Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Finale

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

On Gregory Corso. "He's dealt with truth,  god, love, hate, hope, beauty, so it's actually very interesting. He's taken what he would call the biggies, the big themes, and dealt with them in one or two lines each. Appreciation, but nonattachment, not getting addicted." (p. 341)

William Blake. "The Eye Altering Alters All" [circa 1803.] (p. 347)

William Carlos Williams, 1953: "For man and poet must keep pace with his world." (p. [359])

Ginsberg: "I was high on grass and so it was triply awesome or doubly awesome, the realization that the mind could be spaced out and then come back and focus. . . an aspect of the notion of a gap or jump from one phase of consciousness to another, one unconscious daydreaming to a real place, a focus on the external phenomenal world." (pp. 364-365)

". . . I started looking . . . to ordinary-mind observations for visionary perceptions." (p. 366)

William Carlos Williams: "'. . . make a coordinate point where others can see, compare their perceptions with your perceptions.'" (p. 367)

Ginsberg: "We'd burn all night on the jackpine peak, seen from Denver in the summer dark . . ." (p. 372)

"Old love and remembrance -- I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time . . ." p. 381)

"As in movies, the poignancy or charge or visionary aspect or satori or sunyata or mental electric comes from setting up one pole of thought form or word or picture and then setting up another pole. Then the mind has to fill in the space between by connecting them. . . like an electric charge between the two poles . . . One minute it's somebody talking, the next minute it's a tombstone." (pp. 388-389) 

"Naturally there's going to be a little brain pop." (pp. [390]-391)

". . . the constant awareness of setting something down which other people will read." (p. 393)

"Howl." "The precursors to this were things like Apollinaire's poem "Zone." The parallel texts . . . in addition to . . . "Zone . . . were Christopher Smart's "Rejoice in the Lamb," which has the same construction."  (p. 395)

Surrealistic method. "Hop up your image with some totally opposite zonk. You zonk the image with something so weird that people will ask, 'How'd you get to that?'" (p. 396)

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Possessions.

Jim Jarmusch: 'Dead Man' (1995)

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man (1995). Stars Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer with appearances by Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris, among several other notables. 

A frontier rite of passage in which the West is Truly Wild. Close attention is paid to period detail, and the setting is more Northwest than West, defamiliarizing the familiar. Jarmusch's use of fade to black fade-ins and fade-outs gives the film an episodic feel, like coming in and out of consciousness. 

William Blake, Depp's character, is a fish out of water everywhere he goes. When he goes West, young man, from Cleveland to Machine, a terrible place to which he's conveyed by coal-burning rail, the end seems nigh. Along the way, brutish fellows shoot at bison and anything else that moves outside the cars. In Machine, avaricious frontier capitalists forge deals with the Devil in a Hellish World. To quote William Blake the poet from "And did those feet in ancient time"  (circa 1804):

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

The hero of Dead Man is "Nobody," played by Gary Farmer. Cast out of his own homeland and left to wander, he is Blake's spirit guide and moral compass. Blake, with a bullet lodged near his heart, is pursued by psychopathic bounty hunters to the Ends of the Earth. 

From Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (circa 1803); 

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not thro' the eye,

Which was born in a night to perish in a night,

When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,

To those poor souls who dwell in night;

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

Nobody and William Blake arrive at the Makah village, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, at the Edge of the World.   

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Every Jot and Tittle: John Bunyan's 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' Part the First (1678)

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress in the Similitude of a Dream (i.e. Part the First, 1678). 

Fun book, sort of like a Protestant Christian version of Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly The Purgatorio and Paradiso (1320). 

Even though the stakes are high (The Lady or the Tiger? Heaven or Hell?), we're so accustomed to apocalyptic stories (super heroes, politics, conspiracy theories, zombies), the plot is less interesting than it must have been in 1678. There are some cool touches such as a river that must be crossed in faith, or you will drown; and, outside the gates to the City Upon the Hill (The Celestial City), a trap-door that could drop you straight to Hell just when you think you're about to enter Paradise. However, what makes this particularly enduring and fun is the language. 

From my notes, some examples that impressed me, via The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. (Wordsworth's Classics of World Literature). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996 edition. 

Let's start with "the apology," (page 2):

And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die;
Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so;
Some said, it might do good; others said, No.

Anther little ditty (page 38):

Difficulty is behind, Fear is before,
Though he's got on the hill, the lions roar;
A Christian man is never long at ease,
When one fright's gone, another doth him seize.

"Then said Hopeful, Where are we now?"(page 91) ~ a very existential question, often worth asking regardless of station or circumstance. 

