Episode 97 - Howl

Allen Ginsberg begins his 1956 poem “Howl” with the following words: “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 fix, / 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 floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”  Ginsberg, along with contemporaries Jack Kerouac and William Borroughs, embraced a lifestyle that ran contrary to the stiff materialism of post-war 1950s America – a lifestyle that included sexual liberation, psychedelic drugs, and a rootlessness best characterized by Kerouac’s book, On The Road, which, rumor has it, was typed out on a roll of paper without natural break or pause – stream-of-consciousness to the extreme.  The Great Depression and World War II caused a massive shift in how one approached the task of living, and at least for the Beatniks, that approach meant all out rebellion, even if, according to a popular 1955 film of the same name, starring James Dean, that rebel did not have a cause. What the movement, in general, and “Howl,” in particular, highlights is the insanity that will inevitably crop up when the institutions and monsters borne out of the human mind become so massive that the soul can only whimper in their presence.  Consider the A-bomb, for example.  At no time in human history have our species developed and, I hasten to say, actually deployed a weapons system that can level entire cities in a split second.  Yet we did this in Japan: twice.  And then there were the fire-bombings across Nazi-occupied Europe.  In Dresden alone, so notes Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was first published in 1969, the fires were so intense that citizens rushed to the water towers, climbed in, and were inadvertently boiled alive.  Juxtapose all of this to the pristine American life networks were broadcasting across the nation – Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and Lassie – and we get a recipe for pure lunacy.  The Beatniks chaffed at this absurd contradiction of messaging. The world was not ideal, they argued. They saw it.  They lived it. Ward Cleaver, the Beav’s father, knew it, too, though you could not see the terrible flashbacks behind the genial smile and pipe.  That was artifice.  That was fake or, as Holden Caufield reminds us in 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, “phony.” Rest assured, dear listeners, that I am not dropping the titles of books, films, and television programs to sound impressive.  I do so to provide much needed context.  There were many voices saying the same thing, yet American popular culture marched dutifully forward, seemingly ignoring the calls for alarm along the way.  We were American, after all.  Rugged.  Individualistic. And, importantly, nothing like the Ruskies and their failing communist experiment. The madness, however, soon swelled into what became the countercultural revolution of the sixties with the riots and the protests, the draft card burnings and the assassinations. That gave way to the hedonism of the seventies, the materialism of the eighties, and the cynicism of the nineties. Are we howling or have we been rendered silent, pacified by our devices, oblivious of what simmers beneath?  To howl would require the ability or at least the willingness to step into unchartered places in order to consider the wider context.  It would require that we reacquaint ourselves with our wildness – to rediscover what Walt Whitman calls our barbaric yawp.  Is there cause for hope?  After cynicism came the absurd.  After the absurd came living as performance: Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram.  Is Ginsberg to be an echo or a call to action?  Perhaps it all depends on how many lies we can tolerate: those told to us by others, those told to us by ourselves.