The New Wasteland by Nancy Lazar

 

The New Wasteland (After T.S. Eliot)

 

“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph”- Ken Kesey

 

I. The Death of Hero Worship

 

Autumn is the cruelest season.

Neon martinis and FBI shoes shine

like Day-Glo mercenaries with Colt .45’s

and everyone in happy ties. Heads in the streets,

soles of feet pound a new groove. That year, 1966

everyone knew for certain where Kesey was.

Oaxaca, on a steamboat to Canada, Paraguay.

No one knew the Ratlands broke him.

-They ran into Kerouac but the beat was gone-

Huaraches steal the souls of all real Mexicans.

Paranoia is a fugitive’s friend, they dined

on dead fish suffocated in the red tide.

 

Back in the San Mateo County jail, waiting

room crowded as the back door of a rock concert.

Where is Superman now? The Prophet stands

in the shadows of the Shell station. All he wants

is to cop a urination. American flag fragments

wave on white cover-alls. The new fantasy is the

Acid Test Graduation and everyone thinks

the cops are in on it.

 

When Cassady misses it’s never an accident.

The I-Ching says, “Stagnation is coming

to an end. Strengthen the mulberry trees

with bindings, beware, collapse may yet occur.”

Light dances on the head of a mathematical

pin. Dust is suddenly psychedelic.

 

It was my destiny

to join the great experience

having had the good fortune

to belong to the League

I was permitted to be a participant

in a unique journey.

 

You’re either on the bus or off the bus.

The love that binds me to you strangles me.

Who am I, if I’m nothing without your

approval? Love Greed flows through my

veins like a poison, yet you wait like a saint

for me to do one genuine thing.

Our allegory fortune card, the non-thing

is what we do. Games are off the bus.

Everybody’s out front, going to Edge City.

Furthur!

 

The Wheel, the Unreal City, the Sighs

all pass like bad trips we ignore.

Leary’s dead. New York City-

dead. We grieve for the uninitiated

world, forgive their empty heads.

The war is off the bus! It’s their war,

pray for those who lost it in Saigon

but don’t fight it or you become it.

Reader be warned, never sleep

the sleep of sloths, Never

Trust a Prankster!

 

II. Group Therapy

 

Circled chairs convene a crude fascicule

of wounds, chords and sensors wrought

with tension. McMurphy takes the ropes,

holds them fast for a season. The lab

coat can’t see Plaster Man manipulate

the vinyl wall.

It’s all happening now it’s all happening

here it’s all happening outside-

when it should be in.

Chief Broom is done with waiting.

We are all done with waiting, but we

don’t know it yet. He picks up

the vending machine and tosses

it like a brick, we can’t see what breaks

in us but it does.

 

Now the real movie begins.

Take to the road!

Beautiful People are everywhere!

 

The wind is wild tonight

                “Stay with me”

Stay with me a little longer in the caverns

               “In the caverns?”

               Intrepid Traveler, aveler aveler

Straighten out the curves!

            “Intrepid Traveler, aveler, aveler”

Curve out the straights!

 

Under a bower of cathedral pines

Pointillist light careens across our eyes

Perpendicular peace, the redwoods for a back yard.

 

            “oooooh it sparkles!”

Through black disks of eyes

We tumble

Nowhere else we’d rather be.

 

          “wwwwwhhhhhaaaappppppp!”

What? What was that?

‘Synchronicity’

 

Hits the pavement at 75 mph;

No one thinks to go back for the mic.

 

Stark Naked is off the bus.

The ivory man makes company between us.

The madness inside her

is inside each of us.

Fade to black.

 

III. Last Rites

 

“The man who comes back through the Door

in the Wall will never be quite the same

as the man who went out.”

 

Millbrook collides with The Hieronymus Bus.

Harvard Doctor, heal thyself!

Bodhisattva is waiting:

 

Say this over the crypt:

“O now, when the Dream Bardo upon me

is dawning! Abandoning the inordinate

corpse-like sleep of stupidity,
May consciousness undistractedly

be kept in its natural state.”

