Hello all,
I’ve been hearing from a lot of you, and it seems like there’s a lot of hard work going on around this final. Glad to hear it!
Tomorrow I’ll be at Cafe Pergolesi from 5-7, during our regularly scheduled lecture, for an extra office hours. If you’d like to come by and discuss your paper / final project with me, it’d be helpful if you shot me an email — but if you can’t, don’t let it stop you from dropping by. I’ll stay longer if it’s necessary.
Good luck!
— Madeline
from Justin…
I thought I’d share some ideas for anyone who may be writing about Dharma Bums and/or cares to read my thoughts. I’m not big into Kerouac, but I’ve read quite a bit of his stuff and think Dharma Bums is my favorite. Here’s what I like about it:
“Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene–colleges being nothing but grooming school for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization” (38-9).
According to Ray, him and Japhy are “real” men. They appear eccentric in the eyes of the mainstream “middle class non-identity.” Kerouac’s critique of culture is that it is unified by consumption of consumer goods: “well-to-do houses”, “lawns”, and “television sets” which result in everyone “looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time.” The resulting loss of individuality is exactly what makes authentic people like Japhy and Ray appear “eccentric” when they walk around campus.
By contrast, the Japhies of the world “go . . . to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of stars, to find the dark mysterious secrets of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.” I don’t know exactly what this all means, but it isn’t buying things or watching TV, it is basically what Ray and Japhy are doing in this book, it is the quest for beatitude. This genuine counter cultural lifestyle is explained in an interesting passage that also exemplifies Kerouac’s style of spontaneous bop prosody and its connection to buddhist spirituality:
“. . . climbing,” said Japhy, “is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along . . . The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you never hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like Zen.” Which it was. (64-5)
Kerouac’s writing style is very similar to the way rock climbing is being described in this passage. By not hesitating and stopping to think, Kerouac’s prose creates long winded passages so as to authentically articulate stream-of-conscious ideas and experiences. I chose to include the long quotation above because it demonstrates this style, it is all ONE sentence. Without stopping and letting logic or rational decision making interfere, Ray and Japhy still successfully climb from boulder to boulder, following a natural path. Kerouac’s writing style and counter-cultural lifestyle reflects a kind of non-action approach to life, letting life take its path and not interfering with the course of things. I think this is why Kerouac is so easily considered apolitical.
The Beat generation was fond of anything that expanded the mind and consciousness. Reality was something of the past, something to be manipulated and revealed for what it was: an illusion. Drugs, the Dreamachine, and meditation were some avenues in which this could be achieved. But cut-ups, a writing technique involving chance and literary tradition, were thought to reveal the meaning behind articles and poems, the writer’s REAL words. Cut-ups became the scrying of the Beat literary scene. Brion Gysin described it as table tapping, saying that it was, “certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium.” (195). Essentially, all writers, in some way, must be possessed by the muse for inspiration, and cut-ups were no different. It was simply a re-evaluation of language, which is ambiguous in and of itself. Gysin explained that they, “began to find out a whole lot of things about the real nature of words and writing. What are words and what are they doing?… If you want to challenge and change fate, cut up words, make them a new world.”(196). This is an excellent example of the Beat scene as a world-making endeavor. “All writing is in fact cut-ups… you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors…” (198).
Brion showed how cut-ups defined literature for their generation, but Burroughs introduced them as a psychological weapon. “As far as he was concerned, Cut-ups were a deconditioning agent, almost a new form of psychotherapy, a way to see reality clearly without nostalgia or sentimentality.” (140). It redefined his reality by cutting it up and rearranging it to what he felt was the truth. He believed that by “fracturing the surface of reality” he could protect himself against control. He began to think that he had psychic powers, and that “the only way to find out what someone was really saying was to cut up their words and get at the deeper meaning hidden inside,” “metaphorically dissecting” people to find the truth (240). Burroughs also felt that the act of creating a cut-up was another function of the muse; when he uses the word “random,” he means “divinely inspired.” He explained, “How random is random? You know more than you think. You know where you cut in.” (215). His deep-seated belief in this literary strategy reveals not only his paranoia, but his mysticism as well.
