Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway.

I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds. 

But both the Beat generation and we, behind the Iron Curtain, although a little bit later, were looking for the same things – we wanted to free our minds, to expand them, to find the real meaning of life, to ‘break through to the other side’, (and for a little while there was the hope that it just might be possible). How did it happen that now so many of us are caught up in small affairs – politics, rearranging the world as we think is best, saving Leo, the lion somewhere in a place we cannot even find on the map. Where did the big thinking go? Where did the big existentialist questions disappear? Perhaps the world is such a big place now, with all the modern technology, that we imagine we are thinking big if we can think far enough? Just like the Marxist idea that there will be a perfect happiness if Communism reaches every corner of the world. Even the drugs have been transformed from a tool for a spiritual quest, which they (I have heard) were for the Beats, into a dull escapism.

Is it possible then that the Beats opened a door to this world - a grandiose door fit for their big minds and aspirations, but it was too frightening for the ordinary people and as we people always do, we shut it close? Out of the light we made small trinkets of virtue to show to each other; out of the shadows came the disease of conceit and arrogance. The door was opened with the aim to destroy the old structures and free our minds but it stayed opened for a moment - long enough to crumble the structures, but way too short to free our minds.