source: National Geographic

Tarahumara

The Tarahumara of Mexico evaded Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth century. But can they survive the onslaught of modernity?

By Cynthia Gorney

National Geographic contributing writer

Photograph by Robb Kendrick

Each star in the night sky is a Tarahumara Indian whose souls—men have three and women have four, as they are the producers of new life—have all, finally, been extinguished. These are things anthropologists and resident priests tell you about the beliefs of the Tarahumara people, who call themselves the Rarámuri, and who live in and above the canyons of northern Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, where they retreated five centuries ago from invading Spaniards. The Spaniards had not only firearms and horses but also disturbing beard hair; from their presence came the Rarámuri word chabochi, which to this day means anyone who is not Tarahumara. Chabochi is not an insult, exactly, just a way of dividing the world. Its literal translation, which goes a long way toward evoking the current relationship between the Tarahumara and the rest of 21st-century Mexico, is "person with spiderwebbing across the face."
The Tarahumara are reticent and private people who live long distances from each other, in small adobe or wood houses, or caves, or homes partway under outcroppings so that the rock itself provides the roofing. They brew an alcoholic beverage from corn, which they grow in small fields they plow by hand, and on celebratory occasions they gather to pass the drink from person to person, taking swigs from a hollowed half gourd, until they become voluble or dreamy or belligerent and lie down on the ground to sleep it off. They are extraordinary endurance runners, having lived for generations amid a transportation network of narrow footpaths through the canyons; Rarámuri means "foot-runner" or "he who walks well," and they've been known to irritate American ultramarathoners by beating them while wearing huarache sandals and stopping now and then for a smoke.
They regard work as necessary for survival but lacking intrinsic moral merit of its own, and secondary to spiritual obligations and other matters of the soul. Their traditional economy is conducted by means of barter, not cash; they have a word for sharing that doesn't translate directly into Spanish or English: "kórima," a Tarahumara woman may say, opening her palm for what a chabochi would call charity. There will be no thank you for the proffered coin, though, as kórima implies the obligation to distribute wealth for the benefit of everyone.

They also eat a lot of Maruchan, the Japanese instant noodles that come in plastic-foam tubs. Foil-wrapped potato chips, too, and plastic liters of Coca-Cola, and Tecate beer in pop-top cans—you can spend six hours rattling in a four-wheel-drive pickup toward the deepest remove of a Tarahumara canyon, hairpinning around crumbling dirt roads hacked straight out of the cliffs, until the truck winds around the very last drop-off, and the sun is setting and the smoke is curling from distant chimneys and the sound of ceremonial drums is floating up from somewhere way below, and there along the footpaths are two empty soda bottles and a discarded tub of Maruchan. These are useful for holding the romantic chabochi imagination in check. By the most recent government count, 106,000 Tarahumara live in Mexico, making them one of the largest indigenous groups in North America; the majority still live in relative isolation in the area Mexico promotes as Copper Canyon, but both the place-name and the image of its inhabitants sketched by tourist outfits ("They live a simple life undisturbed by modern technologies," reads one online write-up) turn out to be fragments, understatements, misleading in the neatness of their packaging.
The Copper Canyon itself, for example, or Barranca del Cobre, is actually only one of a dozen massive canyons in this part of the Sierra Madre. Several of them are deeper than the Grand Canyon. And chabochi commerce, legal and illegal, is pushing hard into all of them. The narco industry is increasing its use of the canyons for marijuana and opium poppy cultivation, displacing Tarahumara families from their corn, bean, and squash fields. Government efforts to bring roads and schoolbooks into Tarahumara communities are also bringing cheap tequila, thugs with guns, and all the chatarra, as Mexicans call junk food, hardy enough to stack up in makeshift general stores with no electricity. Traditional Tarahumara men wear wide headbands and loin coverings that leave their legs bare even when it's freezing, but many more now wear blue jeans and cowboy hats, and pointy-toed boots in leather dyed to match their belts. Most Tarahumara women still wear multicolored head scarves and long skirts of flowery prints or deep-hued pleats or billowy pastels gathered into scallops like fancy window drapes. But some now wear blue jeans too.
The region's first commercial airport is scheduled to be built in Creel, the former logging center whose present-day economy depends on the scenic railway line that runs through town. Government planners envision a subsequent hotel boom to accommodate eventual jetloads of new tourists. Officials in Chihuahua, the Mexican state encompassing most of the Tarahumara territory, are courting private investors for a proposed canyon-rim complex—bungee jumps, a chasm-spanning gondola, more hotels, and an "Indian village" for the permanent display of "rituals, ceremonies, and clothes"—to be built farther west on the railway route, along what's now a tourist overlook crowded with Tarahumara vendors. The vendors are nearly all women and children, offering the baskets and weavings they have learned tourists like. Girls not yet old enough for school, or old enough but nonetheless spending their days hawking souvenirs, hold up fistfuls of braided bracelets while repeating the first Spanish they ever learned: "¿Compra?—Want to buy?"
The Copper Canyon development plan is full of uncertainty and controversy—the airport construction has already been delayed many times, and environmental arguments continue, especially since the whole Sierra region suffers from periodic drought. (Promises of ecological sensitivity weren't going over well last spring, when everybody I met, including government officials, knew that one already existing hotel had for years been dumping its raw sewage into the nearest canyon; the owner, who insists septic repairs are under way, happens to be a former state tourism director.) But there's a wider, more universally familiar drama taking place throughout the Sierra Tarahumara, as the territory is also called. With or without the airport, modern Mexico is arriving, permeating an indigenous culture that managed for a long time to keep outsiders largely at bay. Every impulse to imagine that this makes things simple, though—a once harmonious native people, defiled by invaders with misguided notions of what it means to be civilized—is yanked away in short order by the people who actually live in the canyons.
The clinic nurse in the Sierra Madre town of San Rafael, a 35-year-old half-Tarahumara woman named Lorena Olivas Reyes, says her Tarahumara patients are sufficiently chabochified—that's the term in the Sierra, chabochiado—that she doesn't have to invent a new Rarámuri construction for the phrase "high blood pressure," which does not exist in Rarámuri. She is able to use Spanish when she explains to her patients that they, like chabochis, are now suffering from alta presión. Lorena has high, sculpted cheekbones and thick, waist-length black hair, which is wound into a tidy chignon while she's at work in San Rafael. Whenever I've seen her at the clinic, she's been in her nursing whites, looking regal and severe as she moves efficiently among the Tarahumara women in their glorious long skirts.
Lorena first migrated from the place where she grew up, a canyon-walled Tarahumara settlement called Guagüeyvo, when she was 13 years old. She climbed out, literally—there was no road then, and the exit trails head right up the canyon slope—because she loved learning, and the next available grades were in a school too many hours away for even a foot-runner child to navigate every day. I learned this the day Lorena and I convinced a San Rafael carpenter to drive us the five hours to Guagüeyvo in his pickup truck, along with Lorena's three sons, an old bicycle, a tub of lard, a wheel of cheese, a bag of foil-wrapped chocolates, and two rose plants for her mother's garden.
It was the Thursday of Semana Santa, or Holy Week, the pre-Easter days that mark the most sacred time of the Tarahumara year. Jesuit priests first brought Christianity to the Sierra Tarahumara during the 1600s, but they were thrown out a century later, when political tensions prompted the Spaniards to expel all Society of Jesus members from New Spain, and by the time the Jesuits returned in 1900, Tarahumara religious practice had morphed into an intensely held juxtaposition, Catholic liturgy combined with ancient faith, that prevails now in much of the Sierra Madre. Things happen in the canyons during Semana Santa that would startle most Christian outsiders coming upon them for the first time—there's a Judas-in-effigy part a newcomer might fret about allowing a small child to watch; and the Pharisees, the pious Jews of the biblical era, assume primary roles in a pageant of running, drumming, dancing, drinking, and battle. It makes for powerful spectacle, the men sometimes painting their faces and torsos in fierce pointillist arrangements of white against skin, and every spring the weeklong ceremonies attract thousands of visitors to the Sierra. They don't come to Guagüeyvo, though, as it's not even marked on some maps. The whole community is a scattering of dwellings around a brushy concave place in the cliffs, and inside Lorena's family's kitchen we sat around a long table at dusk, eating hot tortillas, which her mother, Fidencia, kept lifting off the stove top and dropping onto a plastic plate.
"How's it going with the dancing?" Lorena asked.
"The lead Pharisee fell and broke his leg," Fidencia said.
They were speaking in Spanish, which Fidencia learned in the Rarámuri elementary school, several hours' walk from the cave where she was born, during the years before she married Lorena's father, Catarino Olivas Mancinas. He is a miner's descendant, from a non-Tarahumara family that goes back a long way in the Sierra Madre. The house he keeps adding on to is among the nicest in Guagüeyvo: extra sleeping rooms with mattresses for the adult children and grandchildren who also live here, plus concrete floors, and a porch with pried-out automobile bench seats for sofas. There's a small solar panel too, which illuminates a couple of buzzing yellow lamps after dark; a road to Guagüeyvo was finally built three years ago, its dirt surface just wide enough for the delivery of electrical poles, but the poles aren't functional yet. Fidencia has been told electricity will come soon. When it does, Lorena will bring her a refrigerator.
This was something to contemplate, this refrigerator. I knew precisely what it would look like: black and shiny. It belongs to Lorena, and at present it's in her kitchen in San Rafael, where there are a couple of paved streets, and most of the houses have electric hookups and flush toilets. It had been a year since Lorena and Fidencia had last seen each other, and although their reunion had been reserved—Fidencia lumbering toward her daughter and nodding and accepting a light embrace—Fidencia now stayed close by Lorena's side as the two of them patted out tortillas and tossed them on the stove. The corn for the tortillas was from the previous season's harvest. Fidencia had collected dried blue kernels that morning, soaked the corn in water from the storage tank outside, cranked the corn through the hand grinder on the porch, and smashed the grindings into meal on the stone metate, the one she brought from the family cave, the kind her grandmother had used, and her great-great-great-grandmother also. Then Fidencia had gone outside again, to haul in an armload from the woodpile and start a fire in the iron stove.
The tortillas were thick and tasted delicious. Fidencia had pulled a chicken from the coop that morning and beheaded it and de-feathered it and dismembered it with a knife before dropping it into the pot, so there was the aroma of simmering caldo, meat and vegetable soup. She was wearing a flowery rose-colored skirt, a bright blue sweatshirt, and a bandanna tied under her chin. Her arms looked as strong as a weight lifter's. ("You know how I get rid of being tired when I'm at work?" Lorena asked me later. "I say to myself, My mother is more tired than I am.") I had heard one of the Jesuits remark that the expanding network of truck-navigable roads was causing the Tarahumara to lose their walking and running endurance over long distances, and now with my mouth full of tortilla in the golden light of the stove fire, I found myself envisioning electricity in Guagüeyvo as a pileup of metallic chabochi objects with cords sticking out—push-button grinders, digital clocks, hair dryers, the new black refrigerator, TVs broadcasting telenovelas between commercials for mascara and laundry soap. I asked Fidencia how she would react, should somebody bring all these items into her home, and she stopped looking at her daughter long enough to take me in for a moment, gravely but kindly, as though she were trying to figure out whether I could possibly be as stupid as I appeared.
"That would be very good," she said.
When I glanced at Lorena, she was trying, with Tarahumara dignity, not to laugh.

