An exposition on eternity, love, separate halves becoming united, growth, and progress based on the words of members of distinct groups in famous American literary circles culminating in the Beats, preceded by the Transcendentalists and Lost Generation, and followed by those that can most familiarly be termed Post-Beats.
There has been in America, since its founding in revolution, a longing for self-discovery and identity. It was a new start. Americans could decide for themselves who they were going to become.
The literature that finally came out of the United States of America almost seventy years after its inception was a literature in large part free of European tradition. James Fenimore Cooper made the popular novel and stuck with style of old, however new his own style, and Hermann Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne maintained a western tone as well, but the Transcendentalists, led by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, recognized something in the new, uncharted, alien continent and finally merged western thought with that of the ancients of the east. Without buildings and villages and the educated elite marring their vision, and with only nature between them and nothingness, they put forth a new proposition for what western thought could be. They realized that
For the awakened individual, life begins now, at any and every moment; it begins at the moment when he realizes that he is part of a great whole, and in the realization becomes he himself whole.
– Henry Miller, “The Wisdom of the Heart,” from The Wisdom of the Heart
… and furthermore, they realized that life itself is endless, all one big yarn ball of a single thing, and in between them, just threads invisibly connecting everyone. The Transcendentalists probably wouldn’t have put it that way. But a hundred years later, the Beats probably would have “dug” that metaphor.
Literature didn’t continue in the vein of the Transcendentalists, not really, until the Beats arrived. Mark Twain and the writers of the Gilded Age were too busy citing the wrongs of government and writing about rural farm life. In an odd sort of way, it would be the Lost Generation,
so-called by member Gertrude Stein as she described the generation of all the men and women who had fought in or had known someone who had fought in World War I, a war with no point, fought out of greed and pride and not much more; people came out of it disillusioned – Lost. By writing largely in a style so dejected and lost, and for struggling to grapple with building a whole new world out of nothing since it was obvious that the art and literature of the past had not worked, the Lost Generation could arguably serve as an antithesis to the Transcendentalists.
Composed primarily of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), these writers were so disenchanted with the America of the early twentieth century that they expatriated to France. Henry Miller, another American writer who expatriated to France around the same time is not counted as a member of the Lost
Generation because he did not live within their circle. Nevertheless, I have included many of his thoughts here and of those who were in his circle, such as Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell.
Being Beat means to be beaten down by the world and by trying to figure it all out, but it also means that state of beatitude that might come from existing in the state of recognizing the eternal. The Beat Generation’s members included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Joanne Kyger. The Beats, who rediscovered the spirit of self-discovery, of rediscovery, and of the possibilities of the infinite that had been left alone after the Transcendentalists, departed from and were inspired by the Lost Generation, though most of them were most definitely influenced by the Transcendentalists. Though often ignored in contemporary literature discussions, dismissed as “Unserious”, the Beats inspired more writers, such as Ken Kesey, Anne Waldman, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan.
By focusing on the Transcendentalists, the Lost Generation, above all the Beats, and in addition, writers that can be called Post-Beat, it is my intent to trace a thread through American history that can shed light on what the Beats and Transcendentalists most aspired to find – A oneness of everything, a continuum of consciousness – In short, and with as little hubris and humor as possible, God. It’s all there in the words, which when placed in the boiling pot, if boiled down far enough become wordless thought. The best wordsmiths create feeling when their words are boiled down.
YOUR OWN PRIVATE MIND IS GREATER THAN ALL.
– Jack Kerouac, The Book of Dreams
It is first the power of the mind that will dissolve the words into the language of the spirit.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
– Henry David Thoreau
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!
– Allen Ginsberg
Rejoice in it, be ecstatic, dwell in it, cool, be it.
Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies.
Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.
– Gary Snyder, from “Just One Breath, ” Tricycle
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evolve as one, an organism, one flesh, breathing joy in the stars
– Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #2”
Transcend.
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
– William S. Burroughs
Come back to yourself and all things as they have always been.
We are always the same age inside.
– Gertrude Stein
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.
