In the end

Now that we have come to the end of our journey, I realize I’ve learned a lot from the Beat Generation and its writers and poets. Not only did men write brilliant pieces of art but women also wrote about their view. Looking back into history is very important because we are only human and make mistakes, meaning that history has repeated itself from our ignorance. I’ve learned that in the fifties it was alright to hitchhike because it was right after the Great Depression when hobos would roam around for jobs and jump trains to get across the country. I have a serious passion for traveling and can’t wait to go out on the road just as Kerouac did. But times have changed and there are different factors, the freedom of trusting strangers is dead as well as writing freely. Anyone can write obscenities but only somebody can write something from the heart and truly be heard even through its obscenities. Nowadays people can ramble on about sex and drugs but in those days it was a movement, there was a cause. Disrespect from the law enabled the Beatniks to form and join the union of “I’m sick and tired of the old customs holding me down.” It was all exciting because it had never really been done, except for in the twenties and that was thirty years earlier. This was a movement of not only writing but expression. These jazz cats talked about everything everyone else was scared to talk about, which is why the hippies came about, why there is good music, and why we can talk about whatever we want in 2008. I’m really happy with all the books I read because I loved them all. So in the end people can know that “art is love is god” as William Berman said and we have the freedom to say whatever we feel.

Woman Rule

Men in the Beat Generation felt as if they could cheat on their wives and girlfriends, many of the woman were muses but had their own talents. Some woman were proud to have inspired the Beatnik men and get no fame from it. Some were content writers on their own who also had their own generation, on page 103 Eileen Kaufman explains, "I knew all the beat writers and artists...it was a joyful time of communication with kindred souls that only was extended when the hippie movement came in. We were precursors of that community, and we were happy to have influenced their loving feeling." I feel as if woman could have been more inspiring but it just wasn't as widely known, although all the members though small, contributed to the Beat Generation. The book contains forty members of woman some artists some poets and how they inspired other woman.

Woman catch the Beat

The last book I started reading was the view of the Beat Generation through the eyes of woman. The muses weren't just behind the scenes but stood for something maybe even more powerful than what the men stood for. With woman empowerment came the end of men chivalry but was it worth it? They drank smoked and wrote just as well as any of the men but weren't acknowledged to a degree. In Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda knight the reader gets a clear visual of the free spirit women were during this generation. Knight writes, "I knew woman living secret or double lives because love and sexual desire for another woman was anathema." (page 5) These woman stood for many things just as Kerouac and Ginsberg, the were great poets and should also get recognition for their free thinking.

Lose lose situation

"The Pusher always gets it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form...buy off the Monkey. Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse...The more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use...You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite." (page201) This passage is very significant to the whole book, on the imagery that drugs consume and take over people's lives. By the end of the book the reader realizes a lot about drugs and why people do them. if you were to sit naked at lunch time with family and friends then you are to show them everything about you, this is something people cannot do. To be venerable is to be weak and to feel weak is to have no purpose in life. Even such a thing as doing drugs gives someone a purpose, to get up and go out. To see another day but only for drugs. What do you make of the comparison of the rabid dog to a junkie? Having no choice because their bodies relied on it or at least in their mentality the needed it to survive.

The Real Meaning

Now that I have finished Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs I wanted to tell you what I made of it. The title is just like the doing anything society considers normal, but naked. Like that dream when you're at school and you realize your naked...in front of everyone. This sense of venerability is nerve racking and honestly free a frozen moment when everything you have is revealed. The meaning of the title relates in many ways to the text. On page 141 Burroughs explains, " Try using junk as a means to something else...Some citizens with Coco-Cola and aspirin control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don't like talking. The Sender is not a human individual...It is The Human Virus. (All viruses are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence...They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, ect. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species.)The broken image of Man moves in by minute and cell by cell...poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus." This passage is very important because it explains how addicts truly feel about the world, and their perspective seem right on compared to the many blind conservative views. People are open minded in different ways, depending on how they're brought up. What Burroughs is trying to say in this passage is try to not judge a heroin addict by their addiction but judge them as a person because everyone has flaws, bad habits, and addictions to some degree. Either negative or positive, "The Sender" is the conservative view and the "Mother Cell" is people who effect others negatively. Bringing others down to the whole that they're in. These negative effects or this "Human Virus" destroys humans and in the end Burroughs writes, "The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated." Assuming irony because many people see others and think they can just fix them, whose to say they're broken in the first place. Naked Lunch has many radical views but all have information backing up rather rational points. I like the extreme views because it's interesting to see that a person could actually think of things such as what is an addiction and who is the one to know right from wrong. In the end Naked Lunch shows the raw meaning of what life can truly be like, not always butterflies and rainbows.

Politics

William S. Burroughs view on politics is quite clear. Like most addicts of the fifties-sixties and like most people today his theory on gonvermnent was conspiracy. Sometimes He talks about religion but as a con man his views aren't the most conservative. His view on America is tainted, through media, advertising, and other cultural aspects Burroughs proves that he is a rational thinker and feels socirty doesn't accept that. What do you think about rational thinkers influence in the world, is it usually negative or positve?

