Allen Ginsberg Essay Example for Free

Allen Ginsberg Essay Allen Ginsberg was born into social confusion. He was jewish, gay, and his mother was a communist. Yet outside of this, he was also birthed within a generation that wallowed in chaos, both morally and emotionally. Before them had come the Industrial Revolution, which had begun the murder of unity or wholeness in American society; assembly lines and the breakdown of the workplace into distinct and separable parts had fragmented both the individual and the family. Yet it was the bomb that truly brought the deafening crush on American psycha, minimalizing mechanical wonders and becoming the first true human leap in the intelligent understanding of how to control and shape the environment (Henrikson xi). However, to Ginsberg and others, nothing was closer to the anti thesis of the concept of human. Their parents had numbed themselves in order to adapt to the depression and two world wars, forcing them to rationalize the reality of post-war America with apathy and materialism and the empty values of consumerism. Ginsberg refused to believe this was the way of the world and began to write about a new generation who had placed new definitions in place of old notions that no longer applied. He and other writers began a To Allen Ginsberg, the problem was that in society the existence of the individual in isolation was naturally more real than society in general, as collective society has an awesome control over people that transcends their individual wills. (Merril 3) The bomb then was a symbol of this control, essentially bounding people to a future under fear, under which they would strip themselves of their purely human emotions in order to cope with the day. In a world where mainstream television told you how to be and Mcarthyism told you what not to be, Ginsberg believed the individuals only answer was only looking inwards oneself where they couldnt reach through the boundaries of externals (Wooley). His age would be on a spiritual quest, but to embark on it they would need a new religion for a new day; modern religion could no longer do as good and evil and evil seemed increasingly inadequate in a world of science fiction turned fact (Ziegler 172). The beat therefore found their religion in Zen Buddhism for one central reason: both sides of good and evil were embraced in oneness for the individual in the meditation where spontaneous flashes of images and sights might come ( Merill 7). In this religion, nothing the human being was impulsed to perform could be wrong as what was right was instinctual and natural. To sustain their humanity in a world gone mad, man had to embrace every emotion he felt as exploiting these feelings..[led them] to new levels of truth (Merill 2). This was the concept of the ying and the yang ; taking on all forces no matter how panicked or manic in coherence with nature. It is in this particular religious ideology and other forms of explicit verbal attacks that characterize Ginsbergs first acknowledged work, Howl. The content of the book leaves no mystery to why it became so controversial; Ginsberg refuses to deny any schema of thought, most noticeably in the sexuality department. If had he had censored these thoughts, it would have equated to admitting that sexual behavior was unhealthy and unnatural; this expression [was] the denial of shame itself and represented the embrace of his full humanity (Merill 2). But to truly understand the work, one has to imagine themselves in the context of the Six Gallery group of San Francisco poets it was performed before, as its recitation was the first of many performances that would eventually make Ginsberg largely responsibible for the movement of the poet from the printed page to the reading halls (Schumaker 635). One must imagine the situation , because it is in the visual that one can get the feeling of it , of the beat of the music, of the beat of the scene, of the swelling chests and rising spirits of culture [surviving] despite the presence of an oppressive national political environment (Schumaker 214). The mood can only be fully set if the voice of Ginsberg is imagined in a somewhat nervous tone, unsure of the response he will garner as he exalts the individual and their inherent potential for goodness outside of the society , saying Holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! The boos, hisses,[claps] of the crowd must be invoked upon the introduction the deity of death known as Moloch who is a direct contrast to the pure human existence (Schumaker 217) The nervousness and dread should be present alongside his description: Mind [of] pure machinery..whose blood is running money..whose fingers are ten armies..whose ear is a smoking tomb.demonic industries!!..granite cocks!!monstrous bombs! Moloch is responsible for taking away the instincts of the people that would bring them happiness as he bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination (Henrikson #). Yet among this distinction of conflict, the presentation of unity and aforementioned one-ness of Zen can be seen in Ginsbergs portrayal of optimistic youth and its convergence with drugs and various arrays of emotions. Words are infused with the surge of the crowd as there are the angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the night, similar to a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping..off windowsills off Empire State, and equal to those who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey [loning it] through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels. These descriptions exalt the individual who absorbs his uncertainty and doubt and lets it take him anywhere in his hunt for spirituality, in an ethereal surreal showing of human purity described in a gritty confessional style latent with acid tripped tongues between lips and roses on the ends of declarations. They also know no form, as Ginsberg says each is a breath, a flurry of emotion representative the human exhaling against conventional society and its brutal and constraining tendencies as represented through Moloch (Merill 23) Ginsberg essentially takes the amalgamation of drugs, obscenity, explicit sexual imagery and hysterical/naked tendencies of his people and compares them to the oblique characteristics of Moloch and the boys sobbing in armies by his side, massive like red revolution but subverted to a nationalistic mantra, cut like concrete on warm warring flesh wishing they could feel like the battleground if it had a heartbeat with organs cut away at three crosses to cele brate the mythic religion when Jesus the baby birthed in love consideration and carnal compassion was felt by his mother; of the two, the blatant and overt obscenities of the steel machine were much more Frankenstein-esque in offensiveness and horror than the words of the skin, of frantic nude protests laced like bluesy Saturday night agony tunes. To bring America to this reality, Ginsberg uses the painful recognition of seeing the best minds of his time ..destroyed by madness, emblematic of his lover Carl Solomon being institutionalized after suffering from the noxious consumerist tones of nuclear America (Schumaker 208). Taking all of madness in within himself, the poet summarizes his response to all of this with the single line FUCK AMERICA AND ATOM BOMB. It is symbolic of his overall explicit nature in protest, such as his later poetry which boasted of cocksucking in front of French cathedrals and standing out in aristocratic French scenes penning Death to Van Ghohs Ear (Campbell NUMBER). Ginsberg not only felt this came naturally but felt it was as the new necessity. America needed to be shocked in order to be allured to these works or poetry, which went deeper than blatant sexuality; emotion energy sex love mysticism were all on the same plane of internal mental thought. Avant garde display was now the means to the end of snapping sensually the industrialized human machine, over-fixated on temporary addiction to a set of materialistic values that came with carnage caved in at the ends of seventeen year old love letters where the blood started to run in the rain and the words and signatures were incomprehensible but the dog tags shined like Sunday morning breakfasts baked in sweet bread and kisses from Grandpa Cookie. It was this unconventional fragmented style of verse that caused mothers to cry when kids read about freedom and a world not burgeoning with the moral and physical suicides of a thousand possibilities in a nuclear haze. Theyd imagine such lines would be a threat to a child, who might become like Dylan acid trip epics with Quinny dosing and skys opening for brief seconds where you can taste and feel it, the thing that makes us mad and burn burn burn with hope at the edge of tongues (Dylan)(Kerouac ). Folk heroes proclaimed that children would become beyond their command, the command of authority figures etched in the physical and moral apathy of the bomb. People were listening. With Howl, Ginsberg set down a formula for later protest songs from the likes of Joan Baez :the obscenities of the state should be followed by the uncontrollable and instinctual emotional reactions of the individual. Such muses from the heart and mind about the existence of the new sort of rain coming down and the boy who disappeared in it could be easily invoked in the depths of the subconscious stalled in meditation. As poet Michael Mcclure said after Howls first recitation, none of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence-to the land without poetry-to the spiritual drabness (Schumaker 215). The apoclypic visions of Ginsbergs The Fall of America and the America that LOOKED FROM ITS GRAVEwere all that lay behind, seen in the influence of Dylan when he too speaks about the end. Blowin in the Wind used lines like How many years can a mountain exist before its washed to the sea while The