Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists

Taking its initial motivation from the Sermon on the Mount and latter-day Beat and post-Beat writers as diverse in vision as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, Bob Dylan, Norman O. Brown, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Beat Attitude (beatitude) stands for the self-convicted state of high-holy vision in which what is lowly becomes exalted and can activate forces, ideals and principles of poetic polity and world-altering vision. These states and forces of "beatitude" and high-holyness are still crucial to the poetics and politics of the post-Beat writer: forces of election or chosen vocation that Emerson and others, from Jesus to Spinoza and Blake, had endorsed as active joy and the felt influx of blessedness inter-animating the self to energize others and transfigure the world to life-renewal. This work comprises an inter-linked collage and glossary for what Beatitude (Beat/Attitude) means and has meant to diverse writers and phiosophers, and shows how “the vocation to beatitude” still motivates as a force of empowerment across time and space, activating some influx from the Holy Spirit or prana/ chi force from the Over-soul and individual Godhead that allows one to write, to think, to act, to love, to create, and thus to renew the world each day, to make it new as Ezra Pound and Saint Paul as well as Buddha said, to hitch the self into the drafts of breath to wind and spirit as life-enhancing energy and hope. Eclectic and antagonistic by turns, pious and lofty as well as lowly and creatural in its fits and flights of life-joy, "Beat" means at one end being beaten-down, broken up, emptied out, beaten up by life and driven down-and-out by negative social forces and over-determinations. The self may become emptied out and broken down into a states of dispossession, but he or she or they can also become the "dharma bum," that is, the keeper of the dharma vision and high-holy visionary authority William Blake (and Bob Dylan et al) had advocated as "Jesus-the-Imagination." As poet & cultural-critic Joshua Clover describes this project, "Rob Wilson is a Pacific Rim citizen and a California original; like all originals, he is filled with intimations of the future and echoes of the past. Beat Attitudes dreams Walter Benjamin's dream of grasping an era by building a barricade of quotations. But the era turns out to be an attitude, a way of being; the barricade that turns out to a passageway to a barely imagined, almost remembered territory. Benjamin first called his work "a dialectical faerie land"; WIlson's might be called a ghost country of radical democracy, a dirty and intoxicated utopia of daily life as it wants to be, as it wants to overthrow our present and prim barbarism. It is this desire, this crime, that Beat Attitudes desires to abet."