A ‘Beat’ ghost walks across American landscape in search of himself

Beat Art cover, designed by Rahul Aijaz

Kerouac ‘On the Road’

“Last night I walked clear down to Times Square and just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost – it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.”

In the words of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac who gives life to words and reinvents a different form of sentence structure to fit the way the ideas flow in his mind, the way a stream flows and flows and flows, creating its way and tackling stones and bushes and branches, the way the wind breezes and shakes the leaves off of the trees which fall on the ground and turn into more beautiful words; he collects them, one man marching through the whole of Unites States of America, with a trumpet in his hands, playing bebop as the musical notes from his instrument and discovering, yes discovering new combinations of notes, words and experiences. One man going through life with his heart in his hands and, eyes and soul looking for a new vision, a new experience, a new world.

This was my reaction upon reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. What Kerouac writes, he feels.

To introduce you to the ‘Roman a clef’ (a blend of fiction and non-fiction) magnum opus called On the Road, the book by Kerouac was published in 1957. It covers his travel adventures across the USA and his close friendship with Neal Cassady, portrayed as Dean Moriarty in the novel. One of the most well-known books in Beat literature, On the Road enlightens you, throws you in the streets, in skid rows, in the big bad world out there, on the road to a destination unknown, where you get lost, get found, stumble, scratch, scrap, struggle, crawl, survive and find yourself. It is an enlightening journey, full of madness, love, passion, “kicks” (as Kerouac and Cassady would say; meaning thrills, fun and experiences), adventure and struggle and trouble and life at its purest and most wonderful yet sorrowful and melancholic, but still thriving, exciting, ecstatic where madmen drink, love, live and enjoy life as we don’t do anymore; where people dance and laugh like there is no tomorrow and don’t have a care in the world but whose hearts burn, burn, burn with love and sadness and the wild joys of life. People who are unpredictable and uncontrollable, who cannot be contained in one body and one world and one life. Their heart and their soul so wild they require hundred lives and yet the energy of all hundred lives is and has to be contained in one extraordinary, mad life and one rotten, crawling, skidding, worn out body.

Neal Cassady (who appears as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road)

We are the truth-seekers, lovers, madmen unbound by any or all limitations of the man-made constructs of society, free from all the laws in the world, free from all fears fed into a child’s hearts; to make him sleep, control him, chain him; we are not chained. We are free men walking into the streets, into the wild, on the mountains, in the oceans and flying with the wings of our hearts. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired of this society. We live on the fence of the society, by choice. We cross the boundaries, we crush the laws and we make our own. We live with passion. Without passion, life is impossible, inexplicable, unlivable. We are the beat boys of the beat society in this beat world. We are the Beat Generation.

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac (right)

The Birth of the Beat Generation

In the small rooms of decaying apartments where smoke infused the air, the paint melted off the walls, beds smelt of semen and alcohol, and the only sound heard was the click-click-click of a typewriter, the Beat Generation was born.

A gang of guys changed the world of literature in post-WWII era. But as James Franco (portraying Allen Ginsberg in the 2010 film Howl) says, they was no Beat Generation, just a bunch of guys trying to get published. In truth, Kerouac coined the term ‘Beat Generation’. An article published in The New York Times Magazine by another Beat writer John Clellon Holmes “This is the Beat Generation” put a definition on their label. It came from a conversation between Kerouac and Holmes in 1948, while discussing the generations, like ‘Lost Generation’ of the 20s, Kerouac said, ‘Man, this is really a beat generation’ not as a way of labeling it, but un-labeling it.

Though the meaning of the term ‘Beat’ may have differed, considering who you ask. For jazz musicians, it meant ‘dead beat’ or ‘beat up; For Herbert Huncke, it meant “exhausted, sleepless, wide-eyed, rejected by society, and on your own.” The idea was conceived by Kerouac hearing old African-Americans saying ‘beat’ meaning crushed, poor and beaten. He also associated it with ‘beatific’ and ‘beatitude’ meaning happiness or holy bliss. It also signified being ‘on the beat’ in Jazz music.

Who were those mysterious guys who were so aptly labelled the Beat writers? They were the rebels who rejected the social norms of the society to develop a more unconventional way of life. They lived life as an expression. A bunch of guys, the most well-known of them being Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Others included Herbert Huncke, Lucian Carr, David Kammerer and Carolyn Cassady (Neal’s wife).

Allen Ginsberg (from Archive of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky)

Spending their lives on the road, getting involved in drugs, alcohol and sex, in search of their souls, the Beat writers came up with, what they called, a New Vision. This new vision and the works produced following it, were first considered obscene as evident from the numerous lawsuits filed against the publishers, the most well-known among them being against Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg went on to join the San Francisco Renaissance in 1955, where he read ‘Howl’ to an audience which included Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He decided to publish the famous poem under his new publishing company, City Lights and was sued for publishing obscene material. Ferlinghetti won the case and it led to a path to expand the boundaries of literary censorship in America.

They wrote about life as they saw, experienced, felt and wanted it. Beats offended the society because they broke the norms. They challenged what was considered obscene and vulgar and unacceptable and unnecessary. They made them uncomfortable with their freedom. The society was not yet ready to change. Their writing style was spontaneous, free-flowing and composed to the pace and rhythm of bebop. The long sentences, paced out with the rhythm of breath (Ginsberg’s style of poetry).

They found and preferred a different way to look at things, to feel and understand the world in a new way, with an alternate consciousness, as if a constant state of trance, a different kind of filter, through a dream machine.

‘Beatniks’, rejection and popularity

The mainstream society rejected the rogue convention-defying lifestyle and literature of the Beats. At the same time, their popularity grew among the like-minded underground groups. Cliques like San Francisco Renaissance, Merry Pranksters (led by Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) encouraged the use of psychedelic drugs and later formed the link between the Beat Generation in the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

The term ‘beatnik’, after Russia launched the first artificial satellite ‘Sputnik’ in 1958, was coined by a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, Herb Caen to condescend the Beats. While the Sputnik burned up after three months of travel, more than fifty years later, we are still talking about the Beats. The recent resurgence in popularity of the Beats, with films such as Howl (2010), On the Road (2012), and Big Sur (2013), and numerous documentaries throughout the last five decades, are evidence enough that Beat Generation influenced the world in their own different way. They will forever be remembered as the road junkies of post-World War II era who travelled across the United States of America in the inky American nights in search of themselves and gifted their souls to the world with their burning, bleeding words.