Bohemian Rhapsody : Art, Angst and Good Coffee--Not to Mention the Enviable Ability to Bravely Run Away. A Report From the World’s Most Enduring Parallel Universe

“STRIVE TO BE WHERE YOU ARE,” SAID THE ZEN BOHEMIAN AT TASSAJA-in the Los Padres forest of Northern California. Since she had taken a vow of silence in honor of the anniversary of her parents’ divorce, she gave me this advice by pointing to her breast. She had ironed the decal letters onto her T-shirt. Later she joined a crew of workers flapping towels and T-shirts to chase the flies out of the dining room at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, flies that were only striving to be where they were.

LIFE IS NOT A CABARET OR A FESTIVAL OF LOVE, MUCH AS WE MIGHT prefer it to be, but bohemia is at least a busy cafe of watchers and waiters, doers and don’ters, thinkers and the heedless, men and women possessed of the need to seize the day or plan the future or regret the past, all stubbornly devoted to demonstrating that life really is what good sense tells us it is not. A festival of love or lost love. A dance of the living at the irrevocable spectacle of the massed dead. A territory whose citizens defy time while figuring out what to do with it, how to pass it.

The bohemian clings to the world of sense and feeling--and his or her particular presence in it--because otherwise experience seems to diminish, fade, decay, die. He wants to write in order to name life in the world, paint in order to guard its shape and color, sing in order to measure time and the heartbeat; or he may simply hang out. In a post-industrial world that clings to the values of useful action, bohemianism devotes its life force to expressing rather than doing; only essence is real, and effectiveness is reduced to an incidental, irrelevant function of soul. Bohemian Nation keeps on trying, inscribing need onto both the silence and the noisiness of our short time on Earth. Forever is on its mind. “I knew all men are mortal,” William Saroyan said in his last hours, “but I didn’t realize this applied to me.”

THERE’S A SAN FRANCISCO PANHANDLER WHO WEARS A TATTOO THAT reads “YUPPIE” with the afterthought “VOID” inked over it. He exchanged conversation for my quarters. “Are you a former yuppie?” I asked.

“I’m a Void,” he said. “It’s the ‘90s, brother. I’m the living image.”

At this minimal level, he was expressing himself, leaving it to his audience to decide if he was also communicating a perspective on social realities. His palimpsest poem, “VOID,” one word long, one-seventeenth of a haiku, with its yuppie shadow behind it, absorbed all his energies. Unlike the mere graffiti artist, he carried it to his audience on daily rounds, using smiles, teeth, repartee. He was not an addict. He was a chemically challenged performing artist in need of fellowship and, perhaps, a substance unknown to me to push the damp wind of outdoors off his chest. His smile offered fellowship in return.

Traditional bohemians are intended to respond with greater assertiveness. Kosmik Lady, who has been handing me her poems on the street for many years, believes Void should give up minimalism. She utters many syllables. Her gospel requires floods of explanation, much Xeroxing.

Free spirits must tell themselves they are making something, doing something, in addition to telling the world they are creative, revolutionary, real, in touch--whatever the language they come to use. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took on the manners of London layabouts, but then lay about actually painting, and soon they were professional artists who had worn capes and velvet at a certain period in their gestation. Now they were artist-bohemians rather than merely bohemians, and continued to don capes and velvet upon occasion. (Defiance of the hard-working is part of the deal; embracing the stigmas of rebellion is one of the tenets of bohemian faith.)

Russian art rebels just before World War I and the Soviet Revolution reflected the passions of St. Petersburg and Russian desperation. The art movement named Futurism has a place in history, but the full raucousness of these visionaries can be evoked by the usual splinter group, this time called Everythingism, the cafe named the Wandering Dog and perhaps most eloquently by the newspaper called Murder Without Bloodshed. When people talk about murder without bloodshed, one can expect a bit of murder with bloodshed. Revolution came hard to Russia, and bohemia was one of its most beleaguered victims.