times are a changin' versed conclusions like Admit that the waters around you have grown and accepit it that soon youll be drenched to the bone. Ginsberg and the beat were aware of this point of no return, a mad run from the end that could come at any time (Schumaker 215) They were asking for the desperation, for the land in front of the setting sun was the only direction they needed to go However, the land had heavy industry walls of red white and blue to block the spread of this so called disease of internal and moral freedom. These obstacles had mouths running with blood crossed with eyes of pristine clandestine censorship to protect the impressionable youth of the next generation from being swallowed by hysterics, as it needed their limbs to fight the great world wars in the bowels of death and destruction that reigned with every passing sunset in the East and in the West. This hypocrisy was essentially what brought Ginsberg into full fledged politics, while others like Kerouac drew the line at the beat representing only self sufficiency and freedom from moral interference (Schumaker 180). Much of this can be due to the inherent political struggles he found in getting his work into the public sphere. When Howl was about to be released for the second time, they arrested a counter assistant at City lights for peddling literature likely to corrupt juveniles, and also arrested Ferlinghetti for publishing it. (Campbell193). Ginsberg therefore was one of the first writers to be constantly backed by the ACLU in open showdowns against what was and was not obscene, not only during Howl but later in the group publication of the drugged up Big Table # 1 (Schumaker 255 , 317). To Ginsberg, this might have been a sign of the government trying to quell the influence of writing that would inflame the masses, similar to the repression of the ideas of the Burgeois revolution through strong state centers in the aristocratic France of the 19th century. But what was more was that the prophetic frenetic man saw lunacy in the fact that the artist was releasing pure human instincts in his musing, feelings which although pure, had to be recited in bland grave like versions such as the censored is holy! (Schumaker 254). His work Kaddish, a trying poem about the death of his mother, was an explanation of this affront . Listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph , Ginsberg praises the ability of Charles to withstand uncontrollable agony by keeping within the limits of structured rhthm. Replacing censored with skin in Howl severely hampered the rhthm of the piece, as missing one part of a language of heartbeats and paranoia encased in syllables was like losing a leg in the moral internal marathon; such a gaping wound could lead to a loss of the entire feeling of the poem. Without the unity, the one-ness, the recited work could not produce the same flash of imagery and light that had occurred, similar to Kerouacs sight of a woman that reminds him of his mother; frozen with ecstasy on the sidewalk..a complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows (Kerouac 172). These estatic moments were what made the spiritual search worthwhile and kids of the mystical mad crazed road hoped that when their moment came, all of these previous moments of light would converge. POPULUSIST ADD HERE Now forceably emersed in the political scene, Ginsberg delved further into politics with his war against the byproducts of age of hate that could not be vanquished with napalm. Particular awareness should be given to his use of blatant contrast to evoke irrepressible feeling. In Plutonian Ode, he draws a parallel between the mythological Pluto and the destructive power of the element that received its name from the God. (Schumaker 629). Lines such as I dare your Reality..I turn the wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons.. My oratory advances on your vaulted mystery are the polar anti-thesies of the beauty of the sparrows waked whistling through marine Streets summer green leafed trees. Protesting such atrocities of nature by nature by meditating on train tracks bound to deliver nuclear material, the recitation of Plutonium Ode would be needed inas his defense, adding parts to it spontaneously like breathing silent Prisoners, witnesses, Police- the stenographer yawns into her palms Sunflower Sutra is very much the same, written he was traveling with Kerouac and viewed a sunflower which was being afflicted with the waste that came as trains passed, its wheels unaware of the indignity it offered the poor flower (Schumaker 632). The subsequent contrast he painted was versed in the lines were not our skin of grime, were not a dread black dusty imageless locomotive, were all beautiful golden sunflowers. In this description, Ginsberg felt like he was taking up the whitemanesque celebration of becoming America through telling a lucid moment which could apply to a majority of Americans. Dylan picked