Chapter - I
Poetry as Saviour of the World
:
Socio-Political
Criticism in Ginsberg's Early Poetry.
Allen Ginsberg's poetry of social and political
criticism may for convenience be categorised under three
heads
:
his early confessional poems which are more
personal than political or social, his drug induced poetic
meditations of the middle period, and his intensely
political poems of the final period. A survey of his
poems from "Howl" (1956) to "Mind Breath" (1972) will
reveal the gradual transition of Ginsberg from a
confessional poet in the tradition of Robert Lowell to a
mature public poet with an independent voice and
personality. However, his early works, in spite of their
subjective, confessional character, at times give forth
howls of protest and wails of grief over the sad plight of
the contemporary society. "Howl" (1956) and "Kaddish"
(13581, Ginsberg's great early poems, are in a sense his
best confessional poems, but they also unmistakably mark
his emergence as one of America's greatest public poets.
Even while he owns up in these poems some of his personal
failures and fears, Ginsberg does not spare the "square"
society and the corrupt administration for what he
considers as their unpardonable transgressions.
"Howl" (1956) and "Kaddish" (1958) : Wrath and Lament from
the Same Swrinq.
"Howl",Ginsberg's first great poem, as pointed
out in the introduction, inaugurated his long and tiresome
career as a public poet.
of protest",L
In this long and "sustained cry
Ginsberg speaks on behalf of the lost
generation of "the best minds", who are "mad", "starving"
and "naked" (CP 126) .
The poem, divided into three
constituent parts, takes the reader on a kind of spiritual
journey through the dark, machine-controlled world of
modern America which is now reduced to an inferno of
corruption and all kinds of wickedness.
Part I of 'Howlpwith its grandiose opening lines
presents the dramatic picture of "the best
poet's generation
minds" of the
:
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 fj.x,
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 following 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.
"The best mindsw of the generation, which includes
the poet himself, are here described as "angelheaded
hipstersu who burn and thirst for some kind of mystic,
heavenly connection (possibly through drug and sex).
However, they fail to get to this "starry dynamo" (CP 126)
because they are helpless slaves in a robot world (as
suggested by the phrase "in the machinery of the night")
(CP 126).
As the entire first part is focussed on '
tlipsters", the phrase needs some elaboration.
is a person who is universally aware of and interested in
new and unconventional patterns, especially in the use of
stimulants and in exotic religion. Ginsberg probably
received the basic concept of hipsterism from his studies
i.n Zen Buddhism.
It is important to remember in this
context that in the years that immediately followed World
War 11, many disillusioned American youth, disgusted with
their country's wallowing in wealth and materialism, chose
to defect from their traditional religion and turned to
Oriental religions for peace of mind and spiritual
illumination. The roots of hipsterism which grew
alarmingly in America in the 1950s and is still powerful,
may be traced to the failure of American christianity to
plug the spiritual vacuum created by the sudden spurt of
wealth and scientific knowledge in the post-war years.
The disillusioned youth who did not care much for wealth,
turned elsewhere and embraced unconventional ways of life.
This explains the reason for eastern socio-religious
movements like 'Hare Krishna' and Zen Buddhism gaining
root in the American soil. The large number of Buddhist
and Hindu temples which have mushroomed in America,
especially in San Francisco since 1950, and the increasing
interest of Americans in Hinduism, must serve as a pointer
to American christianity that it has failed zo satisfy the
average middle class American.
The Beats, tkugh not the
official spokesmen crf any of these movements, have always
been sympathetic to Oriental culture and violently hostile
to the skin-deep, hollow
christian brother-kood of modern
America.
Part I of "Howl" paints a really sad plzzure of "the
best minds". They are "wailed downv by "the sirens of Los
Alamos" for distributing super communist pamphlets, and
they are forced to descend into the inferno 05 subways
where they "howled on
their knees1' ( C P 128). These
people are not illiterate know-nothing Bohemians, but
brilliant young men, "who passed through universities with
radiant cool eyes", but "were expelled from the academies
for crazy publishing obscene odes" (CP 126). They are now
made to cower and crouch in abject fear, and "Listen to
the Terror" "in unshaven rooms in underwear" ICP 126).
They stuaied Plotinus, Poe, an8 St .John of the Crges, but
now they wander around and around in midnight wondering
where to go. They are now branded catatonic,
schizophrenic, the "dementia praecox" they bear quite
messianically for the sake of their sick society. Thus
they indirectly become "sinners" for many, the publicans
who save the honour of many so-called Pharisees.
The topsy-turviness of American spirituality and the
cruel victimization of those who seek "peace that
transcends all understanding"
are brought to scathing
ridicule in Part I. The poem laments in Jeremian elegiac
strain that America's "best minds" are unhappy, mad,
naked.
