Louisville Paper on Keroauc et al

The Measure of the Beat: Spontaneous Aesthetics and the Problem of the Open in Kerouac, Olsen, Cage, and Ginsberg.
by David Need

Introduction

This paper is related to a larger project on Jack Kerouac’s religious views and aesthetics, and it is an early version of a chapter for “The Beat Generation and Philosophy”. In earlier pieces of this project, I’ve dug into Kerouac’s engagement with and critique of Buddhism. I am a one-time Buddhist practitioner and my degree work was on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. That work has alerted me to ways that Buddhist tropes of emptiness, spontaneity, and freedom have been uncritically imported into and continue to haunt our reception of several loosely connected arts and letters movements in the 1950’s. Here I will be looking at Kerouac, Charles Olsen and his Black Mountain colleague John Cage, and the iteration of these influences by Alan Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in the 1970’s under the glossy rubric “First Thought, Best Thought”.

The thread I want to pull here is presaged by similar movements in painting and in music and inflected by post-War encounters with different Buddhisms. Its my thought that too often representations of this period blur actual differences between key advocate practitioners and that this blurring produces a fictive, utopian mask—at times underpinned by the authority of Buddhism—that makes it difficult for us to see this era and its stakes.

At the heart of the issue is a space—be it a measure or a thick duration—within which a spontaneous gesture or figuration or free play occurs. Kerouac speaks of this in terms of musical measure—the bars of a chorus—as sentence, and, because its based on a jazz horn blow, as breath. Olsen, under the influence of Whitehead’s metaphysics, thinks of it as the field of energetic relations a poem actualizes. For Cage it’s the silence between notes. Ginsberg, subordinating these ideas to Buddhist schemas, takes it as an instant of thought, mind’s episodic digression, caught in its duration by meditation on one’s breath.

It’s my contention 1) that a key difference exists between the field or measure proposed—albeit differently—by Kerouac and Olsen, and the empty, silent, open space proposed by Cage and Ginsberg, and 2) that the difference partly hinges on the ways the latter two understood or perhaps misunderstood a Buddhist assertion of a radical or fundamental emptiness in mind and being. This difference is not casual and any tendency to read the former by way of the latter masks the stakes of “freedom” and tends to erroneously foreground tropes of emptiness and formlessness in our imagination of the scenarios they direct us towards.

In what follows, I am primarily interested in theories and suggested metaphysics offered by the artists and less in whether or not their work is consistent with or even whether or not they always held the views asserted. I am, however, interested in what a theory says about the relationship between idea/word and world and in the difference between what’s wanted and what is said.

For the sake of space, in commenting on this I restrict my discussion of each artist to the matter at hand. Good efforts to schematize and critically position their projects exist, and I refer those interested to this material.

Keroauc: Measure and Memory’s Melody

It is fairly well-known 1) that Kerouac developed his principles of spontaneous prose prior to encountering Buddhist thought, and 2) that jazz and bebop served as his primary source for schematizing spontaneous practice. In a draft of a proposed article from the mid-sixties, Kerouac complains, as he often did by then, that Ginsberg had misrepresented his approach to spontaneous writing, specifically speaking of the jazz roots, and making the point that improvisation is a gesture within the bars (stanzas, frames) of a melody and not simply putting down whatever you want.

From a structural point of view, what is implied is that improvisation is not the free display of something out of or against the ground of a prior nothingness; it is rather a play with an already extant formal texture and limit. Gesture across the bar explores a familiar arrangement, pushes at it, in search of a possible relation (a figure). Freedom is found within what is otherwise bound.

In this method, there are two limns—the closure or boundaries established by the measuring bar, and a figure (a melody or set of chords). In this sense, although Kerouac explores the idea of extending a measure and may be aware that in the abstract such extension could be infinite (as, for instance, Duncan suggests), in practice, he works within a bar defined by sentence or breath, a reach across, and this commitment to the shaped and repeating episode remains consistent throughout his work. What is outsized in his writing is not measure, but figure. Kerouac attempts to measure two large forms—his life and America—by this method, but figure can never be open; however large we die, however large, there’s an edge or shore.