this up better than anyone, evident in his verses describing a young child beside a dead pony and thewhite man who walked a black dog in The Times.. Even keener contrast appears when he muses I change my no pets allowed sign to a home sweet home sign and wonder why I havent any friends (Dylan) This social conscious and use of contrast gave the poet singer the whitmanesqueI am America perspective where he could speak for men who werent even of his own color. Hurricane was the epitome of this, Sunflower Sutra Voice represents the spirits, if not actual experiences, of his readers. It occurs to me I am America 219 even though un American whitmanesque celebration of self gone to seed and suffering the indignity of the discarded refuse they came upon an old, battered sunflower, grimy from the passing trains were not our skin of grime, were not a dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, were all beautiful golden sunflowers Ginsberg had given the ideology of protest in Howl with natural offense against the grisly gashed abuses of the state covered in gauze and dead presidents. He had experienced the machinations of the war nation as nymphetic Greek realities which varied in degrees of apocalyptic reckoning undergone in hazy highs under hallowed homages hallucinating of American populistic deities of Whitman-esque form invoked under the beauty of the common land . However, it was Jack Kerouac and On The Road who exposed suburban insanity on the edge of skinless pointless existences and the consequent worshipping of the road that took one away from those invisible developments and commuter fathers. It follows the base set by Ginsberg, as its focal character Sal Paradise set off through America as he had this feeling that everything was dead. (Kerouac 2) In addition, Zen and its absorption of uncertainty and an array of unexplainable feelings appear throughout the book. But like Ginsberg, Kerouac implies that these adjectives can only be positive. The insanity that comes from living on the road is a saving prescence, and the more Sal embraces it with his road mate Dean Moriarity the more the spirit [is uplifited] with its access to the wonderment and wildness of life (Henrikson 176). In contrast, a return to Times Square reveals a people that are grabbing, taking,giving,sighting,dying, reflective of the futility of American behavior during the American time, as the heart was traded over in exchange for monotonous complacency with steel hands and sultry scents of capitalisms carnival. To react to such a scene of such pre-planned monotony, Kerouac wrote in a style known as spontaneous prose which entailed descriptions of long line. It was based on images that were observed and the subsequent recording of sounds and emotions related to that moment, all unleashed in the spirit of a honest confessional that acknowledged every thought without censor, in the vein of Ginsberg and Howl. A perfect example is seen in Dylans novel Tarantula, in the lines jack of spades vivaldi of the coin laundry wearing a hipsters dictionary and it is 5:31-the rain sounds like a pencil sharpener (Dylan).Each line epitomized the crazed memory of the sounds of be-bop and jazz like a man blowing a phrase on his saxophone till he runs out of breath , and would be without consciousness, flowing with images until final revelation of exhaustion brought an end (Merill 45). The energy that is given off by each soul-seeking line therefore seems like enough to hold back the worlds onrushing moral and human decay (Henrikson 176). Alliteration was a staple of Kerouac, and many credit him with its creation and see it reflected in Dylans A Hard Rains A-Gonan Fall, although the instinct to put words together like a black branch with blood ,seven sad forests and a dozen dead oceans seems like a natural inherent impulse in litearature. ( However, like the nature of the verse, sustaining such a crazed personally analytical lifestyle requires the dedication to constant moving, embodied in the way Kerouac would shout Go! when Allen would read his poetry (Schumaker 215). With pauses in life or writing, there would be a pause in the search for spirituality of it, or as Dean says, the journey to the magic land at the end of the road (Kerouac NUMBER). This is all reflected in the last chapters at the end of the road in Mexico revealing the hauting images of shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos who didnt know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges (Kerouac number The road had come to an end for now and therefore the reality of life was in that image stark naked Indian old mystic land, rooted in the emptiness of mans new capabilities over the days where mystics howled at the skies dancing with red faced gods Fundamental Paradox of Buddhsm All experience is essentially emptiness; that purity and absence are one. (Foster 62). To collaborate on this political and literary endeavor, the icon of Bob