Paul Goodman Archive
Written: 1960.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The Beat Generation, in our model, are those who have resigned from the organized system of production and sales and its culture, and yet who are too hip to be attracted to independent work. They are a phenomenon of the aftermath of World War II, and even more of the Korean war. Their number is swelled by youths whose careers, hesitant at best, have been interrupted by the draft.
This group is socially important out of proportion to its numbers, and it has deservedly and undeservedly attracted attention and influenced many young people. The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second—and more important in the long run—they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance. They are not, as such, underprivileged and disqualified for the system; nor are they, as such, emotionally disturbed or delinquent. Some young men might be driven to this position by personality disturbances, but the subculture they have formed has made sense and proved attractive to others without those disturbances, but who have the identical relation to the organized society.
In many ways the Beat subculture is not merely a reaction to the middle class or to the organized system. It is natural. Merging with the underprivileged, the Beats do not make a poor go of it. Their homes are often more livable than middle-class homes; they often eat better, have good records, etc. Some of their habits, like being unscheduled, sloppy, communitarian, sexually easy-going, and careless of reputation, go against the grain of the middle class, but they are motivated by good sense rather than resentment: they are probably natural ways that most people would choose if they got wise to themselves—at least so artists and peasants have always urged. Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theater, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health. (It is, oddly, just these reasonable and natural ways that have won undeserved attention as outrageous. For Madison Avenue boys are miffed and fascinated that the Beats get away with it, and so they keep writing them up.)
We pointed out in Chapter Three that the Beat culture shares specific traits of the “outside” class to which they have appointed themselves. Some of these are accidental, belonging to the particular minorities who form the present-day poor—just as in France, it is the North Africans who set the tone. Others are essential, pertaining to being “outside” of society, such as being outcast and objects of prejudice; defying convention rather than just disregarding it; in-group loyalty; fear of the cops; job uselessness.
Besides these natural traits and present-day poor traits, Beat culture is strongly suffused with the hipsterism that belongs to the middle status of the organized system. This appears in some of the Beat economic behavior that we described in Chapter Three; in a defensive ignorance of the academic culture; and in a cynicism and neglect of ethical and political goals.
Balked in their normal patriotism and religious tradition, the Beats seek pretty far afield for substitutes, in D. H. Lawrence’s red Indians or feudal Zen Buddhists. (But I was delighted, the other night, to hear Allen Ginsberg, one of their best spokesmen, speak with wonder about visiting the Grand Canyon and boast of going to Walt Whitman’s house. Soon, I trust, he will take the cruise up our lordly Hudson to Bear Mountain.)
As a typical genesis for a Beat Generation we have suggested (1) attachment to a middle-class home but (2) withdrawing from its values, (3) without growing into other worth-while values. They are on speaking terms with their families but dissent from all their ways. They experience the University, for instance, as a part of the worthless organized system rather than as Newton and Virgil.
Finally, we saw that the Beats regard themselves as in a metaphysical crisis: they have to choose between the system and eternal life; and therefore their more philosophic utterances are religious and strewn with references to the apocalypse and saints of yore, as when Allen Ginsberg, again, calls Time “the Whore of Babylon”—but indeed she is very like the Whore of Babylon.
This is not, on the whole, a strong position: to be resigned and still attached, and therefore to have recourse to apocalyptic means. But let us see what can be made of it, and turn first to the jargon, a variant of a Negro jargon of English, jive.
In this talk there is a phrase “make it,” meaning “to establish oneself in some accepted relation to something.” One can make it as a writer, as a counter boy, with a girl. The word comes from the common English “make it against difficulties,” as, “They kept shooting at him but he made it across the field.” It is akin to “make good as a lawyer, a writer,” but it is not so strong and positive. (We should not say “Make good as a counter boy.”) The difficulties overcome are those that confront anyone who has dropped “out” of the ordinary social functions when he tries to establish himself as anything at all, to be a something, a something or other. The usage is an acceptance of withdrawal. (The notion of Norman Mailer, in The White Negro, that this and most other jive terms express positive energy or manliness, is quite idiotic.) Consider the series: “He wrote the book—he was a writer—he made good as a writer—he made it as a writer.” Very common is the encouraging, or self-encouraging, exclamation, “You’ve got it made!” or “I’ll have it made!” This refers almost exclusively to the future-improbable. When it is said in the past perfect, “He had it made,” it refers, somewhat wistfully, to some other third person. To express a neutral or proud past fact about oneself, one says simply, “I wrote the book.”
