No! In Thunder:
Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997

I search for the language
that is also yours --
almost all our language has been taxed by war

-- "Wichita Vortex Sutra"

Only in its minute particulars is this memory strictly personal; thousands of people share it, in some form or other. I was fourteen, living near Dallas (gun holster of the Bible Belt), locked in mortal combat with parental sensibilities (Southern Baptist, to be precise). The combined influence of Bertrand Russell's essays and a PBS broadcast of Waiting for Godot had transformed me into a godless existentialist. And I was ready, even desperate, to read anything whatsoever by Allen Ginsberg. In the preface to an anthology of modern British and American poetry, the editor quoted a little of "Howl." It was like starving to death and being offered exactly one bite of a sandwich. The opening lines --

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
      starving hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the negro dawn looking for an
      angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
      connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of
      night ...

-- were instantly burned into my brain. The high school library contained the collected works of J. Edgar Hoover, but no Beat literature. And then (oh, the cultural contradictions of capitalism!) the commercial ritual of Christmas was my salvation.

At the chain bookstore in some ghastly shopping center, I noticed it: Howl and Other Poems. That afternoon, as the rest of the nuclear family unit wandered the mall, I sat in the car, inspecting the booklet, chanting the title poem. Its anaphora and obscenity and very long lines were exhilarating. So was its apocalyptic quality: Ginsberg embraced the very people damned from the pulpit, and in civics class. Oddly enough, though, the radicalism evoked in the poet's memory --

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell
      meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket
      cost a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was
      angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so
      sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in
      1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
      Bloor the Silk-strikers' Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once
      saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must
      have been a spy.

-- had once even reached Texas. Decades before, Socialist Party "encampments" drew thousands of people to hear about the democratic alternative to capitalism, and the IWW ("America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies") organized farm workers not that far from where we lived. All of which had long since been forgotten. Reading the poems of a gay, Jewish red-diaper baby was the first step to recovering that history.

The little black-and-white pamphlet followed me to school. I sneaked it in concealed inside a zippered Bible, and sat at the back of the church, reading it during the sermon. Rebellion intensified, deepened, acquired a sense of history. Now I was carrying a concealed weapon.

SOME YEARS LATER, THERE WAS ANOTHER, LESS AGREEABLE ENCOUNTER with the poem -- this time, in an annotated edition. The effort to explain the private subtext of "Howl" was commendable, but seemed curiously inappropriate. Despite the poet's cryptic allusions to friends and lovers, this "Howl" was not the cry of any specific individual. (You might as well read Leaves of Grass as if its "I" were Walt Whitman himself). The poem did indeed speak of personal experiences -- chronicled in recent years by his (so far, rather mediocre) biographers -- but Ginsberg used them

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

His verbal alchemy "made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul ...."

The result was, to use William Blake's term, prophesy. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "As I was then perswaded & remained confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote"). Another word for prophet, in this sense, is "troublemaker." The literary historians of another century will be able to assemble a useful anthology of documents from the secret police of various countries (including, yes, these United States), demonstrating just how worrisome a prophet Ginsberg became. The San Francisco police confiscated the first printing of Howl. Ginsberg's candid sexual radicalism got him thrown out of Czechoslovakia and Cuba. He wrote one of the best poems against the Vietnam war, "Wichita Vortex Sutra." And in later years, he made an effort to reach a younger audience by composing lyrics for rock bands.

That was perhaps not his best moment. But, doggerel though it may be, his song "Capitol Air" (1980), was at least a good manifesto:

Truth may be hard to find but Falsehood's easy
Read between the lines our Imperialism is sleazy
But if you think the People's State is your Heart's Desire
Jump right back in the frying pan from the fire.

Or as he wrote in another poem: "When Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is arrested or robbed or had his head cut off."

THERE WILL, OF COURSE, BE READERS FOR WHOM GINSBERG is the prophet of a utopia now already dimly visible. For after all, Stalinism is in terminal decline, and life in America is not (as before) perfectly hellish for gays -- while the slaughter of Iraqi civilians was done quickly, and with international support, not like the slaughter in southeast Asia some while ago. And the culture industry now secretes rebellion in a dozen flavors (advertising research having become considerably more sophisticated since the early fifties, when Ginsberg quit his job conducting market surveys). So really, what's to howl about?

millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret
      caverns under the White House
while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of
      rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the
      halls of Congress
no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink
      of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapis continue to gnaw their vitaminless
      tortillas ....

wrote the poet in 1957, as if to denounce the celebration now in progress. And then added:

the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but Asia
      and Russia will not fall
the government of America also will fall but how can America fall
I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won't fall are the good ones
and the good ones don't yet exist
But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems ...

Contents of No. 23