“Permanent Scars” is the fourth essay to be published or accepted for publication from a longer in-process project called Paradise Revisited, in which I filter the world and my own life through the lens of my reading and rereading of Jack Kerouac’s work. It is, at times, memoir, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and reporting.
Permanent Scars
I left the cabinet door open again. Packages of napkins, paper plates, a box of pop corn. Straws. Plastic cups. Paper towels. All visible.
The cabinet: Blond beechwood, pinkish as the sun sneaks in through the bay window. Like the virus. Like all the amassed threats. This virus. The Red Skull. The Skrulls. The Great World Snake. This virus wears a crown. Wears it as a garland of fear.
A crowned virus that morphs and moves. Poisonous. A changeling. Golem. A wreath of thorns. It is a tail of “the big snake of the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple … devouring as it went along.”[i] Ultimately killing almost 7 million around the globe.
Read the full essay in Adelaide.
Other essays:
“Woman on the Margins in the Kerouac Legend” in Beatdom no. 22, the Kerouac centenary edition
“As I Learn from You” in TaintTaintTaint
“The Ghost of the Susquehanna / Ghosts Along the Metedeconk” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Evergreen Review.