It has been three weeks since my friend tragically took her life. An incredibly talented singer, Amy Winehouse (I don't love her music but she had a voice for sure), died. The United States is teetering on the edge of reality: they cannot move past dogma and access common sense in time to save their country from a huge debt crisis. Greece is facing an equally disruptive crisis and no one can find an easy answer because easy answers don't exist. Somalia is experiencing a devastating famine that is ravishing their population. My heart hurts for them. I have a job interview on August 10th and am hoping like I have rarely hoped before. One of my friends is pregnant. Another's baby girl just turned one. One of the best examples of community in Calgary took place this weekend - sincerely one of the best run festivals I have been to, and all weekend I basked in the sun, rain, great music and Chai like I have never tasted.
I have having a hard time reconciling the huge ups and downs in emotions I have experienced in the past few weeks. But, as life moves forward and I am swept up by the tide of time and of inevitability, I can only grasp at these moments as they pass. I am changed like a river that flows: it meanders and widens as it encounters different landscape and as more water is added to it. Rivers gather strength as they approach the sea and not even boulders can keep the water back.
The Beat Generation, created by Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, et al., felt life so vividly. They poured themselves into poetry, art, friends, sex, alcohol, adventure. They grieved for the world they saw around them: a world that took life too seriously and was losing itself to conformity and convention and comfort. Pressure to conform pushed people into insane asylums - voluntarily or not. Propriety was key and this sterilized world was the antithesis of art and creativity and true living. Alan Ginsberg opens his poetic lament to the world he sees around him, stating:
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"
I think that maybe Ginsberg would say the same today for different reasons. Or maybe for the same reasons. Howl almost drives the reader to madness - you feel yourself slipping to join Carl Solomon, for whom the poem is devoted, as you read who, who, who, who, who each of these best minds are and how they have been destroyed my madness - pushed into starving hysterical nakedness by Moloch, Moloch, Moloch - the city god, the society god, the propriety god.
Life was raw, sensation was vivid. And, if you have not yet figured out, the beat generation is one of my favourite things. The beat generation lived in a very specific context of time and place. I admire their dedication to life and to feeling and creativity and to art and poetry. They spoke up and out against the evils of society that they saw around them. Unfortunately their wild, unfettered lifestyle got the better of many of them. Would it be crass for me to suggest that they were martyrs in the long road towards many of the freedoms we have today - freedom of speech, of sexuality, of thought and religion and choice. Life was messy. Death was sometimes messy too. But they really, really lived. That is what I admire.
Here I will depart for a minute to discuss my second favourite of today: Live music. I spent the days of this past weekend taking in the Calgary Folk Music Festival. I have so much respect for this festival: it has a huge base of dedicated volunteers and I really appreciated their commitment to cleaning up their environmental footprint while offering a huge selection of great music. It is a great atmosphere and I really love my city during this weekend (a rarity at times...). This past weekend I saw (and met!) Blind Pilot, one of my favourite bands. I also watched The Head and The Heart, Yo La Tengo, Patrick Watson, Joseph Arthur, C.R. Avery, Cadence Weapon, among others.
I cannot really put into words the feeling that live music gives. It draws me in and I love being part of the audience. I am not a performer in any way, but I am an enthusiastic audience member. Get out of the house and go see a live show!
Maybe I love watching live music because I find in it the same connection to creativity and soul that the beat generation found in poetry - watching art unfold before you and letting yourself go to the beauty of community and collective appreciation for what this artist has produced. The river only moves one way, and you can only grasp at a moment once before the current moves on. I think that, in some ways, the beat generation knew this and they emphatically grasped at each moment like it was the very last. Sometimes we should do that too. I think that it would be cathartic for our problem-riddled, uptight, oh-my-goodness-our-country-is-going-to-the-dogs, society. Lets just feel for a moment. Then we might realize that, oh yeah, there are other people here too.
Hope I didn't lose you.
2 comments:
Didn't loose me - quite enjoyed your post, and very much agreed too!
By the way... who's pregnant?
<>< Mom
well said...nice commentary. I sometimes wonder what my life would have looked like had I been born 20 years earlier. Nostalgia...has a way of making things look better than they really were. Still, I wouldn't mind finding out what it would have been like growing up in an age where everything seemed possible.
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