The choice of the Sierra Madre as a strategic retreat from the Spaniards all those centuries ago is both the gift and the burden of the Tarahumara today. Their ancestors weren't cowards or pacifists; histories recount violent rebellions among Tarahumara in less remote mission and mining centers, where colonists used them for brute labor while trying to press them into European-style village living. But as a people, the Tarahumara survived largely because of what a Sierra priest described to me as a gift for the evasive maneuver—and here the priest clapped his right hand over his left and then slithered the left out gently from underneath, like a fish slipping through a crack in the rocks.
The geography that made the Tarahumara's lands so inaccessible to conquerors, though, made them irresistible to a succession of plunderers. The peaks and canyons contained silver and other minerals, which drew miners as early as the 17th century. The forests attracted loggers, who leveled the trees and eventually—under the initial leadership of a late 1800s American engineer—got a railway built to carry out the spoils. The construction effort lasted almost 80 years; the completed track that winds through the Sierra Madre, with its high bridges and multiple tunnels, is a marvel of railway engineering. These days the logs are brought out by truck (still in reckless numbers, logging critics say, despite their admonitions about the degradation of the forest), and the principal train now using the Sierra track is called the Chihuahua Pacífico, or more familiarly, the Chepe. It's pronounced CHEH-peh, and its main job is hauling tourists.
Tarahumara and other locals ride the second-class Chepe regularly, en route to the towns or seasonal fruit-picking jobs just beyond the mountains. But the real Chepe money comes from outsiders, Mexican and foreign, who crane their necks out the railcar half-doors and disembark at the overlooks, where the first full view of the canyons is so astonishing, such a dizzying display—the Copper label isn't from the mineral, but rather from the luminous colors of the massive sunlit cliffs—that the next exploitable resource is obvious: grandeur. You're standing there blinking, taking it in, thinking: This is too beautiful. There are too many people with money who want a piece of this, including the entire development-hungry nation of Mexico. It's not a fair fight.
Scholars of the Tarahumara say their culture is remarkable in its tenacity—that for centuries they have sidestepped one form of chabochi interference after another, which is why the language remains vigorous, the religious beliefs intense, and so many women still wear the scarf and long skirt. Once I watched a women's race outside a grim-looking Rarámuri enclave in Chihuahua city, where thousands of Tarahumara have migrated to live in close-quartered ghettos that take up entire blocks. The Tarahumara do much of their running in a traditional form of Rarámuri competition, people gathering to bet livestock or other possessions on the outcome. The men race in staggeringly long trail runs, wearing huaraches or barefoot, while steadily kicking a baseball-size wooden sphere. When the women run, they fling and catch hoops with long sticks as they go, and that's how the girls and young women were running through the streets of Chihuahua, huaraches slapping the pavement, skirts flapping at their calves. Behind the cheering spectators, who looked to be their aunts and grandmothers, the wagered goods were heaped hip high: a mound of Rarámuri garments, brilliant as jockey silks.

