Sex, Drugs and the Hindustan Times
| August 21st, 2008
From the Hindustan Times:
The Genealogy of the Beats goes right back to the Romantics, with their “falling and dying” and funereal odes to creatures with wings.
But in more concrete terms – in terms readily understood by those who were looking for a way out of bourgeois reason (the word ‘bourgeois’ here used in the broader nonMarxist sense of the word, as a culture, as a posture of the mind, as an embedment in institutions that serve neither the true nor the beautiful, that seek only to satisfy the majority and enhance gregariousness) – in terms that are both artistic and intellectual at the same time, the Beats would trace their ancestry back to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont and Mallarme, to the beginnings of the European avant-garde.
The word itself comes from Jazz slang for ‘tired’, ‘broken down’, ‘dead beat’ and along with the word came also attitudes and habits, cocking a snook at the world, wearing dark glasses and consuming drugs in significant quantities. The European avant-garde, construed as a movement against bourgeois rationality, took shape and form, first with the Dadaists (“Dada means nothing”, as Tristan Tzara said, avoiding thus the tissue of lies and half-truths that makes up the substance of all merely political revolutions). And then there were the Surrealists, a more ample wave of cultural dissent, buoyed up by practices as esoteric as automatic writing as an instrument to explode the subconscious in public spaces hitherto occupied by socialists and mendicants and soothsayers.
