I Refuse to Become an AI Smartphone Zombie

On The Significance of The Beat Generation, Then and Now

by Ron Whitehead

The Antinomian Fire This Time

The bone man dances circles
round the subterranean gloom
paints pink and blue and purple
until he fills the room
with the smell of roses
and a pandemonium moon.

There is a struggle going on for our minds. Every form of expression is being attacked. The attack is overt and subtle. The attack manifests as mind manipulation. The attack is pervasive. Most people are not even aware of the attack. In the face of fear, the poet, the creative artist can and must speak, must act, must write. I believe in individuals who fight for freedom, in nonviolent fighting that inspires new forms and new voices, in folks who stand against violence, against war.

UNSCREW THE LOCKS FROM THE DOORS

UNSCREW THE DOORS FROM THEIR JAMBS

Anne Hutchinson, William Blake, Walt Whitman

& The Antinomian Tradition

VOICES WITHOUT RESTRAINT

"Government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

--The Bill of Rights, 1st Amendment

Anne Hutchinson, the cousin of John Dryden, organized a circle of women and led them in discussions of church sermons. The notion that women would even dare to discuss these sermons was considered subversive—after all, discussion leads to questions. Anne Hutchinson was convicted of traducing the ministry and banished, cast out of Boston.

Antinomianism emerges from the Protestant Reformation, encouraging its adherents to deny authority and resist the state when its moral position is feeble, contradictory, absurd. In legal terminology, an antinomy signifies a contradiction, which in Walt Whitman's historical moment, was the condition of slavery in a supposedly free society.

"The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots," Whitman wrote.

He, like William Blake before him, saw his purpose as spreading to the people the original ideas of the American republic, and a revolution that had been fought to establish sovereignty in the individual rather than in the state. In an editorial, he declared that the greatest evil was "strife for gain," yet even in his crusading journalism, he was a voice of affirmation and love.

"Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors from their jambs!"

--Walt Whitman

"Poetry fettered, fetters the human race"

--William Blake

"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem…"

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world."

--Walt Whitman

"through the windr of a wondr in a wildr is a weltr
as a wirble of a warbl is a world"

—James Joyce

When Whitman completed LEAVES OF GRASS—the grass being the uncut hair of the dead—he designed it, set his own type, and marked his publication date as the fourth of July, 1855. LEAVES OF GRASS was disdained by critics as "a mass of stupid filth," an example of "New York Rowdyism," and "grotesque and uncouth." The only favorable reviews were written by Whitman himself, pseudonymously, except (that is) for a letter from Emerson proclaiming Whitman's book as the "most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."

After Whitman was debilitated by a stroke, the young Henry James attacked his work, and a generation later, in a jealous attempt to dethrone the cosmic poet who had written the American epic poem of the 19th Century, Ezra Pound continued the attack on Whitman's romanticism.

Whitman revised and expanded his poems for the rest of his life but not before paying over six hundred visits to hospital wards during the American Civil War. Basic surgery was amputation. Suffering was overwhelming. Yet, Whitman maintained cheerful optimism, the hallmark of his character. Whitman gave succor to the wounded.

Pound's CANTOS reflect his own lifetime of antinomian resistance to the warfare state. Long after he made his peace with Whitman, Pound became a pariah of modern poetry, hysterically protesting "a system which created one war after another in series in system." Ezra Pound was incarcerated twelve years in the house of bedlam, St. Elizabeth's, an asylum for the criminally insane in Washington D.C., which, years earlier during the Civil War, had been one of the hospitals for the wounded visited by Whitman.

Another antinomian, arriving in Paris in 1930, with ten dollars and a copy of LEAVES OF GRASS, forty years old, unsuccessful for years at writing fiction during an anguished marriage, liberated from the middle-class values most take for granted, destitute, surviving by persuading a dozen new friends to feed and house him in rotation in exchange for his conversation, fell in love with Anais Nin (another unknown writer) and began his first masterpiece, TROPIC OF CANCER.