But the mound was on a concrete sidewalk. Behind it, the warren of living quarters was as crowded as buildings I'd seen Tarahumara in the canyons use for sheltering goats. There are teachers and carpenters inside the tiny apartments of Rarámuri enclaves, and resident elders respectfully deferred to for community leadership, and university students majoring in anthropology or industrial engineering. But there are also narco workers, everybody knows that, and teenage boys slouched against the walls with their caps turned backward, and glue sniffers and beggars, and girls having babies at 13, and diabetes cases to go along with the junk-food obesity and the alta presión. These aren't entirely urban scourges, either; in Guagüeyvo I met a young chabochi doctor who kept a clinic wall chart of malnutrition cases in children under five—60 such cases as of this past spring, he told me, the combined consequence of poverty, depleted crops, and alcoholic parents too dulled by corn brew or trucked-in liquor to understand that their children are not getting enough to eat.
"The life of the Tarahumara has changed more in the last 20 years than in the previous 300," a Creel priest named Pedro Juan de Velasco Rivero told me. He is one of a group of Sierra-based Jesuits who serve as traveling clerics and Tarahumara-chabochi intermediaries—several speak excellent Rarámuri—and who are now among Mexico's most adamant critics of chabochi culture's effect upon the Tarahumara. Outside of the state tourism office it's hard to find anyone in Chihuahua who believes wholeheartedly in the Copper Canyon development blueprint, with its vast glass-and-steel canyon-rim scaffolding and its enthusiastic estimates of the size of the potential visitor market: 7.2 million from the U.S., one brochure declares in headline, another 5.5 million from Mexico. But I heard chabochis and even a few Tarahumara say the region could use this economic boost—some built-up tourist facilities and a local commercial airport. Poverty is not noble, one Creel hotel owner said heatedly, even when it lives in splendid canyons and dresses in beautiful skirts.
To which the priests reply: Jobs cleaning hotel rooms, with pretty paintings of Tarahumara on the lobby walls, are no advancement at all. "Don't pretend these are projects to help the Tarahumara," de Velasco said crisply. "They're to attract tourists and increase private profits. A 'Tarahumara village' is an absurdity—a lie, really. A gondola over the canyon would be a desecration. And this is an area without water; one new hotel will use more in a day than what a Tarahumara family consumes in a year. With what the government is preparing to invest for hotels, they could bring potable water to all the Tarahumara, which would be much more useful to them than creating a fake village where they can sell things."
After dark in Guagüeyvo, on the night before Good Friday, people began gathering outside the church, a half mile from Lorena's parents' house, across a fallow cornfield and a rocky stream gully. The drumming hadn't stopped; it would continue all night, off and on, and throughout the next 51 hours. Semana Santa rituals had been explained to me by anthropologists, by Tarahumara in other communities, by relatives in Fidencia's kitchen, and there wasn't much overlap in the explanations. The drumming, for example: It starts up three weeks before Semana Santa, all over the Sierra Madre, and a soft-voiced woman stirring lunch stew at a Rarámuri school had told me the sound keeps God from dozing off, because the devil comes nearest this time of the year.

When I tried this on Fidencia, she replied along the lines of, "Isn't that interesting," in a let's-humor-the-chabochi sort of way, and shrugged. We drum because it's time to drum, she said, sounding exactly like my grandmothertrying to remember why a wine glass gets stomped on at the end of Jewish weddings. The Pharisees applying paint to their bodies; the costumed soldiers carrying decorated wooden swords; the shoulder-borne bowers containing Jesus and the Virgin; the straw effigy of Judas—startlingly shaped, one can't help but notice, to suggest the recent ingestion of a lot of Viagra—these are Semana Santa elements replicated all over the Sierra Madre, the crucifixion story superimposed upon planting-season ceremonies, good-over-evil catharsis, and a pre-Christian reverence for the rain, the sun, the moon.
In Guagüeyvo I made one delicate inquiry about Judas's anatomy, having waited for a moment when no men were present, and every woman in the room hooted with laughter. But nobody was sure about the answer, and a visiting nun said she gathered the intent was to make Judas look ridiculous. "Remember, he's a traitor," the nun said. "And he's about to be destroyed."
Now the moon was full as Lorena and I started out across the cornfield. I had put on a skirt and tied a bandanna over my hair, wanting to appear respectful, and Lorena, who was in the corduroy jeans she'd been wearing all day, looked at me reproachfully. "You dressed up," she said, and sighed. "Well, OK."
She went back into the house and came out wearing a skirt and scarf—but the scarf was wrapped as a headband, not tied under her chin. As we walked in the moonlight toward the churchyard, where Lorena's cousins were beating the goatskin drums and dancing in snaky lines, she shoved rocks out of the way with her athletic shoes. "I'm not putting on huaraches, though" she said. "I get too many stones under my feet."
It's so easy to absorb this in a certain way, the mixed-heritage woman in battle with her own identity, and so on. But Lorena's father was in the churchyard already, playing a Tarahumara wood flute with his eyes closed as men with painted faces traced a slow skipping grapevine around him. He is a lean, dark-skinned man who had shaken my hand without comment when I arrived, fixed his gaze on me for a time, and then said abruptly, "Where were you when the Twin Towers fell?" After he heard my answer (home, in California), he nodded, asked me whether Osama bin Laden had been located yet, and went back to playing his flute. He and his twin brother were helping direct the Semana Santa ceremonies. They belong to Guagüeyvo. Lorena does not, not anymore, because she wants for herself and her three young sons things the canyon's isolation and inadequate elementary school can't provide. After she began working as a nurse, she came home for five years, posted at the small medical facility the state had built beside the Guagüeyvo school. They offered to let her stay on. She elected not to. She no longer owns a Rarámuri skirt that fits.

"I am an indigenous woman," Lorena said to me late that night, as we sat up talking; we were grappling with the idea of identity, what it means to be of one culture or another, and how easy it is to muddle things: When do efforts to preserve an indigenous culture begin to trap individuals in some romantic notion of what that culture is supposed to be? Lorena has no enthusiasm for the Copper Canyon development plan; room-cleaning jobs are not what her people need, she said, and she feels a little queasy when she sees the Rarámuri handicraft sellers looking solemn and colorful while the tourists take their pictures. But her reasons are fundamentally unsentimental: They don't make enough money at it. They ought to charge more than they do. And their children ought to be in school. And they ought to stop teaching their sons how to drink.
A single candle was burning in the back room Lorena and I were sharing with two of her boys. It was past midnight. We could still hear the drums. "I feel so calm when I come here," Lorena whispered.
Then she said, suddenly, "I'm going to have a birthday party when my son turns six. I'll tell my sisters I want them to come. I want them to leave here. Maybe just for a few days. But I want them to see what it feels like in town." She meant her two unmarried sisters, both younger, both minimally schooled, living in the family house. The older of the two has three children already, but the children's father has another family in Guagüeyvo. "They could be bilingual nurses too, working in clinics," Lorena whispered. "There is nothing for them here."
Judas burned on Saturday morning. The vats of corn brew were dragged into the open, drinking began at first light, and hot pozole, corn stew made with a slaughtered goat and rabbits caught by Pharisees on the trail the day before, was dished from giant barrels outside a house up the canyon from Lorena's. ("I would walk with you on the trails this afternoon to homes you are unable to see from here," one of Lorena's cousins said courteously, handing me a dish of pozole and a gourd of the corn brew, "but I plan to be extremely drunk.") Then everybody tramped to the churchyard. The effigy was dragged to an open place, a black baseball cap on its head, and a half dozen drunk men fell upon it, shouting, kicking, ripping at the limbs. Finally someone put a match to Judas, and when there was nothing left but ashes and charred bits of straw, the drunk men stood back unsteadily, breathing hard.
Someone cried, "¿Ahora qué hacemos?"
Lorena broke up laughing. She shot me a look. She squeezed her five-year-old's shoulders and repeated this, loudly. "¿Ahora qué hacemos?—What do we do next?"

Cynthia Gorney reported on Mexico's southern border in the February issue. Photographer Robb Kendrick's latest book is Still, about 21st-century cowboys.

Hogar

Hogar
Home 
 

Romans 8:1 

"There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."

 

  Early in The Morning

Jack Frost creeps across the hillside, trailing chilling, icy crystals in his wake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chess: "Hogar" "Home"

Oro y Grana

Oro y Grana
John 11:25
"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:"



Morning fog

Early morning fog lifts as the sun gently lights a golden glow across the calm waters of a peaceful Finnish lake.

Chess: "Oro y Grana"

Hispania Baetica

Hispania Baetica
see this article in full at:


Hispania Baetica was one of three Imperial.. ......

Gugghenheim

The Beat
Bilbao
Gugghenheim

Psalm 4:5
"Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD."
Prov. 11:5
"The righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way: but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness."

