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\nNow a more general withdrawal, from experiencing altogether, is expressed by the omnicapable word “like.”\u00c2\u00a0 E.g.g, “Like I’m sleepy,” meaning “if I experienced anything, it would be feeling sleepy.”\u00c2\u00a0 “Like if I go to like New York, I’ll look you up,” indicating that in this definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in that trip or any trip.\u00c2\u00a0 Technically, “like” is here a particular expressing a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the Greek uev, verily, or on, now look.\u00c2\u00a0 “Like” expresses adolescent embarrassment or diffidence.\u00c2\u00a0 Thus, if I talk to a young fellow and give him the security of continued attention, the “like” at once vanishes and is replaced by “You know,” “I mean,” “You know what I mean,” similarly interposed in every sentence.<\/p>\n
The vocative expletive “Man,” however, has different nuances in different groups.\u00c2\u00a0 Among the Beats it is used diffidently and means, “We are not small children, man, and anyway like we are playing together as like grown-up.”\u00c2\u00a0 Among Negroes, it is often more aggressive and means, “Man, now don’t you call me boy or inferior.”\u00c2\u00a0 Among proper hipster it means, “We are not sexually impotent.”\u00c2\u00a0 So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero worshiping boys might use it.\u00c2\u00a0 When the interlocautor is in fact respected or feared, he would not be called “man.”\u00c2\u00a0 (Perhaps “boss”?)<\/p>\n
“Cool,” being unruffled and alert, has the same nuances.\u00c2\u00a0 In standard English a man “keeps cool in an emergency.”\u00c2\u00a0 If there is always an emergency, it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external:\u00c2\u00a0 the environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous.\u00c2\u00a0 As spoken and enacted by a young Beat, maintaining a mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.”\u00c2\u00a0 In the original Negro the nuance is rather, “I’ll stay unruffled and keep out of trouble around here; I won’t let on what I feel, these folks are dangerous.”\u00c2\u00a0 With the hipster, the jaw is more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, “I’m on to your game, you can’t make me flip.”\u00c2\u00a0 In general, coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anxiety.<\/p>\n
To make a remark about the language as a whole as used by the Beats:\u00c2\u00a0 Its Negro base is, I think, culturally accidental; bu the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning.\u00c2\u00a0 On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin.\u00c2\u00a0 But this can have disadvantages.\u00c2\u00a0 One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as end in itself, as a means of self expression, without subject matter. […]<\/p>\n
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\nLet us now go back to the jargon.\u00c2\u00a0 The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” “high,” “gas,” “sent.”\u00c2\u00a0 These mean not in this world but somewhere, not rational but something.\u00c2\u00a0 “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation.<\/p>\n
When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record.\u00c2\u00a0 One is “with it” or “falls in.”\u00c2\u00a0 The “it” or the understood “where” is not, of course, definite, for pure being has no genus and differentia.\u00c2\u00a0 “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.”<\/p>\n
Contrariwise, it is bad and painfrul to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging).<\/p>\n
The way of being-in-the-world, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something.\u00c2\u00a0 However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boys looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather younger than their years, one wonders whether ordinary growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out.<\/p>\n
A possibility that has interestingly dropped from Beat culture is the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings.\u00c2\u00a0 This is certainly an important truth in Mailer’s proposition that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.”<\/p>\n
(To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe.\u00c2\u00a0 It can then by hypnotic or a hearth fire.\u00c2\u00a0 As music it remarkably thin grue (no doubt I am tone deaf).\u00c2\u00a0 For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) […]<\/p>\n
187
\nTo repeat, Beat is not a strong position and it can hardly work out well.\u00c2\u00a0 The individual young man is threatened either with retreating back to the organized system or breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, culturally there is a lot of strength there; let us try to see where it is.<\/p>\n
Considered directly, their politics are unimpressive.\u00c2\u00a0 They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure that society cannot be different.\u00c2\u00a0 Explicitly, they are pacifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb.\u00c2\u00a0 The Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other commentators an explanation of their religious crisis; but it’s not convincing.\u00c2\u00a0 Their own diatribes seem to be mostly polemical self-defense, as if to say: “You squares dropped an atom bomb, don’t you are criticize my smoking marijuana.”\u00c2\u00a0 In the play The Connection this is openly stated as a defense for heroin.\u00c2\u00a0 On the whole one does not observe that the Beats are so concerned about nuclear weapons as many mothers of families or squares who have common sense.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the Beat spokesmen wrote a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic George Dennison remarked:\u00c2\u00a0 “He seems miffed that people pay attention to the atom bomb instead of to him.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
–Paul Goodman
\nGrowing Up Absurd, 1968<\/p>\n