entered into through his ecstatic trance. Allen
Ginsberg details one such instance of these trances
in his auditory hallucination of Blakes voice
reading the poem "ah sunflower", he remarks
feeling "cut-off", this is no doubt an example of a
shamanic state of ecstasy. However, in Kerouac's
work (Mexico City blues, on the road Dharma
bums, The Subterraneans etc…), we see an
attempt to defy the restrictions of existential
temporality itself. This tendency can be
considered yet another shamanic element.
According to Kristeva Kerouac is engaged in a
greater project “a zeal to master time”. Jazz
challenges the dominant position of time, instead
creating its own parameters of temporality. As
George Lipsitz notes music such as jazz enables
the listener “to think of time as a flexible human
creation rather than as an immutable outside
force” (Myrsiades, 2002).
For Merleau-Ponty time exists on a fixed
continuum and to deny this and instead focus on a
past or future or ulterior notion of time, as
Kerouac does in Mexico City blues etc… is an
example of betraying “being-in-itself”. For
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