Tiflis, in Soviet Georgia, briefly became the Paris of, well, Soviet Georgia, welcoming artists and rebels in such meeting places as the Little Fantastic Cabaret. Some of the Tiflis painters, poets, collagists and designers made their way in exile to Paris, the Tiflis of France. More died; turned out there was bloodshed after all. Yet during the bad times, the 70 years of the Soviet Union, improvised cafe life persisted even when there were no cafes. People gathered at tables in apartments to deal in forbidden thoughts. The impulse survived the regime.

In the mid-’60s, I smuggled a copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” into the Soviet Union. I carried the book everywhere, trying to figure out whom to entrust with it. The sexual liberation of a great people depended on me.

Finally, in Leningrad, I met a lover of jazz and the blues, of Dizzy Gillespie and Billie “Goliday,” and who had done hard time in labor camps. I approached the subject delicately. Shambling together along a canal in the midnight glow of June, I asked the musician directly: How would he feel if Fate happened to offer him the chance to read the book called “Tropik Raka” by “Genry” Miller?

He would be confirmed in his suspicion that God lives. He could die happy.

I passed him the package wrapped in newspaper. He turned pale and scurried off. I was alone without my burden under the midnight sun. I tried to think of Peter the Great opening a window onto Europe in this stony city. At least I had opened a peephole.

When I saw my friend a day later, three people had already read the book, staying up all night, taking turns, drinking coffee, charmed, aghast. “Words!” sobbed the musician. “Such words I have never seen printed in Russian!”

In Moscow in 1991, during the chaotic breakup of the Soviet glacier, an artists’ club--painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, filmmakers--took to gathering in the apartment of a painter named Nina Maksudova. As hunger, cold and despair radiated through Russia, this eclectic group warmed itself with conversation, dreams, the Rolling Stones, William S. Burroughs. They danced, they showed their work, they recited, they played guitars. They went home at sunrise.

The reality of Russian streets is still gray and cold, but this enduring traditional reality also exists--companionship in art, satire, fun, shared revulsions. There is an Everythingism for the ‘90s. One evening, when a masquerade was prescribed as the remedy to gloom, the filmmakers of Nina Maksudova’s salon ransacked the Mosfilm warehouses to dress up in homage to their history--as old Bolsheviks, as Che Guevara, as Heroes of Soviet Labor. A womanizing rhythm and blues singer came in Eva Peron drag. Some guests were berated at the door for insufficient mockery but then admitted anyway.

In bleak and wintry Moscow it was life-sustaining to demonstrate playfulness in the graveyard of conformity and deceit, to dance on the bones. Not even Stalin and Brezhnev had been able to extirpate the roots of Russian bohemia, which has given the world so many poets declaiming in front of the Pushkin monument, audiences standing silently in the frost to hear them. When underground jazz lovers who had already done hard time in labor camps were willing to risk their freedom anew by worshiping the icon of Henry Miller, Bohemian Nation could be recognized, still alive in the Soviet monolith.

NOTHING EVER DIES IN THE ARCHIPELAGO OF BOHEMIA, BUT EVERYCHANGES, volcanoes roar and go silent, islands sink beneath the seas.

For a time, during the Aquarian flower years, California seemed on its way to becoming the conquering Bohemian Nation, with San Francisco capital of the empire, leaving colonies and outposts everywhere. Digger and troubadour armies hitchhiked up and down California’s Route 1; Pieter Breughel’s “The Land of Cockaigne” seemed to advance from being a mere painting to becoming the dream film of our lives, wine bubbling from springs, cookable animals leaping into hungry arms, airy spirits looking for love. A generous food stamp policy helped. The Vietnam War brought folks together so they could smoke and drop acid. The Aquarian age was our mother, we would not want.

Shrewd businesses accepted the revolution as another commercial opportunity. PSA established a no-reservation $10 midnight flight between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The protocol seemed to prescribe climbing aboard with a guitar, a joint and a backpack; shoes optional, but shirt or blouse requested. The flight was a way to make new friends, complete or end a romance, transact business while staying high between Southern and Northern California. Electra propjets flew on Jungian power, plus cheap oil, and the operation may even have made money.

