Adversity Breeds Creativity

“But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me”    – Pablo Neruda

‘On the Road’ may not have been agitational propaganda, but it’s characters showed a refusal that was shared by hippies and radicals to accept uncritically ‘traditional’ values which put a high premium on career, marrige, status, and possessions. COuld the middle-aged Jack Kerouac not remember writing ( in the character of Sal Paradise ) that he felt that ‘the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night!’ And wasn’t this precisely the mood of the coulnter-cultural revolution? On the Road was a search for soul in an America that appeared to be losing its essense to materialism; for Jack Kerouac was essentially a writer with spiritual preoccupations – ‘waiting for God to show his face’, as he once put it to an interviewer who wanted to know what the Beats were looking for. In his writing it’s a sense of inevitable collapse – both the collape of Jack Kerouac, who he knows it inevitably moving towards ‘disease, decay, sorry, lamentation, old age, death, decomposition’, and the collape of the American Dream.
Almost all of his books burn with the age-old question: ‘What must I do to be saved?’ and he claimed in his famous Playboy article ‘The philosophy of the Beat Generation’ that Beatdom evidenced a deep religiosity, ‘the desire to be gone, out of this world ( which is not our kingdom ), high, esctatic, saved, as if the visions of the cloistral saints of Chrtres and Clairvaux were back with us again…’ It was not without careful thought that he named himself Paradise in OTR – could Sal have been an abbreviation of Salvation?
‘I think that ( spirituality ) was our primary thing,” Allen Ginsberg told me, ‘because we all had some kind of visionary experience that pushed us out of the notion of art as just some career or commerce. We suddenly realized that actually art did influence people, that it had cosequences and could clarify consciousness, could bring one to other modes of awareness. Realizing that opened up a whole world of possibility’.

I had a discussion with somebody last night that was seriously pissed off at me for deleting them from Facebook. I am never getting that ten minutes of my life back.

But it is nonetheless absoloutely stunning:

I was using www.stumbleupon.com a few weeks ago and I stumbled upon a blog called ‘The fetus panda’ which is tracking the progress of the new baby the couple above have made together. He is a photographer, and she is a nurse of some kind and they seem to be the coolest people ever. They both use the blog and it’s been filled with interesting craving tid bits and various plans they have for the panda. This isn’t something I would usually gravitate to but I really enjoy following them along. It makes me feel a little more positive about the idea of a family, and children – seeing two people who are SO cool making their own little one. http://www.fetuspanda.com/