High Off the Page: Representing the Drug Experience in
the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Erik Mortenson
Wayne State University
his article explores attempts by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to transcribe their
drug experiences onto the written page. Utilizing both Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work
on intersubjective communication and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of
the “Body Without Organs,” it argues that by writing “through the body,” Kerouac and
Ginsberg are able to transmit the physical and emotional effects of the drug experience
to the reader via the medium of the text. he reader thus receives not just an objective
account of the drug experience, but becomes privy to the alterations in temporal perception and intersubjective empathy that drug use inaugurates.
Just what is the body’s knowledge? A scar traces the history of a laceration, a pain in the back indicates bad posture, a runny nose predicts a cold.
he body is ours to read like a text, provided something occurs. Otherwise,
it becomes all too often a mere given, an instrument used to grasp, to move,
to live. Only through the prism of a rent do we witness the body itself in
all its fullness and possibility. For those of us that desire such a glimpse,
alteration becomes a necessity. But how should we attempt such a mutation
without damaging our precious vessel? Drug use is one answer. Perhaps no
other word creates such a wealth of connotations–addiction, transgression,
criminality, overdose. With all the dangers attached to them, drugs seem
an unlikely candidate for such experimentation.1 Yet there are advantages.
Drugs provide a temporary alteration with fairly predictable results. A
user can ingest a substance, experience the embodied consciousness of the
drugged state, and return with their tale. What is needed, then, are such
accounts of drugs that can provide the user and non-user alike with insights
into how drug use intersects with subjectivity. How exactly do drugs alter
human perception and how might that shed light on our understanding of
the body and its potential?
Fortunately, such an account already exists in the work of Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg. hese writers were involved in a postwar project that
saw drug use as an invaluable means of expanding their range of experience beyond accepted channels. Written during the period of intoxication,
Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s works provide not just an abstract comment but
a concrete record of the effects of drug use on embodied consciousness. he
Janus Head, 7(1), 54-72. Copyright © 2004 by Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Erik Mortenson 55
gains these writers experienced while mapping this terrain are twofold. On
the one hand, the drug-inspired works of Kerouac and Ginsberg reveal an
emphasis on the temporality of the drug experience. heir works become
studies in speed, concerned with the increases, decreases, and stoppages in
the perception of time that drug use enacts. But it is important to note that
Kerouac and Ginsberg were primarily writers, and thus the role of communication becomes of paramount importance in their work. Not only do
their drug writings relate their own personal experiences, but they likewise
seek to explore the interstice between the drugged state and the Other
who stands outside that experience. We become privy to the changes drug
use inaugurates both within the single body and between multiple ones.
Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s willingness to experiment on themselves and bring
back the results in the form of literature provides us with accounts of drug
consumption’s effects on subjectivity and, ultimately, sheds light on what it
means to alter the body and to portray this alteration to another.
Before exploring the specific results of the drug state, one must first
understand the literary process by which information concerning this state
is conveyed from writer to reader. For these two authors, communication between the reader and the drugged Other can only take place when
writing attains the status of original speech. In his work Phenomenology of
Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty differentiates between
two types of language: original and secondary. He writes, “I may say that ‘I
have been waiting for a long time,’ or that someone ‘is dead,’ and I think I
know what I am saying. Yet if I question myself on time or the experience
of death . . . there is nothing clear in my mind. his is because I have tried
to speak about speech, to re-enact the act of expression” (391). Original,
“authentic” expression is already full, since in the act of saying something
we attain an “immediately apprehended clarity” (391). Problems arise only
when we attempt to speak about speech. he sentence turns into a reified
object that loses its immediacy and thus its immanent meaning. his is
precisely the reason writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg are so adamant that
writing should emanate from elsewhere than the “ego.” hus in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac advises, “If possible write ‘without
consciousness in semi-trance’ (as Yeats’ later ‘trance writing’), allowing
subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so
‘modern’ language what conscious art would censor” (70). What Kerouac
is advocating is writing from what phenomenology terms the “intentional
consciousness.” Instead of writing about objects and ideas, the writer is ad-
56 Janus Head
vised to transcribe the workings of their “subconscious” as objects and ideas
are grasped intentionally.2 In “Notes Written on Finally Recording ‘Howl’”
Allen Ginsberg explains it thus: “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely. Meaning
Mind practiced in spontaneity invents forms in its own image–gets to Last
houghts” (81). he ego is an impediment. Forcing the world through the
filter of the “I” reduces externality into easily-manageable representations.
It is only through composing with the intentional consciousness that the
writer is able to produce authentic work that originates meaning through
interaction with the world.
Original speech, however, is tied closely to the body. his can be seen
in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of linguistic communication, which is built
on the gesture. In discussing a threatening gesture, Merleau-Ponty explains
that “he gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself ” (184).