The focus, as already suggested, is on "the best
minds". The rhythmic chant of the relative pronoun "who"
with which each subordinate clause begins retains vividly
the visual image of the hitch-hiking hipsters who became
the phenomenon of the Fifties and Sixties. Commenting on
the sufferings and ridicule they. were subjected to,
Stephen Stepanchev says
:
The Beats have paid a terrible price in poverty,
affliction, and even personal destruction.
In
part they have suffered directly from
unsympathetic and at times repressive society,
as has Carl Solomon in a further period of
incarceration in Rokland Mental Hospital.
However Ginsberg's friends also have been
victimized more subtly. Thus their belief that
a desperate situation necessitates extreme
measures has led to forms of rebellion that
sometimes recoil tragically upon their
practitioners. D r u c addiczion, alcoholism and
the forms of personal dereliction among the
Beats, which from thzir view-point necessary
points of revolt an& spiritual affirmation, have
still left them "starving hysterical naked".3
The "squarew society which has rejected "the best
minds" is deprived of all logic and reason. One of the
purposes of Ginsberg's powerful use of elliptical
juxtapositions in "Howl" can be to satirize such a
society. Besides being a technical device, it does this
function also.
An
ellipsis, as Ginsberg discovered it in
Paul Cezanne's paintings, was " a way of presenting images
as they flashed through the mind".4 Ginsberg found
Cezanne's paintings
remarkable for their unexpected
combination of colours and perspectives. The one thing
Ginsberg cautiously tried to transplant from Cezanne's
painting to his poetry was the technique of juxtaposition.
Paul Portuges and Laszlo Gefin have made brilliant
studies of ellipsis used by Ginsberg in his poems,
especially in " H ~ w l " . The
~
idea is that of creating a gap
between two incongruous ideas juxtaposed, which the mind
would fill in with the sensation of experience. In
Ginsberg's own words, it is a theory of how the sublime
could be invoked and excited in his poems by creating
several "image points in time separated by a wide gap
showing the distance between them, the jump, or
interval, or ellipsis of consciousness actually attaining
an inner secret time shock, a scrrt of mystical eclipse of
time". Startled by the effect created by Cezanne s
juxtaposition of multi-coloured spots in his landscape
;paintings,Ginsberg experimented with it in imagery,
idiction and rhythm, and overall structure of poetry, and
thus also learned that the secret of the success of
Japanese haikus was none other than juxtaposition.
"Howl" Part I is a plethora of elliptical
:juxtapositions. Images such as "angry fix", "the machinery
of night", "unshaven rooms", "drunken taxicabs", "hydrogen
:jukebox" and numerous others, in the words of Ginsberg
himself, "set the noun and the dash of consciousness
together jumping with the sensation of 'Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus (CP 131) .
The images also reveal the
strange association, and the incongruous, illogical
association in the modem society between unmarriageable
forces. For example, the elliptical image "machinery of
their skeletons" suggests a world reduced to a factory of
machines, and its people reduced to mere 'skeletons',
flesh dried up and blood drained, having lost their
ability to resist.
Similarly, Plotincs Poe St. John of
the Cross are juxtaposed with Kansas, and Idaho placed
against visionary Indian angels suggeszs a world which has
lost its alm and reason. Ginsberg's mast favourite
coinage, "hydrogen jukeboxv, apparently illogical, might
also suggest a civilized society whict has forgotten to
dance before a jukebox.
In the second part there is a sigmificant shift of
emphasis from 'the best minds' to 'Moloch' (CP 130-32)the
dark force behind the canker that: has eaten into the
social psyche after the w a r .
If the first section sings
psalms for the best minds, and their uspeakable
sufferings, the next names and condemns the antagonist
Moloch, the ugly robot god of modern civilization to whom
children of America are given in sacrifice. Thus the
whole poem moves between two distinct worlds, the world
peopled by the 'best minds' who starve for the heavenly
connection, and the domestic machine-dominated world that
worships the god of power and wealth.
Thus in another
sense, 'Howl' presents these two worlds juxtaposed, the
two worlds that are against each other, like 'hydrogen
jukebox1.
Moloch is the central image of the second part.
The
Moloch section, interestingly, begins with the screams of
children under the stairways and the sobs of boys in
armies and the weeping of old men in the parks.
Ginsberg
uses all the available adjectives to curse this god who is
more powerful than the Armnonite God of the Scriptures. It
is recorded in the Scriptures that King Solomon's wives
and concubines "led him astray".8 As he grew old his
wives turned his heart to gods other than the god of his
father. Much the same way America has prostituted her
children (her Solomons) to Moloch, and led them astray.
They llve in a world dominated by a mechanical
consciousness ("Moloch whose mind is pure machinery ! " I ,
which is bereft of the feelings of love, and which has no
("Moloch loveless
soul
!"
