The Legacy of Allen Ginsberg 

In my undergrad English Department the Beats were mentioned in a survey course I took, in 1995, on Postmodernism, and the writers mentioned were Allen Ginsberg, for “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac, for On the Road. These two had helped create a new approach to literature. Their writing was intentionally Raw (capital “R”) and cut to the bone, doing away with irony and artifice. These were writers on the go: travelling nonstop from coast-to-coast; they were drug users and the preamble to hippiedom; the Beats were hustlers (Burroughs and Herbert Huncke), and they made it their task to describe life as it was experienced: no more politeness, no more niceties, just “direct expression.” 

The Professor explained that the Beat movement’s innovations made the New Journalism possible (Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer), which in turn opened the door for all sorts of weirdness, including what is now called Postmodernism: an approach to literature focusing on meta-narratives, which relates to the deconstruction of that which was once agreed upon as conventional, consensual, and real; Postwar writers reveled in alternate scenarios, forms and readings that in turn worked to displace and disrupt reality. This is what the Beats accomplished: they gave us the gritty, down in the gutter, deviant and defiant version that was previously considered untoward and not fit for consumption. That this coincided with the invent of television made their reach pervasive and they were eventually, like the hippies after, coopted into the mainstream.

I read the Beat Writers in my twenties. I read quite a bit about the early days: of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and their cohorts. I took Ginsberg to be the submissive Beat. The guy who took the fall for his friends, who spent time in an asylum, who grew up overshadowed, the son of a poet in suburban New Jersey. Ginsberg wrote “Howl;” he learned his craft from William Carlos Williams; he was known for connecting poets, artists and critics. Some critics hold Ginsberg’s poetry up as akin to the great Bardic criers of centuries past, as if Ginsberg ‘spoke for the tribe,’ in the way W.B. Yeats spoke for the Irish, or Walt Whitman sang the prospects of America. I have always wondered at the enthusiasm some people have, particularly poets and critics, for Allen Ginsberg.

I do not sense much feeling in Ginsberg’s poetry. I think this lack of feeling reflects a shallow and pernicious personal life (more on this later). I would argue that some of it has become so cliched as to read like refrigerator art. Here is an example of what I mean (some lines of poems, other direct quotes):

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”

And more:

“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.”

And:

“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your  own consciousness.”

And lastly:

“The weight of the world/ is love./ Under the burden/ of solitude/ under the burden/ of dissatisfaction/  the weight/ the weight we carry/ is love.”

I actually like this one; the idea is echoed by a line and theme from a much better poem, from The Book of Nightmares, entitled, “Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight” by Galway Kinnell, who speaks to his newborn daughter of how he will teach her to praise the world:

...I think 

you think

I will never die, I think I exude

to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

even as

my broken arms heal themselves around you.

...

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,

when I come back

we will go out together,

we will walk out together among

the ten thousand things,

each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages

of dying is love. (my italics)

I like what Kinnell does with the singular “is” in correspondence with the plural noun “wages”: he makes the word, “love,” a plurality and contrasts it with “wages,” which become singular. Love does a lot more than money ever will. 

Ginsberg’s line comes from a poem called “Song” which goes on to define, again and again, love as the burden of life, and it ends with the lines,

“yes, yes,/ that's what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/ I always wanted,// to return/ to the body/ where I was born.”

This is a sentiment I can relate to! But it seems so cliché, at the present moment, as to be bereft of any real meaning. Further still, it rings of the privilege of defeatism, both of which are mirrored later in Ginsberg’s life in his drug use, and as I will elaborate later, his defilement of innocence. He preyed on teenage boys. 

