I just re-read The White Negro, Superficial reflections on the Hipster, by Norman Mailer. It really got me thinking. It really got me thinking about the prophets who predicted my whole life path starting at a time when I was only ten years old. Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Allan Ginsberg!! Wow! They saw all the major influences of my life coming. In his article, Norman Mailer talks about a result of Hiroshima and the Holocaust being that certain people, intellectuals, artists, sensitive people feeling like they were under attack by forces they couldn't control, all the time. He compares this to the everyday, every moment experience of the Blacks in America. He nails this as the root cause of the Beats, the Bohemians, the Hippies, long before these movements were even noticeable. He does not see this as a bad or good thing. Just a thing.
The overwhelming mood of the fifties was to be conformist, to make everyone middle class, to be June Cleaver. Underneath this was our apartheid, our cranking up of the Cold War, our pride(!) in the A-Bomb. At the same time the great creative underside of our society was pushing everything to its limits - drugs, booze, grammar, art, almost like two parallel societies becoming a psychotic side by side. When I look at this I kind of 'get' something that is happening right now. I couldn't 'get' the preppy kids and even the country kids of today wearing their pants falling under their asses, buzz cuts, ugly tats on faces and everywhere. It looks to me that what Mailer was writing about in the White Negro has today become the suburban prisoner. Isn't that what the style is imitating? And the art that is generated for the suburban prisoner is Rap and a lot more I am probably unfamiliar with.
When I think of the early hippies and the late beats, and the people who brought spiritual practices from Asia, and the political wars we fought..feminism, racism, nuclear power,..and mostly lost, I miss the tribal feelings we enjoyed. We recognized our tribe where ever we were. And we had the experience of being White Negroes until we were sucked into the main stream. P. and I got shots fired at us when passing a bar in rural Oregon in 1965 when we were hitch hiking in our long hair and bell bottoms. It turns out we were a threat to the way of life and we were. Things would never be quite the same after the sixties, just as they could never be the same after Hiroshima.
A lot of the prophets who saw all this coming burned themselves out at a very young age. Bright lights burn hot. And this certainly was true with our beloved musicians in the sixties. (Jimmi, Janis, you know the names.) And the drugs gave us the psycho experiences that separated us from the rest of society - sort of. And the wars fucked up anyone who wasn't inclined to do it for themselves. We lived out the dreams of the ground breakers delirium.
What is there to show for all this? We had fun. We won a few squabbles. We work hard to be more conscious. It is harder and harder to get out of the rat race. In fact, I think you might have to leave the country to get sane. What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment