Howl-lelujah

In preparation for this blog post on Ginsberg, I am readying some tea and clicking Thelonius Monk on the stereo… Of course, when I say tea, I mean camellia senensis and not cannabis sativa as Ginsberg and the Beats would probably be talking about, though if I had a little of that, this post might really bop. I am also going to re-read “Howl” so I can be on the right vein when I dive into this… and, done.

In simplest terms: I love “Howl.” When I am in the midst of quoting the lines, which I have to do out loud, It makes me wish I was alive in the fifties and I could chill with those crazy cats, take drugs and talk into the wee hours of the morning or the next day perhaps the day after that when my body just can not take any more of the abuse and shuts down of its own accord. For that is where it ends. The Beats lit up the world for a while, and if I were some extra-terrestrial reading the book of history up to that moment, in the midst of their existence I may have had hope for things to turn around, until the wages of their self-destruction finally took them down, snubbed out their glow.

As I read “Howl” I always get caught up in the who’s. I pass over the first line, and get lost in the rhythm of Ginsberg’s world. The rhythm is such that it is often that not until I finish the first section that I remember the opening lines: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” (2865). It is like getting lost in a jazz solo, the power is in the moment, and not until it is all done that one can listen back over the recording and consider the meaning of it all. It is like the beats themselves: history buys the record, listens back over their momentousness then puts it away. They were alive then, that’s what they had to say, and they burnt out. It is really, really sad. I weep for them and the countless others who have followed that path. Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs: the insight they possess, the drive to live and breathe that is so inspiring that it makes them do it all at once and then they are gone and no-one pays attention to them because they are "deviants" and "addicts."