This usage, of establishing an acceptable social relation against obstacles, draws from the Role Playing that is the chief function of the middle status of the organized system (just as, in any period, a Negro would see the white society as a closed system with roles to be aped). One can say, “He made it, I made it, with IBM,” indicating no specific job, for that is unimportant.
Now a more general withdrawal, from experiencing altogether, is expressed by the omnicapable word “like.” E.g., “Like I’m sleepy,” meaning “if I experienced anything, it would be feeling sleepy.” “Like if I go to like New York, I’ll look you up,” indicating that in this definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in that trip or any trip. Technically, “like” is here a particle expressing a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the Greek μέη, verily, or δή, now look. “Like” expresses adolescent embarrassment or diffidence. Thus, if I talk to a young fellow and give him the security of continued attention, the “like” at once vanishes and is replaced by “You know,” “I mean,” “you know what I mean,” similarly interposed in every sentence.
The vocative expletive “Man,” however, has different nuances in different groups. Among the Beats it is used diffidently and means, “We are not small children, man, and anyway like we are playing together as like grown-up.” Among Negroes it is often more aggressive and means, “Man, now don’t you call me boy or inferior.” Among proper hipsters it means, “We are not sexually impotent.” So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero worshiping boys might use it. When the interlocutor is in fact respected or feared, he would not be called “man.” (Perhaps “boss”?)
“Cool,” being unruffled and alert, has the same nuances. In standard English a man “keeps cool in an emergency.” If there is always an emergency, it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external: the environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous. As spoken and enacted by a young Beat, maintaining a mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.” In the original Negro the nuance is rather, “I’ll stay unruffled and keep out of trouble around here; I won’t let on what I feel, these folk are dangerous.” With the hipster, the jaw is more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, “I’m on to your game, you can’t make me flip.” In general, coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anxiety.
To make a remark about the language as a whole as used by the Beats: Its Negro base is, I think, culturally accidental; but the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging. So among perfectly intelligent and literate young men, some movie or movie star will be discussed for an hour, giving each one a chance to project his own fantasies; but if someone, in despair, tries to assert something about the truth or worth of the movie, the others will at once sign off.
(Among all American adolescents and even fellows in their late twenties, however, there is an embarrassment about “what to say”—“I never have anything to say to a girl,” or “They keep talking about painting and I have nothing to contribute.” Speaking, that is, is taken as a role. They do not have confidence that if they are interested in the subject, they’ll say something, and if they’re not, why bother? Here too the Beats have helped formalize and make tolerable a common difficulty; one contributes just by saying, “Like,” “Cool,” and “Man.”)
Let us interrupt discussing the jargon and look at the related problem of the artistic activities that are carried on in resignation. These are multifarious and voluminous, including painting, poetry, reading to jazz, decorating the pads, and playing on drums. Everybody engages in creative arts and is likely to carry a sketchbook, proving what the psychologists and progressive educators have always claimed, that every child is creative if not blocked. Resigning from the rat race, they have removed the block.
They work at these arts honestly, with earnest absorption, and are not too immodest about the modest products, even if they do continually subject one another and passersby to listening to readings, and encourage the community by exclaiming, “It’s the greatest!” Such creative activity sharpens the perceptions, releases and refines feelings, and is a powerful community bond.
In itself it has no relation to the production of art works or the miserable life of sacrifice that an artist leads. It is personal cultivation, not much different from finger painting. Like the conversation just described, its aim is action and self-expression and not the creation of culture and value or making a difference in the further world. There is, of course, no reason why it should be. All men are creative but few are artists. Art making requires a peculiar psychotic disposition. Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others. This is an unusual combination of psychological machinery and talents, and those who, having it, go on to appoint themselves to such a thankless vocation, are rarer still. These few are not themselves Beat, for they have a vocation, they are not resigned. (My observation is that if artists are blocked in their vocation, they cannot resign themselves to seeking other experiences, and certainly they do not do finger painting, for if they can do finger painting they can make art.)
Nevertheless, living among the Beats, there will be a disproportionate number of artists, for the same reason that artists gravitate to any bohemia. Also, some of these genuine unresigned artists will make works that speak for the Beat community that they live among. That is, the “Beat” artists are not themselves Beat, for they are artists; but their art works tell us about the Beat.
This situation raises interesting questions about the relation of an artist and his immediate audience, and it is worth exploring.
It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, “It’s the greatest!” or, “Go, man, go!” don’t give much security. The artist finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the reassurance that he needs, if he is diffident, is that he is a culture hero for the immortal world. Let me tell a few anecdotes to illustrate this fascinating dilemma of the relation of the “Beat” artist both to the Beats and to the objective culture in which he must finally exist.
