The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (52 page)

In a symposium on “all-over” painting in the early 1960s, Martin James identified another trend: namely, that the new painting did not lay claim to any
fixed
truth, but that through its intersubjectivity it carried validity and conviction
in the context of its time
. And this was perhaps the most
radical notion of all, that the most socially significant art may be the most ephemeral precisely because it speaks to the moment and the situation for which it is created. It is, in short, art with no afterlife, a new form of minimalism. Art, like life, is an experience, an “intersubjective” experience, not a monument.
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Like life, art is an encounter with the
resistance
of the world, and this is what the meaning of life
is
: an encounter with the resistance of the world in which we produce change through action rather than, and as much as, thought.

KINETIC KNOWLEDGE

The boundaries between the plastic and the performing arts were the subject of experiments carried out at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. The college operated on Deweyan principles, in which art played a key role in education. Although it closed in 1957 after only twenty-four years, its roster of staff and alumni was impressive: Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Walter Gropius, Alfred Kazin, Robert Motherwell, Robert de Niro, Sr., Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

The dance critic Roger Copeland has called Hans Namuth’s portrayal of Jackson Pollock painting “one of the world’s most significant dance films.” It showed, he said, that “the fundamental impulse behind abstract expressionism was
the desire to transform painting into dancing
.” This may be going a bit far, but there is no doubt that modern dancers and choreographers like Martha Graham used Jungian psychology, and its concept of the unconscious store of symbols, as the basis for their work, and that Merce Cunningham and Katherine Litz (also a choreographer), for instance, abandoned narrative dancing for plastic dialogue, investigating the body as an instrument, dance as an experience rather than a story, emphasizing what body parts could do.

The “kinetics of the body” became central to the art form.
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Another idea was that of “body armor,” that every person, in seeking survival and fulfillment, organizes an outlook on the world. This outlook eventually becomes “routinized,” then recedes from awareness but remains active
in governing the outlook, including the “physical attitude of the body.”
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Muscular tensions and blind spots in proprioception “represented learned inhibitions and self-aggressions, the physical counterparts to rigidities in mental attitude.” Our bodies come to reflect our attitudes to life.

Charles Olson, onetime head of Black Mountain College, proposed that kinetic knowledge of the body was superior to knowledge that was merely descriptive; that for a full life, use of the body was as essential as use of the mind; and that such usage was simply beyond the reach of science. According to Olson, the body offers resistance: overcoming this resistance, as achieved by the best modern dance, can take us a good part of the way toward fulfillment. Early religions appreciated this (as did the Nietzsche cults in Ascona), but the main monotheisms have not.

Merce Cunningham, who studied with Martha Graham in the early 1940s, then taught dance at Black Mountain College during the 1950s, left to start on his own because he wanted to present movement “in itself” and not as “an allegory of ‘inner’ emotions.”
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He worked hard to free dance from its dependence on both music and narrative, so as to explore the subjectivity of the human body and its range of expression. In particular, he developed what came to be called “all-over” dances; as in all-over gesture-painting, there was no center-stage or hierarchy of position. Cunningham and his longtime partner, the composer John Cage, called this “polyattentiveness.” No less than Jackson Pollock, Cunningham was relying on an energy field. As he himself put it, “The logic of one event coming as responsive to another seems inadequate now. We look and listen to several at once.”

This, then, is also plastic automatism, the kinetic impulse originating in the body and not in the mind. Cunningham’s dances stemmed not from an idea about character or story, but from
movement
. The dance proceeds according to the dancers’ bodies, their movements, the space and time available. “It is not,” he said, “subject to a pre-arranged [intellectual] idea as to how it should go any more than a conversation you might have with a friend.” His dances do not have a chorus with soloists, but individuals with their different voices, all “intersubjective,” all aware at any one time of what the others are doing, and fitting in. This, by common consent, creates a high-energy field of great intensity—so that his dances are like a moving
Pollock painting.

CONVERSATIONS WITH CLAY

The aesthetic of spontaneity and plasticity led artists to choose (and respond to) materials that lent themselves to bodily impulses, most particularly clay. In the 1950s, under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, “the craft of clay pottery was lifted to the status of a high art.” Plastic and malleable, clay offered excellent possibilities for “dialogue.” Manipulating clay requires a high degree of bodily movement as well as sensitivity, since the material cannot be “forced” beyond a certain point. As Peter Voulkos, the most famous of the Abstract Expressionist potters said, it is a spontaneous art form since there is not much time before the clay dries out, and this makes clay the ideal material for a “conversation” between the artist’s unconscious and the environment, moreover a conversation mediated through the body.
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This was another area in which Black Mountain College shone, attracting potters from the British Arts and Crafts movement—Bernard Leach in particular—and several Japanese potters influenced by Zen Buddhism. Mary Caroline Richards, who also learned her skill at the college, described the experience of pottery: “Potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts. It is like a handclasp between two living hands, receiving the greeting at the very moment that they give it. It is this speech between the hand and the clay that makes me think of dialogue. It is a language far more interesting than the spoken vocabulary which tries to describe it, for it is spoken not by the tongue and the lips but by the whole body, the whole person, speaking and listening.”
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Other potters, such as Toshiko Takaezu, compared plastic dialogue to “dancing with the clay.”

Other metaphysical aspects of pottery were developed by Peter Voulkos. He rejoiced in making huge pots—some eight feet high—because these involved “wrestling” with the clay, struggling with the resistance it offered. This all recalls Martin Heidegger’s idea that we ourselves are “thrown” into the world and formed, as we age, by means of the resistances we meet. By
this account, pottery was the perfect synecdoche for existence.

