The Beat Book of the Dead
by Mel Ash

The last couple of years have brought losses once unimaginable to those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties, and indeed to anyone who has bee influenced at all by the counterculture fathered by the men who recently died. Part of ourselves died as well when we heard the news.

The recent deaths of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in 1997 and the more publicized death of Timothy Leary the year before has not only robbed us of role models and teachers we hoped would be around forever (and it seemed as though they had been around forever!) but also put many of us face to face with the fact of our own inexorable aging and approaching deaths, as well as the aging, successes, and failures of the counterculture, once thought of as only the province of the young.

The mainstream media carried the usual retrospective tributes, lauding the late Bohemian prophets now that they were safely dead and seemingly harmless. But what of the deeper Beat teachings? What of the essential messages that they shared with us by putting their minds, bodies, and spirits on the front lines of spirit and culture?

Their lives influenced popular culture in monumental, revolutionary, and yet-to-be-determined ways. A lot of us have lived our lives, knowingly or unknowingly, based on their pioneering work in lifestyles, gender, alternative spirituality, and aesthetics. There's hardly a person around whose way of living and form of consciousness hasn't been affected in some way by the Beats.

But what of their deaths? What can we learn from the form their dying took, as well as their living? The book isn't closed on the Beats, no matter what the pundits and cultural warriors say. They've closed the Beat casket in years past, only to find a very lively corpse returning to haunt their air-conditioned nightmares.

The final chapter is far from written, even if most of the original writers are gone. It's up to us to fill in the blanks, write the sequels, further the plots. What do these lately-deceased Beats have to teach us, their countercultural heirs, their aging step-children? What did they have to say about death, as well as life?

Despite all the current exploitation of Beat culture, despite its eminent marketability in a world where alternatives are fewer and fewer, where rebellion is often a commodified fashion statement, in a world where there is a sense that all the big questions have been decided and that "it's time for everyone to just grow up, stop bitching, and get in line to the shiny new future just up ahead," it's important to remember some of the very real things that can make the Beat spirit a living and evolving force in our lives.

Essentials of the Beat Spirit

Spontaneity: To revise or edit or inhibit is blasphemous. "First thought, best thought" in Kerouacian terms. THIS, right here and right now, is sacred! The Beats sought to reclaim unmediated, immediate human experience from the clutches of robotic and predictable behavior, from edited and censored "reality." This insistence on non-revision or pre-meditation applies to our behaviors as well as our writings and art. How you live your life is your art!

Fearlessness: Don't play it "safe." Nothing really is certain but death. The Beats themselves were the living laboratories from which they issued their field reports on expanding consciousness, attaining love and re-inhabiting the body. Take risks. Put it on the line. Have faith that it'll all work out. Said Ginsberg: "The project is to widen the area of consciousness."

Doing: Despite all the current fascination with Beat artifacts and literature, the essential truth is that the Beats honestly reported the results of their experiments and adventures in living. The actual experience, the "doing," was primary. To only fasten on the texts makes us into armchair bohemians and countercultural consumers. Don't let them sell your culture back to you neatly packaged and sanitized. Create your own experience. Consume your own culture. No "Beat-Lite ©"!

"No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience" was one of Kerouac's maxims. In a cultural environment saturated with mediated experience, with vicarious living encouraged through computers, TV, sports, shopping, and celebrity, we lose sight of the validity and authenticity of our own experience, the accuracy of our own responses and intuition. We tend to unconsciously devalue what we feel in favor of what others dictate.

We run from life and consume simulacrums of the real thing. Virtual beatniks! The Beat spirit insists that we run to life, arms open, turning our backs on a value system that increasingly mandates obsessive safety, smug predictability, studied posturing, and political correctness-both left and right-over chaos, delight, naked honesty, self-revelation, surprise, and discovery.

