Title: "A World without Gravity": The Urban Pastoral Spirituality of Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris
Abstract: “A World without Gravity”:The Urban Pastoral Spirituality of Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris Timothy Gray In his 1956 poem "America," Allen Ginsberg directs a series of questions to his nation, which at the time was consumed by cold war paranoia and impaired by a serious case of cultural myopia. Although Ginsberg's self-proclaimed "holy litany" is most notable for raising political consciousness in the Beat Generation, I want to draw attention to one of the poem's spiritual petitions: "America, when will you become angelic?" (Ginsberg, 146). Students of the 1950s counterculture know that one of the main connotations of the word "beat" was beatitude, and that a host of madcap characters—Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso among them—expressed saintly convictions in their writings, even though their freewheeling activities showed that they were hardly burdened by conformist notions of moral rectitude. When Ginsberg, a homosexual Jewish poet, tells America, "You made me want to be a saint" (146), he is situating himself in the camp of Jean Genet, Sartre's existentialist hero, not in a canon of sanctified Christians. Still, despite all the sensational descriptions of sex, drugs, and booze, a sacred aura emanates from the pagesof this and other classic Beat texts. Although many regard his "mystical visions and cosmic vibrations" (146) as dilettantish, Ginsberg paved the way for succeeding generations of counterculture intellectuals whose search for spiritual salvation has been fortified by equal measures ofpurity and danger. A decade or so after Ginsberg issued his beatific challenge to the nation, a scruffy collection of writers, artists, and musicians holding court in the cold water flats and gritty rock 'n' roll venues of New York City's East Village sought their own version of angelic selfhood, advocating the kind of simplicity found in traditional pastoral idylls, while searching for the kind of purity that religious institutions routinely promised, but often failed to deliver. Curiously, those who have written about the East Village scene have not paid this trend much notice. Rock critics like Robert [End Page 213] Christgau, for instance, usually refer to the music that came out of this neighborhood as "noisy," "brutal," and "crude," though also strangely "sophisticated" (189–90, 200). While such evaluations contain more than a few shards of truth, they overlook the vulnerable and wistful lyrics that sometimes lurk beneath dissonant layers of sound. Literary critics like Daniel Kane advance a bit closer. But by focusing on the collaborative energies and angst-ridden "edginess" of East Village writers, they decline to address in sufficient detail the spiritual aspirations of longhaired bohemians who read their poems aloud at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, published their work in Angel Hair magazine, and sat for hauntingly beautiful photographs taken by Gerard Malanga. These New York writers and performers were street-smart and cocksure about their contributions to avant-garde art, to be sure, but they were blessed as well with a surprising capacity for piety and an incessant hunger for transcendent experiences. By 1969, even the musicians in the Velvet Underground, undisputed exemplars of downtown cool, were claiming that they were "set free" and "beginning to see the light," with Lou Reed piling on layers of irony so heavily that they ultimately canceled each other out. The result was a particularly hip way of pursuing beauty and truth. In an era when "Jesus Freaks" inspired Broadway musicals such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar—not to mention Top Forty radio favorites such as Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" and Elton John's "Tiny Dancer"—avant-garde writers on the downtown scene offered a more penetrating analysis of contemporary religious experience and its secret role in bohemian culture.1 Like their nearly bankrupt city, New York's rebel angels fell upon hard times in the early 1970s, but some were resourceful enough to take flight from the everyday frustrations of urban life while searching for what Jim Carroll, in one of his best known songs, called "a world without gravity." In this essay, which is part of my ongoing study of an "urban pastoral" motif in the New York School, I argue that Kathleen Norris and Jim Carroll provide...
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot