The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  The Human Being are strung lines of word associates that control “thoughts feelings, and apparent sensory impressions.” Quotes from Encephalographic Research Chicago Written in TIME. See Page 156 Naked Lunch Burroughs. See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines keep Thee In Slots..

  Cut the Word Lines with scissors or switch blade as preferred The Word Lines keep you in Time . . . Cut the in lines . . . Make out lines to Space. Take a page of your own writing of you write or a letter or a newspaper article or a page or less or more of any writer living and or dead . . . Cut into sections. Down the middle. And cross the sides . . . Rearrange the sections..Write the result message . . .

  Who wrote the original words is still there in any rearrangement of his or her or whatever words . . . Can recognise Rimbaud cut up as Rimbaud . . . A Mellville cut up as Mell ville . . . Shakespeare moves with Shakespeare words . . . So forth anybody can be Rimbaud if he will cut up Rimbaud’s words and learn Rimbaud language talk think Rimbaud . . . And supply reasonably appropriate meat. All dead poets and writers can be reincarnate in different hosts.

  Cut up . . . Raise standard of writer production to a point of total and permanent competition of all minds living and dead Out Space. Concurrent

  No one can conceal what is saying cut up . . . You can cut The Truth out of any written or spoken words . . .120

  That means that if you take a speech by Nixon in which he’s manipulating your mind and you cut up the speech and rearrange it, as Burroughs suggests, you find out what he is actually saying. Just take his words and cut it up and paste down the middle, or cut it in quarters and rearrange it in a different order. In the original the words are given to you in an accepted, socially ordered, sequential, logical order, as you might expect from a reasonable man talking to reasonable people. He can sneak in a lot of hypnosis, like “I am not a thief.” But if you take that sentence, and cut it up with “Bebe Rebosa is my friend,” it becomes “I am not Bebe Rebosa a thief my friend.” So if you cut up the sentence, you don’t know if he is saying I am a thief or I am not a thief.

  In other words, most writing, most political writing and journalistic writing, is manipulative in the sense that it is trying to convince you of something, some kind of bullshit, some hot air. If you want to make the manipulative phrasing of it stand out like a sore thumb, just cut it up and rearrange it. The manipulative inconsistencies jump out in 3-D.

  Around 1960 I did that. My little cut-up experiment was, during the Bay of Pigs crisis, to cut up Khrushchev’s speech and Kennedy’s speech and mix them together and see what the resultant declaration was. The sentence I arrived at was, “The purpose of these maneuvers is offensive weapons.” As simple as that. Both of their minds put together, in other words, their words mixed together, combined to show what was in the language.

  Orwell’s essay on language “Politics and the English Language” is a great essay, which Burroughs cited often for this very purpose. Orwell points out the style of phrasing that is manipulative bureaucratese. The more manipulative and bureaucratese it is, the more abstract and Latinate it is, the fewer pictures and sensory references there are in it.

  CHAPTER 26

  Burroughs and The Ticket That Exploded

  I stopped at a newsstand on Shaftsbury Avenue and bought a copy of Encounter. Contemplating on their eros the feet of prose abstracted to a point where no image track occurs.121

  Burroughs is putting picture image track as an equivalent of the tape recording in the mind of the word. He mixes here, cuts out some of his plot, his cosmic detective story consciousness plot, with some parodies and prose, which I believe are actual cut-ups of Encounter prose. Encounter magazine being a British Anglo-American literary magazine which was subsidized by the CIA during the early fifties.

  (desperately effete negation of societal values fecundate with orifices perspective and the ambivalent smugness of unavowed totalitarianism.)

  I knew why he was standing there. He didn’t have the ready to fill his script. He was waiting for somebody he could touch.

  (foundering in disproportionate exasperation he doesn’t even achieve the irrelevant honesty of hysteria . . .122

  That is one of the phrases that George Steiner or somebody in Encounter wrote as a negative review of Naked Lunch. “Foundering in exasperation of hysteria.” Burroughs is pointing out, as Orwell pointed out, it’s just attitudinal abstractions and has absolutely no referents for these words, there’s no sight, sound, smell, touch. They are just referring back to other abstractions. One abstraction referring to another abstraction, receding infinite.

