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121 4. Recording the Moment The Role of the Photograph in Beat Representation In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe provides a description of Neal Cassady that epitomizes the Beat quest for the moment: “Cassady in his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head whose thing is speed, meaning amphetamines, and a unique being whose quest is Speed, faster, godamn it, spiraling, jerking, kicking, fibrillating tight up against the 1/30 of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses, trying to get into . . . Now” (131). Cassady’s desire to go faster, to get into the now of experience, is what drew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to his side. But while these latter two have myriad works to their credit, Cassady only produced a short novel and various letters. There are undoubtedly multiple reasons for the fact that Cassady exists mainly in the tributes of others, but one central consideration is the disjunction between experiencing and recording. A consummate participator, Cassady had literally less time to produce—actions spoke louder than words. Cassady is given the moniker “Speed Limit” because his one-thirtieth of a second comes closer to the real movie of life than anybody around him. But his attempt to move beyond the moviescreen barrier of the senses points to another limit, that of representation. Cassady apprehends experience at a mere one-thirtieth of a second behind time’s flow, but Wolfe doesn’t indicate whether he ever revisits these instants once they have passed. Kerouac and Ginsberg, on the other hand, have the difficult problem of not only living as fully in (and closely to) the fleeting present as Cassady does but of also recording and reflecting on their experiences.1 While Beat writing often presents itself as an authentic testimony to lived experience, the Beat relationship to photography provides a parallel site for exploring the role representation plays in “capturing” the events of the moment. Beat writing often directly imitates the “flow” of spontaneous experience, but in photography, freezing a moment of time into an image creates a series of gaps in temporal continuity. Photography lets the past Mortenson Ch4.indd 121 9/9/10 2:33 PM R E C O R D I N G T H E M O M E N T 122 become present again but with a difference. The photo is evidently not the event itself, and captions, commentary, and textual addition meant to bridge this distance only serve to highlight the gap between the primary moment and its subsequent representation. But Beat writers do not passively suffer such gaps; on the contrary, they theorize, inhabit, and produce them. Exploring this gap and its place in Beat thinking gives a better understanding of the Beat project of returning to the moment. This gap is not simply a lack but a space of fullness. Photography is well suited to such an inquiry. The photographic image’s status as a representation calls into question the relationship between spontaneous life lived in the moment and mediations that seek to re-present the present as it fades away. As an index of the real that exists in two dimensions, as an arbitrary boundary marker among past-present-future and as a cultural emblem of ever-contested truth, the photograph is inextricably implicated in the question of the gap between living and recording. Image, Caption, Gap Upon first glance, however, it does seem as though the Beats often accept the photograph as a simple reproduction of the real. In his introduction to Robert Frank’s Americans, Kerouac writes: “As American a picture—the faces don’t editorialize or criticize or say anything but ‘This is the way we are in real life,’” and then continues on to describe the photos as “the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind” (6). For Kerouac, the picture corresponds directly with its subject matter, and thus the photo is capable of capturing the “actual pink juice” of the real world. William S. Burroughs, too, is not immune to such declarations. In his film script The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Burroughs describes a street crap game and then advises in a parenthetical, “Actual street game must be photographed and recorded for this scene” (12). Later, when discussing a scene in Harlem, Burroughs again advises, “The following shots of Harlem in the 1930s can use any available documentary material of the period and place. This not only saves expensive reconstruction but...

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