– William S. Burroughs
It is not a matter of stasis though, as life goes on, and so you go with it. Maintain control.
theirs is the hunger for Paradise.
– H.D.
* * *
Love is the eternal. It is the positive force by which no other means can reach the eternal. By giving into love, the Beats say, it is possible to realize eternity, to realize purpose in life.
Life must be rich and full of loving–it’s no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.
– Jack Kerouac
Love must be given freely and indiscriminately to everyone.
HEROIC ACTS
won’t free us. Free us. Love.
– Michael McClure, “The Robe”
But this proposition of loving to feel the ultimate reality suggests that we live on equal terms, everyone in the world. But woman, as well as many nonwhite races, have been subjugated over the course of time. For them, and even for many men who either sympathize, or who are controlled by their condition of hate and prejudice, it is impossible to realize the eternal because they are hung up on something that rests outside of it.
I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
It is impossible to even grasp the eternal because they limit what they perceive as such.
Our art has been masculine, through and through, that is to say lop-sided. It has been vitiated by the unacknowledged feminine principle. This is as true of ancient as modern art. The tyrannical, subterranean power of the female must come to an end. Men have paid a heavy tribute for their seeming subjugation of the female.”
– Henry Miller, “Of Art and the Future,” from Sunday After the War
Man has paid a price for his willful ignorance and his condemnation of feminine nature. He is ignorant of half of what it means to be human.
It is hard for me to talk about feminist topics in anything but from a male perspective – Actually, being as that I am a man, it is impossible for me to discuss women from anything but a male perspective.
It is not enough that I should be limited in my knowledge of the female just for the sheer physiological and psychological factors of being male, but I have eons of history that has burrowed into my subconscious from male and female artists alike who had the ages of male-dominated society scalped into their own subconscious before they ever began to create.
If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I’m the girl with the unquenchable thirst.
– Anne Waldman
History affects people at a deeper level than they know. This probably includes Anne Waldman, even if she were loathe to admit it. S o that when a girl begins to write finally at the age of sixteen, she has already been indoctrinated with the norms of society and how she is supposed to behave. Even if she has grown up in a liberal, feminist household, she has still had the outside world influence her, and her household (why the need for feminism if there wasn’t a
male-dominated world?). The same goes for a boy, but to an even greater degree. Men and women alike grow up aware of a learned difference.
My war is concentrated in the noise of my hair
My hands
lethal to imprecision My cunt a bomb exploding
yr Christian conscience
My teeth tear out the throat of yr despair My jaws annihilate computer centuries My arms / my knees embrace yr serpent
yr sin becomes my song
– Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #66
It is because of man’s dominance in the arts that the feminine force is regarded as evil. Evil is unknowable. So is a woman to a man. Men have contributed to art more than women by their own stubborn insistence throughout history, and so it comes to pass that rooted in a man’s subconscious is a fear of women, that unknowable force. If he had just allowed her to hold a paintbrush, a pen, rather than forcing a broom upon her, man would know woman better, and know himself better, and he would know that she is not any more evil than he.
MAN IS INNOCENT & BEAUTIFUL & born
– Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #36”
Be not ashamed women … You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
– Walt Whitman
When men are at last united in darkness, woman will once again lead the way – by revealing the beauties and mysteries that enfold us … We have pretended to be single when we were dual, and now we are frustrate and impotent. We shall come forth from the womb united, or not at all.
– Henry Miller, “Of Art and the Future,” Sunday After the War
Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illumined.
– Henry Miller, “The Wisdom of the Heart,” The Wisdom of the Heart
It is only through love that man or woman or both, or better yet, that human can overcome the obstacles that have been placed in the path. Together, the people of humanity can step bravely and triumphantly into the new frontier of whatever terror lies next. This can only be done with love. Eternity can only be understood with love, for the concept of love when expressed as thought and not word or concept, is the only (ONLY WHAT ?NOT A COMPLETE SENTENCE)
that can see eternity, feel eternity, create eternity, be eternity.
Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, “God, I love you” and looked to the sky and really meant it. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums This isn’t to say that romantic love is the key.
Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It’s like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.
– Charles Bukowski
Love is just another way of saying acceptance.
.
* * *
Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
- Ernest Hemingway
When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.
- Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold
Having broken free of the conceptions of reality that humanity has, human is free to see what he
/she may see. Without concepts, it all leads to the Golden Eternity.
* * *
There exists a deeper problem within the consciousness specific to the American.
Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving.
- Gertrude Stein
Never mistake movement for action.
- Ernest Hemingway
It is up to the writers of American literature to think of space outside of an American context. Travel has been important to every generation of American writers save for those that predated the Civil War. Those that dated the Civil War, such as the Transcendentalists, did not need to leave America for space; they had it in abundance. Emerson had so much space to live and think and exist in nature that allowed Thoreau to build a cottage on his property.
Subsequent generations however, would have to leave America to find America, and to find what is there, but cannot be seen anywhere – the Lost Generation in France, the Beats all over the world, searching for that intangible thread beneath the surface of life to record in language between the lines of the text.
“The seam in between is fenceless.”
- Gertrude Stein
* * *
There is also the matter of breaking all perceptions and conceptions of self-doubt, which plagues even the best of us.
As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
- Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game
It becomes difficult to see the world for the true wonder that it and everything in it is.
I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God
Life is a century Death an instant
- Gregory Corso
Just living in beat solitude, in beat-out life is tough.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
- Ernest Hemingway
Most are simply driven to escapism.
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves Let me forget about today until tomorrow
- Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bringing It All Back Home
As I grew older, I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a wretch. But I love, love.
- Jack Kerouac
Then there’s the damning thought that having approached a divine likeness, we may damn ourselves.
He began to realize that, in assuming the powers of the Creator, he had robbed himself of the blessing which death confers upon even the humblest believer.
- Henry Miller, Picodiribibi, from Plexus
The traditional antagonist of the Beats is William S. Burroughs; one might argue that everyone in the Lost Generation was an antagonist to one another, each of them insulting the other and demanding to decide once and for all and for everyone what literature can (WHAT IS THIS
WORD?) penultimately be; and as for the Transcendentalists, their antagonists were those who railed against them, perhaps Melville and Hawthorne.
When the words are separated from the personalities however, it becomes self-evident that the thoughts of each of them are the thoughts of all. Words are an imprecise vehicle of expression, and when you put them in a boiling pot they become pure thought, nothingness; if the writer of the words is particularly good, it boils down to feeling. We all have within us antagonists,
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.
- William S. Burroughs
we all have doubts, and we all have contradictions within us,
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.
- Walt Whitman
and it can be easy to get paranoid, and unsure of what you know…
The whole world is filled with speculation
The whole wide world which people say is round They will tear your mind away from contemplation They will jump on your misfortune when you’re down
- Bob Dylan, “Ain’t Talkin,’” Modern Times
Perhaps this just tells us that we are part of some greater continuum in which all is shared, and we are not just fickle, we are all at once everything, omnipotent.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
These are mere nay saying quibbles from the even the best minds American literature has had to offer. The remedy appears to be very easy, and when the mind is applied properly with the right dedication, it is easy.
The wisest physician will say the best remedy is simply to, “Come out of that.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
* * *
Find a way to combat the negative associations with being that you may have.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is only when we get beyond fantasy, beyond wishing and dreaming, that the real conversion takes place and we awake reborn, the dream re-becomes reality. For reality is the goal, deny it how we will. And we can approach it only by an ever-expanding consciousness, by burning more and more brightly, until even memory itself vanishes.