We reclaim the dignity of our own experience by coming to view our own lives as important, by just saying "No!" to the forces that diminish us, that cause us little deaths each and every day until they accumulate as a numbing zombification of the soul, rendering us the walking dead, vampiric in our insatiable need for the experience and approval of others.

"Just say know!" counters Leary. Know your enemy. Know your cleverly disguised smiling embalmer and mortician. They might be a TV anchor, a boss, a fear of disapproval, or your own set of beliefs about aging being equivalent to settling down-or, more accurately, settling.

Little Deaths

Keeping these essential Beat traits in mind, we can begin to do what Beat poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder has called "the real work," the work of becoming who we really are.

So...what can we learn about death from our dead countercultural elders? How can we apply these lessons to our own lives and deaths? Are there ways that we can begin dying, as Buddhists do, while still alive, becoming clear receptacles for experience rather than old trunks stuffed with the debris of vicarious experience?

Life itself is a series of petit morts, small deaths: of relationships, lost objects, and youth, places left behind...the list of our living fatalities is endless. We'll now take a look at what the Beats themselves had to say about death, ways that they themselves had devised to think about and face the final moment, a Bohemian guide to dying in the spirit of the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead. What follows are some suggestions, exercises, and activities concerning death suggested by the Beats themselves, derived from their lives and writings, similar in style to the ones found in my book Beat Spirit.

It is my hope that these death-centered meditations become a celebration of lives lived courageously; that these death-thoughts inspire you to live your own life more fully in the living Beat spirit; a gloriously chaotic and unpredictable tradition that for many of us is the true spiritual, even religious, foundation of our lives. Remember: Kerouac also defined "Beat" as "beatific."

Try your best to do the activities as honestly as possible, keeping in mind the essential traits of the Beat spirit necessary to reclaim the dignity of your own experience, as well as to claim your own death, a bit at a time.

Allen Ginsberg's Path to Extinction

Allen Ginsberg, like all of the Beats, has written much about death and dying throughout his career. It seems to be a hallmark of Beat writing that the fascination with lives fully lived is the flip side of an obsession with death as the ultimate measure, the final test, the great portal, and the final trip.

In his poem "After Lalon" in 1992's Cosmopolitan Greetings, Ginsberg meditated on death and age, saying, "How'd I get caught in this wrinkled person?" Ever have this experience? You don't have to be wrinkled yet, either. You look in the mirror one day, and instead of seeing that immortal teenager you've always been somewhere in your head, you instead see an aging reality!

In your head, how old are you really? We've all got an ideal age that we're sort of stuck at, a frozen and golden chronological viewpoint from which we view the movie of our lives. Mine's around sixteen, no matter how bald I get. What's yours? Ask others this question, too. Then you'll know just who and what you're dealing with.

At the end of the poem, Ginsberg warns us: "Don't follow my path to extinction." What path is that do you suppose? Earlier in the poem, he says that he had his chance and lost it. Is that the path? The path of lost chances, of blown opportunities? Or is it simply the path of being caught in these human, mortal bodies? Ginsberg, as a Buddhist, often refers to lost chances for "enlightenment" and bemoans the fact that he'll probably have to be reborn again in this world of sorrow.

Pretend that you're lying on your deathbed, just told you have, say, five minutes to go. Name the one big chance you've blown in the life you just lived. What is it? Some job turned down? A place you never moved to? A lover you let go? What? Be heartbreakingly honest with this one. Write it down so you can see it in black and white. Then resolve to not blow any more chances since you've actually (hopefully) got more than five minutes to get it right. This is your last chance.

In his last published poem from the New Yorker, "Death & Fame," Ginsberg imagines his funeral and all the people who would attend. Who hasn't done this at some time in their life? Most of the poem consists of comments Ginsberg imagines the guests to make, things such as "He gave great head," "Howl changed my life," and "His poetry, humor, saved me from suicide."

OK. You've already figured this one out, am I right? Imagine your own funeral. Visualize the people at your funeral, even strangers. If you could, in your urn or casket, eavesdrop on them. What are they saying? Or better yet, what would you hope they'd say? Make up three comments overheard at your funeral, and write them down. Now try to live up to them. (Or live them down, whatever the case may be.)