An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the “previous” generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much still be added!) not yet clear. The point for our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best of the “Beat” writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Beat poets, to “give them a chance.” This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoriety that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. But Patchen asked for the names. The Beat spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worth while. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among whom he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said, paid him any attention.
That is, the Beat audience, having resigned, is not in the world; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. But he too, then, doubts that he is in the world and has a vocation. As a Beat spokesman he receives notoriety and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system.
Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Beat himself, and quite conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Beat spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting, “Don’t listen to this crap! let’s hear from X.” His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist.
And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Beat spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it’s childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming, “I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!”
These illustrations and the analysis of Beat conversation bring out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
Shared creative expression has a therapeutic effect, and so results in transference, unconscious attachment. The striking, and often amusing, example of this is the young ladies who take modern dancing, with its beautiful exercises that release tense muscles; they are all head over ears in love with Martha or Doris, and fiercely loyal and sectarian.
The same occurs among the young Beats, except that, since there is no “leader,” the emerging love attaches either to the community or to each one’s self-image narcissistically. This makes for a powerful warmth of life—“the warmth of assembled animal bodies,” as Kafka said—but it makes it even harder to get into the world. It gives the young men a daily interpersonal excitement, more satisfactory than the empty belonging or conformity of the organization, and happier than the loneliness of art. But it does not give them “something to do.”
So we return to our crucial problem: What to do that is self-justifying when the great social world is pretty unavailable?
The essential Beat answer is: to heighten experience, and get out of one’s usual self.
To heighten experience is a common principle of Beat, Hipster, and Delinquent, but the differences are marked. Among the Hipsters, as Mailer points out, the craving for excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flipping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back into society. But for the Beats, it is a religious hope that something new will happen, a revival.
In my observation, the Beats do not seem to be self-destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and injury rouse in them a normal apprehension, and they express a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of some with whom they keep company. In taking drugs for the new experience, they largely steer clear of being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the aim is to get out of this world, one can hardly play it safe. So it is not surprising if they push their stimulants, sleeplessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping. In his book, Lipton speaks touchingly of someone who goes off to the municipal psychiatric hospital as an expected and regular occurrence. Perhaps this is the feudal support which I have claimed to be lacking in Beat Zen Buddhism: the young sages seek enlightenment, and the city hospital succors them when they break down.
Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” “high,” “gas,” “sent.” These mean not in this world but somewhere, not rational but something. “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation.
When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record. One is “with it” or “falls in.” The “it” or the understood “where” is not, of course, definite, for pure being has no genus and differentia. “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.”
Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging).
The way of being-in-the-world, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something. However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boys looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather younger than their years, one wonders whether ordinary growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out.
A possibility that has interestingly dropped from Beat culture is the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an important truth in Mailer’s proposition that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.”
(To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can then be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crystal ball or a fountain or a hearth fire. As music it is remarkably thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.)
I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and more fit for teen-agers. The difference is between the lostness in juvenile jitterbugging and the “central” experience of Oriental dance or Mary Wigman. Some young men have taken to the Oriental dance, but most Beats do not practice this physiological yoga either, just as their Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of posture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the display of energy would upset their coolness, it would be embarrassing and make them feel too young. I wonder if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain of social dancing as “dry” sex; for certainly one of the reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and sometimes sexual foreplay. But these boys are embarrassed to get an erection, to betray feeling, in public, though they are more than willing to take their clothes off and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in public as an exhibition for the others, but not as contact with them.
An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterwards one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren’t much in the world, how do you know you are “out of this world”? This problem has been fateful for Beat literature. (The classical mystic who loses this world knows well, on returning to it, that it is a poor thing; and also that it is pointless to try to describe the Reality in terms of this world.)
The Beat novelist does not say, “Like when we left Chicago, we went to like New York.” (Samuel Beckett does, of course, do just this in principle, and mighty strange and dull his novels are.) The Beat novelist wants to say that we did leave Chicago and did go to New York. But how would one know? When there is not much structure for the experience—no cause to leave Chicago, no motive to go to New York—these things become very doubtful and it is hard to make the narrative solid. So incidents are multiplied without adding up to a plot; factual details are multiplied that do not add up to interpretation or characterization; and there are purple passages and exclamations. The point of the perseveration is to insist that something happened. (Cf., Appendix E of this book, a review of On The Road.)