A lovely image filled with millions of twinkling lights is this week's Creative Challenge: Season's Greetings w

Chess: "Bilbao" "key" "arrojo" "clave" "steelyard"

Lucien Carr

Vicky Berrocal
San Sebastián

La novela secreta de los beats

En 1944, William Burroughs y Jack Kerouac, por entonces aspirantes a escritores, se vieron envueltos en la estela de un asesinato que escandalizó Nueva York. El episodio inspiró una narración a cuatro manos que permaneció inédita hasta ahora. Además de un fragmento de la obra, ofrecemos la crónica de su gestación y del nacimiento de la contracultura
Por John Walsh
The Independent
Londres, 2008

Los admiradores de la generación beat saben desde hace años de la existencia de la "Novela del Origen", pero tuvieron que esperar la muerte de un periodista de United Press International para verla en letra impresa. La publicación, en noviembre pasado, de And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, [literalmente, "Y los hipopótamos fueron hervidos en sus tanques"] de William S. Burroughs y Jack Kerouac, es un acontecimiento literario, no sólo porque confederó a dos de los tres escritores beat más destacados, sino porque el libro relata una historia –de amistad masculina, obsesión gay y asesinato– que llegó a fascinar a una veintena de escritores estadounidenses. Los lectores que piensan que la obra maestra de Kerouac, En el camino, publicada en 1957, fue su obra de juventud, se asombran al constatar que Hippos... fue escrita en 1944. El protobeat tenía entonces apenas 22 años, y era "un extraño y solitario místico católico" de Lowell, Massachusetts. Su amigo Burroughs, frío, aterrador y entendido en conductas extremas, tenía 30 años; su época de éxito con El almuerzo desnudo y Junkie empezaría más tarde, en 1959. El tercero de esta troika de visionarios "volados", drogones y sexualmente ambiguos era Allen Ginsberg, el desgarbado poeta judío vorazmente homosexual, cuyo innovador libro, Aullido y otros poemas, fue publicado en 1956.

Una década antes de concitar la atención pública, los tres estuvieron implicados en el caso Carr-Kammerer. Un noche del verano de 1943, Ginsberg, estudiante de la Universidad de Columbia, escuchó música procedente de la residencia estudiantil del Union Theological Seminary. Llamó a la puerta y preguntó qué era (el Trío n° 1 de Brahms). El admirador de Brahms era Lucien Carr, de St. Louis, Missouri. Entablaron conversación y se hicieron amigos. Carr llevó a Ginsberg a Greenwich Village y les presentó a David Kammerer y al más viejo amigo de Kammerer, William Burroughs, también originario de St. Louis.

Cuando llegó Navidad, se produjeron encuentros trascendentales. Carr conoció a Edie Parker, una rica mujer de Detroit que era novia de Jack Kerouac. Kerouac estaba ausente, en el mar, pero cuando volvió, Edie se lo presentó a Carr en su casa. Carr llevó a Edie a conocer a Ginsberg y le dio a éste la dirección de Kerouac. El primer encuentro de los héroes beat se produjo, prosaicamente, a la hora del desayuno; los tres hablaron de poesía durante horas y más tarde le hicieron una formal visita conjunta a Burroughs para ver qué podían aprender de él. Fue un banquete literario en permanente expansión.

Durante los meses que siguieron, los nuevos amigos se reunieron en el departamento de Edie de la calle 118 y Avenida Amsterdam. Kerouac se instaló allí a vivir con ella y su compañera de departamento, Joan Vollmer, quien más tarde se casó con Burroughs y terminaría muerta de un disparo en 1951, cuando Burroughs, ebrio, se propuso jugar a Guillermo Tell con ella. Por el momento, sin embargo, era una bendición, al final de una guerra titánica, encontrarse en el núcleo de una nueva generación de escritores.

Los acontecimientos verdaderos en los que se basa el libro ocurrieron durante las primeras horas del lunes 16 de agosto de 1944. Carr y Kammerer caminaban junto al río Hudson en Riverside Park, en el Upper West Side neoyorquino. Lucien Carr tenía 19 años y era esbelto, rubio y apuesto. Kammerer tenía 33, un metro noventa, era atlético y musculoso. Se habían conocido en St Louis en 1936, cuando Carr tenía 11 años, y más tarde se habían visto con frecuencia en la Universidad George Washington, donde Carr había participado en los paseos en bicicleta por entornos naturales que organizaba Kammerer, quien se desempeñaba como instructor de educación física. Kammerer era gay y durante años había estado obsesionado sexualmente por Carr.

Los dos hombres estaban ebrios. Se pelearon y rodaron sobre la hierba. Kammerer hizo lo que los diarios calificaron como "una propuesta indecente", presumiblemente acompañándola con la acción. Carr respondió con furia. Apuñaló dos veces en el pecho a Kammerer con una pequeña navaja de boy-scout. Después puso piedras en el bolsillo del otro y lo arrojó al Hudson.

Terriblemente perturbado, fue a ver a Burroughs, quien le recomendó que le contara lo ocurrido a su familia y que consultara a un abogado. En vez de seguir el consejo, Carr fue a ver a Kerouac, quien estuvo con él todo el día: lo llevó a una galería de arte y al cine a ver el nuevo film de Korda, Las cuatro plumas, y vio cómo el joven se deshacía de la navaja arrojándola a una alcantarilla y de los anteojos del muerto, abandonándolos en el parque.

Incapaz de tolerar la culpa, Carr fue a la policía y confesó su crimen. Los guardacostas encontraron el cuerpo de Kammerer en el río y Carr fue acusado de asesinato en segundo grado. Kerouac fue arrestado como testigo material y se salvó por poco de un cargo por complicidad. Cuando Leo, el padre de Kerouac, se negó a pagar los cien dólares de la fianza de su hijo, Kerouac y Edie se casaron en la cárcel para que la familia de ella pagara la fianza.

El juicio se celebró el 15 de septiembre de 1944 y Lucien Carr fue condenado a un máximo de diez años de cárcel. En cuanto se anunció la sentencia, varios escribas de Nueva York se pusieron a redactar sus versiones del crimen. Ginsberg escribió un borrador de su novela Bloodsong, pero el vicedecano de Columbia lo desalentó, tras decidir que la universidad podía prescindir de una mayor notoriedad. El poeta John Hollander escribió sobre el caso para el Columbia Spectator, el periódico de la universidad. Entre otros que se sintieron intrigados por el homicidio, un crimen pasional gay, se contaron James Baldwin y un joven corrector de la revista The New Yorker llamado Truman Capote.

En octubre de 1944, tras pasar un período con sus padres, Burroughs se mudó a un departamento en Riverside Drive y reanudó sus visitas al departamento que compartían Edie, Joan y Kerouac. Allí fue donde ambos hombres empezaron a colaborar para escribir la novela basada en el asesinato de Kammerer.

Escribieron capítulos alternados, Burroughs como "Will Dennison", un barman de Nueva York, y Kerouac como "Mike Ryko", descripto como "un finlandés pelirrojo, de 19 años, una suerte de marino mercante vestido con sucio uniforme caqui". Aunque muchos de los intereses temáticos y las posteriores obsesiones de Burroughs –drogas, muerte violenta, prostitutas, sexualidad gay, vasos rotos– son evidentes desde el primer momento, el joven Kerouac no se quedó atrás del impávido sabio. "Existía una clara división del material, que establecía quién escribía qué cosa", le dijo Burroughs a su biógrafo Ted Morgan. "No pretendíamos precisión literal, sino tan sólo una aproximación. Nos divertimos escribiendo eso. Por supuesto, lo que escribimos estaba determinado por los hechos reales… es decir, Jack sabía una parte y yo otra. Y ficcionalizamos. En realidad, el crimen se cometió con un cuchillo, no con un hacha. Tuve que disfrazar a los personajes, así que convertí al personaje de Lucien en un turco."

Encontraron una agente, Madeline Brennan, quien elogió el manuscrito y lo hizo circular en algunas editoriales. Durante un tiempo, las cosas parecieron promisorias. El 14 de marzo de 1945, Kerouac le escribió una carta a su hermana Caroline: "Por ser la clase de libro que es (un retrato del segmento ‘perdido’ de nuestra generación, nada sentimental, honesto y sensacionalmente real), es bueno, pero no sabemos si esa clase de libros interesa en este momento, aunque después de la guerra sin duda habrá una verdadera oleada de libros de ‘la generación perdida’ y el nuestro es imbatible en ese campo".