Finally, whereas Ginsberg claims he had an awakening at age seventeen when he met Kerouac and Burroughs: “I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs – when I was 17 – that I realized I was talking through an empty skull… I wasn’t thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts,” his originality existed in part in his ability to market himself and his comrades as “representative” Romantics—in the Emersonian sense—in the guise of avant garde hipsters. Here was a new set of poets and thinkers representing a generation of forlorn and angst filled kids, who had nothing but time and money and all the while subconsciously (or consciously) attempted to ‘possess’ the mother, in the Freudian sense, which is singularly evidenced in their various addictions (Ginsberg’s many sorts, Burroughs a lifetime heroin addict, Kerouac an alcoholic). 

The Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron etc.), too, wanted a re-union with Nature, a merging of ‘self’ and ‘other.’ The Beats, and Ginsberg, in particular, because he was the force behind getting out ‘the word’ and this new movement, did their part to foment in society language not altogether original in conception and, in the end, drained of meaning by technological advancements that saturated society with such cliché announcements as “follow your inner moonlight.” While I would not disparage any language that allows one to cope in a vastly disorienting world, words lose their meaning at a certain point. The one thing the language of the Beats does is hew to a correctness that is indefatigably, and even at times in opposition to reason, politically Left. 

Where Ginsberg’s words, his poetic lines, lack feeling, they sound a bit like proclamations posted on a townhall doorway in any University town, particularly one notorious for progressive politics. Ginsberg has it all figured out: 

“The war is language,

language abused

for Advertisement,

language used

like magic for power on the planet.”

Here is where Ginsberg’s poetry fails: his words exist almost entirely in the political realm, and therefore leave no space for the personal or the tragic. In fact, because “the war is language,” Ginsberg gives himself a pass. Writing about the personal or tragic would be impossible in the present climate. Ginsberg, it seems to me, fails to address in his own life what Faulkner famously characterized as the only subject worth addressing: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself….”

“(The contemporary writer) writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

Rereading “Howl” I am struck by the subject matter: the depraved hipster craving a fix. Ginsberg has little compassion for the economic system to which he attributes the problems his poem addresses. Of course, Ginsberg was only able to write his poetry, to avoid work, and to travel the world, because of a postwar boom unparalleled in the country’s history. Resources were cheap. Everything was cheap. The Beats do not happen in any other context. 

The current social media driven news cycle seems reflected in the second part (of three) of Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl;” his lines read like an onslaught of diatribe, screed and invective. Take a look:

“Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!”

Because this is Ginsberg writing, I think it interesting that Moloch, a destructive force, references a “Canaanite deity associated with child-sacrifice” (dictionary definition). There is further irony in the fact that in 1984 the New York Times labeled Ginsberg the “poet laureate of protest.” 

We live in an age of correctness, an age governed by what the writer, jazz saxophonist, heretic and philosopher Gilad Atzmon calls “Jerusalemite” thinking. In today’s media environment, what Ginsberg called Moloch iterates as another somewhat abstract term, “White Supremacy;” his poem’s lines are akin to sound bites. His protest poem has been refracted and mirrored and in the same way his moment’s cadre of middle class educated young people seized power and become famous, today’s generation of outraged middle class youth protest as a means to political and economic status and power. They seem to be using language similar to that found in “Howl.”

Ginsberg and Ezra Pound. Pound apologized for his antisemitism when the two spoke. Ginsberg was entirely unapologetic about his pederasty. 

In Atzmon’s rendering, Jerusalemite thought relates to the opposite of reason, the opposite of rationality. Atzmon elucidates on his theory on what he sees a s a struggle in the West between Reason and Rules, as follows:

“Athens is the birthplace of Western thought and Jerusalem is the city of revelation. Athens teaches us how to think, Jerusalem demands our obedience. 

The Western humanist values and intellectual assets we are now nostalgic for came from Athens: democracy, tolerance, freedom of speech, philosophy, Agora, science, ethics, poesis and the tragedy. Jerusalem gave us laws, mitzvoth, regimes of prescribed and proscribed behavior. Athens teaches us how to think ethically: in Jerusalem, ethics are replaced by the Ten Commandments; rules to obey. Jerusalem is not solely a ‘Jewish domain.’ The Jerusalemization of our universe is apparent in every corner of society: from pop culture, to the work place, to academia and beyond.  It is the tyranny of correctness adopted by the new Left and it is at least as infectious within right identitarianism.”