Put a different way, one could read Kerouac’s oevre as a serial exploration of and search for a radically open figure, whether its Cassidy, a doubled anima, his dead brother, his mind. It’s a search that ends much where it begins, at one of the classic open figures, the sea. The sea is the site both of an early poem “My Brother, the Sea” and his famous breakdown chronicled in Big Sur. In journals from his time on Mt. Desolation forward, Kerouac speaks of a tension between imagination/words/thought/writing and God/the Buddha/the Golden Eternity/Heaven, where the latter is characterized by a radical cessation (a silence) of the constant flow of thought and word. In these journals, Kerouac speculatively refers to the flow of thought and word as the sea and as Holy Ghost, and, in different ways—whether by the cross seen lifted from the waves at Big Sur, or in a prayer to Stella Maris that she lift us from the sea —comes to see release or freedom as grace and not expression.


Olsen: Figuring Concresence

I’ve seen little convincing evidence that Kerouac read A.N. Whitehead, Charles Olsen’s chief guide to thinking about the frame of a poem, or that Olsen was much guided by Kerouac’s example. Nevertheless, there is a curious similarity between the basic structure or unit considered and both writers open towards the idea of a LARGE figure and end up at the sea’s edge.

Put briefly, Olsen’s notion of the projective is taken from Whitehead’s theory of concresence, the process by which a moment of experience “hardens” into being. For Whitehead, this process is both an all-at-once and a triadic process involving 1) physical prehension or inheritance by which a subject open to being (the actualities formed in past or prior moments of concresence) mimetically prehends a pattern which produces a secondary, subjective evaluation, 2) a responsive phase of mental prehension, also mimetic in basic structure, which is based on not on actualities but eternal forms, and 3) the integration of these as figure and ground. In this structure, what “stands up” as it were, is some figuration that proposes a relation between the eternal forms of the mind and sensed forms.

In Whitehead’s theory, two fields—the infinitely bound together relations of all actualized phenomena as a prior world and a field of abstract potential—are woven together as an experience hardens into a shape. This fabric, however, only comes about because of an edge that “becomes” or irrupts; what matters (and this may be the difference between Olsen and Williams) occurs between contiguous things. Thus the line touches, and continues to touch, the shore drifts, figuring an always further open.

In relation to this, Olsen’s critique of the lyrical interference of the individual ego—one among many issued in the 1950’s—reflects a discomfort with the way forms produced under such a rule deny or fail to signal our actual situation or being at stake in world. This is less a notion of freedom—Olsen was a Melville scholar after all—than an intensification of a feeling of possibility that touches being, is at stake in being.

It might seem that Olsen’s attempt to think towards an open figure (in so far as he works with a theory that sees figure as process) differs from Kerouac in so far as it appears to lack a measuring bar and is, thus, just reach. I would argue that the lintels of the measure persist in two ways, 1) as the difference that is woven, that measure occurs as figuration, and 2) as an effect of the intensification of focus thinking in terms of process produces. And, although he does not thematize this in his theory, the epistolary conceit punctuates Olsen’s process and produces a similar episodic pulsation. Further, Olsen’s process is always defined and haunted by, limned by an actual past, and while he is interested in a creative relation to that past, gesture is anchored by and woven out of a freighted past.

Cage and Ginsberg: No Edges to the Sky

For me, the significant difference between Kerouac and Olsen and the spontaneous, free play explored by Cage and, at least, theorized by Ginsberg is that the latter figures under the influence of Buddhism conceive of the field in which a gesture occurs as, in some way, boundless or empty.

The key conceptual move in Cage’s work came from his attention to and thematization of the silences that occur between notes. His thought here was first influenced by Yogic ideas that propose that Being is, in its essence, profound silence out of which sound is struck. These thoughts were further influenced by Cage’s study with D.T, Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist teacher. In his presentation of Buddhism to the West, Suzuki tended to stress the notion of a radically open or free awareness characterized by a mind no longer constrained by concepts and freedom as a mode of being from such awareness. That is free shapes (being from) occur out of such a ground. These ideas coalesced for Cage in his dictum that silence=absence of intention, that is, silence as an absence of intention from which play occurs.

