Stones and Pearls

.: This post should alarm you with its nonsenseIt is one o’clock in the afternoon. The wall is afire through translucent redwine drapes and a small dense matter squeezes vice-like against your temples and black holes behind your eyes you close them and those funny blue-rim-fire bowling ball amoebas swim against the blackness of your eyelids and achy throat and you’ll never drink again ever ever ever. Your friend stumbles in and opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of brownish liquid and smell that and says “start the morning right.”
Don’t laugh he’s probably an alcoholic or something you should probably pity in a few years when you don’t know him anymore and hear from someone he’s in a bad way. The ever-party, the hangover to drink away, volatile hair of the volatile dog, the Dean.
“The days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won’t sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it’s an abstract balloon. You’ll all go flying to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone.” Why do they go flying off to the West Coast? What are they searching for? What is the pearl they seek? Freedom? Truth? Knowledge of Self? Or, as the guy sitting next to me in the library suggests, a better drug dealer? A “higher” level of consciousness? A “lower” level? Hierarchal on what grounds? Consciousness for perceiving the “truth”? “Truth” truth or socio-political truth? Never mind what they seek, what about how they seek it? Drugs, uprooted life, novel experience, and do the opposite of what you should be doing.
There’s an interest in sex, drugs and Eastern philosophy to counter mainstream American culture. It’s not the most well-thought out movement in history. “On The Road” is as close to a manifesto as it gets and all explication of Beat intention has been laid out only in its aftermath. That’s the beauty of it; it’s a Bacchic roar of dissatisfaction. I suppose that that’s the point. We don’t like it so we’re going to do the opposite. It doesn’t have to make sense, it shouldn’t make sense, it should alarm you with its nonsense. It’s a rejection; back to basics – sex, drugs, and fun. It’s lots of fun. That’s why it got so big when it spilled over into the hippy generation. Petitions are cool and all but…
In a way there is a method to the madness. But whether there is meaning or truth or pearls or whatever you want to call them remains doubtful. Much can be learned from this lifestyle, but one of those lessons may be that you must look elsewhere for the pearls. I don’t think Sal and Dean’s adventure, despite its virtues, gave them what they were looking for. There’s quite a bit of emphasis on Dean’s four kids, three wives, and disregard for all. Outside every party there’s always a “sad” something, and if “the father we never found” doesn’t resonate with you, read it again. It’s not the destination, it’s getting there – that’s from a Toyota commercial. It has become a new romanticism for those disillusioned with the old one.
Gordon Gecko, Ward Cleaver, and Dean Moriarty have all, as Carlo predicted, come to seek a stone instead of a pearl. They have all had their moment of sobriety. They all have their hangovers.