Critically invisible, modern revolt, like X-rays and radioactivity, is perceived only by its effects at more materialistic social levels, where it is called delinquency.

"Disaffiliation", by the way, is the term used by the critic and poet, Lawrence Lipton, who has written several articles on this subject, the first of which, in The Nation, quoted as Epigraph: "We disaffiliate."
-- John L. Lewis.

Like the pillars of Hercules, like two ruined Titans guarding the entrance to one of Dante's circles, stand two great dead juvenile delinquents -- the heroes of the post-war generation: the great saxophonist, Charlie Parker, and Dylan Thomas.
If the word deliberate means anything, both of them certainly deliberately destroyed themselves.

Both of them were overcome by the horror of the world in which they found themselves, because at last they could no longer overcome that world with the weapon of a purely lyrical art.
Both of them were my friends.
Living in San Francisco I saw them seldom enough to see them with a perspective which was not distorted by exasperation or fatigue.
So as the years passed, I saw them each time in the light of an accelerated personal conflagration.

The last time I saw Bird, at Jimbo's Bob City, he was so gone -- so blind to the world -- that he literally sat down on me before he realized I was there.
"What happened, man"?
I said, referring to the pretentious "Jazz Concert".
"Evil, man, evil", he said, and that's all he said for the rest of the night.
About dawn he got up to blow.
The rowdy crowd chilled into stillness and the fluent melody spiraled through it.

The last time I saw Dylan, his self-destruction had not just passed the limits of rationality.
It had assumed the terrifying inertia of inanimate matter.
Being with him was like being swept away by a torrent of falling stones.

Now Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker have a great deal more in common than the same disastrous end.
As artists, they were very similar.
They were both very fluent.
But this fluent, enchanting utterance had, compared with important artists of the past, relatively little content.
Neither of them got very far beyond a sort of entranced rapture at his own creativity.
The principal theme of Thomas's poetry was the ambivalence of birth and death -- the pain of blood-stained creation.
Music, of course, is not so explicit an art, but anybody who knew Charlie Parker knows that he felt much the same way about his own gift.
Both of them did communicate one central theme: Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense -- the creative act.
This, of course, is the theme of much art -- perhaps most poetry.
It is the theme of Horace, who certainly otherwise bears little resemblance to Parker or Thomas.
The difference is that Horace accepted his theme with a kind of silken assurance.
To Dylan and Bird it was an agony and terror.
I do not believe that this is due to anything especially frightful about their relationship to their own creativity.
I believe rather that it is due to the catastrophic world in which that creativity seemed to be the sole value.
Horace's column of imperishable verse shines quietly enough in the lucid air of Augustan Rome.
Art may have been for him the most enduring, orderly, and noble activity of man.
But the other activities of his life partook of these values.
They did not actively negate them.
Dylan Thomas's verse had to find endurance in a world of burning cities and burning Jews.
He was able to find meaning in his art as long as it was the answer to air raids and gas ovens.
As the world began to take on the guise of an immense air raid or gas oven, I believe his art became meaningless to him.
I think all this could apply to Parker just as well, although, because of the nature of music, it is not demonstrable -- at least not conclusively.

Thomas and Parker have more in common than theme, attitude, life pattern.
In the practice of their art, there is an obvious technical resemblance.
Contrary to popular belief, they were not great technical innovators.
Their effects are only superficially startling.
Thomas is a regression from the technical originality and ingenuity of writers like Pierre Reverdy or Apollinaire.
Similarly, the innovations of bop, and of Parker particularly, have been vastly overrated by people unfamiliar with music, especially by that ignoramus, the intellectual jitterbug, the jazz aficionado.
The tonal novelties consist in the introduction of a few chords used in classical music for centuries.
And there is less rhythmic difference between progressive jazz, no matter how progressive, and Dixieland, than there is between two movements of many conventional symphonies.

What Parker and his contemporaries -- Gillespie, Davis, Monk, Roach (Tristano is an anomaly), etc. -- did was to absorb the musical ornamentation of the older jazz into the basic structure, of which it then became an integral part, and with which it then developed.
This is true of the melodic line which could be put together from selected passages of almost anybody -- Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges.
It is true of the rhythmic pattern in which the beat shifts continuously, or at least is continuously sprung, so that it becomes ambiguous enough to allow the pattern to be dominated by the long pulsations of the phrase or strophe.
This is exactly what happened in the transition from baroque to rococo music.
It is the difference between Bach and Mozart.

It is not a farfetched analogy to say that this is what Thomas did to poetry.
The special syntactical effects of a Rimbaud or an Edith Sitwell -- actually ornaments -- become the main concern.
The metaphysical conceits, which fascinate the Reactionary Generation still dominant in backwater American colleges, were embroideries.
Thomas's ellipses and ambiguities are ends in themselves.
The immediate theme, if it exists, is incidental, and his main theme -- the terror of birth -- is simply reiterated.

