A
LONELY VISIT TO PLANET
EARTH:
As
a person who lived through the last part of the ‘Beat’ era and grew into mature
adulthood during the subsequent Vietnam/hip period, it has been a matter of
great interest to me that the creative flowering of the Beat poets, writers, and
primary ‘players’ is just now being critically reexamined in a positive
context—both by the elder members of that social subculture and by more recent
students of the genre who seek to gain understanding of it in the present focus
of social change since the 50s.
One book among many that
somewhat belatedly concern themselves with this subcultural 50s phenomenon,
The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, serves to focus attention
not just on the primal undercurrents and important ideas generated by the Beats,
but on the heritage left by them as the current generation of alienated youth
renew the never unfashionable adolescent struggle against the chains of secular,
monopolitically incorrect consumerism that American materialism has forged.
Aside from refreshing my own recollections and interpretations of the Beatness
that flourished while I was still a
sub-teen child, the book serves as a welcome catalyst to stir up old passions
and help refresh my own (former and present) feelings of alienation to American
mainstream culture that entry into a 5th decade of life has somewhat
started to blandly homogenize and nullify.
In
particular, one segment of this book by educator (and former Beatess) Hettie
Jones, reminiscing on the role of women in a predominantly male movement,
provoked reflective bemusement. Jones (of LeRoi Jones, et al), remarks upon the
early efforts to preserve and distribute the poetry and prose of the period’s
Beat innovators in the form of a periodical, and remarks that Yugen,
the name of this publication, was at the onset a simple, frequently plaintively
rude assemblage of creative angst. Jones further remarks on the simplicity of
the magazine, on the passionate
toil and effort that went into it and the burning sense of how important
it was to publish these poems and essays by new, emerging, and youthfully
energetic sidewalk prophets…how vital it was to ‘get the word out’ to the drab,
conservative and conforming legions of bourgeois stiffs inhabiting those stiff,
starched white shirts and those uniformly drab gray flannel suits of post-war
America.
This reminded me of my own peripheral and somewhat
parallel activity in the 60s, as a minor member of the science fiction community
known as ‘fandom.’ While not centered in political and immediate social issues,
science fiction ‘fandom’ was the venue within which I cut my creative teeth and
developed a lifelong interest in the power of the written word, the lure of the
language as creative tool to generate thoughtful reflection and exchange of
ideas. We ‘fans’ as we simply termed ourselves, while ostensibly dedicated to
science fiction literature, invariably became caught up in the cult movement
that grew around the periphery of our literature. As artsy-schmartzy
wannabes, participation in the
science fiction fan world invariably led to the publishing of what we called
‘fanzines’. This form of self-expression is now simply referred to as a
‘zine’ and I am personally of the opinion that our science fiction fan
movement of the 60s helped give birth to the alternate sub-cultures of comic
book and Gen-X ‘zinedom’ that are major elements of the (regrettably)
conventionalized (and highly commercialized) youth culture movements of
today.
A science fiction fanzine
properly consisted of articles, stories, letters (received from recipients),
editorials, and artwork—ostensibly about or related to science fiction writing.
The form of the ‘fanzine’ probably became popular because there was so little
REAL talent out there in the fan world and so many decidedly inferior muses at
work, simultaneously. Hence, due to the difficulty implicit in having one’s own
meager creative efforts accepted for publication in a fan produced magazine of
major status, this unhappy fact constituted a substantial additional impetus to
write, illustrate, and publish, and editorialise in one’s own fanzine.
I wrote and published several of my own, most seen in today's light as being of
almost unbelievably juvenile inadequacy. My own creative abilities and talents
were marginally good, but not good enough to achieve recognition without
substantial effort and work to polish them up acceptably. Being inherently lazy,
yet sufficiently bright enough (the Irish blood, no doubt) to sail through most scholastic activities with a minimum of
effort, I never managed to make much of an
impact in science fiction fandom.
However, of critical importance to the remaking of my inconsequential
adolescent self into the present insubstantial adult self that I now am was the
larger effect of all these creative activities in developing my pedestrian level
of literacy. I recognize now that if it had not been for all those lonely hours
spent typing, turning the mimeograph crank, cutting stencils, and transcribing
artwork over a hot light box, I would not presently possess the unrequited level
of literate mediocrity that I currently carry into my fifth decade of
life.
