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1 In Defense of Perversity: Diary Entry, 1958 jonas MEKAS I n a bastard standardized conformist sick society, perversity becomes a force of liberation. Horror and degradation for the professors, guardians of Morality, it is a drop of Holy Spirit, a ray of salvation. One has to hit on the very head. The time has come when the action of the silent wisdom, when the truth takes a form of anarchy, and exaggeration, and negation. This subconscious, in its organic protest against the dehumanizing tendencies, sprouts and bursts and spits out its venom. Young Angry Men are necessary not because they are bringing a new philosophy. No—others will bring it in right time. Their function is to destroy . They came against their own will, to begin to clean the rotten swelling of their age. They are the subconscious of their (our) own age. Beat and Angry generation is a protest. Not everybody in this generation is angry and beat. Generations get their markings from a few who express their generation clearest. They are being forced by the total subconscious of their generation to utter, to shout, to cry, to beat out their truths, suspicions, hopes, loneliness, warnings, prophesies. They are the true voices of their generation. Those are sensitive voices. They are pervert—they are not normal. Normality is conformist, money-minded, dead, Eisenhowered, and Mamieed, and Futurized, Harperized, deodorized. To be beat today is to be abnormal, to go against the normality, conformity, to be immoral, to be perverse. H_M Ch1.indd 1 3/25/09 7:29:00 AM 2 jonas MEKAS Even the sexual pervert today is an innocent and helpless protest against the bourgeois morality and unsensitivity. Better a pervert than a businessman . A pervert is an innocent, beating, crying himself, not the others. When the society is unlivable, the brave will die. The innocent will jump out the window, cut their innocent veins, suck in their innocent blood, or dream themselves out in the leaves of marijuana. The unsensitive ones will survive and become Mamies, salesmen, atomic pirates, Dulleses, professors , Wouks. Listen to the songs, on radio, jukeboxes, cheap songs, true songs. Popular American song is the saddest thing in America, or maybe in the world. Listen to their sacred sadness. There was never such sadness in the songs of a large, strong nation: they always came from the trampled small nations, poor, beaten on the paths of war, famine. Now it is in America. An anguished sadness, a suicide sadness, a loveless sadness. Or listen to the jazz. It is a kind of silent, hidden, sad crying out, for oneself, somewhere very deep. Or look at the paintings of de Kooning. There is the same suicide sadness, and cry: he paints his heart out, the heart of his generation. The businessmen do not realize that these songs, and jazz, and de Koonings are also pervert: they demask their dead happy Peale’s Reader’s Digest smiles. The popular art and the modern art sing the truth, as all perversity today does. Isn’t it then that the Mamies, the Eisenhowers, the salesmen, and the atomists, and the Wouks and professors are the real perverts? Aren’t they who go against the truth of life, love, and death? Aren’t they who smear their Old Age in Mademoiselle’s fashions and wilt without tasting it, in anguish? Aren’t they who made love into dating and partnership? Life into business? The true perversity of our age? Aren’t we the holy ones? Isn’t Elvis Presley a half-saint, who showed the absurdity of his parents’ generation by exaggerating their ideals, by buying two three four cars? All ideals and truths of our fathers become fake and lie when lit up: rotten, evil, yellow puke. So let us be beat and angry, and pervert: if that helps to dethrone the falsity and rottenness of morality and puked way of living. It is more honest today to be confused than to be sure (when the time is for dethroning). It is more honest to destroy than to build (there is not yet a clean place for building). It is more honest to be delinquent (and juvenile) than to learn and accept the ways of living in lies and pukes and garbage. Holy are the delinquent thoughts and deeds and insubordination, disrespect , and hate for their ways of living, for their philosophies, for all work (for the perpetuation of the dump); holy is beat and zen...

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