PROSODY AS MEANING

The final aspect of the culture of spontaneity was embodied by what became known as the “Beat” writers, a phenomenon that encompassed poetry, novels and travel writing. Most people think of Beat writing as beginning with the famous reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” in San Francisco, in 1955. But here, too, we find the background was more interesting, again featuring Black Mountain College, and the jazz clubs of Harlem and Greenwich Village. “Howl” was modeled on the tenor saxophone playing of Lester Young. As Ginsberg commented, “The ideal . . . was the legend of Lester Young playing through something like sixty-nine to seventy choruses of ‘Lady Be Good,’ you know, mounting and mounting and building and building more and more intelligence into the improvisation as chorus after chorus went on.”

Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, another leading Beat writer, had met at Columbia University in 1944, when the former was eighteen and the latter four years older. Kerouac had already quit college and Ginsberg would later be suspended. It was wartime, and Columbia, like many other universities, had embraced the military-industrial complex, an approach that would continue and intensify during the Cold War. Intellectually, as Ginsberg characterized it, life was narrowed and reduced by the “anxieties and rigidities of war corporatism,” in response to which the Beats regarded their marginal status not as a failing but as an asset.

When Black Mountain College began to disintegrate in 1956, several of the faculty there, notably the poets, transferred to San Francisco, as did Ginsberg. The last issue of
Black Mountain Review
, in which Kerouac’s essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was published, was put together in San Francisco. Other San Francisco poets—Kenneth Patchen, William Everson, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer—formed a particularly cohesive group, having spent the war years in a work camp for conscientious objectors in Waldport, Oregon.

Ginsberg was the most aware of the Beats, in terms of the traditions
and figures who would give rise to its approach, quite apart from his own debts to Lester Young and the jazz clubs of New York. He initiated correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Olson’s seminal idea, published in an essay in 1950, was “projective verse,” a new kind of poetry, he said, “rooted in spontaneity.” It was “(projectile (percussive (prospective,” the unusual punctuation being part of his innovation. He intended a poem to be a projectile, something thrown by the poet (like the potter throws clay) in a transfer of energy to the reader-listener; it was percussive in being about sound, and prospective in the sense of the prospector or archaeologist unearthing he knew not what when he first set out.

A convinced follower of Jung, Olson believed that the conscious mind was a gatekeeper that stopped many basic ideas from surfacing, or else falsified them; they could be released only through spontaneity, which offered unmediated access. He insisted that this poetic approach should be incorporated into everyday life, that we should lead speeded-up lives, without reflection, and just “get on with it.” He argued that logic forced a structure on syntax and that it was poetry’s duty to escape this. Form was ephemeral. Experimental forms communicated new visions of reality, and the best source of new visions was spontaneous verse “unfettered” by rules. As he put it: “Write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”
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He also had the idea of what he called “proprioceptive immanence,” in which the body was the unifying locus of experience, which the art form must make use of. Ginsberg agreed and showed this in the famous first rendering of “Howl,” which he didn’t “read” or “speak” so much as intone. The occasion was a
performance
in which his whole body took part. Ginsberg also saw his poems as collages with the mind-body communicating spontaneous ideas through an energy field—it was the transfer of energy that counted rather than any specific idea, energy being the fundamental ingredient of a full life. “The first rule of the writer was, as in projective verse, to write only what created an empathic flow of energy in the reader.”
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Excitement, for the Beats, equaled authenticity. It was the meaning of both art and life.

Aside from “Howl,” the most famous of the Beat writings is
On the
Road
, Jack Kerouac’s novel. It began to take shape in April 1951 when, high on Benzedrine, he inserted a roll of paper into his typewriter, and over three weeks produced a 120-foot scroll of single-spaced typescript which became the raw material for his novel. He later explained his technique: the key was to avoid searching for words or imposing structure, but to let them emerge as one struggled “to keep in time with one’s thoughts. . . . Not selectivity of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in seas of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation.” And he, too, compared the process to an improvised jazz solo.
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Kerouac also warned of the perils of “afterthought,” in which one might try to improve the original images. In so doing, “[y]ou think what you’re
supposed
to be thinking [italics added],” said Kerouac, and the point of Beat writing—one point, anyway—was to circumvent that.

Performance was an important element of Beat poetry. In a sense, performance is an element in all poetry, but it was especially true of the Beats, with their concept of energy exchange. Readings circumvented the time lag involved in printing and publishing, and contributed to the idea that culture was
happening
—as Whitehead had said, the basic unit of the energy-field universe was the
event
. Readings also, of course, maximized spontaneity. Poems could be amended, or even created “on the hoof.” But the actual reading, the sounds, the body movements of the poet, the energy contained in those movements and sounds, were part of the
exchange
, part of what made it more like jazz.

Finally, in a reading, the public was
there
, face-to-face with the poet, in the room, responding. This was intersubjectivity at its rawest. Performance both magnifies the indeterminacy of a poem and, paradoxically, at the same time adds meaning.

•   •   •

There was no shortage of critics of the culture of spontaneity, from Norman Mailer to Norman Podhoretz to Diana Trilling. People criticized the writers and painters for being educated beyond their intellectual level, for being charlatans, for being affected, for being pretentious. Nonetheless, by 1959 there were estimated to be more than three thousand Americans in the “bohemian enclaves” of Venice West, North Beach and Greenwich
Village, all pursuing their own versions of the spontaneous lifestyle. Francis Rigney, a social psychologist who studied the North Beach community, concluded they were not as different from mainstream communities as the mainstream thought. But he also found that it was hard, for many, to maintain such a lifestyle—it was often possible only in fits and starts. This is one reason why, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the Beats fragmented and disintegrated.