  “Need bread for your script, man?”

  He turned and looked at me decided I wasn’t the heat and nodded. I passed him a quid. “That should buy six jacks. I’ll see you outside.”

  He nodded again went in and sat down in the script line.

  (ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)

  I waited half an hour of word sludge123

  This is Burroughs’s parody of manipulative prose. If you cut it up you realize the essentially empty nature of it. Burroughs was also trying to cut up his own thoughts, feelings, and his own sexual obsessions, which he felt were tied to certain sensory impressions.

  Another notion of cut-up is whenever you find a sender, a sender like Nixon, or the CIA, or Encounter magazine, your mother, your father, yourself, the great ego self the sender, then the way to deal with the sender is by feedback. So if you wanted to destroy the CIA, you just trace along the word line to find where the human put-down language imagery came from, and then you cut up that negative human language put-down imagery that’s being fed to you and you feed it back to the CIA or your mother. “Cut-up and spray back of all minds living.” “To see or switchblades are preferred cut the word lines.” “No one can con cut-up. Cut your own . . . cut the.”

  What he does in Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded, structurally, is to use random cut-up material. He still has his plots, his routines, just like Naked Lunch, like the blue movie, or like Dr. Benway, and then he’ll take several of these scenes and cut them up together and distill the essence of nostalgia or poesie from each of the scenes, reductively cutting them up to shorter and shorter sections, eliminating more and more until he may have a whole paragraph, which is the cut-up essence of previous chapters.

  Burroughs had an excuse. He thought that nova conditions were approaching, he thought that there were only minutes to go. He thought that some radical means of getting inside language itself, getting inside consciousness, and altering consciousness, was urgently necessary on a large scale. He felt that drugs were manipulated by the government and therefore not available, and other methods like Buddhism, psychoanalysis, etc., were slow and archaic.

  As a Yankee inventor, like his grandfather, Bill invented the cut-up to look inside language. Take your rational consciousness and spread it out on the table before you and objectively take a razor to it, cut it up, recombine it, thus extending it, opening it up, putting more space into it. Then rearrange it to give it a little bit more air and then feed it back into the soft machine. This will cause feedback short-circuiting, thus perhaps liberating the mind for an instant or a whole novel. I think the practice of cut-up is a very witty, interesting form, probably an ancient form of meditation. In other words, the cut-up brings unconscious intention in a piece of writing to the surface. All of his later writings are extensions of this central idea.

  For an obsessive decade, 1958 to 1968, this was his whole purpose, one hundred percent, deconditioning. That comes back to what I said was our original purpose with this course, [that] it was primarily a probe into consciousness. Different decades of progressive development and experiments through literary means of relating to our minds and to subjective consciousness and to the phenomenology of consciousness. That’s probably
why the Beat shot has lasted, rather than being a transient social phenomenon.

  CHAPTER 27

  Neal Cassady and As Ever

  The book As Ever is a collection of letters between me and Neal [Cassady].

  Dear Neal:

  Letters between you and me is like conversation between two equally beat bums, either we are garrulous and complaining or short-writ and enigmatic; but I don’t think we make sense. Take this as garrulity. If I thought writing you a 1000 page letter would answer enigmas, either mine or yours, I would sit down with quill and scroll and furiously scribble. A week ago I reread all of my Denver and Texas notebook, long ramblings of subjective worry, and was absolutely amazed at how cracked it sounded; reawoke in me memory and breath of how totally unified my soul was in love rapture; but read it; so long winded and frustrating it seemed I couldn’t finish—not boredom, but oppression.

  The and and . . . and style of my last letter was like Ezra Pound. And I received a letter from him in same mail as yours, in answer to letter to him asking questions about meter. He wrote A. Ginsberg and address in wavering infantile scrawl all over the envelope front, and covered a whole page of blank paper with the notes:

  S. Liz. (—this means St. Elizabeth’s Bughouse Wash.) AG

  Dear AG

  None of you people have least concept of FATIGUE. I have said it all in print, i.e. all answers to yrs.———Cantos no use to people writing shorts. E.P.124

  Pretty good answer, I thought, at least he took the trouble. I had written Ezra Pound some long bullshit letter about what kind of prosody or what kind of meter you need for writing and asked what is the new meter, and what are your thoughts about meter? William Carlos Williams talks about meter and so I said to Pound, “What do you think?”