A red line across South Dakota traces

the thoughts of Everyman, scrub

and white ash on eyelids trade for sleep

in the dense quatrains of perception,

the all-one Mind of Man has been shut

down, open it! Look through the lens,

listen to the stereophonic reverb back

looping, total emersion. A 4th dimensional

landscape includes all we are and ever were-

To name this is to kill this.

 

Total Attention washes the foot

No disciples, no messiah, no earth

No water. Only fire for the un-experienced.

Paranoia runs like a volcanic river.

Whatever the cost

The movie must be made!

 

Tiresias! You are Cosmo,

the third man, you know Mexico is not

far off, yet you delay, prepares us

for the bust.

Heave your giant foot over

the pedal and push!

 

Straight into Hell’s Angels

heart of the American outlaw

edge city times two,

thunder in the gut

harp played on solid ribs

and the cutting

the binding

the curl, the motionless

inward wrap

testicles and a time warp

apes with brains

and knives

 

and dreams

and lives

 

I’m not sleepy and their ain’t no place

I’m going to

 

Driving the catatonic freeze

into the dusky, dusky, haze

the rolling, the rolling

 

toward a death magnificent and

un-judge-able.

 

IV

 

Down Joachim’s Drain

 

The interspirit storm collector runs

the route like a rat paces a pipe,

effluent of awakening feeds the source,

whirlpooling over a strategy it can’t support.

 

Soon the dancing dervish gathers

in his skirts whatever wont go; guitars,

The Dead, the arms of a thousand

Beatlemaniacs, all waving toward the center.

 

Boo-ya! Mahavira! Owsely’s LSD

fuels a new notion-

It’s your ass

Can you Pass THE ACID TEST?

 

V. What the Lightning Saw

 

If there was a god who listened

without talking, a god who asked

for nothing, required

nothing,

I could be like Him.

Let the rocks be still

Let the leaves wave their white

undersides

Let all the pulses in my veins

crawl like ants

each one a sliver of the whole

a crowd in a trance

weaving Brahma from elastic thread

over the loudspeakers

where the reverb echo lag time-travel now

hits a synchronized nerve

and God lives!

 

Strobbed in a million moments

the fourth man in the furnace

with Shadrach, Mescach, and Abednego.

 

Behind the scenes a finger cymbal rings,

words flood the wire from New York

to San Francisco

the inner wire

the outer whole

no time for games

the man in the space-suit runs the show

and the show runs him.

 

FLASH

There will be no new crucifixion

boats wait on shore, boots

are in the bay, sirens in the distance

sweep an eerie eye,

another circle like our own

intersects in space

includes what it denies.

 

FLASH

Light attracts light, darkness, darkness

like minds will find each other.

 

FLASH

The law of love rules the universe

death is not a poverty

but a gift we share

it lingers like a smoke plume

one heart

 

Beating   beating   beating

 

Notes on “The New Wasteland”

 

The title and form for this poem comes from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Like Eliot, who patterned his poem from a popular book of his time, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, I took symbolism and language from a book with a big impact on my generation, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test and other texts considered important in the early 1960’s.

 

Notes on Part I

 

The Death of Hero Worship- Superhero comics were the staple of the 50’s generation, but the new hero motif was either an altered human, or an alien.

Autumn is the cruelest season- The imprisonment of Kesey for two minor drug charges began in October 1966.

Neon martinis- North Beach in San Francisco, once the center of hip culture, had deteriorated into rows of striptease clubs.

FBI Shoes- The youth had learned one thing that always gives away the presence of police- their shoes.

Ratlands- nickname for Mexico given by Wolfe. Kesey and several of his group spent several months in hiding in Mexico to avoid a trial over minor drug charges.

Kerouac- Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, wasn’t actually in Mexico, but his movement spawned many hipsters who lived out their lives in the relative obscurity of Mexico.

Huaraches- Ill fitting Mexican sandals.

The red tide- A bloom of plankton that came too close to shore and killed fish in Manzanillo, Mexico, during the year that Kesey was on the run.

The Prophet- Title of Kahil Gibran’s book experiencing a resurge of popularity.