"Moloch whose love is endless
oil and stone ! " , "Moloch whose soul is electricity and
banks
!"
"Moloch whose name is the mind
!"
CP 131) .
The poet seems to conceive of Moloch as a conceptual
evil ("Mental Moloch", "Moloch whose name is the mind ! " I .
1:t is a fallen
state, it is a condition of the mind.
A
man who has no vision, and one who does not aspire for the
"petite sensation", which all great poets have sought, is
not better than this Moloch, loveless, robot, machine
Moloch. The poet's message is that with rapid scientific
progress, wlth global eco-destruction, and
~ommerclal~sation
and demonic industrlalisation, the
world psyche has become mechanical. Worship of wealth has
gone to such an extent that everywhere Moloch is being
deified as Lord and God. ("They broke their back lifting
Moloch to Heaven
!"
CP 132)). In the words of Paul
E3reslln:
The entire inter-subjective realm of culture, and
with it the very landscape, has been devoured by
'Moloch'. The litany against Moloch in the second
section of the poem so easily accommodates a wide
range of pent-up grievances against society . . . ,,9 .
The age of abundance has been engulfed by this spirit of
darkness.
In part I11 of the poem, the poet passionately seeks
to identify himself with Carl Solomon who becomes the
representative in the poem, of the best minds of the
generation. The refrain "I'm with you in Rokland" shows
that inspite of the passage of time, Ginsberg has still
kept alive the memories of the experiences in the
Columbia Psychiatric Institute where he met one of the
most influential of his friends - Carl Solomon.
Solomon
becomes the living proof that the best minds of the
generation are being destroyed by what the society calls
'madness'. But Ginsberg is not prepared to call his
friend mad. A little biography would make it clear:
A man
of sharp contrasts, Solomon was a bright
student of Surrealist writers, with a compelling
interest in unconventional behaviour, especially
his own. Two year younger than Allen, Solomon
boasted of experiences Ginsberg could only
imagine. A brilliant student, Solomon had . . .
attended a high school for the academically
gifted. At fifteen he had entered the City
College of New York.10
Ginsberg was shocked that the paranoic society had
stamped upon such a brilliant man the stigma of insanity.
Solomon's wry remark rang loud in his mind
:
"There are no
j.ntellectuals in madhousesn .I1 The mental institute and
its bureaucratic structure taught Ginsberg to look at the
world with a different eye, - "a world that would command
you to observe rules even at the cost of your peace of
mind !".I2 Carl Solomon also gave him the conviction that
'The soul is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse". (CP 132)
"The armed madhouse" is indeed a powerful metaphor,
and it goes beyond Rokland State Hospital to represent the
United State of America, where the individual and the
national soul is starved, suffocated and murdered. But
Ginsberg's conviction that
"the soul is innocent and
immortal" gives him the assurance towards the end of
nHowllrthat the persecuted Solomons will resurrect like
Jesus,and prevail over fascist powers and the Mental
Moloch . "The best minds" who are now "stan-inghysterical
naked", will "split the heavens" and "resurrect" as
America's saviours.
The message of "Howl" to the American middle class
society seems to be a warning against materialism, as
suggested by
Moloch.
The Moloch section and the litany
on Carl Solomon taken together, will mean that the empire
of materialism erected by Moloch, has made an armed mad
house of America, and darkened the soul of its people.
This empire has to crumble, and the final triumph of the
human soul has to be achieved. The mind-forged manacles
of Moloch, which means violence, repression, commercialism,
militarism, technocracy, and mindless industrialisation
and eco-destruction, have to be broken, and America should
be re-awakened to a real beatific vision.
"Kaddish" (1958
It is difficult to include Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish"
in the category of public poetry, considering its
overcharged personal character. There is, infact, hardly
any single poem in the whole history of American poetry
which is so unabashedly confessional, and so intensely
personal. But this poem also demands attention and
careful analysis, in the socio-political context of postwar America. "Kaddish" tells the agonizing story of a
paranoic woman tortured and tormented by an equally
paranoic society.
If "the best minds" of "Howl" were men
"destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" (CP
126), the best mind of "Kaddish" is a woman who suffers
the same afflictions almost literally. And therefore the
poem is much more
than the story of a mad woman, if one
takes into account the cultural, social and political
background against which it is written.
The emotional thread that runs through "Kaddish" is
the eternal longing of a woman, the poet's mother, to be
loved and cared for, and the utter disillusionment she
feels when she is denied both. Naomi Ginsberg, the
paranoic mother thus stands in the poem as the universal
symbol of all suffering women.
Her paranoia, though real,
is the consequence of incessant mental and physical
torture she was subjected to because of her communist
leanings. So as in "Howl", Ginsberg blames square society
as singularly responsible for his mother's afflictions.
Now that she is dead :
Strange now to think of you, gone without
corsets and eyes, while
I walk on the sunny pavement of
Greenwich Village
. . . . and your memory in my head three years
after.. . . (CP
209)
In the opening section of the poem, the poet seeks
consolation in the thought that "Death is that remedy all
singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the
Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers
"
(CP 2 0 9 )
He knows that,". . .while it comes it is a lion that eats
the soul", but there is rest in Death :
No more suffering for you, I know where
You're, it's good
. . . No more fear of Louis ...
(CP 210)
The character of Beat culture which Ginsberg shared
in his early phase as a poet is evident in Section I1 of
.
"Kaddish". Here he goes a step farther than all
confessional poets before him in telling the world
shamelessly what as a young man he felt about the
nakedness of his own mother, how he felt t o m between the
extremes of love and hatred for her. Sacrificing
literature and heightened poetic feelings, Ginsberg as a
son subjects himself to the "remembrance of electrical
shocks" (CP 212) and narrates the whole story of his
mother from her childhood till her death and burial in "an
ungrammatical shorthand that appears to be swift notation
of basic fact.. . " . I 3 With astounding courage the poet
recalls and recreates the story of her breakdown,
hallucinations and great scandalous scenes that shook to
its foundations the entire Ginsberg family
:
The telephone rang at 2 a.m - Emergency - she'd
gone mad - Naomi hiding under the bed screaming
bugs of Mussolini - Help
Fascists
!
Death
!
!
Louis ! Buba !
- the landlady frightened -
old fag - attendant screaming back at her
-
Terror, that woke the neighbours - old ladies
on the second floor recovering from menopause
all those rags between thighs, clean sheets,
sorry over lost babies
-
husbands ashen
- .....
-
Her big leg crouched to her breast, hand
oucstretched Keep Away, wool dress on her
thighs, fur coat dragged under the bed - she
barricaded herself under bedspring with
suitcases (CP 215) .
This revelation, and this language are really
shocking, and one seldom comes across anything similar to
these in poetry. But to Ginsberg, truth of the self being true to one's feelings whether good or bad - is of
supreme value.
For this sake he is prepared to forsake
the established concepts of artistic decorum. He says:
I'am not concerned with creating a work of
art . . . And I don't want to predefine it . . . What
I do is to try to forget entirely abcut the
whole world of art, and just get directly to the
. . . fastest and most direct expression of what
it is I got in heart
-
mind".14
The picture of Naomi as drawn in "Kaddish" is that of
a sexually starved woman. Her physical and emotional
estrangement from her husband Louis for years and her long
solitary confinement in mental asylums only aggravate her
paranoia.
Even in a paranoic condition, a woman is after
all a woman, and she wants to have a husband to lover her,
to make love to her.
Naomi craves both, but is cruelly
denied both, and therefore she is sexually deprived which
further intensifies her dislike for Louis.
In such a
pathetic situation the woman in Naomi begins to have
unnatural feelings for her own grown up son, who has been
left in her care by her husband
:
One time I thought she was trying to make me
come lay her - flirting to herself at sink
-
lay
back on huge bed that filled most of the room,
dress up round her hips, big slash of hair,
scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds,
abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions
pulling down in the fat like hideous thick
zippers - ragged long lips between her legs what even smell of asshole? I was cold
-
later
revolted a little not much - seemed perhaps a
good idea to try - know the monster of the
Beginning Womb
-
Perhaps - that way.- Would she
care? She needs a lover
(CP 219).
Commenting on the uncircumlocutory way in which the
inner secrets of lives have been brought to life in
"Kaddish",Louis Simpson, poet and critic says
:
"Kaddish" gives the impression of lives being
revealed for the first time, not only lives of
Naomi, Louis, Allen and Eugene, but many others
who have never spoken of their shame and grief
and humiliation. Before "Kaddish" no one
would have thought that these things could be
said in a poem.15
However, the appalling spectacle of Naomi's nakedness
and her son's unnatural earning to "know the monster of
the beginning womb", may not just be a son's confession of
his desire for an incest. In Naomi, naked, bearing scars
(of operations, belly wounds and abortions, Ginsberg sees
his own country stripped naked, and brutally ravished by
the agents of Moloch and industry. Naomi thus becomes in
the poem the living symbol of America's spiritual
nakedness, and her paranoia is symbolic of the paranoia of
the country which lost its sanity by its adulterous
relationship with Moloch.
In short as the poem comes to
its solemn end, the insanity and the nakedness of
Ginsberg's mother shifts to America, and the country is
exposed in all its ugly profanations.
Also important is that "Kaddish", considering it in
the strict Jewish sense, is a burial hymn, a litany based
upon the Hebrew burial service, because Naomi was a Jewish
emigrant from Russia.
