in his lifetime. Kerouac's wife was pregnant when they got divorced. He refused to acknowledge that the child was his, until a blood test confirmed it, nine years later. she only met him a couple of times...according to wikipedia...
"Jan Kerouac (nee Janet Michelle Kerouac) (February 16, 1952 – June 5, 1996) was a writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac. Jan Kerouac was born in Albany, New York. Her mother left Jack while pregnant, and Jack refused to acknowledge the baby as his daughter. A blood test when Jan was nine years old proved his paternity and he was ordered to pay $52 a week for her upbringing. Though Jan met her father only twice, she inherited his wanderlust, and like both her parents, Jan made frequent use of drugs and was no stranger to trouble. After a teenage stint in a mental hospital, Jan delved deeper into the 1960s underworld of drugs, before leaving for Mexico at the age of fifteen. For the next few decades, she traveled across the country with a reckless abandon that echoed that of her father and Neal Cassady. Married and divorced twice, Jan lived a troubled life marked by periods of self-destruction. In 1968, she gave birth to a stillborn child and had no other children."
Burley and Kate Helen Branch were never married (depending on your definition), and were described by Berry as "careless lovers", who were apparently extra careless on the night of Danny's conception. but unlike Jan Kerouac, Danny Branch "did not go fatherless, for Burley was that [Branch] household's faithful visitor, its pillar and provider. He took a hand in Danny's upbringing from the start, although, since the boy was nominally a Branch, Danny always knew his father as 'Uncle Burley'."
and in the way that Jan shared her father's reckless abandon, Burley's way of being had also been passed down. "Danny never had belonged much to the modern world, and every year he appeared to belong to it less. Of them all, Danny most clearly saw the world as his enemy - as their enemy - and most forthrightly and cheerfully repudiated it. He reserved his allegiance to his friends and his place."
i guess that this dichotomy of sorts, serves the symbolic purpose of exposing both the distorted perspective on freedom (freedom from responsibility, obligation, tradition, and history - a kind of exploitation - unreconciled to anything) as opposed to a reconciled view of freedom, that gives meaning to our responsibilities, that gives us the opportunity to love God and neighbor. while i don't believe it to be overtly black and white, i do know that our obsession with freedom (whether patriotic or beatnik or progressive or spiritual or whatever) is rarely defined in a concrete way that we can actually stand on it, and understand it. and generally, i assume, when we think of freedom, we don't think of responsibility, and we don't think of reconciliation.
but we are not free when we conquer our enemy - we are free only when we love our enemy.
this notion of freedom (without responsibility) eternally perpetuates the relational holocaust - and is certainly no kind of freedom at all - it is actually a kind of solitary confinement, a kind of hell, that must be violently defended if it is to be sustained.
so...who and what are we responsible for? to what membership do we belong? where does our allegiance stand? who and what do you need to be reconciled with?
and on your last day, who will save you from life support?
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