In his poems, Whitman simultaneously praised and condemned his country. In CANCER, Henry Miller savages America as a "cesspool of the spirit," "a curse on the world." While Whitman introduced orgasmic potential in "Song of Myself," Miller used sexual liberation as antinomian metaphor. Published in Paris in 1934, CANCER didn't appear in an American edition until 1960 when Miller was past the age of 70. Whitman's poems were challenged by the district attorney of Boston, but Miller's CANCER faced 50 obscenity charges that would be resolved, finally, by the Supreme Court. One of the triggers of the Sixties.

Ezra Pound, an iconoclast far on the right of the political spectrum. Henry Miller, a Nietzchean nihilist with an anarchistic distrust of all institutions. Both, romantics who cannot believe Whitman in the dream of American possibility.

Whitman, Pound, Miller, all of them voices without restraint. Crucial American influences on The Beat Generation. The Beat Generation. In the next decade, The Beats will come to be recognized as the most important group of poets and writers in the history of the United States of America.

Jack Kerouac, spokesperson for The Beat Generation, wrote a panoramic rhapsody, infused with Whitman's self-identification with the common, the lowly, the downtrodden. Kerouac eulogizes his hoboes and wanderers in the same natural speech that caused James Russell Lowell to keep Whitman off the shelves at Harvard. Kerouac's prose lines—his long, endlessly unpunctuated, surging sentences—are based on Whitman's "Song of Myself" and, like Whitman, Kerouac is a celebrant who remains optimistic, despite all odds, despite all suffering struggle pain failure. He remains optimistic because he knows the journey is perpetual, without end.

Kerouac's friend, Allen Ginsberg, is even closer to Whitman. "Howl," written exactly a century after "Song of Myself," uses the same long line. In Whitman's case, as in Ginsberg's, form becomes a function of the freedom to which the poet aspires. The “holy, holy, holy…everything is holy” is magnificent Whitman AH and AHA ecstasy. Ginsberg is less ambivalent than Whitman about the human price we pay for commerce and industry, more in accord with Pound and Miller in his suspicion of Moloch, his cannibal dynamo of industry named after the Babylonian god to whom children were sacrificed. His antinomianism, however, has been, like Whitman's, the wound dresser, the adhesive, the sower of a communal purpose. Ginsberg helped organize the peace marchers in the Sixties and witnessed the Chicago National Convention in 1968 along with his friend, William S. Burroughs, who may be the most antinomian of all The Beats.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was arrested for publishing "Howl," Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books is the antinomian mecca of the world, Ferlinghetti, whose A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, has sold more copies than any book of poetry by any living American poet, Ferlinghetti, antinomian to the end, sees the poet as “enemy of the state.”

The antinomian legacy of Whitman, Pound, Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and so many other poets, writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers leads to our doors and in this final moment, having stood in the shadows for too long, we step out and stand on the brink, on the edge, at the ending of time.

Time was. Time is. Time will be no more. It's the big bang epiphany, in the gap between thought and image, voices, streams racing, whispering in our blood, pleading in our bones, strange activities in our nerves, the unconscious life of our minds, a tetrameter of iambs marching, shouting. Voices without restraint. Alchemically transmutative symbol decipherment. The book is a sacred elixir. Manger du livre. Eat the book.

We know the shortest distance between two points is a creative distance. We hear Allen Ginsberg howl "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked" and Diane di Prima rant "the only war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed in it" and Amiri Baraka chant "They have turned, and say that I am dying. That I have thrown my life away. They have left me alone, where there is no one, nothing, save who I am. Not a note nor a word," as Lawrence Ferlinghetti paints PICTURES OF THE GONE WORLD.

