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Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Notes on Buddhism and Poetry

 

Can poetry be Buddhist?

     The existence of any Buddhist aesthetics may be questioned.  The tension between the enjoyment of art and the ideal of the Great Renunciation is evident in many East Asian poems.  For one scholar of religion [1], Buddhism is wholly aesthetic in its apprehension of the world.  “The goal of life for Buddhists is aesthetic.  It is the enjoyment of life itself as intrinsic value.”   Contemplative withdrawal is in fact that focus on intrinsic enjoyment.  “Nirvana is the complete willingness to accept this world as it is as the best of all actual worlds.”  “Nirvana is the aesthetic enjoyment of what is as it is.”  However, this apparent total embrace of beauty is accompanied by a lack of interest in privileging any specific object as better, more meaningful, or more pleasing than another.  Since Buddhist meditation consists of the pure “enjoyment of self” (presumably recognizing at the same time the non-existence of ego), any experience of a work of art will introduce a “distinction between subject and object” which is “not only irrelevant but even a hindrance to its enjoyment.”

     As the end of Buddhism is enlightenment, one might conclude that the twentieth-century American philosopher is correct that any distraction is an obstacle, yet traditions of Buddhist practice contradict his conclusion.  The fact is that Buddhist art has flourished from the earliest periods, from the reliquaries in which the Buddha’s remains, we are told, were distributed to groups of devotees to be placed in stupas. [2]  Since that time Buddhist arts has proliferated in all the countries where the religion was practiced, in architecture, painting, carving, literature, and dance. [3]

     These works were by no means made as part of a secular milieu, but rather as a form of spiritual practice.  The makers of Buddhist devotional objects clearly intended for their works to serve as meditative aids in individuals’ progress toward enlightenment.  Just as chanting the poetry of the sutras was a form of worship, so might shaping original poetic images or graphic forms direct the consciousness toward its liberation.  Representation of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is meant to awaken the sufferer to the possibility of nirvana.  The koans of Zen are obstinately concrete and specific as are the lyrics of Wang Wei and Han Shan.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibet, while intended to underline the evanescence of phenomena, is as well an aesthetic signifier as modern artists such as Banksy have realized [4].  all are meant as upaya, “skillful means,” with the ultimate goal of guiding spiritual development.

     Finally, of course, the Buddha recommended a Middle Way in the very opening words of the discourse regarded as his first after enlightenment, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, avoiding both sensual indulgence and asceticism.  Anyone possessing a body will tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain and to feel lust, hunger, and anger.  Even the bhikkhu remains human and must taste and welcome food, however frugal the meal.  Therefore, a blanket condemnation of aesthetic experience seems out of character compared to a measured use of art which may even embrace the accomplishment of religious ends. [5] 

     I can scarcely deny the often expressed ambivalence, though, of Buddhist practitioners, of which this passage from Bai Juyi is representative.

 

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.

Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—

let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. [6]

                                                                             

 

The appearance of the dharma in American literature

     Though it competed with Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, for American devotees, Buddhism has been an influence in American literature for as long as the Asian texts have been available.  At certain periods Buddhism shaped the broad mainstream of American poetry, while isolated points of contact from individual writers occurred at all periods.

     The Transcendentalists introduced Buddhism to American readers.  In 1844 the Buddha was ushered into the drawing room of American thought when the Dial, at the time edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, printed a translation of The Lotus Sutra which had only that year appeared in a French version, the first access Europeans had to this seminal text.  [7]  The old East-West mythologies persisted in part (as they do yet today), and this new knowledge of authentic Buddhist thought was fragmentary, leading Emerson to refer to the “Bhagvat Geeta” as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” [7] and to note vaguely that “all tends to the mysterious East.” [8]

     Still, respectful mentions of Buddhism became widespread.  Thoreau referred to “their Christ” in contrast to “my Buddha” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [9] and Melville wrote a poem addressed to Buddha asking for nirvana. [10]  Far from the Transcendentalist Northeast, Lafcadio Hearn converted to Buddhism and translated Japanese poems and stories.  Buddhism is thereafter never absent from the stream of American literature.  During the second half of the nineteenth century its most prominent contribution to American literature was to create an enlarged space for mysticism during a time when the Theosophical Society (whose Col. Alcott was a Buddhist), Spiritualism, and eventually the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago were among the popular manifestations of a similar interest.

    In the early twentieth century, during the time of High Modernism, Buddhist poetry shaped the Imagist movement through Pound and Buddhist convert Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.  [11]  Among those later influenced by these were William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists,  Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Rakosi.  Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali, took a course in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, and concluded that Indian philosophers make European thinkers “look like schoolboys.” [12]  Though there had been converts for decades, genuine Buddhist institutions receptive to non-Asians such as Christmas Humphrey’s Buddhist Society of America (established 1931) were appearing.  The main effect of this era’s Buddhist influence was, however, reflected in Williams’ slogan “no ideas but in things.”

     The writing of the Beat coterie in the fifties is surely the most prominent example of Buddhist influence.  With several prominent poets with Buddhist gurus (such as Allen Ginsberg), some who were actual monks (Philip Whalen), and a great many other practitioners (Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder), the appearance of Black Buddhists such as Bob Kaufman and, today, the fiction writer Charles R. Johnson, as well as a great many more who took a sympathetic interest, this group brought Buddhist ideas and texts to millions. 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg on Buddhism and poetry

     As the most influential and prominent Buddhist American poet of the last century as well as a founder of the Buddhist Naropa University with its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,  Allen Ginsberg is a case of particular significance.  Since Ginsberg is a scholarly man, familiar with a great deal of poetic and religious texts, as well as being a serious follower of Buddhist practice, his delineation of the intersections of poetry and Buddhism are uniquely revealing. 

     In the most general way, Ginsberg identifies poetry as a whole with meditation, saying “breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song as well as the air horse/ The mind rides during meditation practice.”  Thus, “fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.” Great poetry is “a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.”  The goal of such “probes of consciousness” is the “purification of mind and body” [13]  

     Yet he specifies certain of his own practices, in particular “spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation,” poetry as the “art of spontaneity in the void” [14].  For Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s formula “first thought, best thought,” or, in slightly elaborated form, “the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought you should have a formal thought,” defines poetry’s proper subject. [15]  For readers who fear the loss of the pleasures of meticulous craftsmanship, this method would substitute “the total delight in chance.”  [16]

     Drawing on several generations of translations of Chinese poetry including versions by Pound, Waley, and Rexroth, Ginsberg also emphasizes a focus on concrete objective imagery.  He quotes Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves,” and advocates “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” [17] 

     Thematically, both “first thought, best thought” and the deep focus on the object of meditation arise from the Buddhist conviction of the ephemeral and ultimately misleading experience of reality.  According to Ginsberg, the “transcendental wisdom” of the insight that life is “both real and dream, both once at the same time,” the realization of “dream as the suchness of the universe,” is the central theme of “the ‘Golden Ash’ school, as Kerouac qualified existence.”  [18]  The phantasmagoria of poetry is explicitly “daydreams,” [19]  but consciously recognized as such and thus pointing the way to an accurate assessment of all perception and leading the reader toward enlightenment.  Every poetic detail of a Buddhist poem signifies “the eternal gateless gate which if it has ‘form’ has an undescribable [sic] one – images of which are however innumerable.” [20]

     While Ginsberg’s Buddhism inspired a body of great poetry, his theoretical writing was always polemic, uninterested in the claims of other world-views and compositional techniques.  Like other partisans, he maintains the universality of his approach, saying that “’Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form’.  That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate.” [21]  He maintains that “beauty itself is the realization of simultaneous ‘emptiness and form’” [22] as though there were at bottom but one variety of beauty.   

 

 

final thoughts

     In that overgeneralization lies the difficulty with Buddhist poetics.  Not surprisingly, it is similar to the limitation of Christian or Marxist poetics, each of which may couch in comely terms a certain world-vision but which has difficulty accommodating any other.  The dialectic of form and emptiness in the dance of eye and object may constitute beauty indeed, though not necessarily any more than the contemplation of form alone, whether one’s beloved’s thigh or the cadences of meter. Impermanence has its own aesthetics as well, reflected in Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness or John Cage’s verbal compositions.  With a sufficient metaphorical imagination a non-Christian reader can appreciate the value of a Christian poem, so likewise a non-Buddhist may delight in Wang Wei, or a bhikkhu might relish Milton.  Poetry is the record of moments of consciousness which, even for an advanced spiritual practitioner, does not reside always at the highest of altitudes. 

     The thematic contributions of Buddhism, the conceptual space for describing meditative revelation and the ambiguity of perceived reality, remain significant and lasting.  The study of East Asian poetry, one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world, immeasurably enriched American poetry, particularly by encouraging a disciplined focus on imagery.  As for Truth, I dare say Gerard Manley Hopkins might bring a reader an illuminated moment just as surely as Han Shan might.  Furthermore, many poems are careless of theme and impress rather with ingenuity or sensuous sound beauty or powerful passion. 

     We are only just beginning to assimilate (and transform) the artistic and philosophic achievements of Asia.  Priceless though they be, they cannot govern American poetic practice in the twenty-first century while they certainly will contribute to it.  In fact Buddhist poetry from a dozen countries of the East has already both broadened and deepened American writing in both form and content.

 

 

 

1.  See Archie J. Bahm, “Buddhist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957).

2.  See the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta.

3.  A suggestion of iconoclastic fundamentalism is apparent in the reluctance for several centuries to represent Buddha himself.  Now, of course, images of the seated Buddha are the most common and recognizable theme of Buddhist art. 

4.  Banksy’s self-destroying work Girl with Balloon was more notorious than original.  Gustav Metzger had been making such works since the late 1940s.  See his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art," Ark, summer 1962.  In 1962 Jean Tinguely presented Homage to New York in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, an assemblage composed primarily of objects collected in garbage dumps and wired to explode and burn immediately after its unveiling. 

5.  Even Augustine, who had been so ashamed of his fondness for the theater, came to feel that there was a place in Christianity for art which encouraged the soul toward God. 

6.  Translated by Burton Watson (who uses the form Po Chü-I) in cThe Selected Poems of Po Chü-I. 

7.  The French was by Eugène Burnouf; he had written it in 1839, but did not publish it until he had completed an introduction in 1844.  The English translation from French, once attributed to Thoreau, is anonymous in the text but by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.  The sutra appears in the Dial immediately preceding a translation of a Hermetic text.  For a full account, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism.   

7.  Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17 1845, Letters III, edited by Ralph L. Rusk, 290. 

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 1: 12.

9.  “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

10.  “Buddha” includes an epigraph from one of the more Buddhist passages of the Greek Testament, James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” 

11.  Pound’s preference for the social ideals of Confucianism led him to mock Daoist and Buddhist holy men, yet his poetry is not thereby affected.  Arthur Waley’s translations and critical writings were a major transmission source (including for Pound) as was the work of D. T. Suzuki.

12.  Spender said Eliot “almost became a Buddhist.  See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 35, no. 2 (Apr., 1985).

13.  These passages are from two pieces, both titled “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, 152 and 262.

14.  From Deliberate Prose, “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” 251.  Compare also Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” which recommends “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”

15.  Ginsberg, Allen. “First Thought, Best Thought,” Composed on the Tongue (1971), 106–117.

16.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 258 and 272.

17.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 266 and 268.

18.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246 and 247.

19.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 152.

20.  “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 250.

21.  “Meditation and Poetics” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 265.

21.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246.

Notes on Recent Reading 45 (Williams, Muir, Waugh)

 

White Mule (Williams)

     William Carlos Williams’ novel, the first of a trilogy (followed by In the Money and The Build-Up), is a beautiful example of the power of clarity and straightforwardness in narrative.  Williams plays a good deal with point of view, and some of the early passages from the infant’s perspective may remind readers of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but, for the most part, the novel is closer to the proletarian realism of the thirties than to the experimentalism of the twenties.  Valuing descriptive vignettes over plot lines, Williams records several varieties of convincingly real speech and wholly plausible events in the life of an American immigrant family clearly modeled on his wife’s.  His willful neglect of reader expectations can be obtrusive as when, for example one sees a horrifying glimpse of the abusive Carmody home which is never again mentioned.  Worse, in the antepenultimate chapter Joe is being set up as front man in a dubious business venture, yet this theme vanishes.  Even if Williams had a multi-volume plan in mind, raising such significant issues only to drop them in this volume is annoying.  The reader feels played like the viewer of a movie serial, left with a cliff-hanger.

     The baby Flossie becomes the unlikely center of the book, though she is barely talking by its conclusion.  Her stubborn élan vital in the face of an inattentive mother, physical frailty, and all the imperfections of the world becomes a sort of mute heroism.  While all the adults bumble on, each handicapped by prejudices, habits, and vices, the baby makes her own way, sometimes by screaming, sometimes by repeatedly falling only to rise again undeterred.  Everyone who has raised a child will recognize the faithfulness of the good doctor’s account of the earliest and most significant stage of life, so rarely documented.

 

 

Scottish Journey (Muir)

     I was prejudiced in favor of this account remembering the German translations (some, provocatively done in Scots dialect) I had seen attributed to Muir (though I understand his wife Willa played a larger role in these than he) and I am receptive to writing about travel.   This particular journey proved, I am afraid, disappointing.  Borne down by the Great Depression visible on every side, Muir cannot prevent his righteous Socialist lamentations from intruding on nearly every page.  As he concedes more times than once, his descriptions are hardly specific to Scotland.  Legitimate enough, had he not defined his goal as setting down something of the national character.  His extended comments on the Scottish National Party reflect the tensions between nationalism and socialism, but are of primarily historical interest at this point.

    I did relish Muir’s down-at-heel persona (reminiscent of other road books by London, Orwell, Miller, and Kerouac).  He portrays himself as somewhat disreputable-looking with a car challenged by every hill, forcing its driver on the mercy of strangers, and this is wholly consistent with his picture of a land depressed by chronic unemployment on top of centuries of subjugation by England, with industrial centers filled with street-corner loiterers, drinking even more than usual. 

     For Muir the sentimental alternative is the pastoral dream of his memories of a childhood in the Orkneys in spite of the fact that his own father’s fortunes steadily declined there, leading him to move the family to Glasgow when Edwin was fourteen.  The description if the trauma of this sudden descent into a sordid urban scene is perhaps the finest passage in the book.  For the most part, however, his prose brings few rewards.  Muir has a sharp eye, and a serviceable pen, but this book is too hasty-seeming to reinforce the reader’s impression of his poetic skills.  Perhaps his wife should have taken a greater share in its composition.

 

 

When the Going Was Good (Waugh)

     I ordinarily avoid anything like an abridgement, but I make an exception for this collection of long excerpts from four travel books written between 1929 and 1935. It is, at least, Waugh’s own editing here of what he jauntily assures us were a series of books written, he assures us, as no more than a means of supporting himself.  Charming and self-deprecating, he describes these as “pedestrian,” “commonplace,” and, at times, callow.  Perhaps others may discern, as he must, the “vernal scent” of his youth in these pages covering trips through Egypt, Palestine, Ethiopia, Guiana, and Brazil.  Like the great off-hand observations of Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin, he conveys with humor and humanity the bizarre and often inexplicable experiences of the traveler who ventures off the beaten track. 

     If all travel encourages receptive senses, the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open.  One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, knowledge about the variety of ways to be human, allowing at once new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes, but, as there so often is, a complementary view is equally true.  The strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and taste and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding only magnifies the distance between one consciousness and another and even more between the individual and the world.  The tolerance and acceptance of a drifter stranded in a tropical village where the road ends, as Waugh was more than once, are perhaps a workable attitude toward life.  They are sometimes all that one has.

The Hipster’s Epigone

 

The essay is followed by the lyrics to Cab Calloway’s “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” and “Are You Hep To The Jive?” 

  

1.  Apologia

     It was perhaps inevitable that an app has been developed that will locate for travelers the nearest “hipster” neighborhood.   A number of sites had already compiled travel guides toward the same end, taking into account an area’s median age and the availability of bike trails but primarily “the density of hipster-friendly businesses,” meaning such things as “coffee shops, craft breweries, record stores, organic markets.” [1]

     From the point of view of a septuagenarian one-time resident in the Haight-Ashbury, it seemed that a group hardly distinguishable from those unashamedly consumption-oriented squares called yuppies in the eighties, were, with the simple addition of a few days of stubbly beard (now tolerated in the office) and a taste for Ethiopian food, transformed into hip people.  Of course, this verbal shift parallels the replacement of the underground papers of the sixties in which the radical visual style matched the politics with consumer-oriented free (advertising-supported) weeklies that like to describe themselves as “alternative.” [2]

     Yet I feel I must rise in defense of the older meaning of the word, however useless such arrière-garde defenses, for, just as the introduction of a new word may signal formulation of a new meaning, loss of a definition is generally accompanied by the loss of the concept that underlies the word, and I lament the loss of the old hipster. 

 

2.  What’s hip?  Who’s a hipster?

      The words hip and hipster have conveyed a number of well-attested meanings over the years.  Apart from the basic anatomical signification of the body part and the fruit of the wild rose (from two different old Germanic roots), the word was used in the nineteenth century to mean, according to the OED “to affect with hypochondria, to render low-spirited.”  During Prohibition a hipster was one carrying a hip-flask and in the thirties a wild dancer (with lively movements of the hips).  Such usages have no part in the principal twentieth century definitions suggesting one in the know, an insider who can see what others cannot.

     The source of this meaning of hip is in fact unknown, though several unsatisfactory origins have been suggested.  Some have proposed that the word referred to the posture of opium smokers reclining on one hip.  In the 1960s many jumped to accept the attractive but apparently highly speculative etymology  of David Dalby that the term derived from the Wolof meaning “to open the eyes, to see clearly.”  [3] 

    Apparently the earliest written usage is in a story about “the great blizzard of 1899” in which a Washingtonian is quoted as saying, “And as soon as I get out I’m hep that the water’s froze. What do you think of that?” [4]  It appears then in a cartoon in 1902 and in novels in 1904 and 1914. [5]  By the late 1930s it had attained sufficient currency to be listed in slang dictionaries. [6] 

     Far more significant, though, in terms of disseminating the word widely was the popularity of two musicians, Cab Calloway and Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. In the late thirties Calloway was one of the most popular bandleaders in the country, well aware from the outset of the fascination that jive talk held for the general population. His “Minnie the Moocher,” a huge hit, was full of such slang. [7]  In 1938 he published a booklet titled Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary [8], which remained, until the publication of Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography Really the Blues (1946) [9], the best guide to hip language.

     A great showman who practiced exaggerated mugging and wore attention-getting costumes, Calloway recognized the exotic appeal of Harlem slang.  Calloway’s 1939 song “Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive” mixes nonsense syllables (including the graceful lyric line (“Palomar, shalomar, Swanee shore”) with a two-syllable refrain (“hep hep”) and a call to “dig your jive on the mellow side,” suggesting good times partying.

     The use of argot itself implies transgressive associations, most dramatically recreational drug use.  References to cocaine and opium and the artificial paradise of getting high fill “Minnie the Moocher” (though Calloway was careful to excise them from his dictionary).  Hip slang arose from the confluence of everyday Black culture, musicians’ shoptalk, and drug-users’ cant.  These three worlds overlapped in part, but they also shared an important characteristic.  Each sought through the codes of a subcultural patois to reinforce their identity with their own group and to exclude outsiders.  The assertion of membership as an insider, the possessor of valuable secrets inaccessible to others, is the essence of the concept of hip.

     Further popularization of the term occurred with the performances of a white musician, Harry “the Hipster” Gibson who would tell his audience, “Gather round, all you hipsters,” and soon embraced the name himself with the song “Handsome Harry The Hipster.” [10] While performing the most extreme facial mugging in American show business prior to Jim Carrey Gibson muted the drug references, saying of his persona only that “he digs those mellow kicks.”  [11]  Though Gibson was only briefly a nationally known performer – he did appear in the film Junior Prom in 1939, but his song "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" (1946), while enjoying a modest succès de scandale, also caused him to be banned from radio play.  While hip was reaching a wider audience beyond Blacks, dopers, and jazz musicians, it retained associations of counter-cultural, even criminal values. [12]

     In the nineteen-fifties America as a whole heard about hip through the popular magazines’ coverage of the Beat writers and, to a lesser extent, the jazz milieu.  The term was also debated on the margins of intellectual life, and controversy arose in the intellectual quarterlies.  Significantly, proponents and critics agreed to a large extent on the term’s meaning, differing only in the associated value judgment.        

     In Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” [13]  Mailer described “the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry).”  Mailer begins his essay with a quotation from a popular journalist [14] who says that a hipster “is rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich Village.”   In order to live more intensely, according to Mailer, “the hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”  In his rewriting of DuBois’ double consciousness, he notes “the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”  He seeks “to encourage the psychopath” in himself, a psychopathic personality that Mailer notes ominously, “may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality.” 

     The most direct riposte to Mailer’s enthusiasm was Norman Podhoretz’s piece “The Know-Nothing Bohemians" [15] the title of which reveals at once the level of vituperation leveled against the Beats in the fifties. [16]   To Podhoretz, Kerouac and the Beats were totally nihilistic, sometimes verging on violence.  To him the hip are “spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can.”  Not only are they “anti-intellectual,” and “primitive,” with “an inability to express anything in words” and a “hostility to intelligence,” more shocking yet, they are “attracted to criminality” and Podhoretz conjures up reason to associate Kerouac with attacks on a homeless man and a nine-year-old.

     The view of the hipster as an inarticulate impulsive juvenile delinquent is evident in late 1950s popular culture.  Feiffer’s Huey character appeared first in Sick, Sick, Sick (1958) as a cool, jiving antithesis to the neurotic Bernard and Geets Romo, Del Close’s character in How to Speak Hip (1959) manifests his hipness in the difficulty of communicating with his square interlocutor.  Such a pose held a certain allure, even some commercial possibilities.  By the late fifties, tourists could be certain of spotting a genuine bohemian since Wally Hedrick [17] was hired by Vesuvio’s across the alley from City Lights to sit in the front window decked out in beard and beret daubing a canvas.  In New York In 1959, Fred McDarrah established the Rent-a-Beatnik service to provide colorful party guests, even Black ones including Ted Joans and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). 

     The cooptation and dilution of the idea of the hipster advanced wholesale during the sixties.  “Hippie,” which had originally been a pejorative diminutive referring to younger aspirants to the scene. [18]  Though in fact the social scene in the Haight-Ashbury included all sorts of elements from the psychopathic through the petty criminal to the striving artist and the college student just passing through, their image was dominated by flowers, daisies, and soap bubbles.  The Summer of Love replaced the feral cunning of the fifties hipster with ingenuous naiveté.   

   The crowds clogging Haight Street and Telegraph Avenue might have been called heads or freaks but most often hippies resulting in a power vacuum about the semantic territory of the word hipster.  Meanwhile with the general social reversion to avarice as a career goal came the inappropriate nineties coinage eco-hipster, or green hipster.  The notion, if not the term, doubtless originated among marketing departments seeking a cachet among young consumers.  Closely related is the concept of bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, a term oxymoronic in both English and French. [19]  Whereas voluntary poverty had been widespread among earlier counter-cultures, this group indulged in conspicuous consumption so long as it called attention not only to one’s means but also to one’s taste.  Preserving the semantic element of a discerning insider, the word here applied to purchasing choices.  Though the “green” element of this newly defined group drew on the radical revolutionary allegiances associated with some earlier hipsters, this new grouping adopted a far more cautious political line, in particular never suggesting the fatal entanglement of capitalism with the impending ecological disaster. 

     An easy slide from such eco-hipsters to the contemporary usage of the bare term hipster occurred around the turn of the twenty-first century.  In the early months of 2000 several journalistic treatments of the gentrification of Williamsburg referred to the area’s popularity with “arty” types not using the term hipster, but the term’s application was soon clear with the publication in February of 2003 of The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham. [20].

     Today many dictionary definitions retain only trace elements of the earlier meanings. In Merriam Webster’s a hipster is still a bit of a rebel, “someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle,” while for Merriam Webster that element has vanished: “a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion).”  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most up-to-date definition appears in Wikipedia whose entry is quite clear.  “The 21st-century hipster is a subculture (sometimes called hipsterism) that is defined by claims to authenticity and uniqueness yet, ironically, is notably lacking in authenticity and conforms to a collective style.  The subculture embodies a particular ethic of consumption that seeks to commodify the idea of rebellion or counterculture.  Fashion is one of the major markers of hipster identity.  Members of the subculture typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used as a pejorative for someone who is pretentious or overly concerned with appearing trendy or fashionable in a non-mainstream way.” 

 

3.  My Hipster, Ma Bohème

      As language is always in the process of evolution, every individual in a lifetime will notice changes in usage and lexicology.  Naturally, then, every generation of elders is likely to consider some innovations improper.  There is a considerable history both of writers denouncing the degradation of language in their own day and of satire ridiculing old people clinging to outmoded usages.  Those with a taste for pedantry are particularly prone to such lexical conservatism.  A glorious example is H. W. Fowler’s impassioned and lengthy objection to the use of meticulous to mean closely attentive to detail on the basis of its derivation from Latin metus (“frightened”).  His demonstration that the current definition is not Classical is buttressed by the accusation that it arose first in France.   Of course, such reasoning, however sound it may be, cannot influence the development of the word.  (Fowler also considered asset “a false form”, individual “often a colloquial vulgarism”, and elevator “properly used only of a grain hoist”.) [21]

     I am, then, well aware that, as writers have more often realized than teachers, the criticism of new and popular verbal usages is fruitless. [22]  I persist, nonetheless, hoping not to halt the semiotic drift but to flesh out the older sense of hip and hipster, lovingly preserving this ghost of a word if only as an exhibit in the museum of the mind.

     Still, were I to locate a sweet spot in the hipster history, a definition that fills an otherwise vacant place in the lexical structure and, more importantly, one that appeals to me, a signification unfortunately now faded, I would select one close to that suggested by Anatole Broyard in 1948 essay in Partisan Review, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” [23] which, even as it took the hipster seriously, describing him as an “underground man,” bearing both the burden and the freedom of being “of the minority,” also foresaw its cooptation in the very intellectual sympathy that led to both Broyard’s essay and to mine.  “The hipster—once an unregenerate individualist, an underground poet, a guerilla—had become a pretentious poet laureate. His old subversiveness, his ferocity, was now so manifestly rhetorical as to be obviously harmless. He was bought and placed in the zoo. He was somewhere at last—comfortably ensconced in the 52nd Street clip joints, in Carnegie Hall, and Life. He was in-there...he was back in the American womb. And it was just as hygienic as ever.” 

     I am well aware of the problems associated with hip as an aesthetic category [24], yet it remains for me a significant and novel twentieth century artistic concept. For all his topicality, all the talk of Hiroshima and Auschwitz and existential Angst, the hipster is surely the mid-twentieth century successor to a legion of earlier artists who claimed to know more than their fellows: shamans, prophets, and seers. To me the hip will always penetrate lies, the vicious claims of all forms of prejudice, most prominently racism, and the lethal lure of war, that old love-killer misogyny, the lies of criminals in high places, and the spirit-killing programming that teaches people that the way to joy is possessions. That sort of hip had its start in Black peoples’ certainty that society was based on fraud, musicians’ winking certainty that art trumped money, and dopers’ intuition that everyone else was as hooked as they but simply didn’t know it, yet that people could still almost miraculously salvage their corrupt and materialistic society through art, beauty, and spiritual ambition. If those insights are lost, a new counter-culture will likely be required to restore the species to a path of progress.

 

 

1.  The app is called Where Is Williamsburg?  The travel guide I mention is for rent.com.  

2.  To be fair, a few of these journals (the Chicago Reader and the Bay Guardian, for instance) have provided investigative reports and arts criticism beyond features on movies, television shows, food, and merchandise.  During its long decline even the Village Voice sometimes pleasantly surprised its readers.

3.  This etymology, though rejected by most linguists, has survived and spread through secondary books such as J. L. Dillard’s Black English (1972).  It is repeated in John Leland’s Hip: A History (2004).  Dalby had ingeniously suggested African origins for a number of other terms current in his own day’s slang, most of which are not accepted by other authorities. 

4.  The Washington Times (Washington, District of Columbia), 12 Feb., 1899.

5.  T. A. Dorgan featured a character “Joe Hip,” “Son of old man Hip.”  The 1904 novel by George V. Hobart, called Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands (the title refers to musical jobs) -- preserves a great deal of slang used among musicians.  The 1904 novel, Rex Beach’s The Auction Block, was made into a film in 1917.

6.  Examples include Jack Smiley’s Hash House Lingo (1941) in which hipster is defined as “a know-it-all” and the glossary for Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (1946) in which a hipster is “a man who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert.”. 

7.  “Minnie the Moocher” was the first recording by an African-American (and the first categorized as jazz) to sell over a million copies.  Calloway went on to be the first of his race to have a national radio show.  He appeared as well in films including both features such as International House (1933) and short films for Paramount such as 1934 Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho, as well as in cartoons including three Betty Boop animations.  Like Dr. John and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins Calloway was a crossover artist bringing a version of African-American culture attractive to white listeners.

8.  Republished in an expanded version the next year as Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau.

9.  Co-written by Bernard Wolfe.

10.  Recorded in 1944, but composed years earlier.

11.  He was busted a number of times, including once with Billie Holiday in a Florida hotel room in 1956 when he was her accompanist at the Ball and Chain. 

12.  Those unfamiliar with the forties popular music scene may be surprised to learn that a listing of the top eighty records of 1946 included tunes by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Django Reinhardt. See https://playback.fm/charts/top-100-songs/1946.

13.  Dissent, fall 1957.  Perhaps equally influential were the columns Mailer wrote for The Village Voice, such as the lists comparing hip and square.

14.  “Caroline Bird, Born 1930: The Unlost Generation,” Harper’s Bazaar, Feb. 1957. 

15.  Partisan Review, spring 1958.  After a leftist youth, Podhoretz became an agent of reaction.  The Partisan Review was, of course, funded by the CIA as part of its effort to counteract the influence of leftist intellectuals.  Podhoretz himself worked for the USIA in the sixties, at a time when collaboration with the government was unpopular among artists and scholars. 

16.  A certain fascinated repugnance is evident not only in literary reviews but also general interest magazines such as Time and Life.  For a detailed general perspective see Anna Lou Jessmer, Containing the Beat: An Analysis of the Press, Coverage of the Beat Generation During the 1950s, available at https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1425&context=etd.

17.  Hedrick, a pioneering artist in conceptual and performance modes, had founded the Six Gallery where the historic poetry reading occurred in 1955. 

18.  In my first memory the word meant something teeny-bopper.  Both hippie and beatnik were scornful labels popularized by the decidedly non-hip Herb Caen.

19.  among the satirical reactions see David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) and the French cartoon book Bienvenue à Boboland (Welcome to Boboland, 2008).

20.  Stories appeared in "The Bedford Files," Time Out New York (TONY) (February 3–10, 2000) and in "Brooklyn Nights Turn Brighter," The New York Times (February 11, 2000). 

21.  See the entries for these words in Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.  I think as well of the elderly British teacher I met in my youth who denounced the word television as “a monstrous bastard” because it combined elements derived from both Greek and Latin.  He had spent his career in India, always more conservative of British standards than the U. K.

22.  One may easily compile a list of canonical authors who use double negatives, sentences beginning with conjunctions, and the like. 

23.  Partisan Review, June 1948.

24.  See “The Legacy of the Beats” on this site.

 

 

 

1939 Hep! Hep! The Jumping Jive

 

Hep hep

De-boodle-de-ack, de-boodle-de-ackasaki

Hep hep

Oh, rang-tang, te-dah-dah

Hep-hep

Gonna tell you 'bout the jumpin' jive

Hep hep

Jim, jam, jump, the jumpin' jive

Hep hep

Cats gonna beat out this mellow jive

Hep hep

Beat it out on the mellow side

Boy

Whatcha gonna say there, gate?

Oh, boy

Whatcha gonna say there, gate?

Palomar, shalomar, Swanee shore

Let me dig that jive once more

Boy

Lay it right on down to the gator

Oh, boy

Lay it flat as a gator

Now, can't you hear those hep cats call?

Yeah

Come on, boys, let's have a ball

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you dig your jive on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jump is the solid jive

Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, don't you be that ickeroo

Get hep, come on and follow through

Then you get your steady foo

You make the joint jump like the gators do

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jumpin' jive

Makes you hep hep on the mellow side

Hep hep, hep hep

Hep hep, hep hep

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Will make you dig your jive on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jump, the solid jive

Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, don't you be that ickeroo

Get hep, come on and follow through

Then you get your steady foo

You make the joint jump like the gators do

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin' jive

Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side

Hep hep

Hep hep

The jim, jam, jumpin' jive

Makes you hep hep, on the mellow side

Hep hep

Hep hep

Now, I've told you 'bout the jumpin' jive

The jim, jam, jump, the jumpin' jive

I know you dug this mellow jive

Oh, you dig it on the mellow side

 

 

 

Are You Hep To The Jive (1940)

 

Are you full of pep? (Yes, yes, yes)

Are you hep-a-hep-a? (Yes, yes, yes)

Are you full of step-a

What do ya know, gates?

Are you in know, or are you a solid bringer-downer?

Listen here, jack

Take it slow you can learn just what I mean

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you lace your boots high? (yes, yes)

Are you fly, are you fly? (yes, yes)

Do you dig, do you dig, do you swing on the gig, are you hep to the jive?

Do you get in the in the grove? (yes, yes)

Does the beat make you move? (yes, yes)

Do you send yourself jack and then trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?

Oh, are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep to the jive? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you lace your boots high? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you fly, are you fly? (yes, yes) (dah-doo-dah)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you keepin' in step, are you hep to the jive?

Do you get in the in the grove? (yes, yes)

Does the beat make you move? (yes, yes)

Do you send yourself jack and then trilly on back and you know that it's smooth?

Are you hep-hep-hep to the jive? (yes, yes)

How do you dig-dig-dig-dig the jive? (yes, yes)

Are you hep, are you hep, are you really in step, are you hep to the jive?