Category: Kerouac and Friends

The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of ‘Beat’

Many thanks to that indefatigable argonaut of the cybersphere, Dave Lull, for bringing Lee Siegel's The Beat Generation and the Tea Party to my attention.  An auspicious find in this fine October, Kerouac month hereabouts.  If I wanted to be unkind I would say that the article proves that anything can be compared to anything.  But he does make some good points.  Excerpt:

Still, American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking, suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on the political spectrum dissent takes place. Surely just about every Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the liberal media: “Are you going to let our emotional life,” he once wrote, “be run by Time magazine?”

More seriously, the origin of the word “beat” has a connection to the Tea Partiers’ sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be “beat” most basically signified “exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out . . . rejected by society.” Barack Obama meant much the same thing when, during the presidential primaries, he notoriously said that “in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government.” That he went on to characterize such people as “bitter” souls who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” only strengthened the anxiety among proto-Tea Partiers that they were about to be “rejected by society.”

Here some serious qualifications are in order.  Although 'beat' does have the connotation of 'beaten down' and 'exhausted,' this meaning is strictly secondary when compared to the term's fundamental meaning which is in the semantic vicinity of 'beatific,' 'beatitude,' The Eight Beatitudes, and the Beatific Vision (visio beata) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  Kerouac cannot be understood apart from his Catholic upbringing.  If we take Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) of On the Road as the main exemplars of beatness, there is nothing of the cool, jaded beatnik about them (the latter term an invention of the liberal media modeled on 'sputnik.')  They are not cool, but hot, 'mad,' joyously affirmative.  Every Kerouac aficionado thrills to the passage near the beginning of On the Road where Sal confesses: ". . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . ." (p. 9)

The very name 'Sal Paradise' is a tip-off.  Salvatore, Salvator: savior.  Paradise: the prelapsarian state, the state before the lapsus or Fall, or else heaven.  Is there any book of his where our bourbon-besotted boy does not talk of heaven? It's all about salvation, happiness, heaven.  In part this is why he distances himself from Buddhism whose solution to suffering is merely negative: 

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

And then there is the later OTR passage in which the 'beat' is explained:

. . . his [Dean's] bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins saying, "Yes, yes, yes, " as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now . . . . He was BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific. (OTR, 161)

See also this Kerouac  interview for confirmation.  This was two years before his death.

Siegel's piece, then, is quite a stretch, but very interesting nonetheless.  But it is annoying when he quotes Ginsberg but provides no reference.  

Kerouac October Quotation #8 The Detritus of Literary Production

Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966), p. 35:

The whole library groaned with the accumulated debris of centures of recorded folly, as tho you had to record folly in the Old or the New World anyhow, like my closet with its incredible debris of cluttered old letters by the thousands, books, dust, magazines, childhood boxscores, the likes of which when I woke up the other night from a pure sleep, made me groan to think this is what I was doing with my waking hours: burdening myself with junk neither I nor anybody else should really want or will ever remember in Heaven.

Hits a nerve.  I also note the incongruity of a book ostensibly about satori mentioning heaven.  My longstanding sentimental attachment to the old dharma lush makes me overlook his silly misuse of 'satori' to refer to his inebriated Parisian experiences.

Kerouac October Quotation #6: Slim Gaillard, the Man Who Knew Time

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. 

From On the Road:

 … one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above.  While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip.  Go, man, go!  (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

 

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.

Kerouac October Quotation #4: Resolutions Made and Broken

Sweet gone Jack made such an effort to be a good boy, but failed so utterly as to break one's heart.  Here is a Some of the Dharma entry (p. 127) written sometime between July and October 1954, before success and fame and alcohol undid him:

RESOLVED

One meal a day

No drinking of intoxicants

No maintaining of friendships

That, if I break any of these elementary rules of Buddhism, which have been my biggest obstacles, hindrances t othe attainment of contemplative happiness and joy of will, I will give up Buddhism forever. [He did break them and did give up Buddhism.]

Agreed, that I may finish the literary work I began, by the age of 40, after which my only work is to be in the Dharma Teaching, to be followed  by all cessation of work, striving or mental effort when Nirvana is nigh and signs indicate there is no more to write and teach.

One meal a day means, the mind not to be taunted and tempted by the senses. (Sensation of taste left uncultivated.) No intoxicants means, the heart not to be deranged, beaten in, (as in excessive drinking), nor the brain hystericalized and over-filled with anxious drug-thoughts and irrelevant images.  No maintaining of friendships means, no relations whatever to contaminate the good of contemplation, no pleasure-seeking, no ego-personality activity, no Co-Ignorance.

Quand tu t'ennui souffre . . .

Not drinking  preserves contemplative strength

Eating once a day, contemplative sensitivity

No friends or lusts, contemplative serenity

Strength, Sensitivity, Serenity = Joy

Kerouac October Quotation #3: This World, the Palpable Thought of God

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

 

Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence.

Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.  By 1959, Kerouac was moving away from Buddhism.  On 10 June 1959 he wrote to Philip Whalen:

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

BlogWatch: Anecdotal Evidence

From the masthead: A blog about the intersection of books and life.  By Patrick Kurp, Bellevue, Washington.  Excerpt from a recent post:

I’m reading more than at almost any time in my life but spending less time reading online. The two facts have a common source – a festering impatience with shoddy writing. My literary gut, when young, was goat-like — tough and indiscriminate. I read everything remotely of interest and felt compelled to finish every book I started. This makes sense: Everything was new, and how could I knowledgeably sift wheat from chaff without first milling, baking and ingesting? Literary prejudice, in a healthy reader, intensifies with age. I know and trust my tastes, and no longer need to read William Burroughs to figure out he wrote sadistic trash.

I've read my fair share of Burroughs and I concur that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley  edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us  as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh.  Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture.  But Ciardi?  I'll bet you've never heard of him __ until now.