When PSA raised the price of the midnight no-reservations Aquarian shuttle to $12.50, most of the dope dealers, actors, musicians, groupies, students, grokkers and groovers were able to absorb the cost. When the flight was suspended, the flower times of California seemed to come to a symbolic autumn.

But the symbolic end was not the same as a real conclusion. The Green Tortoise hippie bus continues to this day, plying the roads between San Francisco and everywhere, Nepal excluded due to intervening oceans and mountains. Bohemian Nation endures.

Ray Manzarek, keyboard player for the Doors, friend and collaborator of Jim Morrison, now performs in coffeehouses and college unions instead of monster rock festivals. Back then he co-wrote with Morrison, stood on floodlit platforms as thousands and thousands gaped and screamed; now he improvises, softly noodling, while Michael McClure recites his beast poems for university beatnik revivalists. “This is the spiritual regeneration of America, the breakthrough of the heart chakra over the lower three chakras,” says Manzarek.

In his mid-70s now, Lawrence Ferlinghetti remains an icon for the Nouveau Beatniks, sometimes called Beatniks Lite, who frequent cafes named in homage to Frida Kahlo (Little Frida’s, in West Hollywood, “for one who painted more than her nails”) or the Bourgeois Pig or Van Go’s Ear. In the early 1990s, beatnikery became a minor fad in L. A. among college students and a few younger movie stars. Blink your eyes and it may be gone, but for a moment heart was in; the lower three chakras were out.

BOHEMIANS PICK AND choose from the garden of delights they have decided to insist must really be there. The story of Eden is re-enacted with kindly snakes and an endless supply of apples.

The world seems to need this moral ventilation system. Over the years, bohemia has expanded its role as the rite of passage from childish eccentricity and yearning into creativity. It offers a permanent ward for those who prefer not to struggle in the world of strict demands. Here there is another sort of struggle for pleasure, pain and moral justification. Enlisters can find reasons for dropping out, bending genders, scrambling brains. They can even say they chose their fate. (I’m a Techno-Shaman. I was a Sufi in my previous life. I got sick of Portland, Oregon.)

The synergy between those who venture through bohemia and those who stay provides structure for the unstructured voyage. It’s an autonomous zone. This parallel world not only coexists with mass society, it seems to play a part in its health, a little like the darting fish that accompany whales, cleaning their mouths, grooming their teeth and crevices.

The system works on principles of reversibility. Bohemians sometimes choose to opt in, the non-bohemian sometimes opts out. It’s convenient to be both a crank and a star--and to be able to do so while being poor, lazy and full of intention, or rich and lazy and full of intention. A bonus of the game of role changes is that one might even become chic with one’s soup cans or tangled wire sculpture. The broker Gauguin was first only a Sunday painter who tended to be rude to his wife; later, a seer.

Some dress-up bohemians seem to be following Oscar Wilde’s advice to make a work of art if possible; otherwise, wear a work of art. They keep busy storing up shadows, gathering them in the hope of finding something thick and lasting, as shadows are not, in the real world, supposed to be.

A CHUNK OF GRAMMAR falls from the sky, wrapped in mystery and exhalation, like an asteroid or a turd from a cruising alien. It hits the head of the boy sitting over his coffee with a pen and a pile of old menus at Ground Zero & Organic Muffins. He begins to write. In his chest he feels unearthly vibrations. The grammar comes in clusters, growing toward a novel if he keeps going; or if he’s distracted, the Great American Rock ‘n’ Roll Song.

It’s tempting to describe the impulses of bohemian eccentricity as one of the roads to salvation in mass culture, and let us submit to that temptation. I consent, I hereby so stipulate. As long as these self-chosen ones can build their lives on foundations of play, music and art, stand up when faced by powerful troubles and bravely run away--and survive--life will thrive at the margins. If we can’t pray, let us at least be ridiculous together. Let us be wasteful. Let us make errors, let us make noise, and occasionally let us hear the music of the spheres.

The young man with the pile of old menus near his coffee mug is happy with his morning’s discovery, for he has written: Strive to have been where you were.