Historically, Kaddish was a
doxology recited by the Jewish rabbi in a congregation,
which in course of time transformed into a song of hope
for the dead sung after burial, in order that the dead
would be saved from the torture of Gehema. But
here, in the case of Ginsberg, his elegy for his mother
crosses the borders of Jewish myth and acqcires great
social and political significance. According to Jewish
tradition, one of the purposes of the funeral song is to
console the society which has been robbed by death of one
of its members. As far as Naomi is concerned, she had no
society from which to be torn apart. She had always been
a lone woman.
The political implications of Naomi's paranoia, and
the probable causes that might have led to it, have been
studied and revealed by M.L. Rosenthal, one of the most
remarkable post-war American critics. He says in his book,
The New Poets : American and British Poetrv Since World
War I1 (1967), that in 1920s the rise and influence of
Hitler, and the disturbances within the Communist movement
created in Naomi a fear that she was surrounded by spies
and poisoners.
In addition to these, she had hysterical
obsessions with Trotskyism and with the Russian spy trials
of the Communist movement.
Thus in "Kaddish" what
Ginsberg feels really bad about is not infact his mother's
paranoia and her miseries, but the repressive attitudes of
the government of his country. And Ginsberg refuses to
apologize on behalf of his mother for her Communist
background. The poem makes it abundantly clear that on
personal as well as political grounds, Ginsberg's
sympathies are more with his mother than with his father.
The poet pours out all his wrath and fury into the poem
while he fiercely reacts against
America's policy of
repression of those who are skeptical of its politics.
Rosenthal writes
:
The virtual sealing off of any legitimacy for
revolutionary debate and organization, in the
wake of war that had already done immense damage
to private personality throughout the Western
world, wrought even more psychic than political
havoc. The story of Naomi Ginsberg is to some
degree a doughty effort to establish the human
validity of a retroactively outlawed type of
experience . . . In another sense, Naomi's story
brings out in every possible way the
psychopathology of the violence done by modern
existence to the most vulnerable among us.16
"The psychopathology of the violence done by modern
existence to the most vulnerable", according to Ginsberg
not only caused the death of his mother, but also has
resulted in the break-up of the American family system and
the total disintegration of the post-war society.
Ginsberg probably has in mind the break-up of his own
family and the resultant crisis. But unlike "Howl" which
anticipates a resurrection,
"Kaddisht',visualises 'Death1
as the only escape from the psychopathology of violence.
("Blessed be Death on us all" CP 225) .
It finds death as
a release from the mechanical consciousness imposed by
"Moloch the Mind".
Ginsberg's prophetic wrath against the abuse of money
and power is the most familiar theme of all his protest
poems. However it is difficult to decide whether Ginsberg
had seriously contemplated becoming a public poet and
social activist prior to his coming to San Francisco.
His poems written before "Howl" and "Kaddish", but
published later only thinly reveal him as a poet with an
unrelenting social and political commitment. They belong,
it may be said, to a period of uncertainty, during which
"he was struggling to fit into the "real world" as he
still then conceived it, working at a long procession of
jobs", and allowing himself to be "torn between various
kinds of sexual impulses which I don't, can't satisfy".1 7
But it may be held that Ginsberg's political radicalism
and interest in social issues were not accidental; they
were on the contrary, evolving over tne years till they
exploded in "Howl". His incarceration in a mental
hospital, his studies in Freud and Zen Buddhism, combined
with his experience from travels, helped him gradually
formulate independent views on politics and social
reforms. One long meditative poem of this period finds
Ginsberg poised between two worlds, the unreal and the
real, and toying with the idea of being as far away as
possible from the civilized world and looking at its
activities as a detached observer. At this stage in his
life, Ginsberg is visibly drawn to philosophic or drug
-
induced meditations rather than being moved by the vexing
social issues of the world of his existence. Only towards
the end of the poem is he disturbed by the thought of
having to return to his country and face the hard
realities there.
The poem is "Siesta in Xbalban in Realitv Sandwiches
(1963), written during Ginsberg's trip to Mexico where he
spent a few months in 1954. The poet is in an ancient
village in the midst of ancient ruins, and the hammock in
which he lies makes him imagine that he is neither in
heaven nor on earth, but between both.
So lying there he
can both look up at heaven and think of eternity and look
down on the earth where he can see
:
. . . . . The white doves
Copulating underneath
and monkeys barking in the interior
of the mountain . . . . . .
(CP 97).
He can also send his thoughts far into the city of New
York and visualize before the mind's eye
:
an eternal kodachrome
souvenir of a gathering
of souls at a party,
crowded in an oval flash
cigarettes, suggestions,
laughter in drunkenness,
broken sweet conversation,
acquaintance in the halls,
faces posed together,
stylized gestures,
old familiar visages
and singular recognitions
that registered indifferent
greetings across time
:
(CP 97)
Thus the poet's mind shuttles between two worlds, the
hammock symbolizing man's middle position.
