A Beatnik Legacy

The following was written by Norman Mailer in the Village Voice 1957--- Some things don't change...." No matter what horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for it's tendency to reduce all of life to it's ultimate alternatives...One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and whites, or or between the women and the men,or between the beautiful and the ugly, the pillager and the managers or the rebels and the regulators...Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort,and if an alien but none the less passionate instinct about the meaning of Life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people,come out of the most intense conditions of exploitation,cruelty, violence, frustration,and lust and yet has succeeded as an instict in keeping this tortured people alive-- then it is possible that the American Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is so,the radical humanist could do worse than to brood upon the phenomenon.For if a revolutionary time should come again,there would be a crucial difference if some one had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending every circuit and process of society from uskase to kiss as the communication of human energy-- a calculus capable of translating the economic relations of man into his psychological relations and back again, his productive relations thereby embracing s*xual relations as well,until the crisis of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic imbalance at the expense of a new mass pyschological imbalance. It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of social currents and dissipations, it's imprisonments,expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital(the first of the major "pyschologies" to approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that--- We are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted,displaced and procedurally stolen as it passes from one to another)---where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more Godlike view of Human Justice and Injustice, in some excruciating vision of those intimate and institutional processes which lead us to our creations and disasters.... our growth.... our attrition...and our rebellion....."