- Henry Miller, “The Wisdom of the Heart,” The Wisdom of the Heart
- all Creation alive – all beings perhaps the only part we can know – That God lives in us, not otherwise – that we, here, are it, the great Presence, we are the great Presence of the Universe, our consciousness is the Consciousness of the Last Thing – that God himself knows no more than we or I why he was born or where he is going, it is all in us to live or die, to change the Universe of leave it, to be or not to be – and I lay back with my near dead like body and skull against the mantle and accepted the question there and then – to Escape Being Now! and avoided the question –
- Allen Ginsberg, June 1960 South American journal, Appendix 6 of The Yage Letters Redux by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
This is where you have to again admonish yourself for chastising what was already pure. Mind essence is soul essence if thought ceases, and that’s the magic, that’s the rub where all knowing and pain and etcetera cease.
“And as you learn the magic, learn to believe it Don’t be surprised when it works, you undercut your power”
- Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter # 46
It occurs to me that Ginsberg may never have attained discipline, so full of self-doubt and mind changes that it seems his mind never arrived at stillness. For Ginsberg though, it seems like he lived in as close a mind state of action frenzy as a such a state could actually arrive to inaction and peace – His thoughts dwelled so often on what Kerouac called the Golden Eternity that his thoughts became the thoughts of the Golden Eternity. Kerouac would say that everyone’s thoughts are the Golden Eternity, but keeping in line with the part of the Eight-Fold Path that advocates Right Mind, Ginsberg certainly had the Right Kinda Mind.
Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands
and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson
you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds
long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.
- Jack Kerouac
“If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.” Gertrude Stein
Yet it is so hard to get to these moments in the end, and they never come a the end, but always in the middle or near the end or beginning – Somewhere arbitrary – Slam, bam bang, middle of nothing, here is nothing, here to rock you back off your feet and into place. These moments of brightest consciousness where consciousness becomes so incandescent it disappears, and identity and memory too are so transient that it is so easy just not to chase the dreaming
non-dream at all…
“I am the Golden Eternity in mortal animate form.”
- Jack Kerouac, Scriptures of the Golden Eternity
Were only it possible to think with simply this one thought over and over again!
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
- William S. Burroughs
But what if Burroughs were right? In a deep sense he is, but if the aim is to absolve into nothingness, to feel the rising tide and then to let it go, then what? It’s as though it were all supposed to come with general ease from this Burroughsian perspective. What would be the point? Zen Buddha nothing nonsense teaches there isn’t a point, and that that’s the point, but to think in Snyder Zen riddles just turns thought into a Steinism of repetition.
“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistence. “
- Gertrude Stein
Whatever and ever and nothing, amen, but all of it gets you back to the same place you started looking for that Answer.
Then the trick is to quest. Evolution happens.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
- William S. Burroughs
With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”
- Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: Essays
With your help we can occupy the Reality Studio and retake their universe of fear death and monopoly.
- William S. Burroughs
Remember that
Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And make up your mind as to what you will think about.
* * *
Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way
To be free
- Leonard Cohen
To be free is the ultimate goal of realizing eternity. In eternity there is nothing else there but nothing, and in nothing there is freedom, because in SOMEthing, there is always something to do. There are trappings everywhere; the wires that birds must sit on in place of trees, the choirs drunks sing in to find oblivion within the confines of society to avoid the confines of a jail cell, the square boxes of glowing fuzz we sit in front of to forget that we’re incapable of even shutting off our mind machines because we were not taught meditation in preschool.
Re-examine all you have been told… Dismiss what insults your Soul.”
Why is it necessary to quote others if we are all of the same consciousness?
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
Having others who have done it, and can speak about it well (again, whose words can be boiled down into feeling)points the way, gives guide to all who might be otherwise lost in a sea of uncertainty, not knowing whence they came or where to go.
Be deeply reverent as you move towards shore
- Joanne Kyger
It is deeply important for Americans to have these guides. America, who has somehow wound up in a state of empire, subjecting its will upon the countries of other peoples, and whose own people are often barely even aware of that fact, need words that can be boiled down into simple gut-shot feeling to light the way. America is young, and needs guidance.
America has not even begun as yet. This continent is seed
- Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #10
They don’t necessarily have to look to these writers. They need only look for what rings true to their ears, whatever shines light on the darkness, anything that makes them more self-aware, and world-aware, and eternity-aware.
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
- Walt Whitman
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