Here to Go with William S. Burroughs

Burroughs wrote a lot about death and what may lie beyond. His most extensive treatment of the subject was in The Western Lands, a book based in large part on his fascination with Egyptian mythology and death beliefs.

Burroughs had a close acquaintance with death, having accidentally shot his wife and later losing his son. Burroughs has said, quoting his friend Brion Gysin, "We're here to go." "Go where?" you might ask. "Why, into space," answers Burroughs. Whether "space" is literal, as into outer space in bodies, or metaphysical space, in spirit-form upon death, is unimportant to Burroughs, who advises that we'll have to lose or heavily modify the body before undertaking our exit.

Burroughs calls the planet a death camp and prison colony, implying that we must somehow attempt escape: "Desperation is the raw material for drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they've ever believed in can hope to escape."

What is the deepest and most important thing you believe in? Love? God? What? Blasphemous as it might sound, you must jettison the weight of your cherished belief before you can attain escape velocity. Write down the heaviest belief you have, and examine if you really need it. Is it a balloon to freedom or merely a pretty anchor?

"Most artifacts have evolved," says Burroughs: planes into rockets, swords into machine guns; only the human artifact remains unmodified, an evolutionary dead end. Death is one of the ways in which we modify the human experience. But how to control it, how to aim it, how to do it consciously? If we're here to go, what exactly, is the best way to go?

Burroughs says that danger is a biological necessity for humans, like sleep and dreams: "If you face death, for that time you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are in danger at all times, since our death exists. Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger?"

Burroughs says that by confronting our own deaths through danger we can "kill " our own deaths. Can you remember a time when you experienced the "surprised recognition," as Burroughs puts it, of your own impending death? Was it a near fatal car accident? A heart attack? A drug overdose? A close brush with sleeping pills in a suicidal mood? Have you been present when someone actually died? Have you ever seen a corpse other than in a funeral home?

"Can you free yourself from fear by cowering in your physical body for eternity? Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the other shore...or sell it if you can find a fool. It's full of holes," says Burroughs regarding the body, the last and final frontier for many of us in this age of decreasing personal power. How do we modify the body for the great escape? How do we push it to the next evolutionary level?

Altering the body, treating it as an artifact, as a cultural construct, is one way to start. Modifying the body also modifies the mind, or at least the way the mind thinks of itself (and hopefully the soul, as well). Modify your body this week in this spirit: simply, by wearing new jewelry (or removing some). Moderately with a new haircut or wardrobe. Radically with tattoos and piercings.

Re-inhabit and explore your body as the launching pad it's meant to be. Die to your old idea of your body. Inhabit a new one of your own making and design. Then take off.

Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip

Leary, always eager to break cultural taboos, was associated with the Beats as early as the late fifties, in many ways becoming part of the evangelical wing of the Beat movement along with Zen teacher Alan Watts. His death in 1996 became a global media event, orchestrated, as always, by Leary's cool manipulation of media. He died as he had lived, fearlessly and very publicly, living out his teaching in his own flesh, never asking us to do what he himself had not.

One of Leary's earliest books, The Psychedelic Experience, was a re-writing of The Tibetan Book of the Dead recast as a manual for psychedelic voyagers. The similarity between the LSD experience and the process of dying was eerily close, and the ancient scripture seemed particularly apt. Leary saw the psychedelic experience as being a form of death in life, as a means of dying to the materialistic world of conditioning and being reborn into a new and transformed consciousness, a perennial message he found echoed in Hinduism, Buddhism, and the writings of Aldous Huxley.

In his last book, Design for Dying, Leary examines what he terms "Experimental Dying" and claims that "death is the ultimate trip." To prepare for the trip, Leary advises that we reprogram our death imprints in much the same way that psychedelic experience reprograms the software of our awareness. We all grow up being imprinted with cultural propaganda about death. Catholics, for instance, associate death with funerals, punishment, and so forth. Buddhists might fear a bad rebirth as a result of their karma.