Imaginemos a los editores estadounidenses de 1945 ante todas esas referencias a la droga, las palabras soeces, el contexto gay ("Este Phillip es la clase de muchacho a quien los maricones literarios suelen escribirle sonetos, que empiezan: ‘Oh tú, efebo griego de cabellos color ala de cuervo…") y los momentos alucinatorios (como el pasaje en que dos de los personajes mastican vidrio roto en el capítulo uno), y decidiendo que publicarla sería buscarse demasiados problemas. Ningún editor la aceptó. Burroughs se mostró estoico. "No era suficientemente sensacionalista ni tampoco estaba tan bien escrito ni era suficientemente interesante desde un punto de vista literario. Era algo más bien intermedio. Su espíritu era existencialista, una tendencia que prevalecía en esa época, pero que todavía no había llegado a Estados Unidos. Simplemente, no era comercialmente viable."

Es fácil encontrar al verdadero Kerouac y al verdadero Burroughs escondidos detrás de sus narradores, y ver a Carr y a Kammerer tras las figuras de Phillip Tourian y Ramsay Allen. La conversación en la que Phillip le pregunta a Mike a qué lugar navegará exactamente ahora es un reflejo de lo que Carr podría haberle dicho a Kerouac pocas semanas antes.

Los dos hombres fueron amigos durante toda la vida, pero el libro a veces se interpuso entre ellos. Carr obtuvo su libertad bajo palabra después de dos años de cárcel, se reinventó como Lou Carr, encontró empleo en la agencia de noticias United Press International (UPI), se casó, fundó una familia y trató de bloquear todos los intentos de relatar la historia del homicidio. Pidió que su nombre se eliminara de las dedicatorias (un verdadero honor) que Ginsberg había puesto en Aullido.

Kerouac, mientras tanto, siguió esperando que algún editor publicara Hippos..., cuyo título había sido tomado de la crónica radial sobre un incendio en el zoológico de St. Louis. A fines de la década de 1950 y durante la de 1960, aterrorizó a Carr hablando de la posibilidad de revivir la novela. Finalmente contó la historia con nombres ficticios en su novela autobiográfica Vanity of Duluoz. Luego, una biografía de Kerouac, publicada en 1973 y escrita por Ann Charters, volvió a poner sobre el tapete la muerte de Kammerer, y un artículo de la revista New York, de abril de 1976, incluyó fragmentos de la novela como si fueran hechos reales. Carr se sintió mortificado de que reapareciera su pasado homicida y que sus nuevos colegas pudieran enterarse. Burroughs ayudó a su amigo a demandar a la revista y ganó el derecho de compartir el control sobre el libro en el futuro.

El albacea de Burroughs, James Grauerholz, visitó a Carr tras la muerte de Burroughs en 1997, y le prometió que no autorizaría la publicación de la novela en vida de Carr. Éste murió en 2005 y es por eso que hoy podemos leer este libro.

No es la más sofisticada de las novelas policiales y no muestra a ninguno de los dos escritores en sus mejores momentos. Pero evoca una época, hacia el final de la guerra, y un lugar, Manhattan, que se ha contaminado llenándose de alcohol, prostitutas, marineros, homosexuales y almas perdidas, todos ellos preguntándose cuándo volverá a arrancar el mundo. Es una fascinante instantánea de una época perdida. Si uno está buscando el vínculo entre los impotentes errabundos de posguerra de París era una fiesta, de Ernest Hemingway, los tipos que viven en los bares de Última salida a Brooklyn, de Hubert Selby Jr. y los jóvenes reventados de Menos que cero, de Bret Easton Ellis, ya no tendrá que continuar la búsqueda.

[Traducción: Mirta Rosenberg] LA NACION

The young generation: Burroughs and Kerouac - an unpublished collaboration

In 1944, two aspiring writers named William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were implicated in a murder that scandalised New York. The episode inspired a collaboration, a debut that remained unpublished – until now. John Walsh gives the lowdown on the novel that set them on the road

Monday, 3 November 2008

REX FEATURES

And the Beat goes on: (above) William S Burroughs in Toronto in 1960

Fans of the Beat generation have known for years about The Novel That Kicked It All Off, but they've had to wait until the death of a journalist at United Press International for it to be published. The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event, not only because it drew two of the three leading Beat writers into confederacy, but because the book told a story – of male friendship, gay obsession and murder – that came to fascinate a score of American authors.