In the terms I’ve used here, Cage has rethought the measure as a space framed not by strophe or reach or lintel, but by an initial and concluding absence that he reads metaphorically. That is, the occasional silence between notes is writ large as silent ground, by which silence is thought of as a space within which occurs free play. The metaphor that makes this thought possible is borrowed from Yogic thought and Buddhism—the idea of a deep, fathomless being best characterized in negative terms like silence and emptiness.

Ginsberg’s adaptation of Kerouac’s spontaneous method as “first thought, best thought” similarly proposes that we think of gesture as a movement framed ultimately by an openness he is able to imagine because of Buddhist thought. Ginsberg’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa teaches within a Tibetan system that stresses that mind and being are ultimately empty and open, sky-like, and, in Ginsberg’s lecture he stresses that breath (gesture) always flows into that openness. In this sense, figure simply occurs in boundless space instead of as a function of measure or measuring concresence.

Concluding Thoughts

In both cases, it seems to me that an openness that is, in the end, always potential for both Kerouac and Olsen is essentialized by Cage and Ginsberg as field. Neither Kerouac nor Olsen think of the field of the poem (the field in which poem/gesture occurs) as empty or as framed by an emptiness—there is always form and relation—and these produce real limits and edges (shorelines).

Indeed, the point I am making is that what is hope for Kerouac and Olsen becomes ideology for Cage and Ginsberg and that, with this shift, we turn to projects and perhaps poetics in which content (melody, chord, the past) no longer matters, no longer applies.

In each case, a duration—whether inscribed by measure or as the thickness in time taken in concresence—but what is different is that Kerouac and Olsen admit being at stake in duration, while Cage and Ginsberg instead propose we are nowhere at stake, occur without a stake. This shift is critically important in terms of the dignity or weight given to content and thus to any referred to, realized world.

I want to place this difference against the near horizon of WWII and as a shift that reflects the post-war gamble on consumption as a possible utopian posture in being. When I read Hrebeniak conclude that Kerouac’s method compresses the gap between memory and composition (admittedly through repetition) or consider the intense focus on instance Olsen brings to bear from Whitehead’s metaphysics, I wonder if I am not witnessing the effort to suture the quite radical rupture WWII effected in culture. And I wonder, if the move to ideology I’ve posited via Cage and Ginsberg is not part of a more radical effort to repress the violence in being writ large by the war, a repression perhaps necessary, that nevertheless, like all repression, writes that rupture large.

Its hard for me at this point not to think of Adorno here and to wonder if the critique Buddhism issues of form and self has not found a strange bedfellow with a consumer culture which would prefer both that we think of ourselves in terms of lack within a larger set of fungible product entities. It would not be the first time that Buddhist thought lent its critique of self as a vehicle for abstract arrangements of power, but it should give us pause, precisely because of the ways in which this ideology makes the space of the poem an “always-the-same” and thus robs us of one of our first tools for shaping the world.


Notes:



Recent work on Kerouac’s spontaneous method include Michale Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) andRegina Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Perhaps the best study is Clark Coolidge, Now Its Jazz: Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds. (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999). My sources for Olsen’s use of Whitehead include Thomas Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993) and Rosemarie Waldrop, “Charles Olsen: Process and Relationship” in JSTOR: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 467-486. For Cage, see Christopher Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998) and Richard Kostelanetz, editor, Writings About John Cage, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Get the Cite David
Kerouac’s comments here suggest a continued fidelity to bop riff-based improvisation as opposed to more the free form improvisation beginning to be heard in the early 1960’s. In Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, Michael Hrebeniak stretches to read Kerouac’s prose in relation to free form jazz [see Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), pp. 216-224]. I would argue that Hrebeniak pushes this too far. As an improvisational artist, Kerouac might consider working within a free range and/or be able to celebrate someone who stretches a form in a review, but his method remains more closely that of the bop refrain.
From “The Blessedness Surely to be Believed”: (Berg Collection 51.1); Dec 27th 1955

“All things take place + act out their coming = going as atomic forms in the same bright sea of the mysterious stuff. All is the ecstasy of form, this ‘stuff’ the world is made of mind, Some call the Mind of God, some call God, some call the Body of the Law or Truth. All appears magically as in a tree-dimensional movie in a crystal bowl, and has no more substantiality than a movie or a dream, being but images + imageness made of empty atoms… We all have our mortal mind which is like ripples, and the immortal mind, which is like the sea, upon which the ripples appear + disappear.

