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40
Allen Ginsberg
Most people who consider themselves religious—at least in the
western world, where the spiritual and physical have been at odds at
least since the Greeks—will subscribe, arguably, to the first two statements
(certainly to the second), but from the skin and nose on down,
things become uncomfortable and finally unacceptable. The “asshole” is
not to be talked about, much less declared “holy,” much less conflated
with things of the “spirit.”
Regarding the issue of madness, consider that Ginsberg’s usable
past was made up of figures like William Blake, Christopher Smart,
Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, and “Plotinus Poe St John
of the Cross telepathy and bop Kabbalah” (12), 2 as he writes in “Howl.”
(In the original manuscript, the list also includes Marx, Genet, Artaud,
Rimbaud, Wolfe, Celine, Proust, Whitman, and Buddha.) Whether
through drugs, meditation, jazz, sex, or travel, Ginsberg wanted to experience
and to depict in the poem the derangement of the senses that
Arthur Rimbaud had recommended in the nineteenth century—mad,
but also shamanistic, prophetic, bardic, and visionary. Vincent Hugh,
at the trial of Howl argued that the book belonged to a tradition in
literature that has roots in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s
Ulysses, and all the “ancient mythologies of the world” (Raskin 223).
Ginsberg’s antecedents for alternate states of consciousness were
not only literary and mythological; they were also familial. Ginsberg’s
mother, Naomi Ginsberg, was a paranoid schizophrenic who had
many breakdowns, starting almost immediately after her wedding to
Ginsberg’s father. She saw enemies everywhere, as Raskin recounts:
President Roosevelt conspired against her; Nazi spies stalked her;
her mother-in-law planned to assassinate her; or so she insisted.
The whole industrial world aimed to destroy her. That story line
was essential to Allen Ginsberg’s myth about his mother—the
myth that infuses Howl. His mother—and all the innocent,
idealistic young men and women of the world—had ‘human
individuality and non-mechanical organic charm,’ Ginsberg
thought. Like them, Naomi stood in opposition to the ‘modern,
mechanical, scientific robot government’ (Raskin 29–30).
The anti-establishment climax of Howl occurs in Part II, an incantation
of accusations against Moloch, the ancient Middle Eastern deity
to which children were sacrificed, seen now as the technological evil