A Psychedelic Quest into the Beat Heart

"And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice." - 1 Kings 19:12

Simon Wincester in his book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake,  A Crack in the Center of the World, recounts how the arts and literary scene and the soul of San Francisco didn't revive until the 50's Beats scene came along.

Wincester says that revival efforts did not "bubble up naturally through the cracks in the wrecked pavement" but were organized in a top-down manner by the Chamber and others. Thus, there was "a kind of artifice about it", and "boosterism" to the whole affair.

"Artists generally prefer to work at their pace, with their own instincts, gathering themselves into groups and movements and schools at their own behest. Though there are exceptions, [footnotes to Depression era national projects where artists might have starved; whereas with the SF quake they could simply move away] artists do not care much to create at the whim of officialdom. - Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake

So I'm tripping through Google (aka web surfing) and books and stuff and can't help noticing the wild & historic connections of Bohemian influences, plus mysticism, LSD, art & philosophy & spontaneity linking Henri Murger - the original Bohemian - to Jack Keroauc to Timothy Leary to Steve Jobs to personal computers to today's DIY Web 2.0 hipsters (aka those digital utopians, according to "cultural critic" Andrew Keen).

On someone else's blog (hint above), I wrote that where blogs are "truly helpful is to explore a hypotheses, in other words throw out the experiment's premise, and use the blog to chart the progress and process. Blogs aren't as good for totally final results because they unfold over a length of time - but are wonderful in allowing one to share the process of an experiment in the making, and participate in the discovery itself."

I'm itching to explore and not know where it'll take me. Maybe the bohemian Beats as a touchstone and then we'll groove into the sixties and somehow end up here in 2006.

The Beats were about living life to the hilt, and joy, and deep reverence, and experimentation. They're often mistaked for nihilists rather than mystics, anarchists rather than freedom-lovers. They definitely did not want to become like the Zombies (as Kerouac named them in his first novel) who blithely followed the bleak soul-stifling conventions of the early Cold War era.

There are many reasons that Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Synder, Whalen and the crew were called Beat. Here's how Jack himself looks at it: "Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of these`niks' and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them ), Ste. Jeanne d'Arc in Lowell Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with 'Beat' anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific..."

Adj. 1.  beatific - experiencing or bestowing celestial joy; "beatific peace"

"All I want is as far as life-plans are concerned from here on out, is compassionate, contented solitude - Bhikkuhood is so hard to make in the West - it would have to be some American streamlined Bhikkuhood, because so far all I've done is attract attention," Kerouac wrote in a letter to poet friend Allen Ginsberg.

Wistfully, that's August 1955 months before Howl put them all on the map, and before On the Road (1957) made Kerouac a literary celebrity and poster boy for a generation. Not all rebels are so mainstream successful, yet...

What strikes me is Kerouac's font of his creativity. And that's something I'd like to dig into further. (He valued solitude, meditation, personal experience & spontaneity.) Here a few nuggets I'm floating:

Office memo's from Viking dated as early as 10/22/53 from Helen K. Taylor, a Viking senior editor said: "The writing is a torrential force that comes directly out of the material, instead of being applied to it. It is almost as if the author did not seem to exist as an outside agency of creation."  - "Forty Years of On the Road 1957-1997", Dharma Beat, Issue 9

Starting with the assumption that "words come from the holy ghost" Kerouac reminds readers that "Mozart and Blake often felt they weren't pushing their own pens, 'twas the `Muse' singing and pushing." - Interview with "bell hooks | Buddha Belly", Shambala Sun, May 1998

"Meditation is when you sit down, let's say that, and don't do anything. Poetry is when you get up and do something. Somewhere we've developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression, it is the way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection, it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn't make sense anymore to mention inside or outside." - Norman Fischer, Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (via Whiskeyriver)

Background themes (mixing up historical context setting posts with pure spontaneous writing) over the next 22 days or so may include:

• Spontaneity & Freedom
• Silence
• Seamlessness
• Opening the Doors of Perception
• Beatific Joy
• Thusness
• Personal Witness
• Art & Creativity

Bonus: I'm gathering with some friends (limiting to small group, say, 8-10) for a three-day nature-silence-imbued retreat with creative-priming poem sketches and photography thrown in over Easter weekend at Hidden Villa Wilderness Preserve in Los Altos hills of California. Email if interested. (Reserve your own space  early: 650-949-8648 or email hostel -at- hiddenvilla dot org. Lodging from $22 for non-HI members in dorm quarters. Private cabins also available: $37 single, $54 double).

p.s.  Why 22 days? It's 22 days to the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. And it looks like 22 ("it contains the secrets to many esoteric questions") is a quite an auspicious number.

images (Top) 1968 Earthquake poster is available from Lead Pipe Posters; (right) 1968 concert poster available at MC5.

tags web2.0 blogs beatblog art innovation startup passion entrepreneurs inspiration inspiration beat generation counterculture literature creativity spirituality

Comments

[Richard]

There's a lot to think about here. The first thing that comes to mind for me is how the things Kerouac valued -- solitude, meditation, personal experience & spontaneity -- relate to blogging.

