The Making of a Counter Culture, Chapter 3: Chapter IV JOURNEY TO THE EAST ...AND POINTS BEYOND: ALLEN GINSBERG AND ALAN WATTS On October 21, 1967, the Pentagon found itself besieged by a motley army of anti-war demonstrators. For the most part, the fifty thousand protestors were made up of activist academics and students, men of letters (among them, Norman Mailer leading his “armies of the night”), New Left and pacificist ideologues, housewives, doctors . . . but also in at- tendance, we are informed (by The East Village Other), were contingents of “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, proph- ets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, min- strels, bards, roadmen, and madmen”—who were on hand to achieve the “mystic revolution.” The picketing, the sit-down, the speeches, and marches: all that was protest politics as usual. But the central event of the day was a contribution of the “superhumans”: an exorcism of the Pentagon by long- haired warlocks who “cast mighty words of white light against the demon-controlled structure,” in hopes of levitating that grim ziggurat right off the ground.1 They did not succeed—in floating the Pentagon, that is. But they did manage to stamp their generation with a politi- cal style so authentically original that it borders on the bizarre. Is the youthful political activism of the sixties any different from that of the thirties? If the difference shows up anywhere, it reveals itself in the unprecedented penchant for _ the occult, for magic, and for exotic ritual which has become 1 The East Village Other's report appears in the issue of Novem- ber 1-15, 1967, po 3:
Chapter IV opens with the 1967 Pentagon exorcism not as comic relief but as Roszak's thesis statement in miniature: the moment "the age of ideology" began "giving way to the age of mystagogy." What the rest of the book doesn't prepare you for is how seriously Roszak takes the early Ginsberg—the tight, short-lined poems of *Empty Mirror*, written before Zen, before India, before "Howl"—as evidence that the counterculture's mystical turn wasn't imported from the East but was already latent in postwar American dissent, a refusal of the Old Left's "adamantly secular mold" that predated any encounter with Oriental tradition. The chapter's buried argument is that Ginsberg's evolution from compressed lyric poet to ecstatic prophet-performer tracks the counterculture's own trajectory: from private vision to public ritual, from seeing God above politics to trying to levitate a building with it. Roszak catches something the later chroniclers (Rifkin, for instance) flatten into a story about expanding empathy: what actually happened was that a generation decided the correct response to the Pentagon was not analysis but spell-casting, and that this was not a failure of seriousness but a new kind of seriousness entirely. The word "ziggurat" does a lot of work—it makes the Pentagon ancient, makes the exorcism almost reasonable.