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This is too big for anger, it’s too big for blame
We stumble through history so humanly lame
So I bow down my head, say a prayer for us all
That we don’t fear the Spirit when It comes to call
--Bruce Cockburn
The last half of the book is a chapter called Primo Po-Mo, meaning Postmodernism, and making that odd term seem perfectly appropriate. Here’s where the commentary happens, where Meltzer explains that Postmodernism is the natural art movement for a dead world. The chapter opens:
1945 marks Modernity’s death & the birth of the Postmodern – despite whatever theorists, critics, academics, clerks, klutzes, kleagles, grad students, rad relics, cocktail intelligentsia, faux aboriginals, white midclass mall rats, hip-hoppers, flip-floppers, say or signify. 1945 closes Modernism’s file; melts fabric glue of liberal humanism’s Enlightenment’s utopic élan & generosity; splatter into Nowheresville all society sustaining (& framing) institutions & discourses. 1945 is the fissure (not Body by Fisher nor Eddie Fisher, Oh Mein Papa" or chess’ Glenn Gould bobby Fisher) or Modernity’s all-embracing moral desires; 1945 is the frisson of modernism’s failure whose seized & frozen unifying discourses of Popular Front, populism, nativism, religion, optimism, were, in an instant, erased in nuclear heat competing with the sun & Fordist Shoah. Ideas that once embraced & comforted became unthinkable before melted shadow-glyphs of evaporated body stains on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sidewalks. Discourses & narratives that had reinforced a throng’s need for distinction & separateness were literally atomized. Postwar painters abandon the human subject, erase & deface all modernist art icons, turn the canvas into an energy field of pigment molecules, mirroring the microscopic gaze, in a sense capitulate to reign of science & technology & anticipating the robotic postmodern & computer-generated imagos.
I have a friend who, in his younger years, never read any fiction but science fiction, because he felt that the purpose of fiction was to hypothesize about what humanity should do next. And he never read any science fiction written before 1945, because how the fuck would they know what to do next?
Theodor Ardorno said that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." If that is true, what is poetry after Hiroshima? What is the usefulness of our beautiful words, our noble efforts, since the day we turned a city to glass? What are we writing for? Posterity? Man, what makes you think there will be future generations to read? I got news for you, if the world is destroyed by an avalanche of nukes, the books will not survive. No extraterrestrials will get to read them.
What purpose does the history of the 20th Century, the history of Modernism and Art, the politics of the 30’s serve now? What good are our Holocaust Museums, what another friend calls Shoah shrines? Would someone please tell me the point of middle-class JAPs of both genders screaming “NEVER AGAIN," blissfully ignoring the fact that with the world’s current technology and wealth, genocide happens every fucking day? “Never again?" Easy to achieve. Explode 100 megatons, less than one percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, and you’ll kill all the humans, birds, mammals, lizards, fish, and trees.1 This isn’t a war we’re talking about, this isn’t a breakdown in world relations, this is one madman or one fucked-up computer program, you take your pick. Nuclear winter, ladies and gents. The cockroaches live to eat cardboard, the scorpions live to eat cockroaches, and our species never happens again.
Excuse me, have I digressed? You came here to read a book review of an epic poem? Beat Thing, is it? And instead, you’re treated to the cranky ranting of an undereducated leftist, a low-rent poet whose post-November political philosophy doesn’t equal much more than sore loser? You would like to suggest that I stick to writing literary criticism, and stay out of things I don’t understand? I’m sorry, I’m only taking suggestions from people who kill themselves at Ground Zero2 or chain themselves to Redwoods,3 because as far as I’m concerned, those are the only sane people left.
You wanna know what the Beat Thing is? The Beat Thing is an indictment. Years before a generation of spoiled Spock-children decided they didn’t want to go to war, the Beat Generation realized what America was, what it wasn’t, and what it would inevitably become. In 1945, the Beat Generation gave up not only on the American Dream, but watched as all of the dreams of humanity were destroyed forever. The term “Postmodern" sounds nonsensical when one first hears it, but it’s a perfectly appropriate term for what happened to humanity and culture in 1945. Everything we have ever aspired to was blown away. There are no more art movements. There is no more art. There is gossip, there is sarcasm, there is meanness with a big vocabulary. There is no art because there is no hope. The work of the Beat Generation and the movements that have come since don’t uplift. What’s the purpose of uplifting people who propagate governments and cultures that will inevitably evaporate the entire species? The work of the Beat Movement takes that bomb, shoves it in your face, and says, Look what you allowed to happen. You are dead. I am dead. The human soul is dead and soon the last body will follow. Do you want to understand the Beat Generation? Understand the dead who don’t have enough remains to be cremated. Understand Burroughs’s statement that the soul is the electromagnetic field around a human body that only a nuclear blast can destroy. Understand everything good blown away in an instant, and everything evil still in a process of slow decay, until this incurable species is finally gone. If Beat is dead, it should be; it’s the art form of a dead world.
Beat Thing doesn’t actually get that far. It’s part of an as-yet-unfinished, multi-volume set. Volume One, of which this rant was at one time a review, ends as McCarthyism begins to rise (sort of; as I say, Meltzer doesn’t stick to chronology any more than I do to topic). When I queried, he told me that Volume Two will be called Spirit Gum and “addresses the post-Beat New Age culture of white middle/upper class privilege." The third volume is not yet titled. Presumably, the final product, if the world continues long enough for it to be written, will present, with few specifics and fewer dates, a rhythmic tale of a culture too stupid to realize that it died in the first atomic blast, and the members of Meltzer’s generation that could not help but notice.
Do you like American music?
We like all kinds of music
But I like American music best, baby
--Violent Femmes
Notes:
1Carl Sagan’s essay, “The Nuclear Winter," 1983
2CNN.com, November 8th, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/07/ground.zero.suicide.ap/index.html
3David Chain, environmental protestor, was killed by a falling log on September 18th, 1998. Many allege murder, though the incident is officially considered an accident. The initial San Francisco Examiner article can be found at
http://www.jailhurwitz.com/media/pac_lumber_done/106_media.htm.
Jonathan Penton is the Editor-in-chief of Unlikely 2.0. Check out his bio page.