Allen Ginsberg Diane di Prima Amiri Baraka Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Numinous howls and rants and chants and paintings. And years of tears come fiercely flowing, streaming. All the pain wells up. Years of failure, of not being enough for anyone. Years of wandering, lost, on the outside, outlaw, being told, "You ain't shit. You don't fit. What the fuck you doin here? All you've done is create pain and sorrow. Wouldn't you be better off dead?"

Turning away from, walking away from, disappearing from authorities, the past, the dead. In the hermetic corridors of authority, the dead splash in their shallow sewers, devouring and regurgitating themselves. And with tears in my eyes, a snarl on my lips, and peace in my heart, I'm failing as no others dare to fail.

And I'm in the gap between thought and image. How'd I get here after all the years of not being self, after all the years of being other, of floating out of my body, on the ceiling, watching skin, blood, bones, nerves going through the motions, believing in space and time without realizing I was already out, out of sync, beyond chaos, breathing rhythms at the ending of time.

And now, here in the gap between thought and image, where the only distance is creative distance, here, now, at the end of time, I focus all three eyes in wolf fashion, closing time. I walk through the stone called LUMP OF FAT, and I float through the fire that is central, and I enter the upper chamber of the golden pyramid, the confluence of all streams, polyglot commingling of all voices, the ocean that feeds herself, and as I float over the open sarcophagus, I am the ocean of consciousness.

Knut Hamsun, progenitor of modernism, recipient of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, in his 1890 essay, "On The Unconscious Life of The Mind," said, "We would experience a little of the secret movements which are made unnoticed in the remote places of the soul, the capricious disorder of perceptions, the delicate life of fantasy held under the magnifying glass, the wanderings of these thoughts and feelings out of the blue: motionless, trackless journeys with the brain and heart, strange activities of the nerves, the whispering of the blood, the pleading of the bone, the entire unconscious life of the mind."

So, what? So, what is the ocean of consciousness?

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed in it."

--Diane di Prima.

"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail."

--Samuel Beckett

Today, Specialization is sold on every corner, fed in every home, brainwashed into every student, every young person. We are told that the only way to succeed, here at the beginning of the 21st Century, is to put all our time, energy, learning, and focus into one area, one field, one specialty: math, science, computer technology, business, artificial intelligence. If we don’t, we will fail. We are encouraged to deny the rest of who we are, our total self, selves, our holistic being.

The postmodern brave new world resides inside the computer via The Web, with only faint peripheral recognition of the person, the individual, and (by extension) the real global community, the real human being operating the machine.

The idea of and belief in specialization as the only path, only possibility, has sped up the fragmentation, the alienation that began to grow rapidly within the individual, radically reshaping culture, well over a century and a half ago with the birth of Machiavellian revolutions in industry, technology, and war. And with the growing fracturing fragmentation and alienation comes the path—anger, fear, anxiety, angst, ennui, nihilism, depression, despair—that, for the person of action, can lead to suicide. Only through our paradoxical leaps of creative faith can we engage ourselves in the belief, which can become a life mission, that regardless of the consequences, we can, through our engagement, our actions, our creative work, make the world a better, safer, friendlier place in which to live.

Sound naive? What does this have to do with Voices Without Restraint?

The Beat Generation, the voice that (though trembling) speaks out against the powers that be, what place does this outsider poet voice have in the real violent world in which we are immersed? Are we too desensitized to the violence, to the fact that in the past century and a half alone we have murdered over 160 million people in one war after another, to even think it worthwhile to consider the possibility of a more peaceful world? Are we too small, too insignificant to make any kind of difference? The power-mongers have control. What difference can one little individual life possibly make?

Today, the XYZ microserf who what where when how why generations are swollen with young people yearning to express the creative energies burning in their hearts, seeping from every pore of their beings. They ache to change to heal the world. Is it still possible? Is it too late? Is there anyone left to show the way, to be an example? To be a guide? A mentor?