The prayer appears in a journal from Nov 21 1960 in which Kerouac writes

God manifests imagination & imagination manifests this horrible birth-death business…
So my relationship to God cannot be established in any form of imagining and that is why it is truly the “Cloud of Unknowing”. The prayer to Stella Maria comes after the following Blues Prayer:

Six Toasts Jubilee Blues

Holy St. Theresa, here’s to you,
my lovely, my lovely daughter
or blessless hoax.

Virgin Mary, sunbreaker
of chains, reign forever!

Darling Child in the Cart
pulled by the skinny lamb
of the slab[?], watched
by angels, burn the empty
sky!

Then toasts to God and St. Benedict

And to the holy crosslike
dogwood which in Autumn
burns six buns of bud
while Brothers struggle
to form the mystical number
Three—

To Holy Ghost!
The Sixth + Second
Ghost!
Amen the Invisible Dreams!

O Holy Ghost, pull
the atoms apart
+ let us see that
Holy Sea!

The softness of the bellies
of kittens or sweet ladies
in white hours in
Heaven. O Holy
Ghost, Our Joy is
Endless—

Kerouac then writes to “Stella Maris” asking that she lift us from the Sea.
says, “Stella Maris, white cross/in the sea, words in the sea, white words on the waves…

“O Stella Maris, blue
angel, white angel,
blue sea, black sea,
O sherihiar (??) Muhammad
sailors also drowned

Aug 3rd 1960 at Big Sur (“Sea”: 40.6) a version of “Sea” poem ends:

“The sea drove me away + yelled ‘Go to your desire!’ As I hurried up the valley it added one last yell, “And laugh!”

and, in #8

“For me, for us, The Sea, the murderer of time by eating lusty cracks of sandy artistry till nothings left but old [] remembering primordial pain of sitting by the unborn bird of roses yet undone—”.

And, from Big Sur, “But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of ‘Oh my God, we’re all being swept to sea no matter what we say or do”—And a bird who is on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my ever hearing him.” As cited in Carole Tonkinson, ed., Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, p. 85.
For this summary, see Hosinski’s thorough discussion. Hosinski, Ch 2 &3.
Yet another connection for me lies in the extent to which both approaches to the space of a poem stress an initial or fundamental vertical action. In Whitehead’s metaphysics this is the irruption of prehension which may, for Olsen, be giant swagger. Coolidge, in his notes on Bop describes the critical importance of the initial impact, “the one of that ever first beat tends very soon to lose it’s ‘e”” and “Awareness of all the room that exists in a single beat” (Cooldige, p. 93) so relevant to Kerouac. I find myself sliding into the past to Rilke who speaks of a poetic gesture as “lifted tree” and “tall tree in the ear”. Thus in sonic terms, the space or tent lifted by the bloom of the poem’s sound as echoed in ear.
The scope of this paper does not allow me to go into depth about Mahayana Buddhist assertions of emptiness or to explore the extent to which Buddhist rhetoric masks and silences critique. Steven Collins and George Dreyfus have both done work edging towards such an analysis. Here it suffices to say that the meaning of the Mahayana assertion that all things are empty is extensively debated in Buddhist philosophy and that, in general, there is struggle with the tendency to essentialize emptiness at some point that may distort one’s view. Within Buddhist thought its held that such distortions may be necessary misapprehensions without which one could not approach the view, but this is not entirely satisfying in critical terms as it is difficult to assess the principle by which this would be evaluated. (In theory the principle is “care”, but, as I have written elsewhere, there is a tension between Buddhism’s wisdom orientation and its concern for care). At stake in all these debates is the value to be given apparitional, illusory form. The Heart Sutra states: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, and very often this is read as an assertion of how an empty ground holds form rather than an indication that illusory formal appearance is all that exists.