Ditto: "Then I thought that it is easier going out of the way, when we are in, than going in when we are out." (pages 91-92).

"Now, Giant Despair had a wife, and her name was Diffidence." (page 92).

Memorable discussion of suicide (see Albert Camus): "My soul chooseth strangling rather than life, and the grave is more easy for me than the dungeon." (page 93). The peregrines opt against suicide, however: "The time may come that may give us a happy release; but let us not be our own murderers." (page 94).

Christian with the Shield of Faith -- William Blake, 1820s

"Is the way safe or dangerous?"
"Safe for those for whom it is to be safe; but the transgressors shall fall within." (page 97).

"And did you think yourself well then?"
"Yes, for a while; but at the last, my trouble came tumbling upon me again, and that over the neck of all my reformations." (page 112). Applicable to an endless number of things -- human nature.

"Concerning that book, that every jot and tittle thereof stood firmer than heaven and earth." (page 114).

And that, my friends, is every jot and tittle of what I have to say for this post. Adieu, and ciao for now.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Divina Commedia: Inferno II

Wallace Fowlie's A Reading of Dante's Inferno (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Having finished reading this guide, here's another handful of memorable insights.

". . . a man may lose his soul before he dies . . . and then, on earth, a devil inhabits the body until its natural death . . ." (page 207).

"The medieval world cultivated and protected a sense of mystery . . ." (page 220).

"No poet, no writer exists alone . . . they are one and many . . . Their art is not unique but comes from others who proceeded them and will be continued in others who come after . . ." (page 226).

"A river is eternal, and thus designates the permanence of man [humankind]. A river flows by and is never the same, and thus designates the mutability of man" (page 228). 

"In the unfolding of the Inferno, of [James Joyce's] Ulysses, and [Marcel Proust's] A la recherche, one human failing in particular is condemned, one trait that returns over and over again in the pages of the poem and the novels: the human will to power. When a man [person] finds himself in a position of power, he finds at the same time in those people who wait upon and for him both clear and disguised signs of suspicion and hatred. Power inevitably brings about its own collapse. To offset this insidious drive, Dante makes it clear that he needs Virgil, and that Virgil likewise needs Dante. A similar pattern of restriction and control is visible in Joyce's Stephen and Bloom, and in Proust's Marcel and Swann" (page 229). 

The poem underscores "the struggle of free will against forces that attempt to nullify it" (page 21). 

And finally: "These two themes, the unseen God and the development of selfhood, will never be lost sight of . . . " (page 21). 

And thus ends today's salute to Disco Inferno. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. Illustrations by William Blake and Sandro Botticelli. 

The Inferno of Dante (Pinsky Verse Translation): Response II

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky, Bilingual Edition, Illustrated by Michael Mazur with Notes by Nicole Pinsky and Foreword by John Freccero. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994, 1995 printing.

Let's run down a few more touchstones from Dante's Disco Inferno, shall we?

From Canto XIV (page 141): 

". . . All over the sand
Distended flakes of fire drifted from aloft
Slowly as mountain snow without a wind." 

Compare a snippet from the devilish 1969 Stooges song, "I Wanna Be Your Dog:"

"And now I'm ready to close my mind

And now I'm ready to feel your hand
And lose my heart on the burning sand

And now I want to be your dog . . ."

Dante Running from the Three Beasts by William Blake, 1820s

Tales of Brave Ulysses (Odysseus).

Canto XXVI (page 277):  

"You were not born to live as a mere brute does . . .

Turning our stern toward the morning light,
We made wings of our oars, in an insane
Flight . . ." 

Moonlight Mile. 

Canto XXIX (page 305):

"'. . . And already the moon
Is under our feet: the time we are allowed
Has now grown short, and more is to be seen

Than you see here. . .'"

Down in the Bottom / The Wishing Well.

Canto XXXII (page 341):

"It is not jokingly that one begins
To describe the bottom of the universe --
Not a task suited for a tongue that whines

Mamma and Dadda . . ."*

The Cooling Board.

Canto XXXII (page 347):

"'. . . down where the sinners are put
To cool . . .'"

The Stooges, "Real Cool Time" (1969):

"We will have a real cool time tonight,
Tonight . . ."

*"Mamma o babbo" in the original Italian (page 340). Bottom Line: the influence of Dante on fellow artists during the past 700 years is demonstrably effervescent and plentiful.  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

'Call Me Burroughs: A Life' / Barry Miles (2014)

Clocking in at 718 pages divided into fifty-two chapters, endwords, notes, bibliography and index, Barry Miles' Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014) delivers a treasure trove of biographical detail, cultural history and social context. One of my favorite big reads of 2014. 

