Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 65
elsewhere in the organisation.
Outings
Organising Group Analysts is like trying to herd cats, snakes or
hummingbirds. You may have gathered that I rather like music so was
determined to go to a Jazz Club whilst in Berlin. Thursday seemed the
best night for those interested, I had sort of advertised this in advance
and knew some people were on board and others wanted to join.
However, finalising and organising with people dropping in and out,
having to book with A-Trane despite not being certain of the numbers,
yet if we didn’t we might not get entry or at least seating, was the most
stressful experience of the Sy, I’d much rather have been organising a
workshop or even giving a lecture (though, thank god, that’s never
going to happen). Still the Thursday outing happened, with 11 GA’s
eventually going.
To describe the experience, I’m going to have to go via San
Francisco or rather Jack Kerouac. Jack and the rest of the Beats loved
Jazz and were fortunate to be able to hear Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie
Parker play at their peak. Jack was so inspired by this he wanted to
write like they improvised. He devised a way of inserting a roll of
paper that he had made up himself into his typewriter so that he
wouldn’t have to stop typing when he got to the end of a page, he
could then write in a way that carried him away like the great jazz
players were with their musical inventions (he would have loved using
a laptop). This sometimes leads to some vivid writing, with notable
phrases and sentiments but lacks structure, and layering. Truman
Capote’s rather cruel comment about him was: “That’s not writing,
that’s typing”.
This method resulted in some interesting, indeed highly
acclaimed, novels On The Road being the most well-known and which,
in fact, made his name and brought him fame even if this was his life’s
tragedy. It was written by 1951 but not published till ’57. Just before
it was, he was in the hills on firewatch, something other Beats, like
Neal Cassady (the ‘hero’ of OTR as Dean Moriarty) had
recommended to him. Though he thought he would enjoy the solitude
and help him write, as it turned out he hated it, found it suffocatingly
lonely and his writing muse disappeared. When he came down from
the mountains OTR had been published, he was internationally famous
and his life effectively ruined as, already a hard drinker, he descended
into alcoholism and an early death at 47. His account of his life just
before fame, The Dharma Bums, is my personal favourite, superior to
OTR, and a testament to his life lived as a courageous American who