The war to end all wars ended in 1918, and in 1945 it was like: Now we are become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Then post-war consumer capitalism weaponized the pleasure principle, and everyone did their best to worship the Bomb. Apparently, the end of history was thirty years ago.
At the midway point of that dread ex-century, Kerouac and Neal Cassady took to the road with the wild conviction that there was something more out there, waiting to be found. After drinking from the waters of Blake, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Joyce, Henry Miller, and Charlie Parker, the Beats joined the underground stream and, along with Miles Davis, Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters, turned on the next generation: Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan, among many others — then Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Stones and the world was never the same:
The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truck stops on the jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies. (Delillo, Underworld)
They sat in the rain and grokked jazz and made art, but by the time the 60s were ending, even before, the cracks were showing on the highwayside.
Kennedy. Malcolm X. Vietnam. King. Nixon. Children dying at home and abroad. Highways and suburbs. The Warren Court and the ensuing cultural backlash. The many divided Americas. And the commercial machine subsuming all the distinctive regional art and culture of the America of yore, tossing it all into the One, Optimized, Ultra-Palatable churn of information and product. Like how the 60s became a convenient historical category for naked UC Berkeley flower meditators. In short, it contained all the makings of our present era.
Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem is named after a line in a Yeats poem describing this epochal “end of the road” moment (Didion’s subject is the unraveling of the 60s):
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What rough beast indeed? For a few shimmeringly brilliant moments in the 60s, the dragon raised its head and the dragon was a gryphon and it seemed to really be the second coming. An invocation of innocence after all innocence was thought to be lost; an awakening of the spirit and a realization that, if the world was a projection of the self, the only lasting revolution was a revolution of consciousness; faltering steps toward a non-exploitative relationship with the natural world and other beings… All that jazz.
But then the wave broke. This is how Hunter S. Thompson remembers it, right before mere anarchy was loosed, the ceremony of innocence drowned:
It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world...
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
The high water mark rolled back and if you were going to stay on the bus maybe you had to follow the Dead around or retreat to the mountains or India because staying around to see the water suck back across the sand, well then you’d be forced to admit it: there was a whole lot of tragedy, bereftness, and humanness right there, in the graveyard of your ecstasy.
And what then? When the ideal disintegrates into smoke and the falcon cannot hear the falconer? When the underground river returns to the aquifer and not a gurgle can be heard above on the high plain?
Well then it’s high time to strike another match and go start anew, because it’s all over now baby blue. It’s all over, but it is not, no, it’s just beginning, phoenix-like. The end of the road is no end at all, and the spirit of the underground river is not the kind of thing that dies.
So back into it, where we left off, with those in the very rip and flux of all these changes, those reckoning its excesses, seeing the bend in the road ahead, and discovering what ground there was to stand on once all the flotsam and jetsam washed back to sea.
The Widening Gyre
And you don’t know it at first, that you might not be getting to where you’re trying to go — or that you’ve already gotten there — because the road’s it’s own special kind of high, and what’s past is past. Like Dean says:
“That's behind us, merely by miles and inclinations. Now we're heading down to New Orleans to dig Old Bull Lee and ain't that going to be kicks and listen will you to this old tenorman blow his top” — he shot up the radio volume till the car shuddered — “and listen to him tell the story and put down true relaxation and knowledge." We all jumped to the music and agreed. The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Dean hunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along.
And you’ve heard tell of Hunter S. Thompson’s cryptic mantra:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. (Blake)
And they sure are groovy, the people who live like that:
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity... (Ginsberg, "Howl")
Visions upon visions tumbling down out of the firmament. But “seasons change and mad things rearrange”:
The wintertime is coming
The windows are filled with frost
I went to tell everybody
But I could not get across
…
Don't say I never warned you
When your train gets lost (Bob Dylan)
And you got to get up with it and be real savvy to know which train you’re on and when and where you’re headed. Because there’s always another:
I can settle down and be doin' just fine
Til' I hear an old train rollin' down the line
Then I hurry straight home and pack
And if I didn't go, I believe I'd blow my stackSome folks might say, that I'm no good
That I wouldn't settle down if I could
But when that open road, starts to callin' me
There's somethin' o'er the hill, that I gotta seeSometimes it's hard, but you gotta understand
When the Lord made me, He made a ramblin' manI love to see the towns, a-passin' by
And to ride these rails, 'neath God's blue sky
Let me travel this land, from the mountains to the sea
'Cause that's the life I believe, He meant for meAnd when I'm gone, and at my grave you stand
Just say God called home your ramblin' man (Hank Williams)
So much so that all the rolling stones have the same condition:
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in. (Robert Service)
And maybe it’s a problem of norms and society and “fitting in”:
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home. (Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem)
Without it there is the aloneness, a distance even from the self. And all there is to do is roam, roam, roam:
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.” (Toni Morrison, Beloved)
But it is what it is, that’s the beauty (“Because the sky is blue / it makes me cry”):
I'm a rollin' stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin, I have paid the cost
When I pass by, all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway (Hank Williams)
And:
You may bury my body, ooh
Down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit
Can get a Greyhound bus and ride (Robert Johnson)
And it’s all for the best because:
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. (Blake)
So if you’re down in Juarez doing some reflecting and the medicine man’s jetted off and left you to deal with a broke-down car and a crippling hangover, there’s always back East.
I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they'd stand behind me when the game got rough
Yea, but the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff
I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough (Bob Dylan)
And you can always just walk.
I’ve Got Shoes
Yup:
I woke up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
Know 'bout 'at I got these, old walkin' blues (Robert Johnson)
To walk you’ll need shoes. But didn’t you know you have them already?
I’ve got shoes, you’ve got a shoes
All of God’s children got shoes
When I get to Heaven goin’ to put on my shoes
Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heaven (An old spiritual)
And you don’t need much else at all (pack light) and take heed of gentle woodland fellows:
I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a
great fire; and the master I speak of ever keeps a
good fire. But, sure, he is the prince of the
world; let his nobility remain in’s court. I am for
the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be
too little for pomp to enter: some that humble
themselves may; but the many will be too chill and
tender, and they’ll be for the flowery way that
leads to the broad gate and the great fire. (Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well)
And the train is actually a prison and there’s a greater Train with nirvana, satori, and paradise a little farther down the line:
Well, if they freed me from this
Prison, if that railroad train was mine,
I bet I'd move on over a little farther down the line,
Far from Folsom Prison, that's where I want to stay,
And I'd let that lonesome whistle
Blow my blues away. (Johnny Cash)
And let’s say the government really does take your shoes… Well?
This is our last Dispatch from the Road… for now. Below are the other two in the summative literature review series. Thanks for following along — truly, the dispatch is nothing without the dispatchee.
Next up: Dispatches from Back East.
- DVD 🙏