Comin’ Around in a Circle: Non-Linear Mysticism in The Grateful Dead, Kerouac, and T. S. Eliot
© 2024 Jeff Zittrain
Presented at the PCA Conference, Chicago, 3/29/2024
Why connect the work of these 3 influential figures? Kerouac and Eliot are literally referred to in Dead songs but I actually came to them before I came to the Dead and what drew me to all 3 is their revelatory aspect: searching for (and finding and expressing) the Profound, filtered to us as mere mortals through moments of sudden illumination. Moments when the light’s all shinin’ on us even if other times we can barely see…
In a simple twist of synchronicity that often seems to happen in Dead world, I am comin’ around in a circle myself this week. In another time’s not-quite forgotten space I was at the University of Chicago completing my master’s thesis on On the Road. I then hit the road myself for the Dead’s 87 summer tour, did lots of music and teaching, and have not been back to Chicago or big-time higher academia until now.
My thesis was an “ethical criticism.” I asserted that contrary to how Kerouac is often disparaged, his characters are running towards something as much as they are running away. In fact, all 3 of these artists strove for a deeper connection and meaningful experience in the face of what they saw as spiritual emptiness of their respective times. Eliot’s famous extended description of the era after WWI as a barren “Waste Land” out of touch with the regenerative power of the spirit and “distracted from distraction by distraction” is echoed in the Dead’s 1970 critique of “a typical city involved in a typical daydream”. In fact, Truckin’s catalogue of New York, Detroit, and yes, Chicago as “all the same street” echoes Eliot’s Waste Land litany of the decaying lost cities Jerusalem, Athens and Alexandria. Truckin’s “cats who speak of true love but sit cryin’ at home” are a later incarnation of the timid coffee-spoon life of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. (Although not explicitly political the Dead did continue their critique of the 70s and 80s as a misguided “Ship of Fools” and “whole world full of petty wars”.) Kerouac is both saddened and frustrated at the mainstream post-WWII 1950s as uninspired, meek, and spiritually-bereft. If you look at Kerouac’s explication of the word “Beat” itself, it encompasses all three essential elements: what that movement was running away from: “beaten down”, running towards: “beatific”, and it even included how they could get there “musical beat.”
This “musical” connotation has an obvious connection to the Dead, but also Eliot – his spiritual masterwork Four Quartets employs a classical musical structure – he said that even as he backed away from calling them “4 Sonatas” he had Beethoven in mind while writing them. (Eliot explained his overall musical inspiration in an essay called “The Music of Poetry” and you see it in titles like Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, and of course The LoveSONG of J. Alfred Prufrock). Even more importantly, in Four Quartets he employs a deep musical objective correlative to convey transcendent experience in a line that many deadheads can relate to: “Music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are / The music / While the music lasts.”
Let’s start briefly with the literal connections and then get into the meat of the specific mystical/transcendent philosophy.
The literal connections between the Dead and Kerouac are well-documented:
Very briefly: The hero and driving force of OTR is “Dean Moriarty” – a pseudonym for Neal Cassady, who literally drove the Acid Test Furthur Bus over the bridge connecting the 50s and 60s countercultures, even lived briefly with the Dead, and is explicitly identified by name in 2 songs (The Other One and Cassidy)
Less obvious are the literal connections with Eliot
He shows up in the Dead’s cover of Dylan’s Desolation Row w/the lyric: “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captains tower” and the next line “While Calypso singers laugh at them” is an allusion to the mermaids (and everyone else) who scorn Eliot’s meekly inept J. Alfred Prufrock. This brings us to the next lyrical connection. Prufrock’s famous opening line “Let us go then you and I” is echoed by Dark Star’s “Shall we go you and I”.
On a deeper level, consider the powerful culmination that occurs in Let it Grow, the closing section of Weather Report Suite:
“Listen to the Thunder shouting “I Am!”
I had always wondered if that was a reference to the culmination of What the Thunder Said, the closing section of The Wasteland so I asked lyricist John Perry Barlow once at a party. He answered me by spreading his arms and reciting the closing lines of that poem “Shanti Shanti Shanti” (Sanskrit for “the peace which passeth understanding) as he disappeared backwards into the crowd.
(So I’ll take that as a “go ahead and use that in a paper someday”…)
The shouting Thunder declares the profound holy power of existence (“I am” is literally God’s name in Exodus 3:14). This takes us into the common specifics of the mystical philosophy of all 3 artists.
The revelations can be centered around the imagery and concept of a circle and a center rather than a linear experience/approach to existence and the divine energy of the universe. In keeping with this theme and a Dead jam, this paper is going to journey on a somewhat non-linear form of spiraling connections.
Overview:
Kerouac:
At the beginning of OTR, Kerouac describes the impetus for his travel adventures with this vision: “Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me” – pearl is classic image of perfect round purity.
He bookends this at the conclusion of this first trip out west, saying: “Here I was at the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one.”
