Anarchy 31/Beatnik as anarchist?

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Beatnik as anarchist?

IAN VINE

Many younger anarch­ists are used to being called Beat­niks, because it is a word which has been seized on by our free press and turned into a term of deri­sion, to be applied in­dis­crimin­ately to young non-con­form­ists who dare to chal­lenge the social norms in sex, dress, and mass murder. It has fre­quently been applied in ways very differ­ent from those in­tended by its ori­gin­ators, and unless we re-define it, is a word without real meaning.

  Who then are the real Beats? Clellon Holmes de­scribed being beat as:

  “… not so much weari­ness, as rawness of the nerves; not so much being ‘filled up to here’ as being emptied out. It de­scribes a state of mind from which all in­essen­tials have been stripped, leaving it re­cept­ive to every­thing around it, but impa­tient with trivial ob­struc­tions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your per­sonal­ity, looking up; to be ex­ist­ential in the Kier­ke­gaard, rather than the Jean-Paul Sartre sense.”

Kerouac says:

  “… we seek to find new phrases … a tune, a thought, that will someday be the only tune and thought in the world and which will raise men’s souls to joy.”

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But these are only the spokes­men. Most beats do not think in such high-flown terms as these. Most society dis­affil­iates will admit to sharing some of the ideas and feelings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Mailer, whether they be anarch­ists or not, but most will not be Beat in the extreme sense. Simil­arly, by no means all of the defin­itive Beat char­acter­istics are pos­sessed by these writers.