One need not search his or her experience of gestures or reason by analogy
in order to understand the meaning of a raised fist since this gesture contains
the significance of “anger” within it. For Merleau-Ponty, the spoken word is
also a gesture, and thus “the meaning of words must be finally induced by
the words themselves . . . their conceptual meaning must be formed by a
kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech”
(179). Original speech is not concerned with simply communicating a set
of facts to the listener, but aims at conveying a style of being from one body
to another. hus Kerouac has recourse to the simile of gesture in explaining
his technique. In his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac compares
the line to “a fist coming down on a table with complete utterance, bang!”
(69). his “bang!” denotes the “telepathic shock and meaning-excitement”
(69) that the reader receives from such expression. Language is not first a
matter of communication, but of alteration. Merleau-Ponty claims that “I
begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher” (179). Before
content comes to form, a certain style of being gets communicated from
the speaker to the listener, causing not a “process of thinking on my part,
but a synchronizing change of my own existence” (183-84). Original speech
can bridge the gap between self and Other since, as Kerouac maintains, the
listener has the “same laws operating in his own human mind” (69). Kerouac
spontaneously composes through his drugged body and the results appear
on the page. he reader then comes along and reads, activating all the latent
characteristics of the drug state buried in the text. hus the “truth” about
the drug state comes to reside not simply in overt content, but in the form
Erik Mortenson 57
of the work itself.
he importance placed on corporeality should come as no surprise, since
the body figures prominently in all of Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s manifestoes.
Jack Kerouac claims that his work relies on “the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown
phrases)” (“Essentials” 69). Here the body becomes a privileged site for
poetics. Breath is tied to the body, and by breathing life into the poem the
poet breathes a part of himself into the poem as well. Allen Ginsberg deepens
this connection between breath, body, and writing in his essay, “Improvised
Poetics.” He declares that “physiologically in the body . . . is . . . the key to
suddenly wakening up . . . a whole Reichian chain of muscular reactions
. . . it’s like having the basic patterns of physiological reactions built into
the language, into the alphabet” (36, ellipses in original). Writing that takes
its cue from the body imbues language with a physical presence. As Daniel
Belgrad observes in his book, he Culture of Spontaneity, such a poetic act
is possible “only because of the very physicality of the poet’s body-mind,
which situated him or her as an object in place and time” (130). he Beat
poet Michael McClure uses a different metaphor but to the same effect. In
Scratching the Beat Surface, McClure speaks of a “systemless system” which
“alters itself in the waves with a living anarchism” (54). he poet allows
energy to flow through the body in order to create a “systemless system”
that is the poem. McClure writes that poems become “extensions of myself
as much as my hand or arm are extensions of me” (89). Again, physicality
is infused directly into the work in order to embody the poem. But if the
body is the basis for poetics, then an alteration of that body through the
use of drugs is going to alter the writing as well.3 Composing through the
drug-altered body allows the effects of the drug to be transferred onto the
written page, providing the reader with a novel account of the drug experience unavailable through mere descriptions of the event.
But how exactly does a reader experience the written drug account?
Here again the work of Merleau-Ponty is instructive. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body grounds the individual in the world. But it also provides
a means for intersubjective communication. Merleau-Ponty claims that
“as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the
other person’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon”
(354). It is only through encountering the Other’s body that communication can be established, that this “system” can be comprised. Writing done
“through the body” allows for intersubjectivity to be established between
58 Janus Head
bodies via the medium of the text. McClure explains it thus: “Blake is as
present today as if he were biologically alive. His works are extensions of
himself . . . . Blake’s works, like all artifacts of all high artists, are his body.
Gestures come so directly from his physical being that their presence is
real and physical” (137-38). Blake’s works are traces of his body, and from
them we are able to connect with a man dead for over a century. Discussing
the use of mantra in his poetry, Ginsberg explains in “Improvised Poetics,”
“the . . . rhythmic . . . units . . . that I’d written down . . . were basically
. . . breathing exercise forms . . . which if anybody else repeated . . . would
catalyze in them the same pranic breathing . . . physiological spasm . . .
that I was going through . . . and so would presumably catalyze in them
the same affects or emotions” (33-36, ellipses in original). When the text is
infused with a bodily presence, the reader is able to connect with the work
on a visceral level. Merleau-Ponty claims that “Aesthetic expression confers
on what it expresses an existence in itself ” (183). While it is the writing
itself that we phenomenologically confront, this “existence” that is the text
retains bodily properties that allow the reader to experience it physically as
well as mentally.4 Beat theories of the body provide a means of connection
between the writing of an author and the body of the reader. he written
word retains a physical impact conveyed from author to reader through the
medium of the text.
