ATHEISM:ATHEISM:
Pragmatism vs
Hope & Ideals.
In the past week or so, I read a particularly notable chapter in that wonderful collection of writings on the erstwhile 'Beat' movement of the 50s/60s, edited and published by Rolling Stone (The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture, Hyperion, New York, 1999, ISBN 0-7868-6426-5). The chapter in reference, "The American Journey of Jack Kerouac", by Douglas Brinkley, is a masterful examination of this little understood and grossly misinterpreted character in the stage piece we refer to as 'post-war America'.
Brinkley skillfully examines Jack Kerouac not just within the already fascinating context of Red-baiting America of the 50s, but within an even more interesting set of parameters that constituted Kerouac's concepts of personal self identity. In addition to this and aside from being a brilliant and empathetic dissection of both 'cold war' American culture and Kerouac's daring search for a unique venue within which to express himself, this chapter is important to all of us in an even greater sense, as it unavoidably focuses our attention on that chief and timelessly unanswerable central question that lurks within each of us: "What is the true meaning (if any) of (our) life?"
Apres BeatOne of Brinkley's points, that Kerouac quite early attempted
to dissociate himself from the runaway 'monster' that had already become known as the
'beat movement', draws us (at least it did me) to an uncomfortable reflection on the
effects of age (QED: maturity) on such thorny, angst-ridden considerations as religion,
personal value systems, beliefs, awarenesses, and individual life philosophies. Kerouac
was, contrary to the widely popular and wildly stereotyped public image of this 'King
of the Beats', an intensely religious person, a devout Roman Catholic, and heir to
the particular religious intensities of his early childhood's French-Canadian cultural
background. Throughout his life, as his personal diaries amply demonstrate, he continued
to maintain belief in a central God; specifically to a very rigidly defined Roman
Catholic God, surrounded by all its crusty and ancient, dogmatic ritualisms. While this
fact is sometimes a shock to those who have never bothered to do much actual reading on
Kerouac or on his life and beliefs, but whose awarenesses are perhaps confined merely to
word-of-mouth impressions and understanding formulated by osmotic inference alone,
this fact begs the question of how each of us reacts to the forces that bear upon all
human life. It questions the impact of the inordinate cultural baggage each of us carries
with us, as conferred and parceled out by the civilisation that smothers us in its Philistine
tentacles.
I
am personally not a conventionally religious individual, despite the fact that I was born
into an Irish Roman Catholic family and raised as an Anglican (through
'confirmation' at age 12). Somehow or other I managed to transcend the rigid confines of
these theological doctrines and mainstream religious constraints to finally emerge into
the typically muddled and rarified uncertainty of secular skepticism. How this process
managed to successfully obtain, I have no good idea. However, from that day at age 12 to
this day at age 54, I am and have been of the belief that there is nothing in the whole
universe even remotely identifiable as a central, universally 'caring' 'God' (or broadly
omniscient, purposeful and deliberate logos, if you prefer). This lack of the
sort of steady, reassuring and sustaining psychological support that conventional
religious beliefs provides requires immense courage with which to come to grips with this
unanswerable question; for while Marx may have stated "Religion is the opiate of
the masses", I have always felt that it takes far more courage to do without
mind-altering theological opiates of this sort than it does to remain dependent upon it.
Kerouac,
as is commonly known, contributed greatly to his own somewhat premature demise through
progressive ETOHism (another more common kind of substance dependence), after perceiving
that his personal vision of reality had been cooptively distorted by cultural forces
through which his original thought had been inappropriately filtered. Kerouac died at the
age of 47 in 1969 of massive esophageal varices (hemorrhaging); one can't help but wonder
what sort of changes in outlook, interpretation, and/or personal values would have been
manifest in his life had he continued to live through his 50s and into his 60s. In a
sense, he was lucky to have bailed out of life at this relatively early age, but it is
clear that his sensitivities wouldn't have allowed him to endure much beyond that point in
life he had already reached, at any rate. ["Only the good die
young"? Perhaps, but it certainly beats staining one's shorts yellow in a dusty
corner of the old soldier's home at an advanced age].
Considering all of this background on Kerouac invariably made me begin to reflect on my own passage through life: specifically on how the bittersweet lessons of life in the graduate school of Hard Knocks have wrought changes to my own sense of hopes, aspirations, and definitions of what the 'life experience' really is all about. This ruminative process has led me to conclude that just as Gail Sheehy proposed that human life may be predictably dissected into distinct stages of emotional growth, so too can one anticipate that the physical and mental effects of the aging process will exert a profound impact on one's principal set of life-rationalising assumptions.
