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 Howl’s 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 Ginsberg’s The Fall of America and the America that “LOOKED FROM ITS GRAVE”were 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 it’s 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 you’ll 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 Kerouac’s 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 it’s 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 Street’s 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 “we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not a dread black dusty imageless locomotive, we’re 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 the“white 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 haven’t any friends” (Dylan) This social conscious and use of contrast gave the poet singer the “whitmanesque…I am America” perspective where he could speak for men who weren’t 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
we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not a dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re 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 capitalism’s 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 Dylan’s novel Tarantula, in the lines “jack of spades – vivaldi of the coin laundry – wearing a hipster’s 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 world’s 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 Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s 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 “didn’t 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 man’s 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 Ginsberg’s 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 Kerouac’s “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 Russian“Sputnik”, 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 beat’s 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. Kerouac’s mantra became “you’re 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 you’d be arrested for obscenity” she doesn’’t een hear the band..she falls down a sidewalk crack” (Dylan ) If one couldn’t embrace the beat of the scene, the crazy wigged out mantra which dictated the path of the man, then they’d never know. They’d point out the beards and the bodies spread across mattresses on each other and the heroin needles and the staircase of marijuana smoke that supposedly led these gloats to “higher realization.”
In Dylan’s 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 Kerouac’s 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 Ginsberg’s 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 Kerouac’s 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 tear 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. Strangelove’s America Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1997.
Merill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1998.
Schumaker, Michael. Dharma Lion New York : St. Martin’s 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.