This is the pattern of OTR. Kerouac keeps going back and forth across the country multiple times and finally out to Mexico which he calls “the magic land at the end of the road” but his ecstatic visions shatter – he gets dysentery, Dean leaves him sick, and the book ends where it began, back in New York.
This is a central problem of road texts, how to end. “Can this really be the end?” the Dead ask at the end of each verse in Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile – ‘no’ the song emphatically answers as it keeps going on and on and on for another 20 verses. However through these experiences as we will see, Kerouac finds a pearl in what Dean calls capital “IT” IT . [(driving, music, no time/know time)]
Dead:
Circular imagery is central to some of the Dead’s most iconic songs:
The Wheel, Ripple (expanding outward), the first single from the first album where “Everybody’s dancing in a ring around the sun” and the climactic chorus of The Other One which is simply “Comin’ Around in a Circle”.
In Franklin’s Tower: Circular trip is both structural and thematic – the first verse kindly wishes “may the 4 winds blow you safely home” and the final verse concludes “may the 4 winds blow you home again” (although Jerry sometimes sang them the same, either way, this bookends the song and more crucially also describes the most important circular trip of all – the trip from non-being through life to death.)
The Eleven addresses this existential circular moment as it’s happening – “Now is the time of returning”
In Four Quartets, Eliot describes this same returning moment of The Eleven and follows a similar bookending pattern and theme as Franklin, beginning East Coker with “In my beginning is my end” and ending that poem with “In my end is my beginning.”
In between, he includes an extended peasant-dancing “rhythm of the seasons” litany that would fit right into the nature cycle lyrics of The Eleven or Let it Grow.
The Dead had the unique distinction to take this to another level apart from Kerouac and Eliot. As a band they could also address this musically, and therefore as a real-time experience for both them and the audience:
It helps to view one of the Dead’s most signature musical approaches through one of my favorite passages from Eliot:
Eliot:
from the climactic 4th poem of Four Quartets (Little Gidding):
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Dead: That sounds to me like a show I saw at Calaveras County 87 with a 2nd set “Playing in the Band >Drums/Space> I Need a Miracle > Dear Mr Fantasy> back into Playing in the Band (or simply the endlessly fun-to say “Playing in the drums space miracle fantasy Band”)
Dead songs in the 2nd set morphing into other songs and returning was common.
But on a few occasions they pushed it even further by beginning a song, heading into a jam, exploring different songs and then leaving the show and only coming back to the song after multiple nights. There were some multi-day split Dark Star’s in the 90s and a Sugar Magnolia on night 1 which only resolved into Sunshine Daydream on night 3. Therefore when the song returns you realize the exploration expanded beyond the concert to include even the life you live in the…days between shows. In this way the music never stops, and is also as that song asserts, never here at all, in the metaphysical tradition of the famous Buddhist mountain which comes and goes, as sometimes Dead cohort the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” of Donovan references. And in all these cases, when you arrive where you started, it is the same song but now different, you “know it for the first time” in Eliot’s words. That is, as Dean might put it in OTR, to “know time.”
Of course, even more experientially, this happens apart from set-lists, with single songs that leave their chord patterns to explore into long jams and then come back to the song such as Bird Song or Cassidy.
[Speaking of jamming, as we saw yesterday in the Playboy After Dark segment, Jerry even described the 2 drummers and jamming as a circular ouroboros]
This brings us to improvisation. To go back to Eliot’s first line: “We shall not cease from exploration” sounds like Kerouac’s OTR description of a jazz jam:
“There’s always a little more, a little…further – it never ends. They sought new phrases. They tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. [Every now and then, a clear hormonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.] They found it, they lost it, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned and Neal sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go…”
What is improvisation but a way to experience being in the present moment. It takes us out of linear time with its focus on a beginning and end. It is a way to access the organic “ever-expanding NOW” from nothing – such as a ripple in still water when there is no pebble tossed or wind to blow.
“To be conscious is not to be in time” says Eliot. He wrote his 1914 dissertation on philosopher F.H. Bradley’s concept of “Immediate Experience” – a fundamental reality with no parts and distinctions – and incorporated this into his poetry – which takes us back to Four Quartets again:
(from Burnt Norton)
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Eliot bemoans our linear state as “Ridiculous the waste sad time, stretching before and after.”
Or in other words “such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there”.
This is why Barlow suggested we “deep six [our] wristwatch [since]…the time it seems to capture is just the movement of its hands”
Let’s go back (in a circle) to tie this all together:
Dead:
Most obvious circular imagery is The Wheel – this describes the relentless movement of the universe, constant change.
“The wheel is turnin’ you can’t slow down,
Can’t let go and you can’t hold on
Can’t go back and you can’t stand still
If the thunder don’t get you then the lightnin’ will”
This sounds inevitably tragic/negative, but in the larger psychedelic context (certainly musically with the pedal steel and smooth groove and melody) it becomes beautiful and comforting.