Instead, says Leary, visualize a new imprint. Start by enacting your own funeral rites, the ones you grew up with. Do this in your mind, or if you're really brave, with friends, presiding as priest or rabbi over your own funeral, reciting the 23rd Psalm or Kaddish.

In the movie, Empire Records, there's a great scene of this sort of ceremony in which a woman lies like a corpse surrounded by candles, while her friends talk about her as though she were dead. You could try this if you've got really cool (or really weird) friends.

After enacting traditional rites in your head or elsewhere, imagine a totally different dying experience, outside of hospitals, religious authority, and so on. Write it down or draw a picture and then visualize it. Place, people, smells, the "hereafter": the whole works.

Leary says he replaced St. Peter at the Pearly Gates in his visualization with William Burroughs! View these visualizations as "games" in true Leary spirit. Leary, not long ago, quit playing the Timothy Leary game. What games do we continue to play?

On one of his last CDs, Leary sings in "Right to Fly": "I choose my place, I choose my time, I pilot my own ship... so break those gates, bust these chains, set this body free; no need to say I'm on my way; what will be will be."

In the spirit of Leary's positive choice making, answer as honestly as you can these following questions:

1) What would you like your last words to be? (His were "Why not?"):

2) Leary had his ashes shot into space. How do you want your body disposed of? Tell those close to you. Maybe make it legally binding.

3) Leary gathered his closest friends and family at his bedside as he embarked on the ultimate trip. Write down the names of five you want with you as you go.

"Timothy Leary's dead; No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in," sang the Moody Blues. He's looking in on us right now as we think about dying. Leary chose his life, as well as his death. This was his final and perhaps greatest teaching. Can we do as much? Why not?

Safe in Heaven with Jack Kerouac

It seems fitting to end our Beat Book of the Dead with a teaching from the man who started it all. Even though his death happened decades ago, in 1969 at the age of 47, his spirit is defiantly alive and at large, more influential than ever at the close of the century. It's been said that Jack seemed to yearn for death and was unafraid of it. His progressive alcoholism can be seen as a suicide in slow motion, and nothing any of his friends could do could halt this descent into the depths of the disease and untimely death.

Obsessed with death in all his writings, Kerouac was marked at the age of four by the death of his beloved older brother Gerard. The later death of his father also was a traumatic and life-shaping event for Kerouac, who believed that we would all go to heaven, that in fact, we were all already "safe in heaven dead," and that nothing really existed anyway.

The synthesis of Catholicism and Buddhism that Kerouac pioneered in the fifties was also an attempt to reconcile his constant sorrow with his exuberant exploration of life. In an article he wrote for Escapade magazine in 1960, Kerouac gives his explanation of Zen.

He mentions the old Zen Masters of China who would ask their students, "Who dragged this corpse here for you?!" Says Kerouac: "Try it and see in the mirror."

Do this. Go to the mirror right now, point at it and demand loudly, "Who dragged this corpse here for you to look at?" Smile and leer widely, stretching what Kerouac called the "skull-cover." Do this whenever you're taking yourself too seriously; do this whenever you're feeling self-important; do this every morning; do this every night. Do it in store windows, chrome car bumpers, your computer screen, anywhere possible. Do it in memory of Jack Kerouac, who lives still in a part of all of us. Do it for Jack, whose writings are perhaps the best mirror of all.

In the words of a prominent Beat heir: "He not busy being born is busy dying." So get busy! Find out who you really are by dying to the things you aren't. Remember: "We're here to go." What have you really got to lose?

The Beat spirit, despite all you might hear, is far from dead.

Dying? Always and consciously.

Living? As usual. And to the hilt.

And being re-born alive and kicking

every time someone somewhere

stops to ask the magical question:

"Why not?"