There is an importance in being honest with oneself. There are many reasons why this is generally a good thing, but I would like to point out the role of honesty and the inclination to bare all that is personal in ones art making process. In my mind, this is less a process of self expression and more a process of self documentation. In the words of William Burroughs: "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing […]. I am a recording instrument […] I do not presume to impose a 'story' 'plot' continuity.' […] Insofar [sic] I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function […] I am not an entertainer […] (Telly, 1976).
The notion of nakedness is not only an aesthetic standard for the Beats (of which Burroughs was part) - the writer's commitment to irrevocably bare all thought and imagination in their work - but also a symbolic public and private stance. Thus Allen Ginsberg and his life partner and also poet Peter Orlovsky disrobed at poetry readings, William Burroughs did not disguise the demonic aspects of his drug addiction and his homosexuality in Naked Lunch and John Kerouac desired to be a medieval Tibetan scholar-monk Milarepa who lived naked in caves (Telly, 1976). Nakedness signified rebirth, the recovery of identity. The idea of the self is the Beat focal point. The complete self revelation and assertion of personal identity is a beginning in the process of connecting with larger forces in the universe or the surrounding world (Telly, 1976). The Beats would often use intoxication as a means to achieve a state of openness that enabled them to share their most private thoughts with one another and then communicate them in writing.
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| Peter Orlovsky & Allen Ginsberg |
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| Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky, 1955 |
The Beat movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American "virtues" of progress and power (Telly, 1976). But as writers, the Beats would seak out to experience life in order to write about it. They each documented, in their own creative style, the state of political, social and cultural values of the post World War II era through accounts of their own lives.
Kerouac's novel On The Road drew from his personal experience while traveling and his characters were based on real people in his life. Dean Moriarty was thus a portrait of Neal Cassady a close friend of both Kerouac and Ginsberg (at a time Ginsberg and Cassady shared more then a friendship though Cassady remained faithful to his many female lovers). He was a character that fused desperation and glee, as the "ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being" to borrow Kerouac's description (Telly, 1976). He was very much in touch with his impulsive nature and was on a continuous search for physical pleasure. This in the eyes of the Beats was a representation of the raw nakedness they were after.
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| Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac, San Francisco, 1949 |
Similarly, Herbert Huncke, a Time Square hustler and drug user appeared in the works of all three writers as Herman in Burrough's Junkie, as Elmo Hassel in On The Road and as Huck in Ginsberg's Vision of Cody. He became a Beat Mephisto who in the words of Ginsberg taken from Howl:
walked all night with shoes full of blood on the
snowbanks waiting for a door in the East River to
open to a room full of steamboat and opium
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| Herbert Hunckle, 1953 |
Telly, John, Naked Angels: the Lives & Literature of the Beat Generation, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1976.
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Stuff to watch:
Howl, directed by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010
Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, 1991
What Happened to Kerouac?, directed by Richard Lerner, Lewis MacAdams, 1986
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