[MD] Grace Beats Karma pt.2

[John Carl]

"But sometimes its Dynamic where your whole being senses that the static
situation is an enemy of life itself.  That's what drives the really
creative people -- the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like--
the feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody has
built around them, they're going to die."


Pirsig



A while back, somebody, may have been our missing Krimel, posted the link to
an article about William James on ether, from the Atlantic Monthly by
 Dmitri Tymoczko:


 "That sounds like nonsense but it is pure *on *sense!" He giggles a little
more. The writing trails away. He holds his forehead in both hands. He is
stoned. He is William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. And
for the first time he feels that he is understanding religious mysticism.

The psychedelia of the 1960s was foreshadowed by events in the waning years
of the nineteenth century. This first American psychedelic movement began
with an anonymous article published in 1874 in *The Atlantic
Monthly*<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/nitrous/wmjgist.htm>.
The article, which was in fact written by James, reviewed *The Anaesthetic
Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy*, a pamphlet arguing that the secrets
of religion and philosophy were to be found in the rush of nitrous oxide
intoxication."


Reading that article, what immediately came to mind was the experience of a
friend of mine  - Chris.  A really smart guy who was extremely depressed, as
really smart guys seem to get sometimes, seemingly trapped in the walls of
their own mighty intellect.


He told me the details of his story while we were at the Burning Man event
together a few years ago.  He reported being so depressed in college, he was
contemplating suicide.  Instead, he took LSD.  And for the first time in his
life, experienced the alternative mindset of religious mysticism.  It turned
his life completely around.   He switched his academic goals from Chemistry
to Biochemistry and did his doctoral thesis on the effects of
ayahuasca<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca> ,
a South American  hallucinogenic plant.  And he became a Christian.  Which
to some, may seem a degeneration from scientific materialism.


Yas, yas, as old Neal Cassady used to say. Yas, yas, but who is the
degenerate and who is the messiah?  And who gets to decide?


In a book of letters from Prison entitled Grace Beats Karma, Neal described
his condition and how he got that way to a Priest who'd become a mentor in
his prison years.


"Dear Father Harley;


As was rightly proclaimed by the judge when he sentenced me to 5 years to
life for selling marijuana, (I had given 3 such cigarrettes to 2
plainclothesman in exchange for a ride to work, thus constituting the more
severe charge of sales)   "Cassidy, you've been leading a double life."  And
further attestation to this unvarnished truth is the full dozen books
written by 4 different authors--including my partial autobiography-- that
catalogue in somwhat infamous fashion these sickening exploits of mine.
Thankfully, only 3 have so far been published, chronologically they are "Go"
a hard cover, later reprinted as pocket book, by Holmes who names me Hart
Kennedy in this first novel that jacket blurb claims is about "Modern youth
in search of kicks."   Second is  "On the Road" by a really fine prose
artist, Jack Kerouac, the originator of the term "Beat Generation" which,
tho you've probably not heard of it, is all the rage in literary circles,
especially on west coast, as the definitative comparison to Hemingway's
"Lost Generation."  I'm called Dean Moriarty in this one, Kersouac's most
popular, a novel dealing in accurate detail with my life until 1953.  Third,
in order of time released, comes "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, a long & pagan
poem supposedly a social protest that's co-dedicated to me & on page 12 of
which I'm called the "secret hero" & for which acquittal in a trial on
charges of obscenity was recently won by famed criminal lawyer Jake Erlish
in a San Francisco court of law.  So you can see, father, some reason, tho
naturally unjustifiable, why, falsely puffed with pride of weak leadership
in the "Beatniks", as newspapers called us, I would strut through the North
Beach "Greenwich Village" of San Francisco accepting in mushrooming hunger
any back-handed plaudits given the bohemian reputation I thus cultivated
each day from 8 & 5 while laying over between trains.


Well lately I had drifted into acting in accord with the main, nay only,
responsibility entailed in mastership of "Beathood", namely, helping the
brothers to attain that state, i.e., "Beat" is not being in despair, down &
out or some other such starkly negative state of mind &/ or body, as various
authors of articles in New Yorker, Holiday, Esquire, Playboy, etc. as well
as many more totally unaware writers of letters to Editors would have us
believe, but is rather the corruption of the word "Beatific" which, despite,
or because of, it signifying the highest type vision of infused
contemplation, Kerouac, while utterly ignoring the almost blasphemous
theological implications, had appropriated for use as applying to certain
contemporary freaks who, with him, firmly believed that it, the VISION,
could be approached, altho necessarily temporarily & artificially, by the
simple expedient of smoking marijuana."