The hammock
experience is common to every man. One can never dismiss
his earthly thoughts and worldly self entirely and be in
heaven for ever; after all he is part of the earth and has
to be here till he runs the race of life. But very often,
aspiring to escape the bitter realities of everyday
existence, he looks up lovingly and sees the other world
where he expects to be one day.
Lying in the hammock the
poet's mind travels frequently between these two worlds :
I looked up at the stars absently
as if looking for
something else in the blue night
through the boughs,
and for a moment saw myself
leaning against a tree....
. . . . . .back there the noise of a great party
in the apartment of New York
half-created paintings on the walls, fame,
cocksucking and tears
money and arguments of great affairs,
the culture of my generation . . . . . .
(CP 99)
The poet is fully aware of the culture of his
generation which is full of "cocksucking and tears, money
and arguments of great affairsn,and is really unhappy.
But he has not yet made up his mind to "lift my voice
aloud" as he did in "Wichita Vortex Sutran against this
culture that is rotten through and through. Therefore he
seeks comfortable escape into "the House of Nightv and
listen to its noises
:
Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,
flees with little paper wingflap
around the summit in its own air unconcerned
with the great stone tree I perch on.
Continual metallic
whirr of chicharras,
then lesser chirps
of cricket
:
5 blasts
of the leg whistle.
The creak of an opening
door in the forest,
some sort of weird birdsong
or reptile croak.
(CP 101
However, this escape is momentary, and the poet is
brought back to broad day-light by the rooster
:
The great red fat rooster
mounted on a tree stump
in the green afternoon,
the ego of the very fields
screams in the holy sunlight
!
(CP 102)
Back from the world of drug-induced meditation, the poet
is sad, because thoughts about his country are uppermost
in his mind
:
There is a God
dying in America . . . .
(CP 105).
Part I1 of "Siesta in Xbalba" marks the journey of
the poet back to the states. Leaving from Mexico, the poet
has a short stop in Guanajuato in Petzcura. Guanajuato was
once a city of Cortesian mines, but now it seems to have
forgotten its hoary past.
It is now in every sense a
modem city with shops and richly dressed people moving
about it. What arrests Ginsberg's attention is the
mununif ied corpses
:
- - - limestone effigies out
of the grave, remains
of fatal character
---
(CP 107)
These apparitions of immortality "are waiting openmouthed in fireless darkness" (CP 108). The foetid smell
in the hall is reminiscent of sperm and drunkenness. The
skulls are empty and fragile, numerous as shells. The
poet wonders :
So much life passed through
this town . . .
(CP 108)
These "apparitions of immortality" in the Mexico trip
renders the poet's thoughts philosophic. Life on the face
of earth is very short, compared to eternity.
It is in
fact, just a fragment of eternity, and after having lived
through this life, what is left behind is an empty skull
and a skeleton. Therefore, it is imperative that one
makes the most of the "fewer tender momentstrhe gets here:
Of eternity we have
a numbered score of years
and fewer tender moments
-----
one moment of tenderness
and a year of intelligence
and nerves
:
one moment of pure
bodily tenderness
.
(CP 108).
The poet feels the ioneliness in the grave appalling,
probably because it revives his own fear of isolation in
his country, which he expresses in the lines, "the
problem is isolation" (CP 108) and in his lament "What
solitude I've finally inkrited"
(CP 109). These lines
make it clear that he is upset over the thought of
returning to the United Szates, "armed with New Testament"
(CP 110). He has got to be armed because:
The nation over :he border
grinds its arms and dreams
of war
I see
:
the fiery blue clash
of metal wheels
clanking in the industries
of night, and
detonation of infernal bombs
...
and the silent downtown
of the States
in watery dusk submersion.
(CP 110)
But this isolation Ginsberg is afraid of, is not his
personal isolation.
It is a universal phenomenon wrought
by war. The real loneliness and the real isolation are
finally diagnosed as national consequences of "The nation
over the border" (America) that "grinds its arms and
dreams of war" (CP 110).
Fred Moramarco in his studied observation on "Siesta
in Xbalba"
speaks of these last lines of the poem
:
These concluding lines signal Ginsberg's
intention to confront the chaos of contemporary
America directly in his poetry - to awaken from
the "Siesta in Xbalba" and return to the States
both in person and in the subject matter of his
poetry. The life of the imagination is to put
to worlc transcribing the world that worships
Moloch . . . .18
Thus in short, "Seista in Xbalba", though primarily
philosophic and meditative in content and treatment, also
becomes preparing ground for Ginsberg's entry into
American poetry scene as a singular voice that awakens the
nation to the evils of Moloch who would destroy its "best
mindsn, unless fought against. The poem in this sense
might also serve as a prologue to 'Howl'. But with his
subsequent volumes, Planet News (1968) and The Fall of
nmerica (1972), Ginsberg has established himself as
America's acknowledged public poet, considering the wide
range of social and political issues he deals with in them
with amazing courage and frankness.
