in Bali, where the unbearable flat–
ness and de-emotionalization of
"waking" life is compensated for
by trance ecstasy. The hipster's life,
like the Balinese's, became schizoid;
whenever possible, he escaped into
the richer world of tea, where, for
the helpless and humiliating image
of a beetle on its back, he could
substitute one of himself floating or
flying, "high" in spirits, dreamily
dissociated, in contrast to the cease–
less pressure exerted on him in real
life. Getting high was a form of
artificially induced dream catharsis.
It differed from
lush
(whisky) in
that it didn't encourage aggression.
It fostered, rather, the sentimental
values so deeply lacking in the hip–
ster's life.
It
became a
raison d'etre,
a calling, an experience shared with
fellow believers, a respite, a heaven
or haven.
Under jive the external world
was greatly simplified for the hip–
ster, but his own role in it grew
considerably more complicated.
The function of his simplification
had been to reduce the world to
schematic proportions which could
easily be manipulated in actual,
symbolical, or ritual relationships;
to provide him with a manageable
mythology. Now, moving in this
mythology, this tense fantasy of
somewhereness, the hipster sup–
ported a completely solipsistic sys–
tem. His every word and gesture
now had a history and a burden of
implication.
Sometimes he took his own sol-
726
ipsism too seriously and slipped in–
to criminal assertions of his will.
Unconsciously, he still wanted ter–
ribly to take part in the cause and
effect that determined the real
world. Because he had not been
allowed to conceive of himself
functionally or socially, he had
conceived of himself
dramaticall-y,
and, taken in by his own art, he
often enacted it in actual defiance,
self-assertion, impulse, or crime.
That he was a direct expression
of his culture was immediately ap–
parent in its reaction to him. The
less sensitive elements dismissed
him as they dismissed everything.
The intellectuals
manques,
how–
ever, the desperate barometers of
society, took him into their bosom.
Ransacking everything for mean–
ing, admiring insurgence, they at–
tributed every heroism to the hip–
ster. He became their "there but
for the grip of my superego go
I."
He was received in the Village as
an oracle; his language was
the
revolution of the word, the personal
idiom.
He was the great instinctual
man, an ambassador from the Id.
He was asked to read things, look
at things, feel things, taste things,
and report. What was it? Was it
in there?
Was it
gone?
Was it
fine?
He was an interpreter for the blind,
the deaf, the dumb, the insensible,
the impotent.
With such an audience, nothing
was too much. The hipster prompt–
ly became, in his own eyes, a poet,
a seer, a hero. He laid claims to
apocalyptic visions and heuristic
