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147 Wholly CommunIon Poetry, Philosophy, and Spontaneous Bop Cinema David Sterritt One rarely turns to the movies for insights into Beat poetics. Apart from avant-garde shorts by Bruce Conner, Ron Rice, Robert Frank, and Alfred Leslie, and a few others, not many films offer more than dim reflections of the Beat sensibility.1 Given this scarcity, it’s unfortunate that Peter Whitehead ’s unique Wholly Communion has been almost entirely overlooked since its completion in 1965. Filmed at a massively attended poetry event that included readings by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, the movie stands with the most vigorous expressions of Beat consciousness in any medium. In this essay, I use it as a vehicle for exploring the rhizomatic flux and nomadic, polyphonic flows that I see as quintessential attributes of Beat poetry and poetics. To this end, I focus on the portions of Wholly Communion that best reflect and embody these properties: Allen Ginsberg’s partial reading of his 1963 poem “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express” and (secondarily) performances by the sound poet Ernst Jandl and the antiwar poet Adrian Mitchell, considering them through the aesthetics of Mikhail Bakhtin and the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The phrase “wholly communion” is a recurring motif in Whitehead’s film and fiction, punning on the holy communion of Christianity and on at least two forms of communion that Whitehead aimed to achieve in his cinema of the 1960s. One is the communion that breaks down borders between artist and theme, figure and ground, subjective and objective, document and reality; the other is that which blurs boundaries among people who simultaneously share an aesthetic experience that is authentic and powerful enough to propel consciousness beyond the temporal and material limits that habitually hem it in. 148 David Sterritt These phenomena are vividly present in Wholly Communion, a spontaneously filmed account of the International Poetry Incarnation, an evening of literary performances involving members and fellow travelers of the Beat Generation that took place at London’s venerable Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965. The improvisational nature of Wholly Communion,conjoined with the heterogeneous content of the Incarnation itself, place the film under the rubrics that Bakhtin calls the dialogic and the carnivalesque. Although dialogism is a polyvalent term in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, it takes one of its most important meanings from his concept of “many equally privileged and fully valid consciousnesses” dynamically posed “on the boundary between one’s own and someone else’s consciousness,” revealing that the “very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion.” This is an excellent précis of the spirit that is heard, seen, and felt in Whitehead’s film, which portrays each consciousness involved in the Incarnation as a singularity that is “turned outward, intensely addressing itself, another, a third person,” seeking the state of “eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord” that constitutes the “world symposium” in its ideal form, which is to say, the “dialogic fabric of human life.”2 In capturing Beat performances at the moment of their unfolding, Wholly Communion enacts the Beat values of collaboration, intuitiveness, and all-embracing creative energy. At the center of all this, Whitehead may be seen as a psychic intermediary linking the singular Incarnation with the mythic meanings it started acquiring while it was happening and has kept accruing ever since. Wholly Communion is less a record of the event, therefore, than an extension, amplification , and intensification of it—a point that becomes clear if we think of the film not as an object for beholding but as a component of a dispersed, multitudinous system constituting what Deleuze and Guattari term a “machinic assemblage,” a set of intertwined networks that perform, regulate, effectuate, and guide converging and diverging flows of desire, expression, content, and becoming. Considered within this framework, Whitehead’s movie resembles a music recording as theorized in Deleuzian terms by Drew Hemment, who observes that when a recording is played and listened to, “the final statement is deterritorialized and set adrift in multiple, uncertain circumstances that can never be fully prescribed in advance,” presenting “only a snap shot of . . . materials and codes circulating in technological networks.”3 Considered this way, the matter at hand in Wholly Communion is understood not as that which was seen, spoken, and heard while Whitehead’s camera and sound recorder rolled but rather as a set of multiple, mobile strata that territorial- [18.189.2.122] Project...

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