(This narrative difficulty of more or less articulate grownups is important in reminding us of what might otherwise be dark about the juvenile delinquents: that in the immense multiplicity of their exploits and kicks, including even horrifying deeds, it is not necessarily the case that they experienced what they were doing. It is therefore beside the point to judge or treat them as if they were performing acts.)
Similarly the Beats make a social ritual of reminiscing and retelling. Meeting in a group, they retell exactly what happened, each one adding his details, with the aim of proving that something indeed happened, and perhaps they can recapture the experience of it, if indeed anything was experienced; just as at a later date, this meeting at which the retelling is occurring will be retold. It is like a man who dreams in exact detail of the fight he had with the boss; what could be the wish in such a dream? It is that when the event occurred he failed to get angry, but dreaming it he is angry. Except that in the Beat retelling, they are not angry this time either.
In such circumstances, it seems to me inevitable that heightened experiences too will pall, for they do not transform enough natural and social world to create experience and new experience. They do not accumulate knowledge, establish better habits, make hypotheses probable, and suggest further projects, all the things that constitute seasoned experience. A Beat will tell you a remarkable vision that he had under peyote, but you do not feel that it was a vision for him; it is as useless as the usual experience of extrasensory perception that is irrelevant to anybody’s practical affairs. So in their creative activity young Beats compile thick notebooks of poems and drawings, but since there are no problems of art, these do not add up to a body of work. What might then occur, unfortunately, is that, when the flesh is not better nourished, the spirit fails. Since better habits are not developed, the young men simply succumb to bad ones, relying more and more on the drugs, and becoming careless about meaning anything. Then other young fellows who chose this way of life because it suited and solved a problem, quit it because of the bad company.
The word “Angry,” we saw, was a misnomer for “bitter and waspish.” The word “Beat,” however, is exquisitely accurate, meaning “defeated and resigned.” Public spokesmen of the Beats have, as the result of various visions, assured us that the word means Beatus, blessed; but this too soon comes to the same thing, “punchy.”
Lawrence Lipton tells us that the word “work” always means copulate. (A job of work is a “gig.”) This is a good thought, for it means that the sex is feelingful and productive, even though effortful.
My impression is that—leaving out their artists, who have the kind of sex that artists have—Beat sexuality in general is pretty good, unlike delinquent sexuality, which seems, on the evidence, to be wretched. Animal bodies have their own rhythms and self-limits; in this, sex is completely different from taking drugs; so if inhibition is relaxed and there is the courage to seek for experience, there ought to be good natural satisfaction. One sees many pretty young Beat couples. (I think they are pretty; some people think they are hideous.) Since conceit and “proving” are not major factors, there is affection. Homosexuality and bisexuality are not regarded as a big deal.
But the question remains, What is in it for the women who accompany the Beats? The characteristic Beat culture, unlike the American standard of living, is essentially for men, indeed for very young men who are “searching.” These young fellows are sweet, independent, free-thinking, affectionate, perhaps faithful, probably sexy—these are grand virtues, some of them not equally available among American men on the average. But Beats are not responsible husbands and fathers of children.
There are several possible sexual bonds. Let us recall the woman at the Patchen party, who pleaded for someone to help the young man. Her relation to him is maternal: she devotes herself to helping him find himself and become a man, presumably so that he can then marry her. (Typically; I do not mean actually in this case.)
Another possible relation is Muse or Model: her Beat is her poet and artist and makes her feel important. This is a satisfaction for her feminine narcissism or penis envy. But it comes, often, to ludicrously overestimating the young man’s finger painting and laying on him an impossible burden to become the artist that he is not.
One sometimes sees a pathetic scene in a bar. Some decent square young workingmen are there, lonely, looking for girls or even for a friendly word. They feel that they are “nobodies”; they are not Beats, they are not artists. They have nothing to “contribute” to the conversation. The girls, meantime, give their attention only to the Beats, who are sounding off so interestingly. But these Beats will not make any life for the girls, whereas the others might make husbands and fathers. If a square fellow finally plucks up his courage to talk to a girl, she turns away insultingly.
Lipton suggests that women follow Beats as they followed roving Gypsies. But this makes no sense, for the Gypsy was an independent who moved with his tribe, his wife, his kids, his animals, and he was (in the ballads) a masterful character. A Gypsy is not a resigned young man, searching.
Finally, of course, there are the young women who are themselves Beats, disaffected from status standards. Perhaps they have left an unlucky marriage, have had an illegitimate child, have fallen in love with a Negro, and found little support or charity “in” society. They might then choose a life among those more tolerant, and find meaning in it by posing for them or typing their manuscripts.