James Joyce, King of Modernism, said the idea of the hero was nothing but a damn lie that the primary motivating forces are passion and compassion. As late as 1984, people were laughing at George Orwell. Today, as we finally move into an Orwellian culture of AI simulation life on the screen landscape, can we remember passion and compassion, or has the postmodern ironic satiric death in life game killed both sperm and egg? Is there anywhere worth going from here? Is it any wonder that a growing number of today's youth have adopted Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, David Amram, Diane di Prima, Hunter S. Thompson, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Shane McGowan, and all the other Beat Generation-related poets, writers, artists, musicians, photographers, filmmakers as their inspirational, life-affirming antinomian ancestors? These are people who have stood (and still stand) up against unreasoning power, looked that power in the eyes, and said NO! I REFUSE! I don't agree with you, and this is why. And they have spoken these words, not for money or for fame, but out of life's deepest convictions, out of the belief that we, each one of us, no matter our skin color our economic status our political religious sexual preferences, all of us have the right to live and dream as we choose rather than as some supposed higher moral corporate military political power-monger authority prescribes for us.

In the next decade, The Beat Generation will come to be recognized as the most important group of poets and writers in the history of America. The Beats have given birth to new generations, to new energies that are waking to the realization that the creative imagination provides salvation from suicide, from death in life, by revealing that there are alternative paths to explore in this world, alternative paths that lead away from the mundane, the superficial, away from submission to mediocrity, alternative paths opening into the inspired brilliant fire called LIFE.

The hallowed doors of Academia, Academia, the bastion of conservative thought, the doors of Academia are finally creaking open, just as it took so long for them to open for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and all other original thinkers. The doors of slow-moving Academia are creaking open and, finally, at least a discourse on The Beats has begun.

"I am more than my physical body and as such
I can see more than the physical world."

--Robert Monroe

Produce produce produce! Young people, of all ages, let go your fears, embrace failure, take risks, be fearless, accept responsibility for your actions, your successes and failures, embrace failure, through failure you will know undreamed of success, weave wisps of memory beyond the thread of time, with mystic memory rhyme, sing within the pilfered soul, rhythms of wind and drum, ride the blood crest to the heart, move with word-thoughts, touch the untouchable emotion womb, cordate-chord at the core of Om.

If history is the embodiment of fear, reason, social convention, and tradition, then it becomes the duty, the responsibility, the compelling creative urge of the poet to crack history's encrusted shell, releasing the dying and dead by invocation of the word, translated into meaningful sound. The poet's home is in the shadow realms of the creative imagination.

Where do we begin? End? We are the center of a vast, interconnected universe. Knowledge is reorganized, redefined through literature, art, music, and film. The genres are changing, the canons are exploding, as is culture. The mythopoetics, the privileged sense of sight, of modern, contemporary, avant-garde poets, musicians, artists, filmmakers are examples of art forms of a society, a culture, a civilization, a world in which humanity lives, not securely in cities nor innocently in the country but on the apocalyptic simultaneous edge of a new realm of being and understanding. The mythopoet, female and male, returns to the role of prophet-seer, of shaman, by creating myths that resonate in the minds the hearts of readers, myths that speak with the authority of the ancient myths, myths that are gifts from the shadow.

Mind is the builder. Heart is the truth-tester. Resurrect the heart. Listen to your heart. Listening is the greatest art of all. We are all dirty potatoes floating in the same tub of polluted water, and the more we bang into each other by openly, honestly sharing the poems, stories, and songs of our lives the more we come clean.

Listen.

BIO: Poet, writer, editor, publisher, professor, scholar, activist, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate Ron Whitehead is the author of over 30 books and 40 albums. Collections of his works are held in museums, galleries, private collections, and libraries around the world.

Ron has produced thousands of events and festivals throughout Europe and across the USA. Ron has presented thousands of readings, talks, and performances around the world. His work has been translated into 20 languages. OUTLAW POET: The Legend of Ron Whitehead, a feature length documentary on Ron's life and work, is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime Films Documentaries.