Beat Mystics

In the smoke-filled cellar cafes and cold-water flats of San Francisco's waterfront and Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the word these days is "beat." Patriarch and prophet of what he calls "the beat generation" is a 35-year-old writer named Jack Kerouac, whose recent novel On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16) chronicled the cross-country adventures in cars, bars and beds of a bunch of fancy-talking young bums. Last week, in newspaper interviews with TV's Mike Wallace, Novelist Kerouac and equally beat Poet Philip Lamantia explained that beatness is really a religious movement.

Wallace: You mean beat people are mystics?

Kerouac: Yeah. It's a revival prophesied by Spengler. He said that in the late moments of Western civilization there would be a great revival of religious mysticism. It's happening.

W. What do beat mystics believe in?

K. Oh, they believe in love. They love children . . . they love women, they love animals, they love everything . . . What I believe is that nothing is happening . . . We're an empty vision--in one mind.

W. In what mind--the mind of God?

K. That's the name we give it. We can give it any name. We can call it tangerine . . . god . . . tangerine . . . But I do know we are empty phantoms . . . And yet, all is well.

W. All is well?

K. Yeah. We're all in Heaven, now, really.

Interrogator Wallace asked San Francisco Poet Lamantia to explain two of his lines: Come Holy Ghost, for we can rise/ Out of this Jazz . . .

Said Lamantia: "You have to be pure. You gotta get through this life without getting hung up. That's the whole question--not to get hung up ..."

W. What is getting "hung up"?

L. Freezing. Freezing from others, from yourself, from the Holy Spirit. If you're hung up, you can't love, or care for others.

W. Why are so many members of the Beat Generation bums and tramps?

L. Oh, you see, Christ says go out and find the bums . . .Find the blind and the cripples . . . Christ invites everyone, including the outcasts. So there's no contradiction at all between Christ and a bebopper and a hipster . . .

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