Dylan entered Ginsbergs life, a man who had already been heavily influenced by the Beat. The folk hero had the world revealed to him during Howl, but this latent influence was only spawned to action when Dylan first read Kerouacs Mexico City Blues. The long line outpouring of feeling based on flashing images and spontaneous events caused Dylan to drop out of school as it was the first poetry that really spoke to [him] in a natural purely Earthly sense. CITATION The musician saw this same spontaneity in Ginsberg when he viewed his improvisational poetry, which was like working without a net and releasing the crazed random feelings he felt from the public and the atmosphere in words (Schumaker 555) . Dylan was enthralled by the process, one that he had obviously attempted in order to assume a rough-edged, made up on the spot feeling on his albums. (Schumaker 555) the next months Eventually, beat politics came to the same point which had threatened Aunt Molly Jackson and the coal miners; un-American ideas were associated with red. Beatnik was a play of words off of the disloyal notion of the RussianSputnik, while the beat generation film by MGM boasted of a rapist on the run for a main character (Schumaker 6. Even worse was a ploy off of was a play Being out there and unloyal to America, Beatnik was a ploy off of the Russian wonder Sputnik. Even worse was the false consciousness of hip which plagued Kerouac the more he heard words like crazy and wigged in scenes as if people thought the repetition of them could bring out the burning burning burning (Campbell 246). Vexner said the culture of dissent was a hot commodity, as if the Beat were selling the idea of sex and anarchy to a world that was starving for it. CITATION Like Mike Seeger and the Lost City Ramblers, Kerouac and the beat needed to re-examine their roots and tried to analyze what and who it meant to be beat, ignoring all mutated concepts of the beatnik and its subverted image. However, Kerouac one day hated them colllectively, but switched his position come next morn, where he was confessing he loved them only to come to the conclusion when asked again that he was becoming paranoid (Campbell 250). Yet in this critique of themselves the Beat forgot to analyze a few elements that had made their image easy to exploit. The first is that when they were called to moan for man, few realized the energy it took to keep up such a lifestyle. The fact that they pose no answers to an incalcitrent society outside of this bewailing of emptiness and internal discovery made their journey a disjointed and dismembered one; the beats endless internal revolution during crazed trips in On the Road only lead back to conformist society with the realization of the death of America in the haunting mystic Indian scene Dean and Sal experience. circular. All of the hope of the convergence of all of those aforementioned estatic moment where everything rushed forward was cut off slashed at the knees like Vietnam massacres upon the lack of the realization of it. Depending again on these personal distortions to lead them back to estatic moments, the Beat almost relied too much on the self. Their feeling that their prose was a superior form of nature really did spark a level of narcissim that reflected poorly. Kerouacs mantra became youre always genious, proclaiming lofty phrases such as Once God moves the hand, to move back and revise is a sin (Schumaker 261). What he had forgotten was that PURITY YADDA, and that eventually the emphasis on him just swallowed the man in the desperation for drink in Satori and his search for a relative (literally any relative) demonstrated the demise of the man that constantly depended on the hysterics of the situation (Merill 77). Ginsberg on the other hand had tendencies to create poetry where everything would be contained in the vertical figure I which would lead to statements such as I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America. 261, 262 The fragmented style of poetry that bordered on apocalyptic knowledge was just too much for some, even too much for Ginsberg himself who was tired of being Allen Ginsberg (Campbell 192). Many who could not connect with this age or this feeling wondered what gave these men the right to proclaim themselves as phrophets or holy maniacs when all they did was speak in a version of English that they thought was superior in its absence of the comma. Few realized that the backlash against grammar was due to the fact that the period destroyed the delicate rhythm of works like Kaddish , which would cause one to spiral back to the boundless agony that the perfect balance of poetry embraced. Like Dylan says , some were like D.A.R woman [who] flies off the handle. looks at jack. says in some places youd be arrested for obscenity she doesnt een hear the band..she falls down a sidewalk crack (Dylan ) If one couldnt embrace the beat of the scene, the crazy wigged out mantra which dictated the