To repeat, Beat is not a strong position and it can hardly work out well. The individual young man is threatened either with retreating back to the organized system or breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat. Nevertheless, culturally there is a lot of strength here; let us try to see where it is.
Considered directly, their politics are unimpressive. They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure that society cannot be different. Explicitly, they are pacifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb. The Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other commentators as an explanation of their religious crisis; but it’s not convincing. Their own diatribes seem to be mostly polemical self-defense, as if to say: “You squares dropped the atom bombs, don’t you dare criticize my smoking marijuana.” In the play The Connection this is openly stated as a defense for heroin. On the whole one does not observe that the Beats are so concerned about nuclear weapons as many mothers of families or squares who have common sense. One of the Beat spokesmen wrote a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic George Dennison remarked: “He seems miffed that people pay attention to the atom bomb instead of to him.”
At the same time, their peacefulness is genuine and their tolerance of differences is admirable, extending also to the squares, except for loathsome class enemies like Time, Housing, or gouging employment agencies. Their ability to occupy themselves in poverty on a high level of cultural and animal satisfaction is remarkable, with paper-back books, odd records, and sex. Their inventing of community creativity is unique. If we consider these achievements, we see that they are factual evidence for a political proposition of capital importance: People can go it on their own, without resentment, hostility, delinquency, or stupidity, better than when they move in the organized system and are subject to authority. (To be sure, the Beats were not among the underprivileged to begin with; they had some useful education and their poverty is in part voluntary; but these are not circumstances unavailable to others.) They do not go far, they invite degeneration, they seem hard put to assume responsibility; but they do exist interestingly and peacefully.
In one important respect, their community culture could be made far more effective. I am referring to the jazz and drums in a community setting. They have chosen too primitive a model, e.g., Haiti. If they would ponder on the Balinese dances, they might learn something—not the Bali dances on a stage on Broadway, but as they exist in their home villages where, to the music of the gamelan, the onlookers suddenly become entranced and fall down or become possessed and would do violence to themselves, except that they are rescued one and all by their friends of the community. (Cartier-Bresson has excellent pictures of these sessions; and of course Artaud, who is becoming scriptural among the Beats, was an ardent champion of them.)
Beat literature and religion are ignorant and thin, yet they have two invaluable properties. First, they are grounded in the existing situation, whatever the situation, without moralistic or invidious judgment of it. It is in this sense that Henry Miller is their literary father. Their experience is admittedly withdrawn. (Miller’s too does not add up.) Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present, like Zen, without patriotic loyalty, long discipleship, and secure subsistence. Nevertheless, their writing has a pleasant bare surface, and it is experience. It is often bombastic, but on the average it is more primary than other writing we have been getting in America.
A second valuable property of the Beat style is that it tries to be an action, not a reflection or comment. We saw that, in both their conversation and heightened experience, this action doesn’t amount to much, for they do not have the weight or beauty to make much difference. But their persistent effort at the effective community reading, appearing as themselves in their own clothes, and willing to offend or evoke some other live response; and also their creative playing (especially if it would become more like the Bali dances), are efforts for art and letters as living action, rather than the likeness to literature that we have been getting in the Kenyon Review and the Partizan Review.
Religiously, they are making a corrigible error. What they intend, it seems to me, is not the feudal Zen Buddhism, which is far too refined for them and for our times, but Taoism, the peasant ancestor of Zen. Tao is a faith for the voluntary poor, for it teaches us to get something from the act of wresting a living with independent integrity. It is, as Beat intends to be, individual or small-group anarchy. If the Beats would think this through, they would know how to claim their subsistence under better conditions, and perhaps they would have more world. Tao teaches, too, divine experience from the body and its breathing. In this it is like the doctrine of Wilhelm Reich, much esteemed by the Beats but not followed by them. The magic they are after is natural and group magic, and they need not be so dependent on ancient superstitions and modern drugs.
Most important, Tao teaches the blessedness of confusion. Tao is not enlightened, it does not know the score. Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state that we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it. If young people are not floundering these days, they are not following the Way.
The sage is murky, confused. As it says, “Block the passage. Shut the door.… I droop and drift as though I belonged nowhere.… So dull am I. All men can be put to some use, I alone am intractable and boorish.”
It’s square to be hip.
The basic words of our jargon are “Search me,” “Kid,” “I couldn’t give you a clue,” “I’m murky.” “Creator spirit, come.”