The Poet as Proahet:Political Thouahts in GinsberatsSmall
QQeIas
Ginsberg's pessimistic view of life, ingeminated in
him chiefly by the most ignominious death of his mother,
and his feelings of alienation in his own land that
worships Moloch, run underneath his political
vituperations in "Kaddish". However, a few comparatively
smaller poems published along with "Kaddish" acquire a
prophetic tone, and in them, like Whitman, Ginsberg is
seen prophesying the fall of America.
He is equally
worried about the dismal future of other nations also,
because his European tour has given him first hand
knowledge of "the classic stations of the Earthm (CP 103).
His prophetic utterances in these poems, combined with his
deep conviction of the priestly mission of the poet, are
reminiscent of Whitman1s solemn exhortation to poets in
U a v e s of Grasa (1891-2). "The poet is priest", Ginsberg
declares at the beginning of "Death to Van Goghls Ear"
(CP 168). "At Apollinare's Grave", another poem in this
cluster, was originally titled "Now Time for Prophecy"
(CP 170). The world, according to Ginsberg, has entered the
'sputnik age', and its future is bleak. History and
politics have both belied themselves by acquiesing in the
martyrdom of some of the greatest poets of the world.
In "Europe
!
Europe!" , composed in Paris, Ginsberg
imagines the future of the great city, and of Europe. He
feels sad that "man has gone madwand that "there is no one
whose love is perfect" (CP 171).
"The cities/are spectres
of cranks/of war the cities are/work
/smoke of the furnace of/ selfhood
&
brick
...
&
iron
&
"(CP 171). War
has wrought the greatest damage to the mind of man:
Mind eats its flesh in
geekish starvation and no
Man's fuck is holy for
Man's work is most war
(CP 172)
The poet can hear the roar of planes, and see the
race of cars, and he knows where they are all rushing,
to inevitable death.
No man has loved perfectly, and
therefore no man is going to attain heavenly bliss. A new
mankind to be reborn and herald the millennium is a
distant possibility.
The agonized thoughts about the future of the world
expressed in "Europe! Europe!" are repeated in
the
sputnik' poem, ''Poem Rocket", inspired by the launching
of the Sputnik by Russia.
rocket) .
(The title
page shows a
The poet is aiarmed at the thought of man having
conquered the heavens, and he is afraid if man would
corrupt space also just as he has corrupted the earth.
Therefore, Ginsberg finds it imperative that he contradict
"the rocket" which symbolizes death and annihilation with
his "poem rocket" which would carry "pure thought
message", the message of peace and love.
The poet's "rocket" has two functions: first, it
denounces the Pope as anti-Christ, and warns against "the
monstrous new ecclesiastical design" "in the dying Pope's
brain"; second, it defies the scientist's false promise
that "he'll make us a new universe"
(CP 163).
Ginsberg has evidently taken the Sputnik launching as
a remarkable event, which would change the entire world
order. He is therefore not sure how long he will survive
in the new age of the satellite. In his own country,
which persecutes minorities, the poet is now living "naked
without identity". He has already had the taste of death,
meaning that he anticipates annihilation of the world any
moment :
already my feet are washed in death (CP 163)
Therefore he seeks to make use of poetry as a sort of
rocket to send to the future and to God "the Great Brain
of the Universe" to join the prayers from other beings,
human and non-human, in the form of "love-sighs
complaints-musical/shrieks of despair and the million
unutterable thoughts/of frogsM (CP 164). His rocket, the
poem, will be an amazing chemical, charged with his
"speeding thought", and it will fly "upward with his
desire as instantaneous as the universe and faster than
lightw (CP 164).
Ginsberg's ultimate faith in poetry as saviour of the
world is expressed in the poem "Death to Van Gogh's Ear"
in which he says:
Man cannot long endure the hunger of the
cannibal abstract
War is abstract
the world will be destroyed
but I will die only for poetry, that will save
the world
(CP 168)
Here, at the outset itself Ginsberg asserts the
poet's indisputable role as the spiritual guide to a world
blinded by Moloch, and names all the feculent deeds of his
country.