Yet Merleau-Ponty’s paradigm of bodily intersubjectivity is only one
side of the coin. If drugged writing is working through an altered body to
record new experience for the reader, how do we theorize this re-orientation
towards the world? In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s reliance on the body as a
means to ground experience, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
call for an experimental body in constant flux and change. In A housand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe a “set of practices” which create a
limit known as the “Body Without Organs” (150).5 his “Body Without
Organs” is equated with “the full egg before extension of the organism and
the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the
intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds” (153).
he egg knows no strict organization. It is only after the egg develops that
the organs coalesce into a regimented structure that becomes immobile.
he “Body Without Organs” is championed as a way of breaking down
this reified body in order to find a new means of experiencing phenomena
by opening the body up to sensations and “intensities” that were previously
imperceptible. Rather than relying on a rigid, fixed conception of the body
Erik Mortenson 59
as a means of experience, these philosophers are calling for a reorganized
body where “experimentation has replaced all interpretation” (162). Although
Deleuze and Guattari warn of the dangers involved in creating a drugged
body, it is clear that in crafting a “Body Without Organs” the drug user is
attempting to open herself up to new experience and phenomenological data
by altering the very foundation of knowledge itself: the body.
But if the bodily consumption of drugs is a means of altering perception, the question becomes: What novel perceptions are drugs inaugurating?
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the fundamental issue here is one of
speed. hey write:
the problem is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate forms
and persons, if we bring into play the mad speeds of drugs and the
extraordinary posthigh slownesses . . . if we confer upon perception
the molecular power to grasp microperceptions, microoperations, and
upon the perceived to emit accelerated or decelerated particles in a
floating time that is no longer our time. (283)
he body as “ground” gives way to the “Body Without Organs.” hese alterations created through drug use, these “accelerations” and “decelerations,”
provide the drug user with a means to perceive what was before imperceptible.
his new sense of time opens up new vistas of the “molecular” for the drug
user and allows for what Deleuze and Guattari call a “hecceity.” Subjectivity is replaced by a becoming that involves both speed and affect: “You are
longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed
particles” (262). If speed is what you are, altering your speed will change your
very being, allowing the world (and yourself ) to be perceived in new ways.
Writings about the drug experience often address this notion of an altered
temporality, but do so on the level of content. How might an investigation
of the formal nature of literary work shed light on Deleuze and Guattari’s
emphasis on speed? hese thinkers downplay the individuality of the drug
substance, preferring to organize their thinking under the rubric of speed.
Yet a closer inspection of writing under the influence reveals that each drug
creates a specific “hecceity” that should not be overlooked. Deleuze and Guattari may be concerned with the overall effect of drugs, but it is important
to flesh out some of the distinctions in speed between various drugs if we
are to fully understand both their effects on temporal perception and their
possible literary representations.
60 Janus Head
he fundamental problem in discussing the speeds associated with drug
use is that there is no objective yardstick with which to measure deviations
from a norm. Philosophy has attempted to solve this problem by positing
the notion of a “real” present that elides perceptual difference. As Richard
Gale notes in he Philosophy of Time, this solution has the result of making
any perceptual present “specious” with regard to a “real or true present, which
is supposed to be punctual” (294). Experience dictates, however, that the
present always remains relational–a second for one person is never a second
for another. What do “acceleration” and “deceleration” mean in such a situation? An answer can be found in an appeal to the notion of attention. In his
work Patterning of Time, Leonard W. Doob presents the results of a study
that discovered “subjects under the influence of the depressant tapped and
drew a mirror image more slowly than when affected by the antidepressant”
(313). Let’s call the time it takes to draw the “mirror image” the present.
Under the influence of a depressant like marijuana, the subject expends more
attention to the process than he would under the influence of an antidepressant such as amphetamines. he person high on marijuana thus experiences
an expansion of the present that concomittingly leads to the feeling that
objectified clock time has slowed. As Peter Hartocollis claims in Time and
Timelessness, under the influence of marijuana there is a “concentration on
the present” (133). he amphetamine user, by contrast, attends to her task
more quickly, leading to a contraction of the present, which means the
next present will be encountered more rapidly. Here objective clock time
seems to speed up. It is important to note that within each of these presents
the number of stimuli remains unchanged–it is not the number of objects
encountered but the length of attention fixed upon them that distinguishes
the variation in speeds between the two types of drugs used.