Cassady- Neil Cassady was also in On the Road by Jack Kerouac, about the beat generation of the 50’s. His “thing” was to constantly flip a sledgehammer in the air.

The I Ching- Chinese divination.

It was my destiny...- Quote from The Journey East by Herman Hesse.

The Wheel- From Eliot, Tarot-the wheel of fortune; or Buddhist- Wheel of Existence from which the soul endeavors to escape.

The Unreal city- From Eliot, Baudelaire, Swarming city full of dreams.

The Sighs- From Eliot, Inferno, The sounds of dead who lived before Christ.

Saigon- Kesey became involved in protests against the war in Vietnam, but took a different tack.

Never Trust a Prankster!- Rally cry of the Merry Pranksters a band of youths who traveled with Kesey in the early 60’s.

Leary- Timothy Leary, Harvard professor who was also experimenting with LSD at that time.

 

Notes on part II:

 

McMurphy-  Randle McMurphy From Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest"

Lab coat- Kesey volunteered for LSD experiments in the late 50's while he was writing.

Chief Broom- a character in OFOTCN.

Beautiful People- From letters home often written to parents by kids choosing a path other than school or work: “I met some Beautiful People and...

Cathedral Pines- La Honda, California, Kesey’s place.

Stark Naked- Nickname for one prankster who had a mental breakdown on the bus.

 “The ivory man makes company between us.” A line left out of Eliot’s original version which he later put back in.

 

Notes on part III:

 

Last Rites - From one of the seven sacraments also called The Anointing of the Sick, from the biblical text James 5:14-15

“The man who comes...- Quoted from The Doors of Perception, 1954, Aldous Huxley, detailing his experiences when taking mescaline.

Millbrook, Conn.- The mansion where Leary and others experimented with LSD Harvard Doctor- Dr. Timothy Leary

“O now, when the Dream Bardo...- Prayer from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 1927, the Invocation of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas for assistance, when one is dying, part II

Total Attention - Practice of the Pranksters to give total attention to anyone experiencing a bad trip.

The movie- Thousands of hours of film were gathered in the years the group was together for a movie about their experience, financed by Kesey to the tune of $35,000 or more.

Tiresias- From Eliot, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a character who experiences both male and female lives, eventually is given the gift of prophecy.

Cosmo- Name Wolfe gives to the one at center of fate.

The third man- Eliot, part IV, notes, either the third man on the road to Emmaus or the legend of the explorers in Antarctica, who had the constant delusion hat there was one more man in the group than they could account for.

I’m not sleepy...- Line from Bob Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

 

Notes on part IV

 

Joachim- Joachim Wach, The Sociology of Religion, 1944, was cited by Wolfe for his insight into the patterns of religious discipleship, including the path taken from the initial revelations of one person, or a small group, to organization and conformity.

The Dead- The Grateful Dead started playing music for the Merry Pranksters parties, originating a sound that became known as Acid Rock; long sets of free flowing music accompanied the multimedia blitz on several screens.

Beatlemaniacs- The Beatles played the Cow Palace in1965. The Merry Pranksters attended a concert that saw thousands of screaming fans for the first time go wild.

Mahavira- Jain mystic, son of Siddhartha, mentioned several times by Wolfe when discussing the ultimate connections between things.

Owsely- Augustus Owsely Stanley III, a chemistry student who began to manufacture LSD doses in the thousands in 1965, before it was made illegal in late 1966.

THE ACID TEST- Name for the parties hosted by Kesey and his group.

 

Notes on part V:

 

Shadrach, Mescach, and Abednego- Daniel 3:19-25, Three Chaldean believers who would not deny their faith and walked through a burning furnace.

Finger cymbal- Allen Ginsburg spoke poetry punctuated by finger cymbals at the Merry Prankster parties in the mid sixties.

Man in the space-suit- Kesey reportedly wore a space-suit at one of the last acid tests as a disguise from the police.

Sirens in the distance- I discovered the original title of The Waste Land- “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” so I’m pleased my ending includes the world symbol for police action.