path of the man, then theyd never know. Theyd point out the beards and the bodies spread across mattresses on each other and the heroin needles and the staircase of marijuana smoke that suppose dly led these gloats to higher realization. In Dylans movie Renaldo and Clara, Ginsberg is representative of the father and Dylan the son. It is a relationship of giving and taking between the folk hero and the beat, a representation of what Ginsberg and Kerouac did for Americana. brought Dylan took in the outpouring of words and feeling and exposure of the full heart that caused him to quit school in a spontaneous moment. He acquired Kerouacs class consciousness GO BACK and the love for the capture of gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen like Dean Moriarity in words and in American travels, reflected in words such as the the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver studded phantom lover he writes about. The protest inherent in Howl is taken into his soul, alongside the absorbtion and reflection of various unexplainable feelings in an unexplainable time. However, he essentially adds an extension to the beat movement, removing the aspects of the beat that confused many parts of society who were still too numbed to come to grips with these bearded men. Songs like Blowin in the Wind took Ginsbergs art of contrast and brought it full circle; these protest songs leaned more towards the finding of the ultimate answer. Other pieces like Hurricane evoke images from NAME DO THIS SHIT TOMORROW. However, Dylan sounds more like every man in Hurricane , like the every voice of Peter Paul and Mary, because of his humbleness and reluctance to put himself above the common man, something the beat had trouble doing feeling they had divine potential to change the face of thinking in itself. In every sense Dylan is the beat, from his wild descriptions of jazz and hitch hiking in his novel Tarantula to his manic performances thriving off of the emotions of the environment to his celebration of drugs sex and wild wanderings of youth. The spot where Dylan and Kerouac left off, frenzied and genius and incomprehensible to those who could not get it, was the place Dylan took up. The spoken word long line tradition and ithat Ginsberg could only cross halfway across the gap was bridged by Dylan, with memories of Kerouacs inspiring prose driving him. The Zen of it all , of all the nuclear protest, all the civil liberty, all the cries for a sympathetic America become one with the combination of these three. Their memory is like a burning mystic sign that has no form, only emotion, bright enough to reinvigprate the young masses in every generation to the crazed motion and the crazed search and the frenetic fraticness of the freedom of sensuality with the keenness and sharpness of political reality like a goddamn shard that cuts us at the arm just to prove we still bleed . As long as it burns, the land will breath even under the lack of life in the H-bomb oxygen starved skinny era. As long as it burns, the hills will rise and fall with the pure schitzophrenic sanity of the wind, an echo that just whispers search on the end of our hope stricken ears against the fear ridden nuclear wet dreams of bodies sexed and eyes hallucinating vexed and the fallout of a demoralized Patriot and its Acts of jingoistic nuclear tendencies. When Dylan said Ginsberg needed to get out on the open road of the tour to wake up America, he meant that he wanted his spirit to ride through the skeletal suburbs warning the kids of the inhumanity and callousness stalking the land. I hear his voice and and see their protest so well, like Blood writ in Blood, haunting my daytime dreams with hazy invocations of what we truly can be. Knowing that there is a generation who also feels the same burning in the center of the heart gives me strands of hope that somehow we can overcome the same inhumanity in this age of faceless terrorism that shows no distinction between America and the West. With a t ear off the edge of the holy cheek, emblematic of the disunity of our feelings, these men push through our insides to assure us these expressions are what will take us whole. POPULUSIST EDGE OF FOLK TATPRETTY FLOWER POETRY Works Cited Campbell, James. This Is The Beat Generation London : Secker and Warburg, 1999. Henrikson, Margot A. Dr. Strangeloves America Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1997. Merill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1998. Schumaker, Michael. Dharma Lion New York : St. Martins Press, 1992. All enamoured with some aspects of the drug culture , labeled as family haters and communist hippies and , the movement began to waver at the end parallel with a lot of the demise of rock stars when coming under controversy and assault by mainstream America. Kerouac became a drunk high off his own lines and Ginsberg moved onto relatively less successful social scenes in rock and roll and the clash.