Within this hefty tome, we find everything from little William S. Burroughs' childhood visions (a la William Blake) of a green deer; his calling of the toads; and instrumental collaborations with other artists -- Allen Ginsberg of course, Jack Kerouac for a time and Brion Gysin, among many others. 

In 1937 while in Prague, Burroughs had an emergency appendectomy and remained in hospital for seventeen days: "before antibiotics, peritonitis was lethal, so he was fortunate" (page 65).  The same year, he married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, who was Jewish, in order to help her escape to the USA from the encroaching Nazis. 

That's "just a little taste." 

By the 1970s, the period when Burroughs was living at "The Bunker" in New York City and also associated with the Hotel Chelsea, he was befriended by Debbie Harry and Patti Smith, in the burgeoning music scene (which I've always found interesting). They remained friends, too. 

In his final years based in Kansas, Burroughs was visited by Kurt Cobain, a highly emotional "Burroughs fan." Given how weird Burroughs himself could be, one can't help but want to laugh or cry in response to his quip, after Cobain drove off from their meeting in October 1993: "There's something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason" (page 620). Cobain committed suicide about six months later, a member of the so-called twenty-seven club.

There are lots of other precious tidbits peppered throughout Call Me Burroughs. I hadn't realized that Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) was gay, for instance. Nor had I quite grasped just how dramatically Jack Kerouac had broken off from Burroughs and Ginsberg, for so many of his last years, largely because of Kerouac's (and his mother's) freak-outs. 

Thank you, Barry Miles!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.    

Journey to Sevilla / Seville: Part III (2014)

In Sevilla / Seville: a tradition of upkeep that goes back many centuries.

Sevilla: another doorway. Or as William Blake put it in The MARRIAGE of HEAVEN and HELL (1790/93):

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Sevilla: Dig the Moorish style. Knock and be received. 

Blake: "In the fifth chamber were Unnam'd forms, which cast the metals into the expanse."

Sevilla: Upper right quarter of another entrance. 

Blake: "There they were receiv'd by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries".

Sevilla: streetscape.

Blake: "Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome."

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Je me souviens: Waterloo 199 (1815-2014)

Next year will be the big 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. From the British imperial perspective, it meant "a century of peace" in Europe (for the British) -- until the Great War of 1914-1918. A skewed perspective, given that wars large and small continued not only in Europe, but around the globe. But Waterloo is worth remembering for any number of other reasons.

In what distant deeps or skies 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
On what wings dare he aspire? 
What the hand dare sieze the fire? 

When the stars threw down their spears, 
And watered heaven with their tears, 
Did he smile his work to see? 
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

(From William Blake, "The Tyger," 1794)

These are samples of a larger corpus of text-based artifacts picked up over the last thirty years by family and friends, during pilgrimages to Waterloo in particular and Belgium in general. 

Je me souviens: Waterloo 199 (1815-2014). Now, on to Brussels!

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il deserto rosso / Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film -- Il deserto rosso / Red Desert / El desierto rojo / Le désert rouge  (1964), presents a stunning palette, splashing colors and light onto buildings, characters and ecosystems in gyroscopic motion. Wild, man, with strange surreal interludes. Fellini's Giulietta degli spiriti / Juliet of the Spirits (1965) takes a similarly wild and colorful plunge. Both films have other things in common, too. For instance, both have a primary woman protagonist -- Monica Vitti, Antonioni's paramour at the time, as Giuliana in Red Desert, and Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, as Giuletta in Juliet of the Spirits. Weird enough. Both characters are a bit "touched" -- by an angel, perhaps, but also by post traumatic stress, too. Both are married and somewhat estranged from their husbands. Both experience the world in otherworldly ways.

In Red Desert, we see a dizzying range of shapes and forms, some natural, some human-made. We see mists and steam and fumes and ships and shacks and puddles and pipes and even a robot ~ it's all in there, and it's all pretty strange when laid out sequence by sequence. The music is a bit "touched," as well. The imagery and sound effects remind me of William Blake, responding to the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Many of these patterns and shapes are beautiful, too, bringing to mind Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal / The Flowers of Evil (1857).

In Red Desert, Antonioni seems to be saying, this is the way it is. Get used to it, or not. And really, what's remarkable is how contemporary this film looks fifty years later. The cooling towers, the electrical grids, the waste pools and toxic fields: all of it could be here and now  -- and is.

Today's Rune: Harvest. P.S.: A fond farewell to Roger Ebert.