Guest Post: Edward Sanders

THE LEGACY OF THE BEATS

We all filtered
& transformed the impact of the B.G on our lives
We boosted the volume of some components
lowered the volume of others.

We used the Negative Capability
of John Keats
years before
Charles Olson pointed out
that amazing N.C. letter to us
in one of his essays.

and we
       focused Neg. Cap.
on the thousandfold
aspects of being
                    a creative rebel.

The Beats
brought us
an intoxicating,
lissome & fantastically
appealing strand
in the Great Woven Fabric
of the way we lived.

We were taught
to escape our shyness
& reticence
               & stand up
               for better or worse

to the ridicule sometimes bestowed
from an uptight right wing
culture

The Beats in their
                sense of public spectacle
drew from a long & complex
tradition
going all the way back
to the public chants
           of Archilochus and Sappho
to the prancing dances of
Dionysus
         & the Theory of Spectacle
in Aristotle's Poetics
to the famous premier performance
of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896
to the poemes simultanes of the
Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire
in 1916--
              to Charlie Parker's seething
sax
      to the silence of John Cage--
to the calm pushiness of the
Happening Movement
& to the concept that there
was oodles of freedom guaranteed
by the United States Constitution that
was not being used.

That's why I've
written a series of
books called Tales
of Beatnik Glory

They were shamelessly
         ready to dance
                       down freedom road

     oh glory

Congress
shall make no
law abridging
the freedom of speech,
or of the press
or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble
& to petition the
government
for a redress
       of grievances

       glory

the right of
the people
     to be
secure in their persons,
houses, papers and effects,
against unreasonable
searches & seizures
shall not be violated

     GLORY


Nietzsche
pointed out how in
the wild dance
of Bacchus
across the earth
you dissolve
the Capital I
into the
Totality of Gaia.

That was
the message.

The automobile
and the freedom and largesse of America
were
the ballet slippers
of those
     testosterone-addled
     unselfconfident ego-inflamed
     young men

who still lived
haunted by the
                 near social revolution
                 of the '30s

& the nightmare
                 policestate response
to a vastly over-exaggerated domestic
                                      communist threat

We learned from the
Beats how to change
the word No to Go! Go!

We learned
from the Beats
how hard it is
to shade the glare
from what Kenneth Rexroth
called the Light from Plymouth Rock

How hard it is
to overcome
                self-revulsion & shame

and that it is the
possibility of
actually finding beauty
            experiencing beauty
            writing & painting beauty
            testing & hearing beauty
            calling forth Beauty

that allows
             us to overcome
                            that harsh
                                       relentless

American glare
                    of No.

In the
100,000 year
moil of
jealousy, guilt, murder
& abuse
they brought
the word Yes
to sexual history

It's okay to be gay
It's okay publically
             to read a poem
      about blow jobs or the thrill
  of french kissing an elm leaf

It's okay to love
                  just one mate
            in the caverns of galore
It's okay
      to explore, to experiment
to laugh at sex
to love love     to be ascetic AND erotic
                                                         at the same time
It's okay to be sexually confused
to swirl up & down
            the yo-yo string of sexual yes-no

Yes Yes Yes

That spirit of rebellion
helped women to
begin tossing aside
their shackles also

     I learned from the Beats
     the lesson of the
     Rebel Cafe

     4 walls of Mystic Fruition

     where our words of agitation,
     revolution & rebellion
     come into
                      sharp focus
     in an ever-noodling
     zone of controlled abandon
     Yes!

Everything's excitement
The spine tingles
like thrilling wands
as we come in
through the door
for a night at the
                   Rebel Cafe

The Beats taught us
                      about the
                              thrill
                                  of the
                      Spontaneous Solo

One example
was when
they took fire
from those thrilling
bebop
               lonerhood
               tremble zone
spontaneous
                saxophone solos
on West 52nd

In my own
time it
was having
          Janis Joplin
sing "Amazing Grace"
w/ some bluegrass singers in a bar
holding a bottle of Heineken's

or seeing
Allen Ginsberg
make up a
             25 minute
             spontaneous
             rhymed blues

at midnight
            with the Fugs
    in a recording studio
               on E. 65th
                         in early '66

We learned that
somehow poetry & music
dance & painting
partying & fucking
Bacchus & Barding Around
Traveling in an armchair
& Traveling
                on the lonerhood galores
                of the road
     all were interwoven
     & interconnected

     in a 40, 50, 60, 70 year
     career of art & creativity

They helped teach us about zen
and other forms of
spirituality

We learned about the
Direct Transmission of the Mind

and to seek out
                  the best minds
                  of our own generation

From the Beats we
received a
           new possibility of spirituality
           and visionary experience

I wrote a tune one morning
to "Ah Sunflower, Weary of Time"
when I was
a 20 year
old student at NYU
and walked through
Washington Square
because I knew
that visionary experience
was possible

from A. Ginsberg's
visit from the deep
chanting voice of Blake
in a room in Harlem

The Beats helped
teach us about
the exquisite beauty
of the American countryside

the raw
         thrill
of America
        & its maddened seethe
as a partly poisoned, partly paradisiacal
                        raked garden
                        between 2 oceans

I learned over the decades
a long and painful lesson
about America
that you can love it and
still be a total rebel

not take its injustices

Kerouac once visited the Merry Pranksters
and saw an American flag
                                 draped casually over
                                                       a divan

in the way of the era

and carefully folded it up
                   in the manner of his era

Although we never used it ourselves, we
loved the word beatnik
We loved it when Civil Rights
marchers in Mississippi were
scored as "beatnik-race-mixers"
There was something especially
taunting & thrilling about its
we-just-might-be-communists
suffix, that wonderful "nik"
that caused police statists
like J. Edgar Hoover to dash
off hot air rigidity memos
on the Beats to the secret
police network.

By 1966 everyone sensed
that in just a few weeks
the reporters in the big
city newsrooms were going
to retire the appellation
w/ which they had gladly rounded
off an entire generation--
Beatnik with the "nik"
like a commie serif
on the quadruple meanings
of BEAT
     & replace it for
   a few years
     w/ the word Hippie

     Frankly I was
     drawn to the Beats
     because I wanted
     a nonviolent social
     revolution

I believed w/ all my
young heart in the
line from A.G.'s America
              "When can I go into the supermarket
               and buy what I need
               w/ my good looks?"

A revolution a.s.a.p.
     where we wouldn't have to wait
     through 10,000 years
     of ultra-rightist
     micro-improvements

I was hungering for a social democracy
w/ maximum freedom & fun
& the possibility of spirit

          in the service of which
         I was convinced
         the Beats were
         part of the
         fabric of the vanguard.