In
the 60s, while the residual Beat creative voices were helping foster and unleash
the simultaneously destructive and regenerative sociopolitical forces of a new
generation of frustrated youth, I was still caught up in the ‘techie’ romance
that the possibilities of applied futuristic scientific technology presented to
youth of my age group. Hence, I lived and breathed Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick,
Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, while other, more intellectually astute
members of my age group were already focused on the deeply insidious and subtly
deleterious and disingenuous effects that man’s new religion of science and
technology were having, not just on our American society, but on the whole world
(especially on the natural world).
Thus, by the time I finally figured out the fact that
science fiction was, while an engaging and entertaining fantasy, nothing really
more than a footnote on the broader page of real human and social issues, it was
a bit late for me to get into the Beat ethos in any sort of vital, meaningful,
sang froid manner. After all, Reedley California, although only a few
hundred miles from North Beach and populated by 3000 people and 5000 head of
beef, might as well have been a colony on the moon (to use an analogy I felt a
degree of literary comfort with, at that time). Later, while continuing to grow
up further in Berkeley (in the 70s and after discharge from the Air Force in
1969), I found that even the city of Oakland could in fact be the figurative
equivalent of the Dark Side of the Moon, upon crossing over that city’s
border that it shared with the People’s Republic of
Berkeley.
Instead, poorly enabled in
my teens to understand the real creative issues at the heart of the Beat
movement (as a boy raised in the VERY rural and agricultural central valley of
California), I sought to blindly emulate the signs and symbols of Beatness—very
much in the manner of almost all of the other disaffected hangers-on and
wannabes who eagerly adopted the name ‘Beatnik’ to describe their filial social
ethos, for lack of truer, purer insights. I was, of course, too far from the
Western epicenter of the Beat ‘thing’ to really be able to understand it and
understandably no one in the conventional literary or social mainstream was
helping us ‘fringers’ achieve that just-out-of-reach intellectual grasp of this
movement that we intuitively felt might be so important in helping us define our
post-adolescent identities.
As
a result, in the late 50s, while North Beach was still snapping its fingers to
the bongo beat over espresso at Café Med, while Berkeley was still simmering and
reaching a rolling political boil, I and a few other modestly aware and
marginally talented youth from the erstwhile ‘outback’ were busy eagerly pusuing
the traces of this phenomenon like scent-hounds with chronic sinusitis. I recall
dressing in what I felt was a requisite proletarian uniform of blue chambray
work shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and making occasional holy pilgrimages to North
Beach, the Haight, and Telegraph Avenue, drinking in all the diversity and color
without fully understanding anything about it, other than the fact that it was
alive, hopeful, and vibrantly opposed to the status quo. Proustian
obsequiousness and existentialist enthusiasms be damned: I wanted some of the
action in any way, shape, or form obtainable.
It
wasn’t until I found myself caught up in what I can only call that terrible
‘Vietnam adventure’ that I finally gained some genuine insightfulness and
awareness into not just the creative mythos, but the ultimate futility of the
human struggle for life. Attending Bakersfield Junior College (that was long
before this unfortunate city finally received a much needed 4-year State
College) after graduation from Wasco Union High School in 1964, my combined
predilections of inherently lazy intelligence and emotional uncertainty about
what the future held for me personally resulted in a dawning recognition that it
probably wouldn’t be long before I found myself knee deep in mud, carrying a
jammed M-16 high above my head through some nameless rice paddy in SEA. As a result, and knowing that I wouldn’t
last a day (even in a waterfight held at a distance of 100 yards with
squirtguns), I joined the Air Force and found myself serving in a safe ZI area
as a Strategic Air Command medic..
The story of my two+ years
of service in North Dakota and Arizona, as a medic, before joining the
‘uniformed anti-war movement’, is another story. Suffice it to say that in the
end, upon (honorable) discharge in 1969, I returned to the San Francisco Bay
Area (where I was born) and settled down in Berkeley, eager to continue my
pseudo-Bohemian education. Lacking the wherewithal to attend UC Berkeley, I had
to once again accept a familiar role of being back on the fringes of the
movement, rather than at the center of it. By this time the creative echoes
of the Beat counterculture across
the Bay were largely forgotten in the rush of my Berkeley contemporaries and
peers to embrace Mario Savio’s anti-war movement, the hippie thing, and the
‘tune-in, turn-on, & drop-out’ ethos implicit in “sex, drugs, and
rock’n’roll”. As a constrained,
middle class medical technologist working a pulmonary clinic on Oakland’s ‘Pill
Hill’, beset with frustrated
countercultural aspirations, I had neither the time nor the luxury of immersing
myself fully in this sub-cultural movement. As a result, I remained ever on the
fringes, one of those unhappy wannabe, spiritual drop-outs who just couldn’t
quite accept the level of social or financial risk implicit in actually doing
so, but who faithfully attended sporadic Socialista gatherings at
La Pena, anyway.
Further complicating matters, as a medical person
from a long line of medical people, I could never completely buy off on the idea
of seeking escape through use of
consciousness-altering substances (other than wine, which I found was an
agreeably useful creative catalyst to stimulate my sense of wonder, while
slaking my muse’s thirst). Thus, robbed of the utility of argument that advocacy
of drug abuse provided for subverting the dominant paradigm, I was left with a
sort of semi-Bohemian dilettantist quandry—which is where I remain today,
frustrated still by my perpetual ‘outsider’ status and forsaken by the sub
currents and alternative movements that leave my occasional philosophical
tangents largely emasculated and subverted by impotent expressions of
substantive angst and liebes-regret that merely increase with
age.
Beat expressions of protest
aside and viewed generally, as an outsider to any inner enclaves of
formally recognized subcultural opposition to today’s dominant American
corporate culture (of spiritually void material consumerism), I have always
entertained what would probably be considered some very radical attitudes on the
subject of humanity’s place in the scheme of the vast cosmos we are presented
with. So radical are these opinions and views that I frequently amuse myself by
entertaining the fanciful image of being almost literally a displaced,
dispassionate visitor to this planet, hailing from some other, more enlightened
civilisation (hence the title of this broadside, “A Lonely Visit to Planet
Earth”). It is often THAT hard for me to get into the mindset that underlies the
continuing conversion of this planet’s natural beauty and resources into
buyable, consumable, and disposable ‘things’ that only drain our natural joy of
living and bind our souls to dull, lifeless object-anchors. It is a process that
is somehow analogous to proposing an idea wherein all the priceless art
treasures in the Guggenheim Museum would be removed and boiled down into some
basic molten plastic plasma, that could then be molded into trivial household
objects of no moment whatsoever.
While it is engaging and sufficiently wasteful to
dwell on the dominant social pathologies and political diseases of our American
nation in continuation of this line of thought, by means of examining important
alternate American sociopolitical movements such as that of the Beats, the
larger issues perpetually and unavoidably dredged up in the doing beg yet again
that timeless question, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
Indeed, what is missing today from the minds and
thoughts of those incorporated powers that effectively ‘rule’ American lives
(and through profusion and dissemination of American consumer culture, the lives
of all others in the world), is a greater view of exactly what ‘it’ (viz. human
life on this planet) is all about and where this relentless process is leading
us, this process of obsessive conversion of natural resources into consumable
luxury goods with utility only for those at only the highest levels of the human
food chain. Whereas in the past, America at least had religious codes and
(several) religion-based sets of moral principles (which if we never quite
completely fulfilled their highest aesthetic expectations still served to set
the tone for the overall conduct of our human hive’s activities) to
serve as moderating guidelines, today we appear to have no functional morals
save those centered on the amassing of obscene amounts of personal wealth by an
elite few. And we now also possess the advanced science and technological means
to manifest the gravest of impacts on both humanity and the physical world in
this accelerated quest for raw personal gain (read: unbridled
greed).
Too, the average person
had, when faced by similar apparently unavoidable prospects in past centuries,
the option of retreating to the figurative sanctuary provided by possession of a
strong set of personal religious beliefs. Lacking such a theological safety net
myself, I and those like me can only view the current wanton rape of our planet
with the greatest emptiness and an accompanying sense of exquisitely desolate
sadness. As a wise person once remarked, it takes the greatest courage to
believe in nothing. Accordingly,
when there is nothing to believe in and no deity that appears to have a
supreme (if inconceivable and inscrutable) purpose for all the apparent worldly
chaos that defies our logical understanding, one tends indeed to feel quite
understandably like an alien life form on one’s own planet.
