Neal Cassady's Hammer

As some of you may know, I've spent a number of years now reading up on Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty, aka Cody Pomeray, aka Hart Kennedy, Speed Limit, Houlihan, the Holy Goof, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about his trope, in later years, of carrying around a small sledgehammer which he would flip, toss, and juggle. It became his signature trick, and he was rarely seen without it.

Ken Kesey mentions Neal on one occasion hooking down speed in an quiet parking lot and, while the rest of his crew are busy elsewhere, carrying on a faux-sportscast event, hammer careening through the air. "How's that for reflexes? One-thirtieth of a second, maybe less! Champion sinews and synapses... One, two, three... he's well on his way to breaking the record! Is this boy never satisfied? No applause, please-- it's an act of devotion..." and so on and so on. John Barlow, sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, talked about how Cassady would listen to jazz on headphones late into the night, stripped to the waist, pouring sweat, while the hammer became a "lethal blur" flying around him. And of course Thomas Wolfe mentions it when he first meets Cassady in an abandoned building in San Francisco where the Merry Pranksters were holed up.

Anyway, what's my point? Well, it's that everyone seemed to have their own take on it. Prankster Ken Babbs said he thought at first that Cassady was just dicking around, but then realized he was using it the way a juggler or an athlete would-- to stay "trim, alert, ready". Kesey, who expounded to the Pranksters the idea of being separated from the real world by a 1/30th-of-a-second lag in the senses, used Cassady's hammer-tossing as a way to continually test one's reflexes, to see how much time one could shave off the lag. (He also said that when Cassady missed the catch-- kerblamm, the hammer would hit the floor-- it wasn't an accident, that Cassady was attuned to some emergent bad vibes and was trying to break them up). John Allen Cassady, his son, said that Neal loved flipping pencils or sticks for his and his kids' entertainment, seeing how many times he could catch them in a row before missing and starting over at "one". (He also notes that, given Neal's legendary consumption of amphetamines towards the end of his life, he probably had to have something on hand to play with to keep his revved-up limbs busy).

I think they're all valid. It was just something that Neal did, that you could read into any way you liked. This seems to be the teaching method that catches on the fastest and endures the longest. Action-- praxis-- was Neal's real legacy. He didn't really write much down, but yet he was absolutely inspirational for two separate cultural movements, because of what and who he was, and what he did. He was an unassailable fact in the vivacity of his existence, and people latched on to it, and read from it, and formulated what they needed from it. This holds true today. You can read messages, I am almost completely convinced, in the patterns of clouds, in the conversations of strangers, in the patterns of rubbish on the street-- if you want to. Any goddamn thing we encounter has a message, a story, and a lesson. Our existence is a book of greatest subtlety with, I would imagine, roughly six billion different interpretations, and more being added all the time.