Simple that is, till you get thrown in prison for it.

With his conviction he was cut off completely from his job on the railroad
forever and the lucrative union pension accrued.  He went into prison with
no idea on earth how he was gonna support his wife and three kids when he
got back out.


His wife  Carolyn wrote:  "The first time he was arrested and held for a
week in San Francisco city jail his attitude had born the fruits of his
metaphysical studies:  he was calm, poised and assured, and he performed
something of a miracle in spontaneously separating two battling thugs who
shared his tiny cell, after which he nearly fainted thinking of the risk
he'd taken  His release furnished further  proof of the universal truths
he'd been learning and attempting to practice.  Alas, when he was
re-arrested and falsely accused, his faith deserted him to be replaced by
anger and resentment, attitudes that had to be repressed.  Unjustly
condemned, his bitterness  intensified."


Yeah, that Carolyn was quite a pip.   Her book,  Off The Road, tells what it
was like to be married to such a dynamic personality.  During the time that
Neal was in Prison, Kerouac was in New York and semi-enoying his new found
celebrity.  Feeling more than a bit guilty that his book about Neal is what
got the authorities so interested in entrapping him.



Pirsig]


"If you eliminate suffering from this world, you eliminate life.  There's no
evolution.  Suffering is the negative face of Quality that drives the whole
process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on with
suffering individuals like Lila."


"Grace Beats Karma" was taken from one of Neal's letters and it exemplified
the general tone of his attitude in those years.   Carolyn said,"I've often
wondered whether his retreat to Catholicism was also an attempt to recapture
some of the comfort afforded him in his early childhood by his contact with
the only warmth, beauty and grace encountered in his otherwise harsh
existence.  The church must have been a magical and seductive fantasyland
for such a sensitive boy."


Dogma or mandala?  What's the difference?  Rote religion has its uses too.
 Sometimes hurting humans just need to get their minds off their troubles.


When he got out of prison, he didn't stay religious long.  Carolyn had
already decided that for his own growth and freedom, she was gonna divorce
him after he got out.   But its an open question whether the static social
latching of family and responsibility were hindering Neal.  On the one hand,
he may have settled down and finished his autobiography.  On the other hand,
he'd never have hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters.


Pirsig]


"Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its
own.  This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can't get off
and you have to keep riding and riding till the tiger throws you and devours
you."


And that was the report from Mexico that his grandson Bill and I got when we
drove to the scene of his death on the 25th anniversary.  We interviewed a
friend of Neals, Peter Olwyler,  who told us how tired Neal could get of
being the center of dynamic change.  The way he described Neal in those days
is captured perfectly by "a tiger ride".    How he missed his relationship
with his family and especially, and this was real crucial to Bill's
understanding, how he regretted the break in relationship with his daughter
Cathy, Bill's mom.


Nowadays we know a lot more what meth does to the brain and Neal's
enthusiasm for that drug for it's energizing effects was probably the main
factor in his death.  But he was ridin' that tiger, working hard  to impress
and please this fast, younger crowd and fulfilling his insatiable lust for
the first time in his life.  He couldn't get off at this point, except by
that simple expedient all men have for disembarking from the train.


Casey Jones you'd better watch your speed.


Indeed.


At the end of the book is a prescient diatribe by Allen Ginsberg.  I've
excerpted it here because he makes some points about Spirit that are
pertinent to the dialogue on Pragmatism and Idealism that seem right on to
me.  And I'll leave the last word for my favorite Idealist of all... tho he
doesn't know he is one.



"Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of
mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of
that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the
individual shares with his Creator.  The suppression of contemplative
individuality is nearly complete.  The only immediate historical data that
we can know and act on are those fed to our sense through systems of mass
communication....


The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from
Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene.


Those of us who have used certain benevolent drugs (marijuana) to alter our
consciousness in order to gain insight are hunted down in the street by
police.  Peyote, an historic vision-producing agent, is prohibited on pain
of arrest.  Those who have used opiates and junk are threatened with
permanent jail and death.


To be a junky in America is like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany.


Poetry is hated.  Whole schools of academic criticism have risen to prove
that human consciousness of unconditioned Spirit is a myth.


Only those who have entered the world of Spirit know what a vast laugh there
is in the illusory appearance of worldly authority.  And all men at one time
or other enter that Spirit, whether in life or death.


Pirsig]


But they're not being contrary in a way that is just decadent.  They're way
too aggressive and energetic for that.  They're fighting for Dynamic freedom
from static patterns.  But the Dynamic freedom they're fighting for is a
kind of morality too.  And its a highly important part of the moral process.