Beat sound, Beat vision

The Beat spirit and popular song

Laurence Coupe

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719071133
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book reveals the ideas behind the Beat vision which influenced the Beat sound of the songwriters who followed on from them. Having explored the thinking of Alan Watts, who coined the term 'Beat Zen', and who influenced the counterculture which emerged out of the Beat movement, it celebrates Jack Kerouac as a writer in pursuit of a 'beatific' vision. On this basis, the book goes on to explain the relevance of Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder to songwriters who emerged in the 1960s. Not only are new, detailed readings of the lyrics of the Beatles and of Dylan given, but the range and depth of the Beat legacy within popular song is indicated by way of an overview of some important innovators: Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Van Morrison and Nick Drake.

1 ‘This is IT’: Alan Watts and the visionary tradition

Western writers and artists have been looking to the East for inspiration since at least the eighteenth century. In the United States a decisive moment came in the middle of the nineteenth century when Ralph Waldo Emerson discovered the Hindu scriptures in translation, and conveyed his enthusiasm to his protégé, Henry David Thoreau. Both men became associated with the school of thought known as Transcendentalism, which effectively fused English Romanticism and Eastern mysticism. The Transcendentalists, as the name implies, thought of themselves as religious thinkers, not just literary writers or cultural commentators (though they were both of these). But it is significant that their idea of religion was formed mainly by their study of texts such as the Bhagavad Gita rather than the New Testament. Their preference for Hinduism over Christianity led to their being regarded as subversives, or even heretics. At best, they were accused of superficiality, of dabbling in Eastern thought instead of engaging with the profundities of the pilgrim fathers’ favoured religion. In truth, they were not opposed to Christianity, but they objected to what they saw as the spiritual impoverishment fostered by the dominant church, namely the Unitarian – Emerson famously referring more than once to ‘corpse-cold’ Unitarianism. In discovering the potential in Hinduism, and in celebrating the idea that the sacred could be apprehended by letting go of dogma, they had a profound impact on the spirituality of the following century. Perhaps their most important influence – one that is routinely overlooked – was on the Beat movement.¹

The mystical philosophy espoused in Emerson’s essay, ‘The Over-Soul’ (1841) – which posited an affinity between humanity and divinity, with nature as the bridge – was particularly important. Here Eastern wisdom, particularly the speculations of Hinduism, is made accessible to educated North Americans in enthusiastic but elegant prose which is rhetorically very powerful:

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.²

Never had the idea of the One been rendered so attractive to Western ears. Emerson made mystical experience seem the most natural thing in the world. Indeed, it is fitting that he should do so, as he had understood from his immersion in Hindu scriptures that the divine was perpetually manifesting itself in nature, if only we would open our eyes:

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man’s words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.³

Note the implicit dialectic between the sacred and the profane realms, which mysticism works to realise. Note too the trust in the power of language to articulate the divine: even ‘profane words’ may communicate ‘the Highest Law’.

There is a chapter in Thoreau’s Walden (1854) entitled ‘Higher Laws’, which may indicate the author’s commitment to the Transcendentalist ideal. Indeed, the book is an account of Thoreau’s retreat into rural solitude at Walden Pond in Massachusetts in order to live authentically and discover his spiritual being, which he had undertaken at the instigation of Emerson himself. Walden celebrates the contemplation of natural beauty and the giving-up of false, materialistic goals. It is clearly informed by that reverence for Eastern wisdom which his mentor had encouraged, as in the following passage:

I have read in a Hindoo [sic] book, that there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. ‘So soul,’ continues the Hindoo philosopher, ‘from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme [ie, Brahman].’ I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. … Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.⁴

Thoreau clearly follows on from Emerson, nowhere more so than in the ease with which he moves from esoteric wisdom to everyday reality. He accepts and extends Emerson’s idea of nature as bridge between human and divine. The difference is that he has a much more practical interest in the ways of the natural world. That is, his ‘theology of experience’ is rooted in his response to his environment. One cannot imagine Emerson himself undertaking the kind of rural frugality of which Walden is largely a report. Nor would he have been capable of the book’s close observation of the behaviour of animals, the appearance of trees, the sound of birds and so forth.