  “Don’t you people have the least concept of Fatigue, I’ve said it all in print.” It took me about two days to figure out what Pound meant, “I have said it all in print, i.e. all answers to yours.” He meant he had already answered all my questions elsewhere. Sometimes when somebody writes me a letter I reprint that. But then he had this afterthought of Bodhisattva generosity. “Cantos no use to people writing shorts.” He was saying that the extended variable meters in the Cantos and the ideogramic method he was using were not the thing to study if you were writing a short, concentrated poem. Then I had more advice for Cassady.

  Seriously: You should attempt then something you think I may take and others take for granted: an outline of your emotions of loss of love, a long confession of your secret feelings; not only the frenzy and perceptions and activity, but the deep single real personal unstated suffering you feel and felt. By take for granted I mean you never avail yourself of human ears to confess to, you always confess your crimes, but I know little of your feelings as a boy and man—even in Joan letter.125 Certainly I never understood how much you wanted Luanne. Did she? You have felt more unhappiness than almost anybody, but seldom do you allow it to be shared—as Jack knows; he remembers your crying in the eatery now as the center of his book. God, Neal, I wish I could see you, (in a timeless world in the sunlight)—I suppose you know all this.

  Even that fool Bill, in his last letter, told me all about himself and then ends his paragraphs “I hope I’m not boring you with all this.” Heaven, heaven, things I’ve been waiting and wondering about for years.126

  What I was getting at there was the unstated, that interests me now. We take for granted that other people know what we’re thinking about or feeling and we write poems taking for granted something that has never been stated and has never been understood. The poems have a thin surface because the substance of what we were feeling was never laid out to begin with. That is important because people write poetry that nobody understands because they assume that it’s understood already. They just write poems where the language is thin because it didn’t include the original complaint, so to speak. It didn’t include the original heart throb fear, or whatever.

  Then a letter to Neal on October 31, 1950, which was a moment that affected everybody of this group, Cassady and Burroughs and myself and Kerouac quite a bit. It’s about [the death of] a friend of ours named Bill Cannastra who moved in high artistic circles.

  The great question on everybody’s soul, was, was it an accident or did he do it on purpose? I met Ann Adams, who was with him, and she gave me a minute account of details. The party was leaving her house after a night of sticking and wandering, and on the way to Claude’s [Lucien Carr], Claude and Cannastra had become friendly and got drunk, pawing each other, recently. Subway to Claude’s to get money, a touch O’the dawn. When they talked about the Bleecker Tavern (negress Winnie’s hangout) Bill lurched out of the window as a joke. He stuck his head and shoulder out, but apparently had misjudged his lurch and found himself half hanging unbalanced out of the window. The others rushed to pull him back, and hung on to him, as the subway roared through the tunnel. His coat ripped, and they couldn’t get a grip on him by his shoulders as he was too far out. When he saw what was happening he began screaming to be pulled back. He ducked, trying to avoid the pillars in the tunnel, and hunched his head, but suddenly there was a thud and he was knocked out of the window to the tracks, out of their hands. When the train stopped, she went to the last car where his body was dragged and saw that his head was broken and brains showing out the temple.127

  That was one of the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, in a sense. It went into my own poem “Howl.” It was one of the first community deaths, or deaths in our community, that affected everybody. We shuddered and had an awareness that it was a mortal place we were in, a reminder of mortality.

  Although [Cassady] had been a very energetic hero figure for Kerouac and for myself, he began to go through an early period of disillusionment and blankness around that time. The point I’m trying to make is that his career as a hero was worn out already by 1950. Neal was much mythologized as a hero figure into the mid-sixties, but he himself already felt worn out, worn down, and blanked out by November 1950. There are a series of statements about that that are really interesting, because they fit in like a jigsaw puzzle to Kerouac’s writing about him in On the Road and Visions of Cody.