This is one difference between Bird and Dylan which should be pointed out.
Again, contrary to popular belief, there is nothing crazy or frantic about Parker either musically or emotionally.
His sinuous melody is a sort of naive transcendence of all experience.
Emotionally it does not resemble Berlioz or Wagner;
it resembles Mozart.
This is true also of a painter like Jackson Pollock.
He may have been eccentric in his behavior, but his paintings are as impassive as Persian tiles.
Partly this difference is due to the nature of verbal communication.
The insistent talk-aboutiveness of the general environment obtrudes into even the most idyllic poetry.
It is much more a personal difference.
Thomas certainly wanted to tell people about the ruin and disorder of the world.
Parker and Pollock wanted to substitute a work of art for the world.

Technique pure and simple, rendition, is not of major importance, but it is interesting that Parker, following Lester Young, was one of the leaders of the so-called saxophone revolution.
In modern jazz, the saxophone is treated as a woodwind and played with conventional embouchure.
Metrically, Thomas's verse was extremely conventional, as was, incidentally, the verse of that other tragic enrage, Hart Crane.

I want to make clear what I consider the one technical development in the first wave of significant post-war arts.
Ornament is confabulation in the interstices of structure.
A poem by Dylan Thomas, a saxophone solo by Charles Parker, a painting by Jackson Pollock -- these are pure confabulations as ends in themselves.
Confabulation has come to determine structure.
Uninhibited lyricism should be distinguished from its exact opposite -- the sterile, extraneous invention of the corn-belt metaphysicals, or present blight of poetic professors.

Just as Hart Crane had little influence on anyone except very reactionary writers -- like Allen Tate, for instance, to whom Valery was the last word in modern poetry and the felicities of an Apollinaire, let alone a Paul Eluard were nonsense -- so Dylan Thomas's influence has been slight indeed.
In fact, his only disciple -- the only person to imitate his style -- was W. S. Graham, who seems to have imitated him without much understanding, and who has since moved on to other methods.
Thomas's principal influence lay in the communication of an attitude -- that of the now extinct British romantic school of the New Apocalypse -- Henry Treece, J. F. Hendry, and others -- all of whom were quite conventional poets.

Parker certainly had much more of an influence.
At one time it was the ambition of every saxophone player in every high school band in America to blow like Bird.
Even before his death this influence had begun to ebb.
In fact, the whole generation of the founding fathers of bop -- Gillespie, Monk, Davis, Blakey, and the rest -- are just now at a considerable discount.
The main line of development today goes back to Lester Young and by-passes them.

The point is that many of the most impressive developments in the arts nowadays are aberrant, idiosyncratic.
There is no longer any sense of continuing development of the sort that can be traced from Baudelaire to Eluard, or for that matter, from Hawthorne through Henry James to Gertrude Stein.
The cubist generation before World War 1,, and, on a lower level, the surrealists of the period between the wars, both assumed an accepted universe of discourse, in which, to quote Andre Breton, it was possible to make definite advances, exactly as in the sciences.
I doubt if anyone holds such ideas today.
Continuity exits, but like the neo-swing music developed from Lester Young, it is a continuity sustained by popular demand.

In the plastic arts, a very similar situation exists.
Surrealists like Hans Arp and Max Ernst might talk of creation by hazard -- of composing pictures by walking on them with painted soles, or by tossing bits of paper up in the air.
But it is obvious that they were self-deluded.
Nothing looks anything like an Ernst or an Arp but another Ernst or Arp.
Nothing looks less like their work than the happenings of random occasion.
Many of the post-World War 2, abstract expressionists, apostles of the discipline of spontaneity and hazard, look alike, and do look like accidents.
The aesthetic appeal of pure paint laid on at random may exist, but it is a very impoverished appeal.
Once again what has happened is an all-consuming confabulation of the incidentals, the accidents of painting.
It is curious that at its best, the work of this school of painting -- Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Willem De-Kooning, and the rest -- resembles nothing so much as the passage painting of quite unimpressive painters: the mother-of-pearl shimmer in the background of a Henry McFee, itself a formula derived from Renoir;
the splashes of light and black which fake drapery in the fashionable imitators of Hals and Sargent.
Often work of this sort is presented as calligraphy -- the pure utterance of the brush stroke seeking only absolute painteresque values.
You have only to compare such painting with the work of, say, Sesshu, to realize that someone is using words and brushes carelessly.

At its best the abstract expressionists achieve a simple rococo decorative surface.
Its poverty shows up immediately when compared with Tiepolo, where the rococo rises to painting of extraordinary profundity and power.
A Tiepolo painting, however confabulated, is a universe of tensions in vast depths.
A Pollock is an object of art -- bijouterie -- disguised only by its great size.
In fact, once the size is big enough to cover a whole wall, it turns into nothing more than extremely expensive wallpaper.
Now there is nothing wrong with complicated wallpaper.
There is just more to Tiepolo.
The great Ashikaga brush painters painted wallpapers, too -- at least portable ones, screens.

A process of elimination which leaves the artist with nothing but the play of his materials themselves cannot sustain interest in either artist or public for very long.
So, in the last couple of years, abstract expressionism has tended toward romantic suggestion -- indications of landscape or living figures.