It is finished. It is over. It is finally done.

Ron Whitehead is finally off his rocker.

For years he’s been tapping his own phone, publishing books, scattering poems, rocking in a rocking chair, organizing readings and music and onslaughts of literature. For years he’s been rocking. For years he has been a one-man literary movement circling the globe and taking no prisoners. He’s been rocking in the free world and rocking in Kentucky. I’ve written about his writing for a long time now and it always surprises, shakes, rocks. I once called him a “rock poet.” I once called him a “non-violent fighter looking for a fight.” I was wrong on both accounts.

He’s not a “rock poet.” He’s a poet who rocks. He’s not a “non-violent fighter looking for a fight” because he has found his fight. He has always known the fight, the struggle, the arena of combat. His fight is in a place called America. Whitehead is our post-Beat Theseus working his way through the labyrinth of America; in one hand he holds the flaming sword of poetry and in the other the old Beat ball of yarn leading him back to his roots, his words, his Kentucky. The monster is in the maze and Whitehead is tracking him down, spinning out Beat yarn, singing America.

Whitehead’s fight has been personal and his combat has rocked. This rocking began early. This rocking began during his childhood in Kentucky. It began with music and poetry and his father reciting “The Song of Hiawatha”:

I’ve seen TV and movie westerns but “Hiawatha”
helps me look deeper into what I imagine the Indians
to look like. Why are they called Indians I wonder.
What are they really like? This is a special moment
here now listening to Daddy tell the poem, seeing
everyone pay close attention listening to the story.
I’m waking up to a new mystery. To many mysteries.
I want to know about the lives of these strange
people everyone calls Indians. Why do I feel close
to them?

Barber, handsome, coon hunter, daring, entertainer,
recording star, played guitar, ukelele, drums,
piano, tap dancer, artist, he had a painting in
barber shop, he sang in womanless wedding dressed
like woman, great gardener, inventor, builder,
built our home and cafe, liked to dress up at
Halloween, always won, compted in school fairs,
races, always won, a man bet him to run from Crow
Nose to Centertown with him, Daddy won, Linda
watched, had a recording machine in our home, Moma
on part of record, worked at Jeffersonville
shipyard, right across river from Louisville,
during WWII, heavy equipment operator, Remember
when he climbed a cliff in Jefferson County getting
mistletoe, on his deathbed Daddy said “go to
Church for me.”

Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus has Dublin, and Whitehead’s Bone has Ohio County, Kentucky, the place he calls, following Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, “the omphalos, the navel of the world.” Ohio County is not the omphalos for us all, but it is for Bone. Bone’s gods include God, Elvis, and the other two parts of the Holy Rock Trinity: “but I’m jumping ahead cause for our generation Bob Dylan and the Beatles did it too.” Bone’s world is a place of hard work in coal mines and poor people and Holy Rollers. And the Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon.

There is another contest in Book Two. Bone’s evolution from kid poet to the poet who rocks continues. Bone’s consciousness is torn open by prose, prose poems, songs, stories, myths, poems. However, another character, shadowy, appears to challenge, upset Bone’s growth, complicate the simple motion of the Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon. His name is Brain and he is Bone’s hyper-intellectual “invisible brother,” the brainy side with the shadow mind. Brain is the force moving Bone out of Kentucky, away from the marathon, into far-off places like Dublin:

Like a lantern run low of oil the sun casts its
last embers into a multitude of diminutive waves
dancing restlessly cross the River Liffey. From
the center of the arched bridge I watch the dance
of Dublin slow, falter, change rhythm as the
embered waves sink, the flame finally extinguished.

In Kentucky
my body travels
round the world

Joyce experimented with depicting human consciousness throughout all his work (the spiritually paralyzed Dubliners of the short stories; the evolving consciousness of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait; the clash of interieor monologues, modernist styles, and novelistic excesses in Ulysses; and the consciousness of everybody in Finnegans Wake [“Turning up and fingering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the dark”]. Joyce pointed toward a new fiction, a new world. Modernist experimenters from Pound and Eliot to Sergei Eisenstein and Jackson Pollock were influenced by him. The Beats saw in Joyce a model of artistic integrity as well as an example of radical art. Kerouac’s “true novels” employed what he called “Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog.” Whitehead tells the “true story” of his world, his American omphalos with each rock of the chair, each poem, each fascinating glimpse into his life and work. He is exploring the last great unknown American frontier.

The rocking chair contest is over. Whitehead will keep rocking just as rock and roll and Beat culture will keep rocking the world. It is almost a year since September 11th as I write this. Burroughs consistently warned us of the coming of the Ugly Spirit; Whitehead wrestles with it:

What world have we born ourselves into?

Are there wicked evil spirit forces demon
expressions trying to bedevil and conquer us?

Why have we murdered over 100 million in one
century? What is immortality? Does anything matter?

What world we have born ourselves into.

John Rocco
Queens, August 2002

James Joyce scholar Dr. John Rocco, NYC, teaches English at SUNY Maritime. His books include The Doors Companion, The Nirvana Companion, The Beastie Boys Companion, The Grateful Dead Companion, and a forthcoming book on James Joyce, all Schirmer Books. He is a reviewer for American Book Review and many music publications.