his expansion of the present that occurs under marijuana use is literally
“captured” in Kerouac’s texts. Writing under the influence of marijuana,
Kerouac’s work is able to represent the distinct attentional effects of the
experience to the reader. Take a passage from Visions of Cody, where Kerouac
explains a “gray afternoon” to the reader:
that kind of day, that’ll only know a rosy cloud at sundown when the
sun will find its tortured way through masses and battles of fevered
darkening matter–raw, dank, the wind going like a gong through your
coat and also through your body–the wild woolly clouds hurrying no
faster in the heavens above than the steam from the railyards hurrying
over the fence and up the street into town–fantastic, noisy . . . (85)
Erik Mortenson 61
his passage continues on for another five lines, as Kerouac continually
infuses his descriptions with detail upon detail in an effort to convey the
feeling of a “gray afternoon” to the reader. According to Kerouac’s friend
and fellow Beat writer John Clellon Holmes, such passages in Visions of
Cody were written while under the influence of marijuana: “He’d blast, get
high, and then he’d write all night. And the reason why those sentences are
so long and exfoliating and so incredible is because of pot” (Gifford 77).
he expansion of the present that takes place under marijuana allows Kerouac to delve deeper and deeper into his descriptions. With its abundant
use of commas and space-dashes, this passage decelerates as Kerouac packs
his explanation of “that kind of day” with an array of particulars. Sentence
length expands correspondingly as Kerouac’s perceptions “exfoliate” into
additional clauses that nuance the overall description while slowing down
the reading process. By the time the reader comes to the end of the line, the
idea of a “gray afternoon,” registered momentarily by a sober observer, has
been explored in the extreme depth that marijuana use allows. Kerouac’s
passage not only presents his thinking process while under marijuana, but
conveys the speed of the experience as well.
For Kerouac, this expansion of the present that marijuana produces
allows for what is known as “digging.” Consider a letter Kerouac wrote to
his friend Neal Cassady:
First let me say that I have been digging the World Series and the tones
of the various announcers. his morning I did the World Series the
honor of getting up early and blasting ahead of time. here’s an announcer from Philly called Gene Kelley who is an exact replica of John
Holmes (that is, dig John as a radio announcer), with the same way of
being proud of his verbs, and so on, like when a groundball is hit, he’ll say
. . . ‘a slow, twisting, weak roller’ as if baseball was the significance of life
itself, the things happening in it representing in symbols of action, the
symbols of (twisting) despair in the ‘modern world.’ . . . hen quickly
I turn to old reliable southern-accent Mel Allen, who has that simple
back-country mind, like Dean, just pointing out things like . . . ‘Well,
there’s Johnny Mize mopping his face with a handkerchief ’ . . . You
can tell Neal, how I dig all this; my mind, wrapped in wild observation
of everything, is drawn, by the back-country announcer, back to the
regular, brakeman things of life. (Selected Letters 230-31)
62 Janus Head
As with his “grey afternoon” description, Kerouac meanders through clause
after clause that slowly draws out the details of Gene Kelley’s and Mel Allen’s
announcing that inspire the account. Yet “digging” not only expands the
moment, but opens the “digger” up to a new range of empathetic feelings
as well.6 In his letter to Cassady, Kerouac’s description of Kelley as “being
proud of his verbs” is not simply a comment on his technique. Instead, it
demonstrates a desire to understand the announcer on some sub-linguistic
level. Kerouac continues to equate Kelly’s tendencies with “life itself ” and
“symbols of (twisting) despair in the ‘modern world.’” In much the same
manner, Allen’s “simple back-country” announcing draws Kerouac to “the
regular, brakeman things of life.” Kerouac thus reinterprets the announcer’s
words in his own terms, extrapolating attitudes and feelings that the two
announcers never explicitly verbalize. Marijuana-induced “digging” is a
means of understanding an Other and empathizing with their plight. In On
he Road, Sal and Dean smoke “a tremendous Corona cigar of tea,” (283)
then proceed to “dig” their newly-acquired Mexican friends. Dean exclaims,
“Will you d-i-g that weird brother in the back . . . . And they’re talking and
wondering about us, like see? Just like we are but with a difference of their
own” (283-84). Despite the barriers of language and culture, marijuana use
builds a bridge from one self to another. Slowing the world down so that a
moment may be taken in more fully, marijuana-inspired “digging” allows
for a leisurely contemplation of the world around the “digger.”
Unsurprisingly, amphetamine use produces the opposite effect. While
marijuana expands the moment and leads to a decelerated reading experience, amphetamines contract the moment, leading instead to a sense of
acceleration. Consider a passage from Kerouac’s novel he Subterraneans.