That said, we do need to acknowledge the influence of both writers on the Beats, even if Thoreau’s seems the more obvious. In his account of the ‘Beat spirit’, Mel Ash asserts: ‘Ridiculed in his time for his image of himself as a gigantic meditative “transparent eyeball” that saw and observed all without critical comment, Emerson prefigured the Beat / Buddhist alliance of a hundred years later and laid important groundwork for this very American tradition of questioning the unquestionable and shaking up “polite society”.’⁵ As for Thoreau, Ash provides more than enough evidence of his influence: ‘Probably the most “Beat” of his time, eschewing formalities, disdaining “proper” appearance, dismissing money-based economy, avoiding most forms of “respectable” work and fascinated with nature, poetry and Eastern mysticism, Thoreau, like other early American Beats like Whitman, is now treasured as a national icon.’⁶

That other ‘early American Beat’ deserves a special mention. It is not only his own debt to Transcendentalism, and his own commitment to finding the sacred in the profane, that counts. It is also his audacious use of open form in verse, and his capacity to celebrate his own experience without inviting the charge of egotism. His poetry is paradoxically both highly personal and universal, both particular and general. This stems from his orientation towards mysticism, particularly nature mysticism. Here is the opening of ‘Song of Myself’ (1855), a definitive exposition of his ‘theology of experience’:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil,
this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and
their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never
forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.⁷

With such utterances in mind, we might concur with Ash’s assessment of the poet: ‘Whitman is one of the primary Beat ancestors, a man who eagerly embraced Eastern mysticism, refused gender roles, and advocated a wide-open political vision, all earmarks of Beat ethics.’ Again: ‘Whitman foresaw two roads for American culture, one lit by spirituality, art, literature, simplicity, loving comradeship, robust health, and the other, he said, consisting of “solely materialistic bearings” that must be firmly countered with the elimination of repressive Puritan ideals.’ Thus, Ash feels able to conclude: ‘The Beats and their heirs of the twentieth century stand in an unbroken line of descent from the “Gentle Gray Bard” of New York, standing watch and calling alarm, providing a corrective culture of resistance to the headlong rush to the modern religion of “progress.”’⁸

If Whitman is the main literary ancestor of the Beats, and above all of Ginsberg’s, it is imperative that we do not infer from our first quotation that his stance is one of irresponsibility. Far from it: his repudiation of orthodox religion and his embrace of a new, free-flowing spirituality involves a sustained engagement with the deeper currents of Eastern mysticism. This is evident in the following lines from his ‘Passage to India’ (1870), which celebrates Hindu-Buddhist wisdom as part and parcel of a North American revival of mysticism. It is in many ways a poetic version of Emerson’s ‘Over-Soul’:

O Thou transcendent!
Nameless—the fibre and the breath!
Light of the light—shedding forth universes—thou centre of
them!
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving!
Thou moral, spiritual fountain! affection’s source! thou
reservoir! …
Thou pulse! thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space!
How should I think – how breathe a single breath – how speak
if, out of myself,
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?⁹

Such confidence in the possibility of expanding vision, unfettered by dogma, was indispensable to the Beats. They learnt from Whitman how to open their minds to the possibilities of the cosmic Self, of the Atman which is also Brahman – or, to use an alternative vocabulary, to wake up to their Buddha-nature.

It was not Whitman, however, but Thoreau who proved to be the specific catalyst for Beat spirituality. In 1953, Jack Kerouac read Walden, and it stimulated him to seek out the Hindu scriptures for himself. However, at that time there was still considerable confusion in the West over the distinction between Hinduism and Buddhism (as there had been in the era of the Transcendentalists), so Kerouac ended up taking home Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932) from the library instead of the Upanishads. The significance of this moment should not be underestimated:

Kerouac’s reading of Walden, and later of Buddhist teachings, clearly marked a new era in his life, but it also marked a new era in the life of the nation, since Kerouac’s awakening to Buddhism stirred similar searches in other members of the Beat Generation, and in the hippies of the sixties, thus helping to bend postwar counterculture eastward. Just as Kerouac, in a mood of desolation over a lost love and a large pile of unpublished manuscripts, had turned to Thoreau and to Buddhist texts, many young people, disenchanted with Cold War America and the atomic age issued in by World War II, sought solace in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958). In turn, The Dharma Bums soon proved itself capable of marking new eras in individual lives, thus sparking something of the rucksack revolution of wondering ‘Zen lunatics’ that it had prophesied.¹⁰

Other writers associated with this spiritual turn were Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Anne Waldman. Essentially, each of these concurred with Kerouac when he declared: ‘The Beat Generation is a religious generation.’¹¹ For example, Ginsberg defended the controversial title poem of Howl and other poems (1956) as a ‘protest’ in the original sense of ‘pro-attestation, that is, testimony in favor of Value’. Of the volume as a who...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on usage
• Introduction
• 1 ‘This is IT’: Alan Watts and the visionary tradition
• 2 ‘Go moan for man’: Jack Kerouac and the beatific vision
• 3 ‘Vision music’: Bob Dylan via Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
• 4 ‘Mantra rock’: the Beatles via Allen Ginsberg
• 5 ‘Eco-Zen’, or ‘a heaven in a wild flower’: from Gary Snyder to Nick Drake
• Postscript
• Select bibliography
• Index