A good
friend of mine, Dr. Fred Kelly
(who was former head of the NASA flight medicine program at the Cape--yes, THAT Cape;
prior to his retirement, a former dual-qualified flight surgeon and Naval Aviator, and at
one time a leading candidate for NASA's selection of the first doctor-astronaut), wrote a
book about his experiences in the early space program entitled America's Astronauts and Their
Indestructible Spirit (now out of print--the book's original title was
originally simply "Indestructible", but as it was
published immediately after the Challenger explosion in 86, the publisher felt
this might be indiscrete and changed the title). The central premise of the book
was that in order to successfully undertake the horrific risks that the early space
program posed to the first astronauts (it takes more than raw guts to agree to have your
posterior strapped to the pointy end of a somewhat unpredictable and frequently unreliable
guided missile and shot into space, I think--at least it did in those days, given formerly
extant 'state of the art'), the 'Mercury Seven' had to maintain a sort of unreasonable,
yet unshakable belief in their own indestructibility/immortality. This sort of absolute
belief in one's imperishability is easy to subscribe to in early life, since at the start
of life it is nearly inconceivable to entertain the reality of an absolute end to all
experience. In the middle of life, the passage of time and the accumulation of experience
both conspire to set the stage for a greater awareness of the inevitable end we all face,
later on. Finally, in the last third of life (being far nearer the end than the
beginning), the uncertainty and troubling doubt of how we are to eventually end our own
tenuous thread of human life becomes all too real.
Accordingly, youthful recklessness and sophomoric
abandon are all too easy to explain. Along the same line of reasoning, the gradual process
of hopes and ideals transmuting to first cynical disdain and later to barely bridled
hopelessness are all too explicable. The concept of a geriatric Pollyanna is just
as incongruent and categorically impossible as is a youthful Socrates, viewed
within this frame of reference. Consequently, youth is a time of hopeful energy and
unlimited possibilities, whereas old age is a time of barred doors, burned bridges, loss
of hope, and diminished expectations.
Many of us who are not Ginsbergs, Synders, or Kerouacs, but who are still cursed with a small amount of creativity that is never quite sufficient to achieve public awareness or recognition all have to deal with the awful reality of this process. Those who 'buy off' on a God-concept that promises a spiritual reward beyond this physical form we now have are somewhat more fortunate in the here-and-now of advanced years than those of us whose painfully logical skepticism disallows us any hope of this sort. What a bleak prospect, eh? To feel that there is nothing beyond this life that will in any way relate to anything possibly following? Kerouac was spared that final battle, despite his having the crutch of religion as some sort of solace to fall back upon; regrettably, in the end, ETOH was his real God...not the Christian God his childhood tradition and training prepared him to seek out and subscribe to.
In James Ramsey Ullman's children's classic about the first ascent of
the Swiss Matterhorn, Banner in the Sky, the
character of Captain Winter (based upon Edward Whymper) states to the youthful protagonist
Rudi (as well as I recollect it), as they observe the beauty of the setting sun's
alpenglow, that "Youth is a time for dreams and hopes; the trick is, as one gets
older, never to lose them". Fine words to cherish, but all but impossible to
sustain in a daily, meaningful context amidst the daily onslaught of psychic damages we
incur in the latter stages of life.
I fancied myself a poet when I was younger, inspired in part by the warm and fuzzy support imparted from knowing that there were others who also correctly perceived the deceitful reality of American sociopolitical and economic life, behind its sham of artfully deluded, conventional awareness contrivances. It was at that time quite easy to write, inspired by a million billowing hopes and dreams and by all the potential that life tantalizingly held forth. Now that that spiritual collectiveness of that former hope has seen its day and departed into a thousand vague and disparate memories of the past, nothing is certain anymore, except the fact that 'the end is nearer than the beginning'. No one in my old group is interested now in such further collective sharings of fears, uncertainties, and other imponderables, as we all continue to grow out of those naivetes and into the universe of mind-numbing end-game uncertainties. It is sad, of course, but an all but unavoidable outcome as we all continue to live out our small, individual lives of quiet desperation and failed dreams.
Somber thoughts to ponder as the winter of our discontent howls, storm-like, through the distant halls of flown youth's broadest life awarenesses. My advice to counter this dreariness: go have some good strong coffee and admire Christine Baranski's lovely long (and youthful) legs as she plays the part of the Grinch's childhood flame in this year's Jim Carrey Christmas flick (How the Grinch Stole Christmas). Jim is a relative, by the way, but I don't have a fraction of his personal fortune or even a hundredth of his immensely whacko sense of humor (besides, he's an arr-arr guy and I'm not).
Happy T-Day to all... (23 Nov 00)
+++++++++++++++
"You are old, Father William", the young man said, "and your hair has become very white; and yet you incessantly stand on your head--do you think at your age it is right?"
"In my youth", Father William replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain; but now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, why I do it again and again!"
-Lewis Carroll's Alices Adventures in Wonderland