Readers who think Kerouac's 1957 masterpiece On the Road was a young man's book are startled to find that Hippos was written in 1944. The proto-Beat was only 22, a "strange solitary Catholic mystic" from Lowell, Massachusetts. His friend Burroughs, cold, scary and a connoisseur of extreme behaviour, was 30; his years of success with Naked Lunch and Junky came later, in 1959. The third of their troika of strung-out, druggy, sexually ambiguous visionaries was Allen Ginsberg, the gawky, Jewish, voraciously homosexual poet, whose ground-breaking Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956.
A decade before they came to public attention, all were involved in the Carr-Kammerer case. One night in summer 1943, Ginsberg, a Columbia University student, heard music in the dormitory of the Union Theological Seminary. He knocked on the door and asked what it was (Brahms's Trio No 1.) The Brahms fan was Lucien Carr from St Louis, Missouri. They talked and became friends. Carr took Ginsberg to Greenwich Village and introduced him to David Kammerer and to Kammerer's oldest friend, William Burroughs, also from St Louis.
As Christmas approached, momentous meetings occurred. Carr met Edie Parker, a rich Detroit woman and the girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was away at sea but, on his return, Edie introduced him to Carr in her apartment. Carr took Edie to meet Ginsberg, and gave him Kerouac's address. The Beat heroes' first meeting was, prosaically, at breakfast-time; they discussed poetry for hours and later paid a joint formal visit to Burroughs to see what they could learn. It was an ever-expanding literary party.
In the following months, the new friends met in Edie's apartment at 118th Street and Amsterdam Ave. Kerouac came to live with her and her flatmate, Joan Vollman, who later married Burroughs and was shot by him, when a drinking game went wrong, in 1951. For now, though, it was bliss, at the end of a titanic war, to be at the heart of a new generation of writers.
The real-life events behind the book occurred in the early hours of Monday morning, 16 August 1944. Carr and Kammerer were walking beside the Hudson in Riverside Park on New York's Upper West Side. Lucien Carr was 19, slight, blond and good-looking. Kammerer was 33, 6ft tall, athletic, muscular. They'd met in St Louis in 1936, when Carr was 11, and later at George Washington University, when Carr joined nature hikes conducted by Kammerer, the PE instructor. Kammerer was gay and had for years been sexually obsessed with Carr.
Both men were drunk. They quarrelled and rolled on the grass. Kammerer made what the papers called "an indecent proposal", presumably backing it up with action. Carr responded with fury. He stabbed Kammerer twice in the chest with a little Boy Scout knife. Then he put some rocks in the bleeding man's pockets and rolled him into the Hudson.
In disarray, he went to Burroughs, who recommended that he tell his family and consult a lawyer. Instead, he went to see Kerouac, who hung out with him all next day, took him to an art gallery and the new Korda movie The Four Feathers, and watched him dispose of the knife down a sewer and get rid of the dead man's spectacles in the park.
Unable to stand the guilt, Carr went to the police and confessed. Coastguards found Kammerer's body in the river, and Carr was accused of second-degree murder. Kerouac was arrested as a material witness and narrowly missed being charged as an accessory. In an odd twist, when Kerouac's father Leo refused to pay $100 for his son's bail, Kerouac and Edie got married in jail so that her family would pay his bail.
The trial took place on 15 September 1944, and Lucien Carr was sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in jail. No sooner was the sentence announced than several New York scribes began writing their versions of the killing. Ginsberg wrote a draft of The Bloodsong, which recreated Kammerer's last hours, but was discouraged by the assistant dean of Columbia, who decided the university could live without more notoriety. The poet John Hollander wrote about it for the Columbia Spectator. Among others intrigued by the crime-of-passion gay homicide were James Baldwin, and a young copy-boy at the The New Yorker called Truman Capote.
In October 1944, after a period staying with his parents, Burroughs moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive and resumed calling on the apartment shared by Edie, Joan and Kerouac. It was here that the two men began collaborating on their joint novel based on the Kammerer murder.
They wrote alternate chapters, Burroughs as "Will Dennison," a New York bartender, Kerouac as "Mike Ryko," described as "a 19-year-old, red-haired Finn, a sort of merchant seaman dressed in dirty khaki". While many of Burroughs' thematic interests and later obsessions – drugs, violent death, hustlers, gay sex, broken glass – are apparent from an early stage, the young Kerouac held his own against the chilly sage. "There was a clear separation of material as to who wrote what," Burroughs told his biographer, Ted Morgan. "We weren't trying for literal accuracy at all, just some approximation. We had fun doing it. Of course what we wrote was dictated by the actual course of events – that is, Jack knew one thing and I knew another. We fictionalised. The killing was actually done with a knife, it wasn't done with a hatchet at all. I had to disguise the characters, so I made Lucien's character a Turk."
They found an agent, Madeline Brennan, who praised the manuscript and hawked it around some publishers. For a time, things looked promising. On 14 March 1945, Kerouac wrote a letter to his sister Caroline: "For the kind of book it is – a portrait of the 'lost' segment of our generation, hard-boiled, honest and sensationally real – it is good, but we don't know if those kinds of books are much in demand now, although after the war there will no doubt be a veritable rash of 'lost generation' books and ours in that field can't be beat."
You can imagine American publishers in 1945 inspecting the junkie references, the F-words, the gay context ("This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, 'O raven-haired Grecian lad...'") and the hallucinogenic moments – like when two of the characters chew broken glass in Chapter One – and deciding it was too much trouble. None took it on. Burroughs was stoic. "It wasn't sensational enough to make it from that point of view, nor was it well-written or interesting enough to make it from a purely literary point of view. It sort of fell in-between. It was very much in the Existentialist genre, the prevailing mode of the period, but that hadn't hit America yet. It just wasn't a commercially viable property."
It's easy to spot the real Kerouac and Burroughs behind their narrators, and to see Carr and Kammerer behind the figures of Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen. The conversation in which Phillip asks Mike when next he's going to sea exactly mirrors what Carr would have said to Kerouac a few weeks before.
The two men stayed friends for life, but the book sometimes came between them. When Carr was released on parole after serving two years, he reinvented himself as Lou Carr, found a job at UPI, the news service, got married, started a family and tried to block any attempts to re-tell the Columbia manslaughter story. He asked for his name to be removed from the dedication (a signal honour) to Ginsberg's Howl.
Kerouac, meanwhile, kept hoping some publisher would bring out Hippos. In the late 1950s and 1960s, he terrified Carr by talking about reviving it. Eventually he told the story under fictional names in his autobiographical novel, Vanity of Duluoz. Then a 1973 biography of Kerouac by Ann Charters brought up the death of Kammerer, and an article in New York magazine, in April 1976, included extracts from Hippos as if they were hard facts. Carr was mortified to have his homicidal past dragged up for his new colleagues to read. Burroughs helped his friend by suing the magazine, and won the right to share control over the book's future.
Burroughs's executor, James Grauerholz, visited Carr after Burroughs died in 1997 and promised he wouldn't allow publication of the novel while Carr was alive. Carr died in 2005, which is why you can read the book at last.
It's not the most sophisticated crime novel, and it doesn't show either writer at his best. But it evokes a time, towards the end of the war, and a place, Manhattan, that's become sour with drunks, whores, sailors, faggots and lost souls, all wondering when the world is going to re-start. It's a fascinating snapshot from a lost era. If you're looking for the link between Hemingway's impotent post-war drifters in The Sun Also Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of Last Exit to Brooklyn and the zonked-out kids of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, look no further.
To order a copy of 'And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks' by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs for the special price of £18 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Lucien Carr, a Founder and a Muse of the Beat Generation, Dies at 79

By WILBORN HAMPTON

Published: January 30, 2005
Lucien Carr, one of the founders -- and one of the last survivors -- of the Beat Generation of poets and writers, although one who never wrote poetry or novels, died on Friday. He was 79.
Mr. Carr died at George Washington University Hospital after collapsing at his home in Washington, said his son, the writer Caleb Carr. He had suffered from bone cancer in recent years.
A literary lion who never roared, Mr. Carr served as an inspirational muse to a bunch of college chums at Columbia University in the 1940's: the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelists William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, writers who a decade later changed the course of American letters in coffeehouses in San Francisco and New York.
It was Mr. Carr, for example, who introduced Ginsberg to the works of Rimbaud, a major influence on Ginsberg's work, and then introduced Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg. He introduced them all to Neal Cassady, a railway worker with literary ambitions who became part of the Columbia undergraduates' coterie of ''angel-headed hipsters.'' Together they formed the nucleus of what became the Beats.
Any practical assistance Mr. Carr gave to the Beat movement came as an encouraging editor, the profession he pursued for nearly half a century at United Press and United Press International. It was Mr. Carr, for example, who gave Kerouac the roll of teletype paper, pilfered from U.P., on which the author wrote ''On the Road,'' and it was Mr. Carr who was among the first to read the novel and offer advice, which may or may not have been taken. As Ginsberg once said, ''Lou was the glue.''
Chroniclers of the era and biographers of its writers have always had as much trouble placing Mr. Carr in the group snapshot of the Beats as they have had in defining the movement. Both defied description. The one episode all seize upon came while Mr. Carr was still at Columbia. In repulsing the homosexual advances of a hanger-on of the Beat crowd, Mr. Carr stabbed his pursuer with a Boy Scout knife and killed him. Mr. Carr served a brief time in prison for manslaughter, but was later pardoned.
Born in New York but raised in St. Louis, Mr. Carr had boyish good looks that were only enhanced by a slouchy physique and sardonic grin hidden under a riverboat gambler mustache. A motorcycle enthusiast, who took up boating on his retirement, Mr. Carr was a great jazz aficionado and an avid reader for whom the greatest joys in life were in simple things like a long riff on a tenor sax or a well-turned dependent clause.
Shortly after leaving Columbia, Mr. Carr, to the consternation of his fellow Beats, took a job with United Press in New York and spent the rest of his career, until his retirement in 1993, with the wire service, mostly as the news editor supervising the agency's report for morning newspapers. He remained in contact with the Beats, although Kerouac and Cassady died young. Ginsberg remained a close friend until his death in 1997 and often visited Mr. Carr at U.P.I.'s newsroom to lobby for coverage of whatever political cause he was pursuing at the moment.
If he had been more of a midwife to the Beats, Mr. Carr was an extremely vocal mentor to two generations of journalists who came up through the ranks at U.P.I. He was a great champion of brevity. ''Why don't you just start with the second paragraph?'' was his frequent advice to young reporters overly fond of their own prose.
He guided U.P.I.'s coverage of the major stories of the second half of the 20th century from the cold war and the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam and the moon landing.
He was married twice, first to the former Francesca von Hartz, with whom he had three sons: Simon, of New York City; Caleb, of Cherry Plain, N.Y.; and Ethan, of Amherst, Mass. His second wife was the former Sheila Johnson. He is survived by all of them as well as by Kathleen Silvassy, his companion for the last several years of his life.
source :

Early Life

Carr was born in New York City; his parents, Russell Carr and Marian Gratz Carr, were both products of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, young Lucien and his mother moved back to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.^[1]
At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer, a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a member, and quickly became infatuated with the teenager.
Over the next five years, Kammerer pursued Carr, showing up wherever the young man was enrolled at school. Carr would later insist, as would his friends and family, that Kammerer had been hounding Carr sexually with a predatory persistence that would today be considered stalking. Whether Kammerer’s attentions were frightening or flattering to the younger man (or both) is now a matter of some debate among those who chronicle the history of the Beat Generation. What is not in dispute is that Carr moved quickly from school to school: from the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to the University of Chicago, and that Kammerer followed him to each one. The two of them socialized on occasion. Carr always insisted, and Burroughs believed, that he never had sex with Kammerer; Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally wrote that Kammerer "was a Doppelgänger whose sexual desires Lucien would not gratify; their connection was an intertwined mass of frustration that hinted ominously of trouble."
Carr’s University of Chicago career ended quickly and badly, with an episode that concluded with the young man putting his head into a gas oven. He explained away this act as a “work of art,” but the apparent suicide attempt, which Carr’s family believed was catalyzed by Kammerer, led to a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward at Cook County hospital. Carr’s mother, who had by this time moved to New York City, brought her son there and enrolled him at Columbia University, close to her own home.
If Marian Carr was seeking to protect her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. Kammerer soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton street in the West Village.
William Burroughs also moved to New York, to an apartment a block away from Kammerer. The two older men remained friends.

Columbia and the Beats

As a freshman at Columbia, Carr was recognized as an exceptional student with a quick, roving mind. A fellow student from Lionel Trilling’s humanities class described him as “stunningly brilliant…. It seemed as if he and Trilling were having a private conversation.”
It was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on 122nd street (an overflow residence for Columbia), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio.^[11] Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat scene had formed, with Carr at the center. As Ginsberg put it, “Lou was the glue.”
Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York’s grimier underbelly together. Carr had a taste for provocative behavior, for bawdy songs and for coarse antics aimed at shocking those with staid middle-class values. According to Kerouac, Carr once convinced him to get into an empty beer keg, which Carr then rolled down Broadway. Ginsberg wrote in his journal at the time: “Know these words, and you speak the Carr language: fruit, phallus, clitoris, cacoethes, feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.” It was Carr who first introduced Ginsberg to the poetry and the story of Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet whose youthful brilliance, decadent style and early death make him a enduring favorite among college students. Rimbaud would be a major influence on Ginsberg’s poetry.
Ginsberg was plainly fascinated by Carr, whom he viewed as a self-destructive egotist but also as a possessor of real genius.^[16] Fellow students saw Carr as talented and dissolute, a prank-loving late-night reveler who haunted the dark pockets of Chelsea and Greenwich Village until dawn, without making a dent in his brilliant performance in the classroom. On one occasion, asked why he was carrying a jar of jam across the campus, Carr simply explained that he was “going on a date.” Returning to his dorm in the early hours another morning to find that his bed had been short-sheeted, Carr retaliated by spraying the rooms of his dorm-mates with the hallway fire-hose – while they were still sleeping.
Carr developed what he called the “New Vision,” a thesis recycled from Emersonian transcendentalism and Paris Bohemianism which helped undergird the Beats’ creative rebellion:
“1) Naked self-expression is the seed of creativity. 2) The artist’s consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses. 3) Art eludes conventional morality.”
For ten months, Kammerer remained a fringe member of this simmering crowd, still utterly infatuated with Carr, who sometimes avoided him and on other occasions indulged Kammerer’s attentions. On one occasion he may even have brought Kammerer to a session of Trilling’s class.Accounts of this period report that Kammerer’s presence and lovelorn devotion to Carr made many of the other Beats uncomfortable. On one occasion, Burroughs found Kammerer trying to hang Kerouac's cat. Kammerer’s psyche was evidently decaying; he was barely scraping by, helping a janitor clean his building on Morton Street in exchange for rent.In July, Carr and Kerouac began talking about shipping out of New York on a Merchant Marine vessel, a scheme which drove Kammerer frantic with anxiety at the possibility of losing Carr. In early August, Kammerer crawled into Carr’s room via the fire escape and watched him sleep for half an hour; he was caught by a guard as he crawled back out again.

Killing in Riverside Park

On August 13, 1944, Carr and Kerouac attempted, and failed, to ship out of New York to France on a merchant ship - aiming to fulfill a fantasy of walking across France in character as a Frenchman (Kerouac) and his deaf-mute friend (Carr), and hoping to be in Paris in time for the Allied liberation. Kicked off the ship by the first mate at the last minute, the two men drank together at the Beats’ regular bar, the West End. Kerouac left first, and bumped into Kammerer, who asked where Carr was. Kerouac told him.
Kammerer caught up with Carr at the West End, and the two men went for a walk, ending up in Riverside Park on Manhattan's upper west side.
According to Carr’s version of the night, he and Kammerer were resting near 115th street when Kammerer made yet another sexual advance. When Carr rejected it, he said, Kammerer assaulted him physically, and being larger, gained the upper hand. In desperation and panic, Carr said, he stabbed the older man, using a Boy Scout knife from his St. Louis childhood. Carr then tied his assailant’s hands and feet, wrapped Kemmerer’s belt around his arms, weighted the body with rocks, and dumped it in the nearby Hudson River.
Next, Carr went to the apartment of William Burroughs, gave him Kammerer’s bloodied pack of cigarettes, and explained the incident. Burroughs flushed the cigarettes down the toilet, and told Carr to get a lawyer and turn himself in. Instead Carr sought out Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife and some of Kammerer's belongings before the two went to a movie and the Museum of Modern Art to look at paintings. Finally, Carr went to his mother’s house and then to the office of the New York District Attorney, where he confessed. The prosecutors, uncertain whether the story was true – or whether a crime had even been committed – kept him in custody until they had recovered Kammerer's body. Carr identified the corpse, and then led police to where he had thrown Kammerer's eyeglasses in Morningside Park.
Kerouac (who was identified in the New York Times coverage of the crime as a "23-year-old seaman") was arrested as a material witness, as was Burroughs. Burroughs’ father posted bail, but in a famous Beat side-story, Kerouac’s father refused to post the hundred-dollar bond to bail him out. In the end, Edie Parker’s parents agreed to post the money if Kerouac would marry their daughter. With detectives serving as witnesses, Edie and Jack were married at the Municipal Building (where New York City couples still get married by the dozens every day),^[30] and after his release, he moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Parker’s hometown. Their marriage was annulled within a year.
Carr was charged with second-degree murder. The story was closely followed in the press, involving as it did a well-liked, gifted student from a prominent family, New York’s premier university, and the scandalous whiff of homosexuality.^[31] The newspaper coverage embraced Carr’s story of an obsessed homosexual preying on an appealing heterosexual younger man, who finally lashed out in self-defense.^[32] The Daily News called the killing an "honor slaying."^[33] If there were subtler shadings to the tale of Carr’s five-year saga with Kammerer, the newspapers ignored them.^[34] Carr pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter, and his mother testified at a sentencing hearing about Kammerer’s predatory habits. Carr was sentenced to a term of one-to-twenty years in prison; he served two years in the Elmira Correctional Facility in Upstate New York and was released.^[35]
Carr’s Beat crowd (which Ginsberg called “the Libertine Circle”) was, for a time, shattered by the killing. Several members sought to write about the events. Kerouac's The Town and the City is a fictional retelling, in which Carr is represented by the character "Kenneth Wood"; a more literal depiction of events appears in Kerouac’s later Vanity of Duluoz. Soon after the killing, Allen Ginsberg began a novel about the crime which he called “The Bloodsong,” but his English instructor at Columbia, seeking to preclude more negative publicity for Carr or the university, convinced Ginsberg to abandon it.^[36] According to author Bill Morgan in his book, The Beat Generation in New York, the Carr incident also inspired Kerouac and Burroughs to collaborate in 1945 on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which wase published for the first time in November 2008.^[37]
Settling Down
After his prison term, Carr went to work for United Press International, where he was hired as a copy boy in 1946. He remained on good terms with his Beat friends, and served as best man when Kerouac impetuously married Joan Haverty in November of 1950.^[38] Carr has sometimes been credited with providing Kerouac with a roll of teletype paper “pilfered” from the UPI offices, on which Kerouac then wrote the entire first draft of On the Road in a 20-day marathon fueled by coffee, speed, and marijuana. The scroll was real, but Carr’s share of this first draft tale is probably a conflation of two different episodes; the 119-foot first roll, which Kerouac wrote in April 1951, was actually many different large sheets of paper trimmed down and taped together. After Kerouac finished that first version, he moved briefly into Carr's apartment on 21st street, where he wrote a second draft in May on a roll of UPI teletype, and then transferred that work to individual pages for his publisher.^[40]
Carr remained a diligent and devoted employee of UPI. In 1956, when Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On The Road were about to be national sensations, Carr quietly was promoted to night news editor.
Leaving behind his youthful exhibitionism, Carr came to cherish his privacy. In one well-noted gesture, Carr asked Ginsberg to remove his name from the dedication at the start of “Howl.” The poet agreed. Carr even became a voice of caution in Ginsberg’s life, warning him to “keep the hustlers and parasites at arm’s length.”^[41] For many years, Ginsberg would visit the UPI offices and press Carr to cover the various causes with which Ginsberg had allied himself.^[42] Carr continued to serve Kerouac as a drinking buddy, a reader and critic, reviewing early drafts of Kerouac's work and absorbing Kerouac's growing frustrations with the publishing world.
Carr married Francesca van Hartz and the couple had three children: Simon, Caleb and Ethan (in 1994, Caleb published The Alienist, a novel which became a best-seller and made the son the acclaimed author his father once meant to be).
“When I met him in the mid-50s,” wrote jazz musician David Amram, Carr “was so sophisticated and worldly and fun to be with that even while you always felt at home with him, you knew he was always one step ahead and expected you to follow.” According to Amram, Carr remained loyal to Kerouac to the end of the older man’s life, even as Kerouac descended into alienation and alcoholism.^[43]
Lucien Carr spent 47 years, his entire professional career, with UPI, and went on to head the general news desk until his retirement in 1993. If he was famous as a young man for his flamboyant style and outrageous vocabulary, he perfected an opposite style as an editor, and nurtured the skills of brevity in the generations of young journalists whom he mentored. He was known for his oft-repeated suggestion, “Why don’t you just start with the second paragraph?” ^[44] One reporter quoted Carr as having two acceptable standards for a good lead: "Make me cry or make me horny."
Carr died at George Washington University Hospital in January 2005 after a long battle with bone cancer.

