Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows

[Dave Monroe]

... from Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in
the 1960s (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), Chapter Two, "Heartbreak
Hotel: At the Crossroads of White Loneliness and the Blues," pp. 36-57
...

But while the vocabulary of economic history tells half the story, there
is another half that requires metaphor.  For the first eighteen or so
years of a prosperous youth, one regards the reality that one is given
as the only possible reality.... Complications are easily absorbed; the
unfamiliar is easily drawn in and focused.  The facts about ancient
Egypt that we absorb in elementary school are linked invisibly to the
patterns in the sidewalk we peruse on our way home....  Most of the time
anyway.  For occasionally and unpredictably, we experience what Virginia
Woolf called "moments of being" when we see the world not as we've been
taught to ... but existence as such--naked, immediate, present.... At
such moments, the sheer beingness of these things floods us with light
we have not yet learned to fear.  (46)

We suddenly see a contradiction between the bland complacency of a
society and the sharp irruptions of a formless Being.   Our moments of
naked confrontation with it cut a fissure through the surface of the
world we thought we knew--a fissure that opens into another dimension,
into other worlds, into the void.  Like Persephone, we are swept up and
swallowed.  This agonizing insight of adolescents was described by Peter
Marin in 1969 as "an impulse to apocalypse in the young, as if they were
in exile from a nation that does not exist--and yet they cans sense it,
they know it is there."  (47)

We did know it was there, and the essence of the '60s I am trying to
understand more than thirty years later was this impulse to
apocalypse--apocalypse in the double sense of both revelation and
cataclysm.  This '60s was the public legitimatization of an experience
that is usually private and fugitive.  At the edge of the fissure, a
counterculture grew like the dense colonies of mysterious organisms that
thrive only in the depths of the ocean near life-giving jets of hot gas
and molten lava.  In this '60's, millions of kids recognized in each
other's eyes the look of one who has seen through to the strangeness on
the other side that reveals the strangeness of this, the nearer side....
It was what Norman Mailer [The Armies of the Night] called 'the
revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was
going to happen next." ...  The decade's elaborate and joyful codes of
gesture, glance, and dress all referred to this most ordinary yet
subversive perception.  Suddenly, the secret was out.  From the limbo of
our in-betweenness, we saw what most adults required themselves to
forget: that existence is, and therefor might not be.  That contingency
undergirds being.  That cultures are founded on fictions.  That rules
are a way of forgetting, not juts a mode of repression.  We needed a
form that could represent this vision to ourselves, that could express
our second sight and our fear of, and need for, loneliness.  (47-8)

... "Rock was the form we found," Bromell claims, but ... and he later
notes that, "At just about the time rock was born, but with no interest
in its existence, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote ... 'The
Question Concerning Technology'" in which, according to Bromell, MH
claimed that "a denial of an interactive, interdependent relationship
with Being was precisely what technology, especially after Auschwitz and
Hiroshima, had come to express" (p. 97) ... also calls The Beatles
(a.k.a., "The White Album") "the first major postmodern work of popular
culture" (p. 142), where "The Beatles are still committed to their
essentially comedic vision ... but now it stands ever closer to the
abyss of irony" (143) ... but, after all that, and perhaps astoundingly,
it's not until p. 147 that Bromell finally gets around to Pynchon,
quoting The Crying of Lot 49 as the epigraph t his "Afterword: 'Our
Incompleteness and Our Choices'":

Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to
end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which
must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold.

... which is compared to Emerson's "flash-of-lightning faith" @ p. 163.
Well worth reading, not only on the music, but on the era at large, so,
thanks again for mentioning it, Doug ...