Kerouac wrote this work in a benzedrine-fueled three day marathon (Charters,
Kerouac 185), and this often-quoted passage retains the increased energy
that the drug induces:
So there we were at the Red Drum, a tableful of beers a few that is and
all the gangs cutting in and out, paying a dollar quarter at the door,
the little hip-pretending weazel there taking tickets, Paddy Cordavan
floating in as prophesied (a big tall blond brakeman type subterranean
from Eastern Washiington cowboy-looking in jeams coming it to a wild
generation party all smoky and mad and I yelled ‘Paddy Cordavan?’
and ‘Yeah?’ and he’d come over). (13)
Erik Mortenson 63
Digging involves an attention to a few details within the moment, expanding on them until an empathetic understanding of the object being “dug”
is reached. Here, however, Kerouac is obsessed with novelty–his attention
continually shifts from character to character as they parade across the
room. Even when Kerouac does begin to explicate a character like Paddy
Cordavan, he quickly shifts to another facet of the event, explaining how
when he “yelled ‘Paddy Cordavan?’” Paddy responded “Yeah?” and came
over. Rather than dwelling on the inner souls of his characters, Kerouac
instead gives quick visual descriptions then immediately moves on to the
next scene or occurrence. By collapsing the present in such a way that more
of them can be included in his account, Kerouac provides the reader with a
sense of the “acceleration” associated with amphetamine use.
he shortening of the moment that results from amphetamine use is
best exemplified in the life of veteran “speed freak” Neal Cassady. As William Plummer notes in Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, the “raps”
and letters of Cassady which would go on to inform Kerouac’s prose style
were themselves “sped by amphetamine” (129).7 As a boy, his brother Jimmy
would imprison him in a wall-bed, where Cassady experienced a sensation
of time having had “gradually apexed to about triple its ordinary speed of
passage” (First hird 113). Later in life, Cassady was able to control this
sensation,
to hold still as death and listen intently for the inner ear to speed up
its buzz until, with regular leverlike flips, my mind’s gears were shifted
by unknown mechanism to an increase of time’s torrent that received
in kaleidoscopic change searing images, clear as the hurry of thought
could make them, rushing so quickly by that all I could do was barely
catch the imagery of one before another crowded. (First hird 113)
his constant “kaleidoscopic change” of “searing images” is an apt description
of the type of change in attention that amphetamine enacts. he moment of
perception shortens so drastically that Cassady barely had time to perceive
an image before “another crowded” to replace it. While digging expands the
present to focus ever-more-closely on singular details, amphetamines like
benzedrine shorten that present so that details can be accumulated, leading
not to explication but to cataloging.
he “digging” inspired by marijuana use finds a corollary in the confessional nature of amphetamine consumption. While marijuana use expands
64 Janus Head
the present to allow the “digger” to understand an Other more fully, amphetamine use creates an intense desire for personal revelation that finds
expression in the hurried pace of the narrative itself. At the beginning of he
Subterraneans, Kerouac announces that “another confession must be made,
as many I must make ere time’s sup” (3). As the novel develops, Kerouac
continually divulges personal and oftentimes unflattering facts about his life
in an effort to tell everything as quickly as possible. Belgrad notes that “Beat
works do not invoke what Michel Foucault called ‘the rituals of confession’”
but instead “elicit not a judging authority but an intersubjective ‘moment
of rapport’” (205-6). Both drugs are involved in an attempt at empathetic
union that Kerouac and Ginsberg continually seek. However, each achieves
that union in a different manner. In On he Road, this desire to “confess” to
the Other is tied even closer to amphetamine use. Carlo (Ginsberg) explains
to Sal (Kerouac) that he and Dean (Cassady) “are embarked on a tremendous season together. We’re trying to communicate with absolute honesty
and absolute completeness everything on our minds. We’ve had to take
benzedrine” (42). Unfortunately for the amphetamine user, however, there
never seems to be enough time. Despite conversing the entire night, come
daybreak Carlo and Dean’s task remains incomplete, and they must meet
again to continue their discussion. Marijuana expands the moment so that
there always seems to be enough time, while amphetamines like benzedrine
create a feeling that time is always running out. Kerouac’s frantic confession in he Subterraneans is an attempt by an author to describe everything
desperately, to tell the whole story, to unburden all of his problems on the
sympathetic ear of another “ere time’s sup.” 8
Kerouac is trying not only to describe and explain his connection to
others, but also to show the reader physically his experience through the
text. In his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac delineates his idea
of “scoping,” comparing the act of writing to “a fist coming down on a
table with each complete utterance, bang!” and then advises the writer to
“Blow as deep as you want–write as deeply, fish as far down as you want,
satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and
meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind” (69).