It may certainly be true that Ginsberg felt marginalized by his homosexuality—and it certainly did not help to have homophobic friends like Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs—but in the end, his entire schtick seems like performance. The Beats helped create the counterculture, no doubt, but how much of that was influenced by nefarious forces working behind the curtain that perhaps even leaders in the movement like Ginsberg were blind to? And, how much was grassroots and how much media influenced?

I took up the task of wrangling with Ginsberg after coming upon an audio interview of feminist writer Andrea Dworkin in which she describes Ginsberg’s pederasty. In her telling, Ginsberg and Dworkin were at a Bar Mitzvah in the Boston area, each of them godparents in the ceremony. The Supreme Court had just criminalized, in some new way, sex with minors and Ginsberg was apoplectic. He claimed he could go to prison based solely on some photos at his apartment. When pressed, Ginsberg claimed that the thirteen year old being celebrated in the Bar Mitzvah was an adult - Ginsberg claimed that the definition of Bar Mitzvah made it so that the subject of the event became a man - and therefore capable of making sexual decisions in encounters with adults. Ginsberg said that he particularly enjoyed seducing fifteen year old boys and giving them blowjobs. When Dworkin asked him if he thought these encounters might be detrimental to the mental health of the boys engaged, might be damaging to their egos, Ginsberg insisted that she was missing the point and told her there was no real way to know. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx714AGs-sk&t=2s

I am interested in the ways that Ginsberg became complicit with an agenda of trauma (I consider coercing teenagers as young as thirteen into adult sexual encounters to be a form of traumatization). Like Leonard Cohen, Ginsberg participated in MK Ultra experimentation that included the use of LSD under the guidance of CIA trained doctors. Ann Diamond, one of Cohen’s former girlfriends, claims that Cohen was a covert operator connected with an Intelligence agency: CIA, Mossad, or MI6. A reading of Cohen’s lyrics reveals quite a bit of ambiguity and darkness, including the suggestion of sex with minors. (To read more on this find a copy of Jasun Horsley’s 16 Maps of Hell). Is it possible Ginsberg was in some way unwittingly doing the work of Intelligence (by sowing trauma in the boys he preyed on)?

I have been doing a bit of thinking about societal complicity with pervasive social engineering based on the traumatization of children (minors younger than eighteen). This trauma is designed to replicate through its carriers. When Ginsberg writes about meeting Burroughs and Kerouac at age seventeen and having his ‘mind blown,’ at least with Burroughs, I have to assume sexual predation. It is no wonder I do not think highly of Ginsberg's poetry. It seems he had incredible difficulty forming intimate relationships. To the point he was a pederast. These, unfortunately, are the powerful in the world; the ones to whom the most damage is done, do the most damage.  Now, not many years after the Beats, trauma, coercion and correctness overlap, and I am left to sift hopelessly through page after page of shallow vanities—tweets, notifications, hysterias—bereft of decency in a world utterly off its rocker. 

***

Ginsberg reading “A Supermarket in California”: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhTh01CO60Y

In this poem Ginsberg outlines the pathos of American consumerism: old men shopping alone at midnight, and for a moment the poem elicits a twinge of loneliness. Once the speaker in the poem introduces the store detective who watches everything—much in the same way the speaker does—suddenly that feeling of isolation, for me, dissipates. I think a sense of paranoia should replace the sense of isolation, but does not. A curious tidbit I noted in past readings but which illuminates my concerns with Ginsberg and his strange affiliations. In this poem he celebrates Walt Whitman, and characterizes him as a pervert: “childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” The poem catalogs two dead homosexual poets (Whitman and Lorca) and the watcher, paralleling the detective, projects on to the scene and then wends his way back home through the night. 

Walt Whitman