Wednesday, August 16, 2023

"Do what thou wilt"

The Devil's pronouncement. I've been recently reading multiple texts about the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al. They're all ego and The Devil incarnate---I don't say that dramatically or religiously, but just exactly: This is what happens to you if you go through your life fucking and doing drugs and  adopting random religious tenets indiscriminately according to the fashion of the day. There's no "Nirvana" in store for you. What they were feeding you, and themselves, was an ugly joke and falsehood. Do your own research on Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, all of them, and how they turned out.

In general, I used to be sympathetic to the Beats: I consider myself a libertarian, and don't like people telling me what to do. But after numerous accounts of these creeps having sex with 12-year-old girls or boys in Mexico (because they wanted to and could for $2) and after accounts of Burroughs' former NYC friend in Mexico (whom Kerouac lived with for months) who got off on introducing Mexican kids to heroin for the first time... sans any "judgment" from his visiting US pals... According to the Beat philosophy, all of this was fine.

Just today, I accidentally came upon this online text:  https://fallen-leaves.org/2022/01/16/jack-kerouac-on-the-road-1957/   A lengthy intellectually- and spiritually-based exploration of why the vision of "On the Road" was so seemingly freeing yet so ultimately utterly false and degrading. The voice of Sanity. Finally.

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