Writing is a means to capture experience, to trap it between the lines on a
page. Drug-induced writing thus works through the body to inscribe the
sensation of the drug state onto paper in order to deliver the “telepathic
shock and meaning-excitement” of this state to the reader. he Subterraneans
offers a frantic cataloging of doubt which triggers a parallel sensation of ac-
Erik Mortenson 65
celeration in the reader, a reading driven on by the narrator’s relentless account
of the innermost details of his love relationship. In much the same manner but
with different results, Kerouac’s letter to Cassady and Visions of Cody, with their
ambling, hyper-detailed descriptions, slow the reader down into a world constantly expanding with minute detail upon minute detail. Both types of accounts
are packed with perceptual data, but the form of the work receives its impetus
from the drug that fueled it, and each works in a different manner to shape the
reader’s experience.
But if writing through the drug state offers a revolutionary means for connection, this technique reaches its limit case with LSD. he difficulty posed by
LSD, however, has not deterred Allen Ginsberg from attempting to transcribe his
experience with the drug. Experimenting with LSD-25 at Stanford University in
1959, Ginsberg found the type of empathy that he and Kerouac were seeking. In a
letter to a relative, Ginsberg claims that he discovered “a sort of identity common
with everything” (Schumacher 311). Unfortunately for Ginsberg, this vision was
difficult to transcribe into poetry. In “Lysergic Acid,” Ginsberg composes under
the influence of the drug, but as his biographer Michael Schumacher concludes,
the “result was some interesting, though confusing, writing” (312):
A We
and that must be an It, and a hey, and a hing with No Answer
It creepeth, it waiteth, it is still, it is begun, it is the Horns of Battle it is
Multiple Sclerosis
it is not my hope
it is not my death at Eternity
it is not my word, not poetry
beware my Word (Collected Poems 232)
Ginsberg is clearly struggling to explain the LSD experience to his readers.
But rather than allowing the drug to speak through him onto the page, he instead
attempts to reflect on its effects. he poem thus remains mired in negativity, forced
to describe what the experience is not instead of what it is. “Magic Psalm,” written after the hallucinogenic experience, takes the opposite tack. Where “Lysergic
Acid” searches for a means to describe the drug’s effects, “Magic Psalm” employs
the formal structure of Ginsberg’s earlier poems in a vain attempt to capture the
temporal impact of LSD. Ginsberg writes “croak my voice with uglier than reality, a psychic tomato speaking hy / million mouths” (CP 255). Structurally, the
lines of this poem follow those of “Howl.” But the benzedrine-inspired format
66 Janus Head
of “Howl” fails to convey LSD’s sense of temporality. Juxtapositions such as
“psychic tomato,” claimed to make “incarnate gaps in Time and Space” in
“Howl,” fall short of the more celebrated “hydrogen jukebox” and “reality
sandwiches” found in his earlier work. Ginsberg’s use of preestablished forms
to convey his idiosyncratic LSD experience means that his presentation of
the intoxicated state remains filtered through an unspontaneous, sedimented,
secondary consciousness. As Ginsberg himself claimed in a 1976 interview
with Paul Portuges, he was “trying to superimpose the acid vision on the old
memory of a cosmic-consciousness, or to superimpose the old memory on the
acid vision–so that I was not living in the present time” (Portuges 121).
It is only when Ginsberg returns to his body in “present time” that
his writing begins to capture the drug experience. Despite his advocacy for
drugs as a tool for mind expansion, by the time Ginsberg journeyed to Asia
he had become disillusioned with their use. As he explains to homas Clark
in a Paris Review interview, “I don’t renounce drugs but I suddenly didn’t
want to be dominated by the nonhuman anymore . . . or do anything any
more except be my heart” (Ginsberg, “Interview” 316). Instead of trying to
leave the body and meld into the “nonhuman,” Ginsberg decides to return
to the body as a means of establishing “human relationships rather than
relations between the human and nonhuman” (Ginsberg, “Interview” 314).
With this new mindset, Ginsberg once again took LSD and produced the
poem “Wales Visitation.” In it, Ginsberg writes:
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible (CP 480)
Where his earlier LSD poems focused either on explaining the mental conceptions the drug was building or reverting back to the earlier forms as a
means of making sense of the experience, “Wales Visitation” immerses itself
in the objective minutiae of the LSD moment. Drawing on “what seen by
one man in a vale,” Ginsberg gets back into the body in order to link up
with humanity. As Ginsberg claims in Portuges’ he Visionary Poetics of Allen
Ginsberg, “for the first time I was able to externalize my attention instead
of dwelling on the inner images and symbols” (122). his “externalization”
allows Ginsberg to get outside himself and connect up with the “wisdom of
Erik Mortenson 67
earthly relations” instead of becoming mired in the “nonhuman,” abstracted LSD
consciousness that allows a user to “enter into alternative universes and with the
speed of light” (Ginsberg, “Interview” 315). Ginsberg himself describes the poem
as “one giant being breathing–one giant being that we’re all part of ” (Schumacher
487). By returning to his body, Ginsberg not only changes the trajectory of his LSD
writing from intense mental configurations to an intersubjective world moving
towards an ultimate union of the “One,” but also provides himself with a means
to better convey the experience of LSD to his readers.
Unfortunately, “Wales Visitation” still fails to convey the LSD experience
fully to the reader. he fault lies less with Ginsberg than with the difficult nature
of LSD itself. According to a study described by Hartocollis, “At various stages of
the experience, subjects typically report that ‘time is standing still, racing backwards
or forwards, or dragging interminably’” (127). In contrast to a marijuana-induced
expansion of the present and an amphetamine-induced contraction of the moment, LSD users undergo a change in attention that cannot be attributed to any
particular “speed” at all. he present seems to over-expand to include everything.
But the linearity of the written text renders it incapable of holding all of these
disparate elements together simultaneously, and thus we get a portrait whose lines
run “in time” but whose images cannot possibly do justice to the interconnection
LSD inaugurates:
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
grass shimmers green
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,
tree-lined canals network live farmland,
blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills,
pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern– (CP 481)
his passage attempts to present something of the atemporal nature of “peak” moments during the LSD experience. here is certainly an abundance of movement,
but at the same time a curious lack of causality. Despite the incessant “breathing”
of the “valleys” and the “trembling” of the “vegetables,” this parcel of countryside
feels strangely divorced from teleological history. Ginsberg likewise avoids the
cyclical imagery characteristic of much nature writing. here are no seasons, no
seeds, no births, and no decay. We do not transcend, but merely exist a static moment that is nevertheless overflowing with flux. he content of Ginsberg’s poem
68 Janus Head
thus leaves the reader with a sense of time “standing still” even as elements
within the poem vibrate with life. Yet one wonders if “Wales Visitation” has
the formal impact that its imagery suggests. How can you write the feeling
of timelessness when the act of writing itself places you squarely back into
temporality? Ginsberg experiences a pure presence during the LSD moment,
but the sense that this attention is eternal is impossible to capture on the
written page.
he difficulty Ginsberg encountered in describing LSD sheds light
on the limits to which drug temporality can be represented to another.
Ginsberg’s experience, however, highlights another limit that needs to be
addressed when dealing with drug use–dependency. Ginsberg came to believe
that he needed drugs in order to perform acts of consciousness-raising, even
though they caused him to become physically ill. Deleuze and Guattari are
equally aware of the dangers that drug use raises, and they ultimately remain
skeptical about their utility: “the line of flight of drugs is constantly being
segmentarized under the most rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and
the dose, the dealer” (284). Imprisoned by the “hit and the dose,” the addict
spirals downward rather than upward; drug use leads to more drug use, not
to a higher plane of understanding or a new “line of flight.” his problem is
acute in the Beat canon–witness the history of Burroughs’ heroin addiction or
Kerouac’s untimely death due to alcoholism. Such examples lend credence to
Deleuze and Guattari’s ultimate announcement that drugs fall short of their
emancipatory claims. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, “Instead of making
a body without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities,
drug addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one” (285).
he drugged body may open the user up to new “intensities,” but the strict
reliance on a chemical substance to effect this change leads to a circular pattern of use, withdrawal, and eventually death.
Despite these reservations, Deleuze and Guattari do not denigrate drug
use entirely. Drugs can still show the way. What Deleuze and Guattari are
looking for is the point where “drugs have sufficiently changed the general
conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing
through the holes in the world” (286). And it is precisely here that Kerouac’s
and Ginsberg’s writing has been successful. By shifting temporal perception
through the written word, they have provided the “nonuser” with a means to
experience the altered drug reality. his “nonuser” has acquired the insights
to be gained from the drug but without facing the negative consequences of
drug use that Deleuze and Guattari describe. Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s audi-
Erik Mortenson 69
ence is a step ahead. Rather than always starting “over again from ground
zero,” they are able to “start from the ‘middle’” (Deleuze and Guattari 286).
hese works are thus a blueprint, a launching pad where the reader can shift
her or his experience in a fundamental, bodily manner simply by opening
a book. Where Henry Miller wanted to “succeed in getting drunk, but on
pure water” (Deleuze and Guattari 286), Kerouac and Ginsberg actually
achieve such ends, getting the reader “high” off the page.