"Occhi"

Ojo 

Soldier 

Tiger

Trigger

Gatillo

Disparador 

 

Jas. 1:8

"A double minded man is unstable in all his ways."

 

Proverbs 21:28

“A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly.”

 

Elephant Seal Pup, Año Nuevo

A young Elephant Seal Pup takes a break in the sun at Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve.

Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge at Night, Sydney, Australia

Chess: "Trigger" "Gatillo" "Disparador""soldier" "Alaska" "ojo" "occhi" "cantilever" "eye of the tiger" "Pirates of the Caribbean" "camera" "cámara" "Kilimanjaro" "fugo fish: camarón: shrimp"

The Tiger By William Blake Published in 1794 in Songs of Experience

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?


In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?


And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?


What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?


When the stars threw down their spears,
And water`d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?


Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


Theme
.......“The Tiger,” by William Blake (1757-1827), presents a question that embodies the theme: Who created the tiger? Was it the kind and loving God who made the lamb? Or was it Satan? Blake presents his question in Lines 3 and 4:

What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake realizes, of course, that God made all the creatures on earth. However, to express his bewilderment that the God who created the gentle lamb also created the terrifying tiger, he includes Satan as a possible creator while raising his rhetorical questions, notably the one he asks in Lines 5 and 6:

In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thy eyes?

Deeps appears to refer to hell and skies to heaven. In either case, there would be fire--the fire of hell or the fire of the stars.
.......Of course, there can be no gainsaying that the tiger symbolizes evil, or the incarnation of evil, and that the lamb (Line 20) represents goodness, or Christ. Blake's inquiry is a variation on an old philosophical and theological question: Why does evil exist in a universe created and ruled by a benevolent God? Blake provides no answer. His mission is to reflect reality in arresting images. A poet’s first purpose, after all, is to present the world and its denizens in language that stimulates the aesthetic sense; he is not to exhort or moralize. Nevertheless, the poem does stir the reader to deep thought. Here is the tiger, fierce and brutal in its quest for sustenance; there is the lamb, meek and gentle in its quest for survival. Is it possible that the same God who made the lamb also made the tiger? Or was the tiger the devil's work?
Meter
The poem is in trochaic tetrameter with catalexis at the end of each line. Here is an explanation of these technical terms:

Tetrameter Line: a poetry line usually with eight syllables but sometimes seven. Trochaic Foot: A pair of syllables--a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Catalexis: The absence of a syllable in the final foot in a line. In Blake’s poem, an unstressed syllable is absent in the last foot of each line. Thus, every line has seven syllables, not the conventional eight.

The following illustration using the first two lines of the poem demonstrates tetrameter with four trochaic feet, the last one catalectic:

.....1...........2...........3...............4 TIger, | TIger, | BURN ing | BRIGHT .....1...........2...........3...............4 IN the | FOR ests | OF the | NIGHT

Notice that the fourth foot in each line eliminates the conventional unstressed syllable (catalexis). However, this irregularity in the trochaic pattern does not harm the rhythm of the poem. In fact, it may actually enhance it, allowing each line to end with an accented syllable that seems to mimic the beat of the maker’s hammer on the anvil. For a detailed discussion of meter and the various types of feet, click here.
.


Structure and Rhyme Scheme
The poem consists of six quatrains. (A quatrain is a four-line stanza.) Each quatrain contains two couplets. (A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines). Thus we have a 24-line poem with 12 couplets and 6 stanzas–a neat, balanced package. The question in the final stanza repeats (except for one word, dare) the wording of the first stanza, perhaps suggesting that the question Blake raises will continue to perplex thinkers ad infinitum.
Figures of Speech and Allusions
Paradox: If the maker of the tiger also made the lamb.
Metaphor: Comparison of the tiger to a fire.
Anaphora: Repetition of what at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Example: What dread hand and what dread feet? / What the hammer? what the chain?
Allusion: Immortal hand or eye: God or Satan
Allusion: Distant deeps or skies: hell or heaven
Alliteration: See poem annotations.
Symbols
The Tiger: Evil (or Satan)
The Lamb: Goodness (or God)
Distant Deeps: Hell
Skies: Heaven
.
Annotations
Alliteration
The color-coded letters in the first two stanzas give examples of alliteration.
Meaning of the Poem
Stanza 1: What immortal being created this terrifying creature which, with its perfect proportions (symmetry), is an awesome killing machine?
Stanza 2: Was it created in hell (distant deeps) or in heaven (skies)? If the creator had wings, how could he get so close to the fire in which the tiger was created? How could he work with so blazing a fire?
Stanza 3: What strength (shoulder) and craftsmanship (art) could make the tiger's heart? What being could then stand before it (feet) and shape it further (hand)?
Stanza 4: What kind of tool (hammer) did he use to fashion the tiger in the forge fire? What about the chain connected to the pedal which the maker used to pump the bellows? What of the heat in the furnace and the anvil on which the maker hammered out his creation? How did the maker muster the courage to grasp the tiger?
Stanza 5: When the stars cast their light on the new being and the clouds cried, was the maker pleased with his creation?
Stanza 6: The poet repeats the the central question of the poem, stated in Stanza 1. However, he changes could (Line 4) to dare (Line 24). This is a significant change, for the poet is no longer asking who had the capability of creating the tiger but who dared to create so frightful a creature.