~ Andrea Lau
I have it! Please email me and I’ll forward it to you. Apparently, the google book is incomplete, and doesn’t include Rob’s afterword.
1) For those of you who are writing your last response this week, you can write your response on anything you like: a book, topic, question, etc., that hasn’t been discussed so far? a set of ideas you would like to flesh out for the sake of your final paper preparation? whatever you’d like, so long as it’s pertinent to beat literature (so… don’t write about what you did this weekend, unless what you did this weekend was beatific in some respect, I guess). As I have had a few people seek clarification over this issue, I’m going to extend the deadline to Thursday, 11:59 PM.
2) If you’d like an overview of your grade so far, please email me a request. I will respond to the email by Friday at noon (so that those with extensions can be accounted for).
3) VERY IMPORTANT: your final papers will need to be emailed to me! I am going to be in Chicago. So if there are problems you foresee (be it mediational, what have you), please let me know ASAP and I will make arrangements for you. The deadline will not change (Thursday , March 17th, by 10:30 PM)… just less trees will die in the process.
The Beats are a group known for their wanderlust, with Kerouac tramping about the continental United States while Ginsberg journeyed to India and Snyder fled to China and Japan. Burroughs and Ginsberg’s The Yage Letters is an illustration not only of the fears and desires that fuel this wanderlust, but of the parallel desire for travel within the mental realm.
While Burroughs structures his narrative as a kind of goal-oriented quest, he nonetheless seems to suggest that his travels are undertaken not just in search of a destination, but for the movement of the journey itself. In the guise of his alter-ego Lee, Burroughs describes the feeling of being stuck in a town in Ecuador, a “nightmare fear of stasis. Horror of finally being stuck in this place” (Burroughs, 36). In a clever technique that is almost cruel, Burroughs replicates this stasis for the reader, perhaps in an attempt to provoke a similar “fear of stasis,” by essentially repeating himself pages later: “This place gives me the stasis horrors. The feel of location, of being just where I am and nowhere else is unendurable. Suppose I should have to live here?” (Burroughs, 46). This repetition uncannily replicates this stuck “feel of location”, as despite the fact that Burroughs has traveled in the time between the two letters, the repetition calls into question the possibility of any change in time and space.
Through his descriptions of the yagé experience, Burroughs suggests that the psychedelic trip is indeed a trip – a mental journey which, although entirely internal, gives the feeling of travel through time and space. As Burroughs puts it, “Yage is space time travel” (Burroughs, 50), an experience that can only be described in terms of vast movement, “migrations, [and] incredible journeys” (Burroughs, 50). In being transported to new mental realms, Burroughs is able to transcend the physical limitations of reality, and in doing so he is able to escape the bounds of “being just where I am and nowhere else.” In these descriptions of the inner travel that is made possible through the psychedelic experience, it becomes clear that part of what drives Burroughs towards drugs is also what drives him to travel: a concurrent fear of stasis and love of movement, a lust for travel both physical and mental. While he may not reach any sort of beatitude, he is at least given access to a momentary transcendence of space and time through which it is possible, however briefly, to avoid the paralyzing stasis of being.
– Palmer
The use of hallucinogens and psychadelics by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg had their roots in different intentions. They both went down the rabbit hole regularly, seeking different things. In The Yage Letters, this distinction becomes apparent. Where Ginsberg is looking for spiritual enlightenment, for “the Great Being”, for God, Burroughs seems to use the idea of “the final fix” as an excuse. At first, it appears that Bill’s drug use is simply for its own sake, going into his mind simply to see what’s there. But his reasons are deeper than that: for him, the quest, the eternal exploration, is sacred. He is less concerned with the end result of an adventure, but the act of traveling, “expeditions [that] leave for unknown places with unknown purposes” (51).