Pusherman

There are many characters in Naked Lunch usually not interminable but always leaving a lasting impression. "I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune..." Burroughs contemplates on other people and concludes with "the world network of junkies, tuned on a chord of rancid jinssom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning ." Conveying the message of poking into the mind of a junkie, and finding a cure. Addictions are hard and different from bad habits the pusherman symbolizes how the buzz on drugs can get anyone at anytime. Like a song hummed then caught in your head. Burroughs also uses satire in Naked Lunch. Reading between the lines gets you further than reading the book as a whole. Since our minds don't know everything all at once it takes steps and interpretation and time to realize understanding. Burroughs is also making fun of how naive people are, how easily we are influenced, he includes himself in that statement.

Words of Advice for Young People

People often ask me if I have any words of advice for young people.
Well here are a few simple admonitions for young and old.
Never interfere in a boy-and-girl fight.
Beware of whores who say they don't want money.
The hell they don't.
What they mean is they want more money. Much more.
If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch,
Get it in writing.
His word isn't worth shit.
Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
Money brings out the worst
Avoid fuck-ups.
We all know the type.
Anything they have anything to do with,
No matter how good it sounds,
Turns into a disaster.
Do not offer sympathy to the mentally ill.
Tell them firmly:
I am not paid to listen to this drivel.
You are a terminal boob.
Don't allow people to bring you down in the hole that they're in, everyone can be something in life as long as they're determined.
Now some of you may encounter the Devil's Bargain,
If you get that far.
Any old soul is worth saving,
At least to a priest,
But not every soul is worth buying.
So you can take the offer as a compliment.
He tries the easy ones first.
You know like money,
All the money there is.
But who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetary?
Money won't buy.
Not much left to spend it on, eh gramps?
Getting too old to cut the mustard.
Money is brought up agian and the fact that getting older is inevitable.
Well time hits the hardest blows.
Especially below the belt.
How's a young body grab you?
Like three card monte, like pea under the shell,
Now you see it, now you don't.
Haven't you forgotten something, gramps?
In order to feel something,
You've got to be there.
You have to be eighteen.
You're not eighteen.
You are seventy-eight.
Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.
Time will get everyone and theres a major difference in youth and elders. Different generations, views, beliefs. "You've got to be there"
Well they always try the easiest ones first.
How about an honorable bargain?
You always wanted to be a doctor,
Well now's your chance.
Why don't you become a great healer
And benefit humanity?
What's wrong with that?
Just about everything.
Just about everything.
There are no honorable bargains
Involving exchange
Of qualitative merchandise
Like souls
For quantitative merchandise
Like time and money.
So piss off Satan
And don't take me for dumber than I look.
Burroughs goes on to talk about the devil and his temptations for you to sell your soul. He interprets the currency of life to be a killer because what people tell you to do isn't always right.
An old junk pusher told me -
Watch whose money you pick up.
-William S. Burroughs
What do you make of these words of advice for young people? What is the overall message?

Using your ears

The Inspiration of Inspiration

Taking a break from the beatniks right now, to look into some deeper influences. After reading Waiting for Godot I noticed that existentialism and other fundamental ways of thinking/writing are often praised and criticized. Boroughs way of writing was a stream of conscious. Having to do with the meaninglessness of life and the great absurdness. Both methods are ways of allowing a person's creative spirit to reign. Jack Kerouac along with the beat generation adopted existentialist ideas with "arthouse" films which quoted and was inspired by existentialist thought and their writers. Both literary techniques have to do with obscenities in attempt to express unspoken thoughts and describe certain feelings. Two quotes I found suitable for both literary techniques are:


"The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."
- Amiri Baraka



But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."
- Jack Kerouac



Although these topics may not be inspiring to others, people should know their history in order to NOT repeat it. I don't think many take a look around and actually see, they just glance over. Without many of these pioneers their would have been no push for the civil rights movement and certain freedoms that we attain today. Also the influence of drugs and their increase of popularity in the 50's-60's. Although deadly without LSD many computer programs wouldn't exist today. I'm not saying go out naked smoking the peace pipe, I'm just saying keep an open mind. What do you think JJ?