  Nov. 25, 1950

  Dear Allen:

  It is not an easy task to write to you, or anyone; in fact I cant’s bring myself to write at all. In regard to this vacuum wherein I can find nothing to say to anyone, Diana [Hansen] has the worst of it. Accordingly, if you see her at any time please tell her I just can’t write or do anything else and that’s the end of it. I have many beautiful instances of my inability to function at hand, and could recite them for you, but need not since I really haven’t the strength. I can’t overemphasize too strongly how ugly my life has become, simply because of this “do nothingness,” and how low I’ve gotten by realizing emotionally every damn moment what a really disgusting fish I am. Honestly it’s awful, not only am I unable to do the ordinary things necessary (brush teeth, see doctors, do important RR things, sleep) but also, can’t do absolutely imperative things, i.e. my car’s broke down, needs easy to fix spark plugs, do you think I’m able to walk two blocks to get them and take ten minutes to fix it? no, no, I’ve been riding streetcar to work for weeks, etc. etc. things even worse, but suffice to say I just eat every 12 hours, sleep every 20 hours, masturbate every 8 hours and otherwise just sit on the train and stare ahead without a thought in it. One thing I do is think every 5 seconds of the things I have to do, I keep reciting them over and over in my mind?, “fix car, fix feet, fix teeth, fix eyes, fix nose, fix thumbs, fix bronchial tubes, fix asshole, get new RR lantern, get RR pass for trip back here in March for Hairy Jack and Harassed Diana, (if they want it) get started on book, get lined up for RR jobs on way east, get dog (I got thorobred cocker for Cathy) rabies shot, get backyard fixed for Cathy to play in, get this read and that written etc.” The net result of all this is my belly is sick all the time, it’s loose, I eat and I fe
el sick after, I smoke and get mad for not stopping, etc. etc. I wish I had a toad stool to crawl under and die.

  Then, I remember reading this letter and thinking that it was odd prose.

  To attempt to get an exact fix on the ever-mysterious soul is futile. But nowadays one must needs have abstract thinking and it forces the physicist of the inner world to elucidate a fictitious world for oneself by fictions piled on fictions, notions on more notions. He transmutes the non-extended into the extended.128

  Then there is a whole disquisition on the effects of marijuana on him and on Jack, marijuana making them both blank-minded. This is an early notice of that.

  The particular Mexican t [marijuana] that Jack and I have been blasting (I ran out almost a month ago and if you lovely boys would take pity and just send me any small amount available I’d surely swoon) was different than any other t because I’ve noticed that anyone who uses it has a tendency to think the same strange things as do others who have it. I know t has similar effects on all of us, but this stuff was more so; even Al Hinkle entered completely into the same pattern of kicks once he’s blasted.

  Hinkle was a Denver friend who was a railroad brakeman. A big, tall, scholarly, quiet, resolutely silent fellow.

  In the light of this, and letters Jack has written me, I suspect the brooding alone on Richmond Hill for what it was; a final and most disheartening realization of himself. This is not to say he was not happy, it was that itself which showed him the truth of the matter. Under its (t) influence he was really stoned consistently for long period; and alone. When one is alone on this stuff the sheer ecstasy of utterly realizing each moment makes it more clear to one than ever how impossibly far one is from the others. Not different from them or intolerant; one is more close than ever to people and the world, but, in the end alone for no one can ever follow the complexities that make up the mind that is so t conditioned. One, then, cannot make ones self clear to others; the difficulties of yourself tracing the trail of inner feeling and conviction are so insurmountable that not only in writing, but even in speech and action, one is completely misunderstood—because all that comes out of one is a caricature of what one is thinking & that is so distorted from the actual thought that people pick up on this caricature as your action or thought about the matter at hand, whereas really one had meant it for a caricature (realizing inwardly the incapability of even beginning to speak or show action about what one is experiencing) and once beginning this trait is unable to stop and so, actually, becomes artificial. A horrible fate to be artificial, no genuine feeling left; all is bemused thought that means nothing to anyone else but ones self.129