In The Yage Letters, Burroughs’ quest for yage becomes a journey for a journey. He is driven, not for any particular enlightenment, but for transcendence itself. Hallucinogens represent an escape from the mundane; more simply put, it is a He has a continual need to move on, and he writes, “This feeling of urgency has followed me like my ass all over South America… Where am I going in such a hurry? Appointment in Talara, Tingo Maria, Pucallpa, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico City? I don’t know. Suddenly I have to leave right now.” (49) He has an aversion to staying in one place, explaining, “This place gives me the stasis horrors. The feel of location, of being just where I am and nowhere else is unendurable.” (46) This need for travel transfers over in a metaphysical sense, and he travels into his mind, into different places, through different routes, using both drugs and the Dreamachine. Burroughs saw yage as the final adventure, and describes it as “space time travel”, saying that “the room seems to shake and vibrate with motion” (50). Ayahuasca becomes the ultimate exploration of his subconscious, “a place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum” (53). For William Burroughs, it is not the destination that he seeks, but the journey. It is an odyssey of the mind.
~ Andrea Lau
What’s most remarkable about the Beats is how their existence was carried out by what defined them as writers; worldly consciousness, drug experimentation, camaraderie, and an excess of personality. This is none more evident than in The Beat Hotel, which for whatever reason, cannot helped but be read as a fictional novel, despite it being a biography. This is in part because the Beats lives were anything but normal. At the Rue Git-Le-Coeur, we as readers gain a wider perspective on the Beats and their off-beat brotherhood, one that is subject to such eccentric happenings, that you wonder how they ever got any writing done at the Hotel (mostly because those happenings were a source of inspiration). In the biography, the Beat’s identities become fully realized to us when we read about Ginsberg, Corso, Gysin, and even Kerouac for a small portion as they attempt to co-exist with one another. Another of their obvious inspirations to create was each other, trying to communicate and analyze their ideas and distinct styles with one another. Whether it be Allen Ginsberg and his romantic entanglements with Peter Orlovsky and William Burroughs, or Gregory Corso’s encounters with many different foreign women in Paris, we learn about who the Beats were in their daily lives. Simply put, they are real characters you can’t make up.
Like most groups of friends, the Beats were not strangers to drama. Their larger than life personalities conflicted at times, causing them to re-examine their choices in their current location and the friendships they made. I personally found Ginsberg and Burrough’s relationship to be screwy at best, as it was written how Burroughs knew he was in love with Ginsberg in his initial move to Paris (and later moved on after meditation and self-analysis). But it’s these emotions and relationships that further expand the complexity of this group of writers. What The Beat Hotel does best is not trying to analyze the writers, but instead show who they were, what they did during and after their heyday, and how their camaraderie helped define a generation. One section in the book says “At the Beat Hotel, Allen, Gregory, and the other residents lived in a micro-climate of their own creation, self-referential and hermetic. It was an ecosystem that fell within the emerging drug culture, with its background in jazz and the avant-garde, its roots firmly planted in the bohemian tradition” (Miles 65). For better or worse, most of the Beat’s greatest creative endeavors were done at The Beat Hotel, while leaving their mark on Paris, the Beat generation, and each other.
~Mackenzie Sutcliffe
In Earth House Hold, Gary Snyder serves as a guru for the spiritually experimental. His writing reflects an immersion in Buddhist spirituality, love, and neo-tribalism. These concepts are all interrelated and necessary for his new vision of the world.