If
Hemingway’s 'lost' generation had had bad dreams about its possibilities in the
social devastation following the First World War, the Beats saw this process
actually taking on a palpably horrific form, as America emerged the victor from
the Second World War armed with the greatest scientific and technological powers
yet known to humanity at its disposal; the monster of corporate expansionism and
the secular religion of consumerism were increasing recognised together as a
double-headed monster to be resisted at all costs . The Beats viewed, through
the eyes of some its more enlightened prophets (such as poet Gary Snyder), the
beginnings of what has today become an unstoppable colossus of monolithic power:
the abuse of science and technology in the abject and total service of corporate
subjugation of the natural world, in the advancement of materialism. In most
cases, they lived to see the culmination of that trend in the present state of
terrifying world-wide destruction that goes on in the name of that great God,
GNP.
Unhappily, not only are we (the slightly more
enlightened ones who understand the greater issues at stake) stuck with the
Gaussian distribution curve of intelligence quotient that strictly delineates
humanity’s limited ability to be fully aware of the dire consequences of ongoing
events, we are also held in virtual slavery by the tremendously influential
forces that corporate enterprise has arrayed against us in the form of
commercial advertising, control of the media, and purpose-shaped and
highly-constructed entertainment
cartels. In consumerist America, it is virtually impossible, therefore,
to muster up enough active concern to effectively deal with the ongoing
destruction of the planet due to the fact that we are all being maintained on a
force-fed diet of societal soporifics in the form of consumable goods and other
inconsequential distractions. The fact that the ability of humanity to resist
and forestall programs of such massive globally destructive impact (as
world-wide corporate activities essentially take the form of) is far less
effective than the forces at work to degrade the world are capable of
supporting, means that the process is probably far too far advanced by now to
result in any meaningful reversal of this misfortune at all.
So
too, do certain relentless natural processes such as human propagation among the
poorest elements of humanity (to name one only) threaten all of us (and by this
I mean the longevity of human life on the planet); sadly, the lack of concern on
the part of those international powers most able to redress this imbalance of
goods, wealth, and entitlements simply ensures continuation of the unhappy
status-quo. Of course, seen against the vast backdrop of the cosmos, ultimately
human life is utterly meaningless and so insignificant as to be completely
negligible in any absolute sense. The bottom line for the human race therefore
seems to be the esoteric equivalent of a choice the executioner might pose to a
man irrevocably condemned to die: “Do you want it now…or
later?”
In
that most personal of contexts, I would myself like to stick around just a bit
longer to see what experiences my own intimate and self-associated expression of
human life has in store for it. In the larger scheme of things, however, I am of
the opinion that given the fact that humanity provides continued evidence of its
own ineluctable inability to endure (i.e. self destructive tendencies combined
with an inability to take the larger view of what is best for all, rather than
best for the individual) in the longer term, as a viable life form on Planet
Earth, it would probably be far better for the world (Mother Ghea?) to rid
itself of this pestiferous life form
known as Homo Sapiens (surely a bitterly ironic joke, if ever there were one)
and fall back into then natural, timeless rhythms of the natural universe for as
many eons the planet has left in this solar orbit.
After all, in the endless life of the Universe,
humanity’s tenure is certainly a brief one by any measure of of the constants of
time and space. In a few hundred millions of years (perhaps even within a few
hundred, at the rate we are going), humanity will disappear anyway, when the
Earth boils itself away in the final death throes of our sun, gone supernova.
Why not simply end the misery now? It is hard to conceive of a prolongation of
the sort of abysmal unhappiness that we daily endure now for several hundred
millennia more. Believe me, if I were a God of the sort that Christians and
believers in other religions have such unshakeable faith in, I wouldn’t hesitate to waste
this miserable terrestrial experiment gone awry in the blink of a Cosmic Eye.
Since the mold in the earthly petri dish appears to have gone so irreversibly
bad and mutated into an such an unacceptable form anyway, why not simply end the
experiment?
It
is a philosophic question worth pondering as this unhappy sphere full of
squabbling, festering, combative, dissatisfied, and primitively ignorant little
human parasites continues to wobble forlornly around the indifferent cloud of
combusting Hydrogen we call Sol.
