| more multiples |
[May. 18th, 2009|11:06 am] |
John Clellon Holmes’ essays in Nothing More to Declare deserve to be better known than they are—or at least they seem that way in memory. Forty years ago, “A Decade of Coming Attractions” both taught me about the visual imagination of young moviegoers in the decade or two preceding my birth and gave me lovely verbal analogues to the visual transformations that the movies of my own adolescence had wrought in me. “The Great Rememberer” was a verbal portrait of Jack Kerouac that was superior in language and insight to Kerouac’s own novels (for that matter, it was far superior in language and insight to Holmes’ own novel about the Beat Generation) and “The Consciousness Widener” (or some such title) was an analysis of Allen Ginsberg superior to anything that Ginsberg ever produced.
Kerouac was all about loss and historical memory (“the father we never found” and the older America that was hanging on anomalously, “on the lam, on the sauce, or on the”—whatever the concluding word of Holmes’ rhetorical phrase was, I don’t think it was “go,” and that was the point: the difference between the young high-speed travelers and the beaten-down supposed “living markers of authenticity” they were intent on experiencing in all their down-at-the-heels glory. John Clellon Holmes linked it all with the ambiguous attitudes towards history and immediacy that had been part of American literature from Hawthorne and Melville onwards.
And he summed up Ginsberg’s would-be wisdom for the world as “Widen the area of consciousness.”
The problem, in the 1950s and 1960s, being that “Widen the area of consciousness” was taken to mean “Do drugs,” which purported solution amounts to “Widen the area of hallucination.”
Which is the problem I have had with writers who trust their personally originated hallucinations more than the socially imposed hallucinations that we call “culture.” The point is that one ought not to trust either of them even if eventually we have to live in them, or in one of them at a time.
People who are intermittently crippled by their own biochemistry and consistently waylaid by their own inattention learn to understand what widening the area of consciousness really means. For we operate in the world by narrowing the area of consciousness, and if we don’t narrow it for long enough, we don’t do a very good job of getting our jobs done. If our body chemistry gets in the way, all the worse for us.
Traditional modes of mood alteration and consciousness stabilization, from Orthodox Christian and Zen Buddhist meditation to yoga postures and other technologies of the body, are associated with the path to sainthood, arhathood, or whatever. But the expansion of consciousness involves no more than the ability to bracket the disabling portions of personhood while stretching the capacity to maintain multiple mental linkages concurrently.
If you can, as in that novel by René Daumal I cite so often, retain in your memory a few more interlinked phenomena at the same moment, instead of forgetting all about the first ones by the time you get to the end of a chain of reasoning, it is immaterial whether you like to spend the remainder of your time collecting train timetables or hanging by your ankles in a room full of parakeets. You can still produce reliable insights on some topics (and none at all on others, and fair to middling on others—but you knew that already).
The wounds and instilled preferences of early childhood are forever with us, and the ingrained barriers to sainthood or enlightenment or whatever are real barriers. But….
…but these obstacles don’t have a thing to do with increasing our compassion by enhancing our comprehension, or with understanding where the world is going instead of sleepwalking our way through it. That is a matter of enhancing our wakefulness, and trying to improve our comprehension of how our dreams and nightmares leak into our waking life even when we think we are fully awake.
Fully secular intellectual activities are perhaps, in the twenty-first century, one of the most efficient means of pursuing a spiritual path, but they don’t have to be. One can be a good atheist and still expand the area of consciousness more than our blinkered New Atheists usually do (for they are usually walking in their sleep as much as the believers they oppose, if not more so). |
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| Comments: |
Thanks for these; I will have to track some of them down. Your last series of posts has sent me in a general spiral of looking around to do background reading without actually having anything at hand. Pretty normal for me. However, I have started reading essays from my study again and A. Huxley's "The Education of an Amphibian" points out some of the problems facing essayists (or writers in general). Namely, that the reader will strip the writer of his originality and importance, and remember only bits that reflect best his (the reader's) world view. Also, that truth can be said, but not transmitted unless the reader is led to "experience" the truth as an independent act. Then again, to see clearly, one must rid themselves of jargon and embrace the Zen "no mind."
This and a Huxleyan approach to describe man through modern biology (no longer modern) leave me feeling strange that I find little in Huxley that is still not pertinent today-- though expressed in somewhat older but durable clothes. I take that to mean: man has still not come to grip with these xyz issues.
Edited at 2009-05-25 01:43 pm (UTC) | |
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