“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” the first line of Howl by Allen Ginsberg hints at a group of disillusioned writers crying for help through the only medium available to them: poetry.
Allen Ginsberg and his other Beatnik contemporaries, like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, began a literary movement that rebelled against the conventions of the literary world. The idea behind the movement was letting the shrouded subconscious come to the surface to ooze out in poetry. Allen Ginsberg summed up the modus operandi of the Beat Literary movement as “inquisitiveness into the nature of consciousness, with literature as a ‘noble means.’” “First thought, best thought” was a philosophy of writing expounded by the Beat Generation based on letting your stream of consciousness and undisciplined thought flow straight from the hollows of the mind. It is pushing the edges of language till the subconscious babbles. This was fueled by their impulses, rejecting stationary lifestyle choices in favor of the endless travel that was to become essential to their world. They wandered all around; their spirits untamed with a thirst for answers, seeking for new experiences, people and ideas. They believed in the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being instead of a society where cultural expression is thwarted and people have left spiritually and physically to take the vows of organized life.
The term beat was coined during a discussion between writers Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes recollecting the glamour of the Lost Generation, which consisted of prominent writers such as T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Kerouac sometimes referred to his as the ‘angelic’ generation but waved it away and called it ‘beat’ which as a hip slang meant, exhausted, at the bottle of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed and perceptive. In short, it was synonymous with an intellectual form of youth rebellion, the echoes of which can be heard in the twists and turns of their verse and prose rhythms. The Beats endure, much as Ginsberg predicted in Howl, “with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their bodies good to eat a thousand years.” The social fabric of the mid-century had failed to provide their lives with meaning. They shared a dark suspicion that the life they were leading was a lost cause, that we’re all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between the two poles: a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other.
Their ‘New Vision’ was to reclaim poetry from the ivory tower and place it squarely in jazz clubs, alleyways, and bedrooms. The Beats lived their beliefs by existing hand-to-mouth and befriending criminals, prostitutes, delinquents, and others who lived on the margins of society. Interestingly, through their immersion into the sordid parts of American life, Beat poetry emerged as largely affirmative of human nature. They ask that people find beauty in failed journeys, in the discovery of personal excess, in feeling the sting of limits, but these are the boundaries around which humanness is constructed. Labels, on the other hand, can sometimes evacuate the presence of that which they attempt to contain. Throughout their work, the creative process is celebrated, as is the integrity of those who resist the seduction of the age-old narrative and foster their own vision. Through their associations, they broke out of their own spiritual, physical, and sexual boxes, challenging the limits of their experience and closing the gap between lived experience and the written word.
In this vein, their themes challenged the false sheen of American patriotism, the resulting proliferation of nuclear weapons, the onset of the Cold War, and increasing racial tensions that further contradicted the American Dream. We had myriad ghosted bodies emanating out of the eternal war scenarios, broken lives, and broken neurological pathways. Hedonism was the way forward for the generation. Everybody was lost in a dream world of their own making. Literature’s true call to arms- to challenge, to needle, to push at the world, not to tread water in the safe shallows of past paradigms. Literature is made to break the barriers that the old guards established. “Keep the world safe for poetry” was the trenchant motto. Gradually the vision spread like wildfire, both to the youth stereotype and to the artists of the Beat generation, indelibly altering the global view of music, literature, and the arts for future generations. They became icons of wanderlust, role models for those who wish to emulate his life of spontaneity and perpetual restlessness. John Lennon was a Beats fan, and the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band pays tribute to William Burroughs. Decades later, Paul McCartney provided background music to Ginsberg’s song “Ballad of the Skeletons.” Bob Dylan started writing only after being inspired at a Beats’ spoken word performance, finding a mentor in Ginsberg.
The peak of their influence was during the late 1940s through the early 1960s, when their thematic explorations of sexuality and social class ushered in the hippie movement, the rage of the 60s. They scandalized the puritanical American mainstream, with its consciousness raising, herb puffing, and racial and sexual liberations. Beat burnt bridges of their relationships, burnt out of their minds, fell into the trapdoor of decadence and revelry. Beat thought was countercultural, anti-materialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian; in short, anti-system. They explored esoteric spiritual practices—including Hinduism, Zen mixed with psychedelic trance, in the continuous search of the elusive truth. Allen Ginsberg describes this experience as “The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the sense. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself; he exhausts all poisons in himself to keep only the quintessence…” The sense of skating on consciousness and sanity in language is what makes the Beat Generation’s works raw and untainted by inhibitions. At the same time, it is a feeling of comfortable foreignness, of being perfectly outside, of edging, like the Beats.
The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek had said in his autobiography Light My Fire, “I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed. It opened the floodgates, and we read everything we could get our hands on.” British rock band King Crimson has a 1982 album, Beat, released on the occasion of Kerouac’s book On the Road’s twenty-fifth publication anniversary. It is a tribute to the writers, with songs like “Neal and Jack and Me” and “The Howler” referencing the artists and their works. Bowie met Burroughs for the first time at a cross-interview and then went on to encapsulate his writing style. In a 1974 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie had said, “Nova Express really reminded me of Ziggy Stardust.” Kurt Cobain idolized Burroughs, and they even collaborated on The “Priest” They Called Him. Among contemporary artists, artists like Lana Del Rey and Matty Healy are the forerunners carrying forward the Beat culture philosophy. The name of the English pop rock band The 1975 comes from a page in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that was dated “1 June, The 1975. Lana Del Rey pays homage to Allen Ginsberg by narrating stanzas from Howl in her short film Tropico. Her seamless self-expression with her churning out novels like Beat poetry on amphetamines and artistic dwelling capture the essence of the Beat spirit.
Some of the Beats burned so brightly and so intensely that they burned themselves out young. However, their ideas illuminated a generation for a search of some kind of original mind. It wasn’t just a movement but a restless rhythm beating against the rigid walls of convention. It was the howl of a generation searching for truth in smoky jazz clubs, on winding highways, in the pages of unfiltered, untamed prose. They exchanged the artificial glow of consumerism for the raw light of experience, choosing the open road over the picket fence, the ecstasy of the moment over the security of the predictable. To be beat was to live a spiritual life in a civilization increasingly deaf to its own ideals—a civilization gaining in worldly power but losing its character and its soul.
-This article has been written by Aadya (2nd Year)
