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March 07, 2003

Beats and Hippies

Kinda leapin' off my last blog, I've been doing some thinking about the Beats and the Hippies.

My friend John, who is reading through On the Road also, claims that the characters and persons in On the Road are in actuality just as depressed and dissolusioned as they were later in life. Kerouac's Desolation Angels, and even Ginsberg's Howl (although written in '56) has elements of a jaded beat counter-culture. This makes a bit of sense to me, though I in the passed haven't seen that jaded element in their earlier writings.

I always picked up On the Road and felt what I thought was a real bit of existential joy. Like that feeling when you're just heading out on your first big spring break road trip with a group of friends, or even that feeling when you get back to school after Christmas Break. There are all these fascinating people in fascinating contexts, all ready to converge.

I always got this sense reading the early and middle beats. Then I started to read some of their biographies, and later-in life poetry. Kerouac's Desolations Angels is probably the best example of this, and Ginsberg's poems New Year Blues and Sad Dust Glories: Poems During Work Summer in Woods. I realized that these people who once were persuing "it, it, it!" as Neal Cassidy might have put it, had finally given up.

This stood in stark contrast with a the new hippie movement, all happy and engaged. The beats were, in many respects, their heroes. But they never seemed to fully embrace the Hippie culture. They were the old and wizened warriors of the journey, and they couldn't really muster up the energy to fully run with the new and emboldened younger generation. Yet none of them seemed to be able to really fully pull away from the Hippie movement. You still saw Ginsberg and Burrough, mingling about with Dylan and the rest, but they almost seemed out of place. Like ghosts really.

I saw a video of a Greatful Dead concert in the late '60s. At one point, they had Neal Cassidy come up on stage. People cheered, but he just looked hollow. Made me think of that Ben Fold's song Stan.