To raise the question of drug use within the Beat canon is to risk several
commonplaces. Discussion often turns to addiction as the stamp of a Beaten down lifestyle, to drug use as a conduit for highly idiosyncratic personal
visions, or to Beat rebelliousness against moral, social, and legal codes. All
of these factors are indeed relevant to any discussion of drug use. But to end
there would be to ignore some of the most valuable insights that Kerouac’s
and Ginsberg’s drug writing have produced. What Beat writers like Kerouac
and Ginsberg are most concerned with is the intersection between drugs,
bodies, and consciousness. Drugs are not some amorphous entity, but have
a specificity which makes various types of perception possible. Each drug
builds a body that encounters the world differently, opening up the drug
user to speeds and perceptions previously unavailable. And these perceptions are not isolated. Drug use acts on embodied consciousness to produce
shifts in relationships between bodies–a new type of intersubjectivity gets
established, a stronger type of empathy is reached. Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg recorded a moment in history when the drug state was more than
an issue to be avoided, a social blight to be fixed, or an intellectual problem
to be studied. Instead, the drug state was a site where something new could
take place that held the possibility for a radical altering of human potential.
Rather than letting these gains slip further into the past, it is time to listen
even more attentively to the call.
Notes
Who gets to speak about drug use? Certainly not the addict, who is either
busy satisfying his or her need for narcotics or repenting in an effort to avoid
incarceration. Public rhetoric may have changed from the overly bombastic
anti-drug campaigns of the Reagan years to the “don’t ask don’t tell” election
strategies of Clinton and Bush, but the notion of handling the question of
drugs in an open, honest manner is tantamount to political suicide. And
while the scientific community is invested in drug studies, gone are the days
1
70 Janus Head
when such research meant controlled experiments with individual human
subjects. When not in the service of pharmaceutical corporations, research
in this field has come to mean highly specific neurological experiments
on laboratory animals rather than investigations of altered states of bodily
consciousness. What is missing in all of these forays into the world of drugs
is an interest in their possibilities for human existence.
2
Nomenclature creates some difficulty here. In “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty:
A Reappraisal,” Monika M. Langer explains the distinction between the
“prereflective consciousness” and the “ego” that Jean-Paul Sartre describes
in he Transcendence of the Ego: “In its primary mode (that is, as prereflective consciousness), consciousness is absolute, non-personal spontaneity
. . . . he subject, or ego, on the contrary, is an object constituted and
apprehended by reflective, or secondary, consciousness” (103). It is this
“prereflective consciousness” that Kerouac labels the “subconscious” and
that he is trying to tap.
3
his does not mean, of course, that the mind is elided. he point here
is that the body should be given equal consideration when discussing the
subjective experience of the drug state.
4
What is the exact nature of these “bodily properties” that allows this connection to be established? All of these manifestoes rely on the notion of
“energy fields” developed by Alfred North Whitehead. As Charles Olson
explains in his “Projective Verse” essay: “A poem is energy transferred from
where the poet got it . . . by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to,
the reader. Okay. hen the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energyconstruct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” (148). Yet the dynamics of
this transfer of energy need explication. Does the reader release the writer’s
latent energy during the act of reading? Or does the artistic work (re)direct
the energy that the reader brings to the work?
5
According to Deleuze and Guattari, you never actually reach the “Body
Without Organs,” but “you are forever attaining it” (150). While the use of
the term “limit” appears incongruous with these philosophers’ insistence on
experimentation and expansion, their deployment of the word circumscribes
a space within which there remains infinite possibility. Just as “energy field”
poetics bound the interpretive possibilities of a text without reducing it to
one final meaning, the “Body Without Organs” seeks to create a bodily
container that does not stifle change and adaptation.
6
William S. Burroughs’s notion of “digging” is a bit more pejorative. In his
introduction to the original Junky, Burroughs defines “to dig” as “to size up,”
Erik Mortenson 71
a definition that implies an invidious distinction between self and Other.
In a paper dealing with Beat drug use, Burroughs is conspicuously absent.
he reason for concentrating on Kerouac and Ginsberg instead of the more
obvious choice of Burroughs is that his drug of choice, “junk,” is notoriously difficult to represent to another. As Burroughs himself has noted, he
produced little while actually under the influence of this drug, and thus for
the purposes of this study his contributions are minimal.
7
Culling examples from disparate sources of writing raises the question of genre distinctions. While a letter is not the same as a novel or poem,
Beat works tend to conflate such distinctions, viewing all writing as equally
literary. In her introduction to Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956,
Ann Charters rightly observes that Kerouac’s “letters bring us closer to the
life he actually lived before he turned it into literature” (xxi). Nevertheless,
for purposes of exploring writing done under the influence of drugs such
distinctions are unproductive.
8
Compare Kerouac’s own reading of his work on the CD Jack Kerouac
on he Beat Generation. His “Excerpts from ‘he Subterraneans’” reads much
faster than the next two tracks from “Visions of Neal.”
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Author’s note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed
to Erik Mortenson, 3882 Evaline, Hamtramck, MI 48212. E-mail:
af5431@wayne.edu.