“I learned that other people were not as we were, but slightly demented, in such a way that they could easily become dangerous. We as more responsible members of society who knew better, had to take care of them as though they were sick. Society was a helpless and dangerous beast, that we had to tend to and save from its own irrationality.” Kenneth Rexroth
A noble mission, but by all accounts Rexroth was not much of a caregiver. Why try to educate the masses with impenetrable poems in arcane language? Ostentatiously intellectual, pedantic poet, insufferable boor. At least that was Kerouac’s impression, when Jack showed up drunk to a salon soiree in Kenneth’s SF dining room.
There was no love lost after Kerouac escorted a drunkpoet friend to an afternoon affair with Rexroth’s red headed wife in their living room. Kenneth was off fucking some student, if his boasts about how many women he’d screwed were true.
Without naming names, Michael McCure was a Beat drunkpoet, friend of Kerouac’s. McClure also read at the Gallery Six dawn of Beat Fame with Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack’s bongoes and red wine growls.
Rexroth routinely trashed Kerouac’s novels and Blues Pomes on his KPFA radio show. Jack’s ultimate insult was puking into the piano of Kenneth playing jazz, while reciting his poetry in NYC. (When that was a thing, after bongos.)
A curmudgeon well before that, TRexroth bemoaned in 1952,
“We believed that as we grew old and fell out of rank,
new recruits, young and with the wisdom of youth,
would take our places and they surely would grow old in the Golden Age.
They have not come.
They will not come.”
as the largest youth revolution in history brooded under his nose.
So even the smartest man in the room can’t predict the future, better than a one eyed Gypsy reading the palm of teenage John Wilkes Booth. “You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies, not one friend. You’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards.” Fifteen years before he put a bullet in the President’s head on Good Friday, 1865.
“Coffin that passes through lanes and streets.
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the lands.
With the countless torches lit-with the silent sea of faces, and the
unbared heads.
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising
strong and solemn.
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang.
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac”,
Walt Whitman mourned in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.
What chance does AI have over the unpredictable chaos of humanity? They’ve spent billions to buy “authoritative sources”, played their war games, amped up amygdala flooding, thumbscrewed chaos theory at an elemental level, nudged us onto the subway tracks, tied us down before their cattle train of propaganda.
The Security State erected for the Global War on Terrorism, switched smoothly to Biosecurity with an invisible enemy. “a health-based paradigm of governance. People unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past, because they also knew that the world in which they lived could not continue to exist. It was too unjust and too inhumane.
“Needless to say, government are preparing an even more inhumane and unjust world. If the powers that govern the world believe that they had to resort to a measure as extreme as the health terror, this is because they feared they had no other choice if they wanted to survive.” Giorgio Agammben blogged from Italy as they followed the Chinese Model in their lockdowns.
Predictive pundits say it was bankers panic over quadrillions in debt, as they hawk galactic fluctuations in gold futures. Or that bourgeois democracy is fading like the Good Witch Glenda, with the Imperial Oz ensconced behind. Jesus is Coming with a Sword beaten into Flat Earth discs. Rumors Abound like Cuchulain’s Hounds.
Ten billion minds swirl like flocks of disturbed birds,
“in circles around Matter’s binding posts
A random series of inept events
To which reason leads illusive sense, is here.”
Sri Aurobindo, Yogic Sage foretold. Emergent epiphenomena braids the nonosphere. Their best laid plans and artificial intelligence could not predict human reactions to their scheme. That’s my hope, clinging to an upside down boat, receding shoreline too far to swim. McClure’s The Flower of Politics hails my craft.
THIS IS THE HUGE DREAM OF US THAT WE ARE
HEROES THAT THERE IS COURAGE
in our blood! That we live!
That we DO not perpetuate the lie of vision
forced upon ourselves
by ourselves. That we have made the nets of vision real!
AND SNARED THEM
Immune Resistance ritual: Attune to the soles of your feet greeting the ground. Toes’ direction guide ankles/knees, all the way from stem to stern, human gaits rise bottom up. Adjust foot plants with awareness habit. Walk outdoors in nature if possible. (If you can’t walk, swim or wriggle and writhe.) Walk away from Monkey Trix, swingin’ in the rafters of your cage. Baby steps to develop your stride. Walk briskly, don’t hurry. It’s a koan to wrap your mind around, like reciting poems with prosody.
Sources for quotes, anecdotes and pomeverses
Kenneth Rexroth: Selected Poems, edited by Bradford Morrow, A New Directions Book, 1984
A Flash of Green or Who Killed Jack Kerouac, Stephen Simac, Paradise Press, 2023
Booth, Karen Joy Fowler,. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022
California Poetry : From the Gold Rush to the Present, Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks, Heyday Books, 2004
Where are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, Giorgio Agamben, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021
Poems at the Extremes of Feeling: The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall, edited by Robert Pinsky, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019
Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster, Allan Combs and Mark Holland, Marlow & Company, 1996