Hit the road, Jack Kerouac

( Picture of Kerouac reciting a passage of On The Road to audience)
I've recently learned that there is a Beat Museum in San Fransisco and have every intention on going there this summer when I arrive in California. Now that I've read The Dharma Bums and On The Road by Kerouac I'm moving on to a new member of the Beat Generation. Firstly, I would like to conclude on Jack Kerouac. The reason why I chose The Beat Generation as a topic for my blogs is because I'm interested in people who change the world for a drastic cause. Much like Martin Luther King was a spokesman for the Civil Rights movement, and Bob Dylan was a spokesman for the sixties, Kerouac was a spokesman for poetry and freedom of expression in the forties-fifties. People who are able to bring everyone together for a good and creative reason are admirable. Being a leader is very hard and even more so when you're leading a group of people who are against most norms. Beat was seen as worn down and weary until Kerouac and others changed the definition. Beat took on a new roll and became uplifting and rhythmic. Someone who was tired and beat out, wanted change so they went to cafes and drank black coffee staying up all night discussing eccentric topics to a certain vibe, a particular beat. Now I'm going to focus on a different member of the Beat movement. William S. Burroughs, Kerouac helped edit his book Naked Lunch which played a key role in the history of American Literature.

Japhies

As the book draws to an end there is one major and original theme that I have never learned about. Kerouac had "...a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures." Not only does the theme of being different show but the religion of buddhism occurs. Japhies,being spirtual bums of zen buddhism,hike and hitchhike around trying to find their truer beings. One thing I learned about Oriental Religion is that the lotus is very symbolic. The lotus flower means Estranged love, forgetful past, spiritual healing, and meditation.

Tea for Two?

On page 120 there is a brief description of tea that I found interesting. “Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.” Although the Beat Generation was a movement that wanted to "save the planet and alter human consciousness," Allen Ginsberg, at the same time. The achievment of those two things would be almost impossible. What other things can tea be related to? Tea itself sybolizes tranqulity and health. It also brings warmth, what other symbols in books we've read can relate to tea?

Haiku

Here is a photo I took in Cape Cod during low tide. Now one of the most memorable lines from The Dharma Bums is when Japhy and Smith are talking about how a poem puts you in the vibe so you can feel the imagery especially haiku, "A real haiku's gotta be simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' by Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles." (p. 59)

What kind of Haiku can you make up bringing meaning and imagery to put an impression on someone. Based on the photograph of the sunset I took, try to make up a Haiku using three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 although Masaoka Shiki's was different.
The sparrow hops

Along the verandah,

With wet feet. -Shiki

"the living and the dying and the heartbreak"

In The Dharma Bums by Kerouac the main characters are narrator Ray Smith (Kerouac) and Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder). So far themes such as outdoor gatherings to release the spirit, hitchhiking and hiking, jazz clubs, poetry readings, and parties with Buddhist rituals have appeared. The main idea of the book is the feeling of conforming in this world, to look and act a certain way. On page 29 Smith says, "I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarity to this feeling." The woods make Smith feel a certain way, do you think many people would feel the same? Can you relate to his longing of the woods and what they represent or to something that may make you feel this longing towards something else? Keep in mind that it's a "lonesome familiarity" that Kerouac is describing Smith's thoughts as.

The Dharma Bums

Much like On The Road, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums was written years after in 1958and attains similar themes. Including The wilderness, travel, city life, drugs and alcohol, love, and purpose of life. Kerouac seems more mature and interested in Zen Buddhism. What is interesting about this novel compared to Kerouac's other novels is that it seems to relate to all his other semi-fictional works. Dharma is a noun meaning "essential quality or character, as of the cosmos or one's own nature and conformity to religious law, custom, duty, or one's own quality or character." I predict that the definition of dharma will have a lot to do with the storyline. The picture is of North Cascades National Park where the book takes place.

Howl

Now that the journey of On the Road has come to an end, I've decided to look at the most prominent figure in the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg. Friends with Kerouac amoung many others in the character list, is a famous poet whose most known for two poems America, and Howl. Howl written in 1955 is considered a principle work for the Beatniks along with Kerouac's On the Road. Since the generation was mainly based on radical poetry with a "beat" or rhythm, this poem symbolizes many tragedies in life and the true ugliness and utter magnificence it exemplifies.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
This first part sets scenes, characters, and situations replete from Ginsberg's personal experience from his life and how it felt being a youth in this certian era. During the fifties when the Great Depression ended, he wanted to show how he felt about the world. Elevated up by madness to escape madness, the recreational use of drugs at an end of prohibition of alchol, raising a middle finger to authority, and speaking obscenities.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
The second part takes the the characters in their drastic setting and blames their suffering on Moloch, a biblical idol in Leviticus who the Canaanites sacrificed children to. This implies that the characters portrayed in Part one are misunderstood and innocent like childeren and then sacrificed to this idol/monster. Moloch is intended to represent government and civilization.
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Lastly, the third part of Howl is Ginsberg talking to his dear friend Carl Solomon (also in charcter list) whom he met in a mental institution and whose life story proved momentous to Ginsberg. Solomon's mother suffered with schizophrenia and was then lobotomized, the ending of the poem represents humanity. Although people misconstrue, there is also room to acknowledge and value. Because Kerouac and Ginsberg where such good friends, they had the same ideas on life. In my earlier blog I qouted Kerouac in On the Road when Sal says, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing..." this was the raw meaning of the Beatniks movement. A truth that a group of people understood even when others couldn't or didn't want to accept. What do you think of this poem?