SEX AND THE BODY IN MICHAEL MCCLURE’S QUEST ‘FOR THE MAMMAL SELF’

FRANCA BELLARSI

Sexuality and the Beat Generation Alongside figures like D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, the ‘Beat Generation’ writers believed that sexuality had been harmfully evacuated from literature. Though a heterogeneous group, the Beats were united in their wish to counter the diseased consciousness which, in their eyes, affected the post-World War II American mainstream1 and its conformist adherence to the American Way of Life turned into a kind of civil religion.2 To the Beat Generation, one of the roads to rebellion was the refusal to abide by the tacit censorship, which had, for so long, made writers refrain from frankly, and candidly representing the sex act. Profoundly influenced by Whitman and Blake, the Beat Generation poets rejected Puritanical repression and denied any gap between the sacred and the profane. This dismissal of the binary opposition between the earthly and the holy, the physical and the spiritual led to a form of hybrid mysticism in which the integration of desire, pleasure, and sexual energy was part and parcel of the search for a more authentic consciousness than the one moulded by mass media conditioning, the McCarthyist containment of un- American ideas, and the cycle of work, production and consumption.3 In their quest for mind expansion, the Beats considered it essential to return to the body and to drop the psychological armour created by

1 See Allen Ginsberg, ‘Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs’ (1959), in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, ed. Bill Morgan, New York, 2000, 3-5. 2 Robert Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict, New Brunswick and New Jersey, 1997, 20, 161-63. 3 Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), London, 1972, 72-73. 174 Franca Bellarsi the collective need to conform. However, dropping the socially- conditioned mask and reconnecting with a more genuine self could come in a number of variants: merging both a literal and an all- encompassing definition of desire, the Beats understood the term ‘sexuality’ both in its narrow sense of a physical act between individuals, whether heterosexual or homosexual in nature,4 and in the much broader, idealistic sense of a fusion with the physical world, an ‘at-onement’ which entailed the observation and the celebration of the actual processes of the human body and mind apprehended in their ‘suchness’.5 Said differently, for the Beats, sexuality was intimately linked to the notion of primitivism and to the concept of wilderness, defined as the untamed part of Nature of which both our flesh and psyche partake. As the poet Michael McClure put it, ‘Consciousness is a natural organic phenomenon. The Beats shared an interest in Nature, Mind, and Biology – areas that they expanded and held together with their radical political or antipolitical stance.’6 It is precisely on the work of Michael McClure that the present essay wishes to focus, as some of his poems powerfully exemplify the Beats’ combined sexual frankness and idealization of sex. After a brief presentation of McClure’s overall biocentric sensibility and poetic objectives, the discussion will then turn to ‘Fuck Ode’ and ‘Dark Brown’, two multi-dimensional poems which, though originally published in 1961, to this day remain singularly understudied. In both works, McClure graphically explores the sex act in its raw and rugged physicality, whilst at the same time also presenting it as a communion with the universe at large and, therefore, as a gateway to the sacred and the spiritual.

McClure’s biocentrism Though not a native of California, Michael McClure became a Californian by adoption. Born in Marysville, Kansas in 1932, the poet

4 Two founding members of the Beat Generation, namely Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, were openly gay and made homosexuality a central theme of their work. Moreover, Ginsberg was a major precursor to Gay Liberation in the USA. 5 This explains why the Beats were interested in experimenting with both hallucinogenics and meditation techniques, particularly Buddhist techniques, as means by which to observe the naked activity of the mind. 6 Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface, San Francisco, 1982, 11. Hereafter abbreviated as SBS.