The Big Bang 1960-62
To be in San Francisco in 1960 was to be at the heart of a sea change in the way America – and eventually, the world – thought, felt, imagined and created. And to be on Druid Heights was to be at the heart of the heart, as much as being a member of the still-incipient Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane.
”Between 1958 and 1970” wrote Watts, “a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, paining, religion, communication techniques in radio, television and cinema, dancing, theatre, and general lifestyle swept out of this city to affect America and the whole world, and…I have been intensely involved in it”
It was the gathering dawn of ecology, of the drug culture, of the sexual revolution, of a relaxation of the uptight mores that had defined the 1950s. Prefigured by the Beats, who Watts was closely connected with through his friendships with Gary Snyder, Alan Ginsberg, Locke McCorkle and Jack Kerouac, the 60s was also a time of spiritual transformations, of experimenting with Eastern Philosophies. These didn’t a global tipping point until the Beatles became disciples of the Maharishi Ji in 1967 – but the beginnings came much earlier, and one of the chief channels flowed through the conduit of Alan Watts.
The hippy revolution in spirituality, later to become the ‘New Age’, quite quickly decayed into magical thinking, hip capitalism and fantasies about angels, alternative medicine, astrology and UFOs. What Watts was teaching, to be later traduced, was altogether less exotic and altogether more intellectually convincing. Even at this time he was distancing himself from the Beats and challenging Kerouac’s take on Zen, depicted most forcefully in his roman a clef, ‘Dharma Bums’
Watts thought Kerouac and his followers were charlatans who thought Zen Buddhism simply meant doing whatever you felt like, a point he made in his essay for the Chicago Review in 1958 ‘ Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen’.
As he wrote in his autobiography
“ The Beat Generation was aggressively dowdy and slovenly and lacked gaiete d’espirit. Patrons of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop on Grant Avenue went about in shaggy blue-jeans with their feet bare and grimy and their hair in pony tails and overuse of marijuana made them withdrawn and morose, even if internally beatific.”
He also profoundly disagreed with Kerouac’s final conclusion in ‘Dharma Bums’ – ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference’.
“ Just because Zen surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say ‘to hell with it’ nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes” wrote Watts.
However, in 1960, all of this was still to come. Now finally escaped from a suburban life, Watts felt he had truly come home. He rationalized his abandonment of Dorothy as “it is well know that – for men especially – the forties are a “dangerous decade”, because if they have been well brought up it takes them this long to realize that one sometimes owes it to other people to be selfish”
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