Blogging -- at least it seems to me, who admittedly am not that smart about things -- does rely a lot on personal experience and spontaneity, but in some ways blogging is inimical to solitude and meditation (posts like yours are a rare exception), not to mention the background themes you list -- silence, of course, being the obvious one.

I'm a writer who reads mostly litblogs, and I wonder whether the poets and fiction writers who also blog are -- aside from the promotional value of their blogs -- somehow harming their "imaginative" work by spending so much time posting every day.

I think about whether Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whalen, Burroughs, Snyder and company would have gained or lost if the web and blogging had been available to them in the 1950s.

[Laura Moncur]

I've been reading your thoughts about the Beat Poets and the correlation to Blogging today. I personally consider the Impressionist School to be a more apt correlation.

The Impressionists were painting, but in such a different manner that their work was shunned by traditional artists. Without the Impressionists, however, pixelation would have been unfathomable.

I think Blogging is writing, but it is in such a different form than newspapers, novel writing or even poetry. The linkability of writing on the Internet has created a completely different form of writing that will take years to become a "school".

You're right. These ARE exciting times. I actually think what we are doing is even more exciting than the Beat Poets themselves.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Hi Richard, Hmmm, you bring up some good points on whether blogging is helpful to creative writing. And whether the Beats would have blogged had it been available. I think they'd give it a go, esp. ones that were having difficulty getting published in mainstraim circles. Whether they'd continue, I'm not sure. That's a great question to ponder for ourselves, myself.

Hi Laura, Great comments on painting. In painter George Condo's introduction to Jack's "Book of Sketches" he says that Jack waas influenced by Andre Masson's Automatic Painting. He kept small notebooks in the breastpockets of his shirt to sketch out word paintings since 1951.

I'm PERSONALLY interested in the style of writing, but that's not what is historically significant. What's significant is that the Beats were mimicked by "junior hipsters" whom later became the "hippies". What's significant is they set the stage for free love, drugs, and Eastern thouoght ten years ahead of the masses. What's significant is that folks like Ginsberg welcomed and supported Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. What's significant is that they triumphed individual freedom and personal witness ushering in personal publishing (after Howl was read, hundreds of poets & writers were unleashed and began publishing outside NYC and doing-it-themselves hand presses) and personal computers. I'll hopefully get to that.

(Snippets from
http://nytimes.com/books/97/09/07/home/kerouac-plummer.html)

"It could be argued that Kerouac's impact has been felt elsewhere, particularly on those 60's hybrids, the "new journalism" and "confessional poetry."

...Prior to meeting Kerouac in the 40's, and even in the early 50's, Allen Ginsberg was fitfully toeing the line of the post-T.S. Eliot era: that poems should be neat networks of images and ironies revealing as little of the author as possible. Moved, however, by the naked outpourings of Kerouac's fiction and by his theory of "spontaneous prose" ("Once God moves your hand--[If you] go back and revise, it's a sin!"), Ginsberg threw off fashionable strictures and emitted a poem entitled "Howl" that shivered the timbers of academe, invited a court case on obscenity, and, eventually, changed the course of American poetry.

...Bob Dylan read him [and later knew the Beats personally], and so did future novelists Thomas McGuane and Ken Kesey; all three were extremely impressed. Actor Nick Nolte read "On The Road" while still in high school in Omaha. His statement in a recent interview is eloquent testimony to Kerouac's effect on American adolescents: "I remember thinking, 'You mean you can just do that? Pick up and go?' It seemed incredible to me.""

[Chas Martin]

I remember reading "On the Road" in the early 70s. It inspired me to leave Boston and drive west, mostly on secondary roads. Three months and a lifetime of experiences later, I arrived in San Francisco. I wonder how many journeys Kerouac inspired. Not just the physical excursions, but the internal as well. His passion was so great that I find it hard to believe he could ever be still long enough to meditate, or to write. I read somewhere that “On the Road” was written on a continuous roll of paper. Seems appropriate.

Earlier today, I read a passage from "Einstein Picasso," by Arthur I. Miller. He made an interesting point about Einstein’s thought journeys:

"That creative thinking is essentially nonverbal seemed clear to Einstein: How else could "we ‘wonder’ quite spontaneously about some experience?"

Kerouac, for me, opened the doorway through which my imagination first, then my physical body, moved from one state to another. While my imagination has always been active, my input was limited. Once you taste the experiences of the road, you forever thirst for more. Once you’ve been there, you can always go again. The imaginary road offers at least equal rewards, and far fewer limitations.

[Felix del Campo]

The Beats are my co-pilots. We desperately need their energy, though it appears that you and I filter them in slightly different ways. To your list of "background themes" I'd add: noise, restlessness, rage, revolution, orgasm, transcendance, Dionysus. The Beats to me were as much a sword as they were a doorway.

[Tom Foremski]

Kerouac's font is where everybody else's creative font is too--it is inside. But to access it we have to switch off from the chatter of the conversations in the outside world--and the chatter of our conversations within ourselves about mundane stuff--and allow our brains to communicate to us but without conciously seeking that communication.

Our brain processes things in the background and then throws them out into the light of our consciousness where we can catch them, and record them, or we can miss them entirely. Like, dreams, it is important to write them down, it moves the information into a longer term data storage area.

That's why we get great ideas in the shower--it is one of the few places where we've cut out the external chatter :-)