"The Poet is Priest", he says, but "Money has
reckoned the soul of America", money being the greatest of
America's iniquities (CP 167). Next, the poet lists some
of the wrongs the world has done to its great poets and
philosophers : the murder of "Lorca the fairy son of
Whitman", and
the death of Mayakovsky, and Hart Crane
(CP 167). Then with a prophetic warning that America will
be driven from "the golden Door of the futurew,Ginsberg
tells his country of its ingratitude to Einstein, Russell,
and Chaplin:
Einstein alive was mocked for his heavenly politics
Bertrand Russell driven from New York for
getting laid and the immortal Chaplin has been
driven from our shores with the rose in his teeth
(CP 167)
Further, referring to the unholy "ecclesiastical
designsn of the Church the poet speaks of the Catholic
Church entering into conspiracies "in the lavatories of
Congressn, and denying "contraceptives to the unceasing
masses of India (CP 167). Turning to government and
institutions, "the poet as priest" says that their fall is
imminent.
Industry has produced
of rubber trees and phantoms"
a million automobiles
(CP 167). Trees become
machines, and people become parts of machines that no
longer walk. The fertile soil of America has turned
barren, thanks to the great advances in industry, and while
the rest of the world goes hungry, "mountains of eggs were
reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress:
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the
eggless wilderness and I rarely have an egg for
breakfast thou my work requires infinite eggs to
come to birth in Eternity eggs should be eaten or
given to their mothers
(CP 167).
The anger of the poet-priest explodes as he mentions
the root of all evils, money, the offspring of Moloch:
Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial
money of illusion
!
Money made of nothing,
starvation, suicide! Money of failure Money of
death! Money against Eternity! and eternity's
strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion
!
(CP 170).
The metaphorical use of the title "Van Gogh's Ear" is
intended not at all as a tribute to Van Gogh, (1853 1890), the great Dutch expressionist painter who cut off
his ear in order to win the favour of a prostitute.
Gogh stands in the poem as a symbol of irrational
Van
behaviour. The painter by his whimsical act was in effecz
pronouncing his own death. Similarly America, obsessed
too much with materialism, is prostituting itself to the
whore of wealth, unmindful of consequences.
It is giving
itself up to whims and fleeting pleasures at the risk of
enduring values.
("It has rejected its saviours"
(CP
167). Therefore the poet leaves a prophetic warning :
These are obvious prophesies
America will be destroyed
(CP 169)
Notes
Donald Barlow Stauffer, A Short Historv of American
Poetrv (New York
E.P. Dutton,
:
1974) 409.
The New Testament. Oxford NIV Scofield Study Bible,
Philippians
4 : 7.
Stephen Stepanchev, American P o w Since
York
:
Harper and Row,
(New
1945
1 9 0 5 ) 274.
Harry J. Cargas, qtd. in Daniel BerriContemorarv Protest Poetry (New Haven, Conn
University Press,
:
College and
1 9 7 2 ) 215.
Critical studies on Ginsberg's use of ellipses by
Paul Portuges and Laszlo Gefin are reprinted in Lewis
Hyde, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg
University of Michigan Press,
1984).
(AM
Arbor
:
The
Paul Portuges,
"Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cezame and the Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus". Reprinted from Contemorarv Literatu
(Summer, 1 9 8 0 ) 141-57. Laszlo Gefin, "Ellipses, The
-
Ideograms of Ginsbergn in Ideoa-am : Historv of a Poetic
Method (Austin
:
UniversiZy of Texas Press,
Harry J. Cargas,
1982).
215.
Allen Ginsberg, qtd. in Laszlo Gefin, Jdeosram
Modern n
a
cA
m
ireMilton Keynes
University Press,
1982) 119.
:
The Open
L
8
e Old T e s t a m a , 1 Kings. 11
:
4. "For it came to
pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his
heart after other gods
:
and his heart was not perfect
with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David, his
father".
Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Analvtical Muse
Poet-
Since the Fifties (Chicago
:
:
American
University of Chicago
Press, 1987) 26.
Michael Schumacher,
Biosra~hyof Allen Ginsberg (New York
St. Martin's
:
Press, 1992) 115.
Michael Schumacher, 117.
l2 Allen Ginsberg qtd. in Michael Schumacher, 117.
l3 Harvey Shapiro, "Exalted Lament", Reprinted in
Lewis Hyde, ed. 86.
l4 Allen Ginsberg, in Gordon Ball ed., Allen Verbatim
:
Lectures on Poetrv. Politics. Consciou-
(New York
:
McGraw Hill, 1974) 106.
l5 Louis Simpson, qtd. in "Souls in Sympathy with One
Another". Rep. in Lewis Hyde, ed. 114.
M. L. Rosenthal. The New Poets
.
:
American an8
.
ritish Poetrv Since World War I1 (New York : Oxford
University Press, 1967), Rep. in Lewis Hyde ed. 22.
l7 Allen Ginsberg in George Plimpton ed., Poets
Work : The Paris Interviews (New York
:
aL
Penguin Books,
1989) 191.
h
e AmericanSept Fred Moramarco, T
Oct, 1982) Rep. in Lewis Hyde (ed.) 222.