Were The Beats On The Spectrum?

We make no bones of our unabashed love of the Beats here (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs) nor do we whitewash their many sins and shortcomings (alcoholism, drug addiction, and wife killing to name just three of many).

We can see this is part and parcel of the same matrix, an attempt to deal with the pain of life in literary / spiritual / philosophical / chemical terms.

Addiction is a form of self-medication, an attempt to kill the pain.

When the pain can be identified (a broken leg, f’r instance), then with healing the need to kill that pain is gone.

People with no spiritual / emotional / mental pain in their lives do not become addicted to drugs when the physical pain is gone.

Why then were the Beats so chemically dependent?

A big clue comes in their very name.

Before there were beatniks, before there was the Beat Generation, there were the Beats.  It’s been said -- and with no serious degree of inaccuracy -- that the Beats as a literary movement consisted of everybody in Allen Ginsberg’s address book.

Well, not literally, of course, but Ginsberg was the drum major of the movement and in no small sense was the guy who promoted the Beats to the world and (like Stan Lee) himself in the process (unlike Stan, he proved far more of a creator in his own right).

But if Ginsberg provided the mouthpiece, Kerouac gave the voice that flowed through it.

Jack Kerouac was a John Steinbeck-like character who never felt in step with the rest of the 20th Century.

A working class poet, Kerouac never connected with the country around him and restlessly set off to find what he was looking for…even if he couldn’t tell you what it was.

There are several different stories about what was meant when they said “Beat” that vary on who tells the tale and when.

The conflation with the Beatitudes is lovely and sweet, and certainly those surviving Beats turned more towards this philosophy in their later wistful wisdom, but that’s a late ret-con to the name.

Beats as in a musical sense -- i.e., those seeking the rhythm of life -- is another charming analogy and certainly fits well with the Beats’ inclination to jazz (especially the experimental kind), but again, a late addition to the mythos.

No, to understand the meaning of the term -- and the nature of the Beats themselves --  we need to look back at Kerouac’s original explanation:  They called themselves “Beats” because they felt beat down by life.

Here’s where the swaggering John Wayne types start ridiculing and finger-pointing, sneering at the Beats as “pansies and perverts.”

What the John Wayne types fail to see is that in many ways the Beats proved far more tougher and fearless as they.

It’s easy to wiggle into a predetermined mold and gain herd immunity by acting the way society expects you to act.

It’s quite a different thing to shun that easy path and to constantly question society, relentlessly examining yourself to find out what it is that’s missing from your soul, what it is you need to find or do to fill that hole.

That the Beats never found what they were looking for is a fair assessment, likewise the observation that they were far from the first to muse on this.

But what sets them apart as the cultural breakthrough is that they were the first to get mainstream society to begin seriously questioning itself.

Not all, and not nearly enough, but certainly a tipping point, a moment when the genie could not be returned to the bottle (or the hypodermic).

That dawning of awareness helped move along societal change in so many ways.

For example, it would not only be untrue but ridiculous to claim the Beat movement had any direct influence on the civil rights movement, but the fact the Beats even existed and penetrated the public consciousness even in the form of grossly inaccurate satire meant the underlying ideas of the Beats also gained some exposure.

(This is akin to what I posted earlier about how Archie Bunker, far from undermining white supremacy and bigotry, gave it a voice and validation by simply being on TV.)

But the question we’re focusing on today is this:  Were the original Beats “beat” because they fell somewhere along the autism / Asperger spectrum?

I think a positive answer can be given.  While it’s impossible to accurately diagnose someone at a distance (be it time or space), we can say whether or not they displayed traits we find today in people along the spectrum.

There’s a lot of minor evidence (their tendency to develop early idée fixes or well documented hallucinations / altered consciousness experiences before turning to drugs and alcohol, not to mention highly unconventional day-to-day lifestyles), but the big one towering over the rest is their weariness, their feeling of being “beat” down by a society they couldn’t fully grasp (and that remained hostile to the Beats’ efforts to grasp it; self-awareness is not an ally of the culturally complacent). 

I have an autistic grandson as well as friends and family members along the Asperger’s spectrum.  I see in them many of the frustrations expressed by the Beats to the confusing world they found themselves in.

The Beats were not beat through any personal failings; the Beats were beat because they were a new generation, a mutation in the human psyche (or at least the American branch of same) that moved us out of one mode of thinking and into another.

In this the Beats were like the first stage of a giant rocket: Aiming for the stars but falling back to earth, yet sending others on to complete their mission.

Does this excuse their bad behaviors, the havoc and wrecked lives they left in their wake?  

No, of course not…

…but it does explain them.

Trapped without context in a world they couldn’t fit in, unable to adequately articulate their own longings, the Beats did the best they could, creating a new language and vocabulary and syntax, one that those who came after them could use as a foundation to build on.

And let’s not be unfair:
While there had been previous expressions of the Beats’ longings (everyone from Diogenes to Thoreau to the original California nature boys of the late 19th / early 20 centuries), and while there were certainly other movements in the political and cultural spheres that acted like force multipliers for them, the Beats toppled the first domino that lead to the Beat Generation (i.e., those who were seized by the writings and ideas and imaginations of the original Beats) to the beatniks (a borderline imitative-near-satirical movement based on Beat Generation influence) to the hippies (basically the beatniks with better clothes and drugs but no irony, totally buying into the Beats’ vibe though three generations removed) to the yippies (those peace & love types who took actual steps to bring it about) to the progressives and hipsters of today.

(And, yes, we would be remiss to not point out many 1967 hippies were really “plastics” i.e., phonies & hypocrites who liked playing hippie and getting stoned and / or laid on weekends then working 9-5 M-thru-F, phonies & hypocrites who as soon as the Vietnam War ended and they no longer faced the draft immediately dropped every altruistic and egalitarian value genuine hippies embraced to become cocaine snorting disco yuppies, and how those rat bastards made Reagan not only possible but downright inevitable and how their selfish “me-me-me-gimme all!” attitude fucked over the entire planet, culminating in the worthless sac of human excrement currently squatting in the White House, but chill, there’s a happy ending, the old Beat movement never really died, never really went away, and there’s a lot more progressives now sharing those ideals and visions and it ain’t gonna be easy, lord knows, but it ain’t impossible, either.)

Jack and Allen and Bill are like Moses of old:
Lost and wandering for ages, finally catching a glimpse of the far distant Promised Land, watching from the mountaintop as the generations they inspired move forth to embrace it.

© Buzz Dixon