Similar to what Kerouac derived from his crazy spinning speed, the lesson is Buddhist: life is suffering until you give up the desire for permanence.
You must remember: “There’s nothing you can hold for very long”.
But even more than that Stella Blue Buddhist lesson, in The Wheel, something is ultimately accomplished:
“Everytime that wheel go round
Bound to cover just a little more ground”
It’s the classic Robert Hunter language of folksy common sense, and now it reassures us that we’re going forward, or that the universe is going forward.
This may sound comforting, but it doesn’t fully settle the central question of On the Road: how can all this movement lead towards peace?
The Dead answer begins with Playing in the Band:
“Standing on a tower
World at my command
You just keep a turnin’
While I’m playing in the band”
This is the voice of the Thoreauvian self, in control because, as he declared in Walden, “The universe radiates outward from me.” Like a ripple I would add. While on the road of life, this centered self can transform our experience to one with a center instead of an end.
Which circles us back to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot – not standing on a tower but fighting in a tower on Desolation Row. What are they fighting about?
Pound felt he failed both his master poem The Cantos, and his life. His plan had been to emulate Dante and write himself into and then out of Hell. He succeeded in the first part but the ending never came. And he didn’t enjoy the ride. His description of his despair nails our point on the head. In the final cantos, collected only as “Drafts and Fragments”, he bemoans:
“That I lost my center (fighting the world).”
Pound wasn’t alone. As in OTR, the linear vision creates the crucial problem faced by characters in road texts and us in real life: There is no grand final ending. (Even Pee-Wee Herman learned the hard way at the end of his Big Adventure, the Alamo has no basement.)
More successful and perhaps the reason for the fight with Pound is Eliot’s concept of the “still point of the turning world”, a phrase which sounds remarkably like the experience of Playing in the Band – with the musician at the still point while the rest of the world keeps turnin’. In Four Quartets this mystical “point” accomplishes no small task; it makes sense of the seeming chaos of existence.
It is “immediate experience” beyond our rational linear understandings:
And it also sounds like a description of a Dead concert moment:
“At the still point of the turning world…
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline…Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
[This recalls the spirituality of the spinners we talked about yesterday]
As Four Quartets was written after Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his “still point of the turning world” refers specifically to the crucifixion – the sacrifice of the Christian God, but for the Dead the “still point” occurs while Playing in the Band. It is the self engaged in the creative act. This may seem worlds apart from the crucifixion but is actually not completely different. In a very real sense it can also be seen as sacrificial.
There is an ego-death in playing music, especially the way the Dead do it (and that’s at least part of what their “Grateful Dead” name implies). They collectively subsume to the rest of the band, the audience, and ultimately the universe and existence itself, letting inspiration move them brightly from beyond. The music plays the band as they say. We listen to the Thunder through Bobby shouting “I Am!”
“You are the music while the music lasts” shows up again here, and we know it for the first time.
Now we can come around in a circle to our title and The Other One climax. The lyrics are based on the Furthur Bus Trip but it is not only about the Furthur Bus Trip. It is about the revelations of that (or any) trip when it peaks in its more abstract and elemental chorus which is simply:
“Comin’ Comin’ Comin’ around (Comin’ around y’all)
Comin’ around (in a circle)”
This refers to nothing in particular, but to everything…in completion…the pay-off… Kerouac’s (round) pearl.
It is the peak experience of unification and connection, a mystical oneness, Eliot’s “immediate experience.”
Kerouac expands on this in the later part of OTR when he talks about – capital IT “IT”
He highlights Dean’s mystical faith in this larger pattern. This is how he could “see around corners.” He drives like the Dead jam – by letting go…:
* “Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself.”
* “…the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.”
Dean’s basic tenet is clear; a deeper pattern exists under the chaos.
The Grateful Dead experience is based on the same faith:
Jerry: ” [The Acid Test was] like the study of chaos. It may be that you have to destroy forms or ignore them in order to see other levels of organization.”[1]
* Cassidy: “let your life proceed by its own design”
* Playin’ in the Band: “I don’t trust in nothin’, but I know it come out right”
And now everything leads us up to the revelatory bridge of Black Peter – the end of Peter’s life and the end of this paper. Line by line: “See here how everything lead up to this day…”
“This day” is Peter dying so his death all started with his birth. To return to Eliot: In my beginning is my end, In my end is my beginning. It’s circular to the point of being one and the same.
But importantly it’s also “just like any other day that’s ever been.” And what’s the same every day – “the sun goin’ up and then the sun goin’ down.” Another cycle. And through his window the light’s all shinin’ on him. All moments are ripe/portals for transcendence. Death may be the ultimate transcendence but ego-death (through jamming, meditation, poetry, an Acid Test, dancing, driving) is available at any time. You can get this miracle every day. You just gotta poke around and look at it right.
And for that, we can be grateful.
[1]Rolling Stone, Nov.30, 1989.