Earth House Hold is a journal of self-discovery, as Snyder explores the perception and worldview of Buddhism. In “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-Ji” he describes a temple in Kyoto, in a season where the participants focus their efforts solely into concentrating the mind. Snyder illustrates the discipline of Buddhism by detailing the simple meals, almost total silence, meditation, and strict schedule. The freedom from desire, to not simply repress it, but extinguish it altogether, is discussed by a Master in response to a question of liberation: “Don’t seek Buddha or understanding; exhaust feelings of pure and impure. Also don’t hold onto this non-seeking as right. Don’t dwell where you exhaust feelings, either… Don’t cling to any dharma whatsoever.” (76) One must make his or her mind like wood or stone. He also shows the long process of metaphysical analysis in the self: “Almost had it last night: no identity. One thinks, ‘I emerged from some general, non-differentiated thing, I return to it.’ One has in reality never left it; there is no return.” (10) Snyder is trying to grasp the idea of nothingness in the universe, and man’s place (or lack of a place) in it. Humans misperceive reality and objects and themselves as having an essential nature, when in fact they are all emptiness. However, this concept is not as cold and lonely as it sounds, because Buddhism connects to love on a very fundamental level.
Snyder’s description of love, particularly spiritual love, in Earth House Hold, paves the way for his rebirth of mankind. His explanation of romantic love, and its translation in terms of the self, is fascinating in its implications for the self. He writes: “The giving of a love relationship is a Boddhisatva relaxation of personal fearful defenses and self-interest strivings- which communicates unverbal to “the other” and leaves them to do the same” (34). He describes it as a letting go of the ego, to allow for full intimacy to both the partner and “the other”; this opening up to otherness allows for an integration of the self, and through that, liberation. Snyder explains that, “the ‘other’ becomes the lover, through whom the various links in the net can be perceived” (34). Humans, while generally selfish and distracted by their own suffering and ego, can seek mutual survival in empathy. But instead of limiting love to partners, he expands the idea to include the universe.
Snyder brings these concepts of spiritual love and the acceptance of otherness into his theory for social and economic reform. He first discusses the positive traits that current social paradigms hold: “The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom (prajna), meditation (dhyana), and morality (sila.) Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see it for yourself- over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live” (92). He then proceeds to take apart our idea of civilization, and replace it with a morally and economically sustainable one: primitivism. He explains that, “if evolution has any meaning at all we must hope to slowly move away from such biological limitations, just as it is within our power to move away from the self-imposed limitations of small-minded social systems” (127). He realizes that humanity must transcend its humble beginnings if it is to survive. He writes that, “the primitive world view, far-out scientific knowledge and the poetic imagination are related forces which may help if not to save the world or humanity, at least to save the Redwoods” (128). While Snyder recognizes the limitations of archaic knowledge, he also argues that its application would still make a tremendous impact. He explains “poetry and Bushmen [will] lead the way in a great hop forward” (129). In this way, love and understanding will free the world.
– Andrea
Similar to the cut-up videos and Dylan permutation-play recently posted, this video of schizophrenic existentialism pairs one of Brion Gysin’s permutation poems with a “videopoem” by Alex Itin.
“Closely related to the principle of the cut-up, where the intended coherence of a text is interrupted and rearranged, the permutation involves a more mathematical variation of the concept as exercised on a short phrase. Concurrent with his exploration of the cut-up, Gysin discovered the permutation upon seeing in print the Divine Tautology, “I am that I am,” while reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. In my 1980s interview, he elaborated: “I saw the phrase on paper and I though, ‘Ah, it looks a bit like the front of a Greek temple,’ only on the condition that I put the biggest word in the middle. So, I’ll just change those others around, ‘am I,’ in the corner of the architrave. Then I realized, as soon as I did this, it asked a question. ‘I am that, am I?’ And I said, ‘Wow, I’ve touched the oracle!’ SO then I turned the next one, and I said, ‘Oh, all the way along is has to do this.’ Thought it was the first of his permutation poems, “I Am That I Am” (1959) was not published till years later (in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In [1973]; a short version appeared in Emmet Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry [1967]). The Full version, as put through a computer by mathematician Ian Sommerville, was performed for BBC Radio in 1960, as part of a program, ‘The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin.’ The show, says Gysin, was ‘broadcast to the second lowest rating of audience approval registered by their poll of listeners. Still sorry to think that the lowest rating on record went to an opus by Auden and Britten.'” – Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader
– Palmer
Beat Literature and the World 