If you are imprisoned, and you can’t find a way out, you will either go in circles or give up. Going in circles, in my view, is better than giving up, because you are retaining the idea of freedom.
And I think in important ways what Jack Kerouac, his generation, and those who emulated them, did, was go in circles. The implicit assumption–one stated in various ways by various authors–was that this whole country–maybe even Western culture generally–is one big prison, that emotional freedom is difficult or impossible to achieve, and “running from” without a “running to” was the best antidote to despair.
So Jack and Neil went in circles. Then they died. Young.
It is an odd thing that people can have actual political freedom–as seen from any sane and informed historical perspective–and still feel unfree.
Actual freedom, in some ways, is a sort of torture. For a lot of people, I think it is like Red, in Shawshank Redemption, who had been imprisoned so long the World seemed impossibly large, and impossible to manage.
American culture until the 1950’s was pretty much like all cultures the world over, for all of history: we had expectations, and we had sacred institutions, and if you stepped over the line, you could expect violent consequences. This is how culture is enforced. And it applied to the Plains Indians, Zulu Warriors, Australian Aborigines, Swiss Burghers in the Middle Ages, Egyptian nobility in 1,000 B.C., and the Shakyas in Buddha’s time.
This is the meaning of Rousseau’s idea of being “forced to be free”. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. The most useful commentary (on Rousseau–and also on Nietzsche, who many read, but few have anything intelligent to say about) on this is Alan Bloom’s truly outstanding book “The Closing of the American Mind”, which of course foretold the era we are in. As he says, Nietzsche himself foretold cancel culture and the sacrality of victimhood. They are logical developments of intellectual evolution based on bad foundations. Ideas have consequences. Obviously.
But what Rousseau was perceiving, without in my view really understanding (something he had in common with Freud, who was nearly always almost right), was that most people are actually happier in cages. They are happier with limits which cannot be negotiated. They are happier forgetting there is an outside, and an Alternative. They are like trained dogs. Most people don’t train their dogs to Sit, and Stay any more, because it feels mean, but I think dogs actually like that. They want to have clear ideas about how to behave.
And our aspiring Overlords are not on completely irrational ground when they assert that most people WANT to be controlled, WANT to be told what to do, WANT to have their freedom limited to Coke and Pepsi and Mountain Dew.
What about water and wine and whiskey? Oh, we don’t sell that here.
I think the bisexuality of Kerouac and Cassady (and homosexuality of Ginsberg, and likely pedophilia and certain hard drug use of Burroughs, etc.) was an important element in their lives. Men having sex with men was culturally taboo, and back then men were beaten to death for doing it sometimes. But a small culture was emerging in New York, and perhaps San Francisco and elsewhere, where it was ALMOST open. Where such men could find each other, not in the light of the day, but in rooms with the door partially ajar, and the windows not fully shuttered. In the right place, you know, and at the right time.
And Almost Freedom is almost worse than open captivity, of the literal sort that Oscar Wilde faced. Almost Freedom is a prison door cracked enough that you can imagine it open, but which won’t open enough to let you out. I think that is what drove much of their madness and their crazy pounding on the doors of our collective culture.
As I have argued, the nervous breakdown in our culture started in the arts, and in my view started with the Beats, which I will recollect for you originally meant beat down, or beat up. “Beat”, as in tired. It was only later that Kerouac tried to spruce it up and turn it into something it was not. In spirit, in fact, it is a lot like “punk”. Punks, in my understanding, were the guys who got anally raped in prison. It was not a positive thing to be a punk. Certainly, though, such people would have good reason to be angry.
[I was reading last night, incidentally, that Clyde Barrow was apparently repeated raped in prison. He killed his attacker eventually with a pipe, and got away with it when a lifer claimed responsibility. In his early marauding days, though, he planned a retributive attack on that prison, and I’m sure his experiences had a lot to do with how many people he killed, some pointlessly.]
Learning to live with freedom is both a personal and a cultural task. Imagine how hard it would be to navigate our social worlds if we shared no holidays, if we all used different calendars, if none of us read the same history, if none of us had common reference points, like George Washington, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus.
You would feel lost, daily. So we all need a bit of Givenness, in the midst of this Thrownness. This amounts to a freedom from one form and source of anxiety. This is the extent to which Rousseau was right.
But our true Home is in the Moment. Rules and institutions are our training wheels, or our crutches, while we learn to walk. Prison bars keep us from falling down while we are finding our feet and our voices. They are not meant to last, in my view. There is something inevitable about them falling away, in this life or the next.
Do you think they celebrate Halloween or Christmas in the next life? For us, these are special days, but what if every day is special, and so much better than our best days that it is literally vastly beyond our ability to imagine?
Oh, I am Stream of Consciousness-ing again. It seems to do me good. I let things out, sometimes invisibly to myself at the time, through this process. Imagine it as a brief flood down a stream, intended to liberate stuck logs, and help them continue their path down the river. Too much water and you overflow the banks, but just enough, and everything is moving that should be.