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Howl 41
of instrumental reason, Blake’s Urizen. Moloch had murdered Naomi
and would murder others. But Moloch is clearly also the cities and
their buildings. Moloch is the military-industrial complex, CIA, FBI,
Blake’s “satanic mills,” and multinational capitalism all rolled into one.
(In early drafts, Ginsberg wrote, “Moloch whose name is America
. . .” [AGHO 64], a line he later took out. 3 ) This apocalyptic section
of Howl was written under the influence of peyote, after walking
through San Francisco with Peter Orlovsky. He at first saw Moloch as
memories of gloomy New York City, but when he stared at the façade
of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, “suddenly the gothic eyes of the skull
tower glaring out” and “dollar sign skull protrusion of lipless jailbarred
inhuman longtooth spectral deathhead. . . .” (from Ginsberg’s Journals:
Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958, qtd. in Raskin 131).
Schizophrenics who believe that the radio is talking to them (as
did Naomi Ginsberg and, somewhat differently, as does Allen Ginsberg
in Howl and later books) are not altogether mistaken. Fifteen
years after Howl, in The Fall of America, Ginsberg writes a long poem
that he composes as he is being driven across America, listening to
the voices on the car radio hypnotize listeners into shopping and
supporting a war in Southeast Asia. Ginsberg was prescient in illustrating
the forms that modern hegemony takes, not centralized but
dispersed, even “implanted” in each person—another “paranoia” of
Howl.
“Madness” appears in the very first line of Howl: “I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical,
naked . . .” (9). 4 Ginsberg was thinking of his friends, the petty thief
and addict Herbert Huncke, Carl Solomon whom he met in a mental
hospital, Phil White (a heroin addict who committed suicide in
prison), William Cannastra (who was killed in a subway accident),
David Kammerer (stabbed to death by Ginsberg’s friend Lucien Carr),
Joan Burroughs (shot to death by William Burroughs, by accident
presumably, in Mexico) and Kerouac, going through his own mental
hell, lost, unpublishable, uncertain. 5 In Howl, “madness” becomes a
floating signifier. Does it refer to the agonizing schizophrenia that
killed Ginsberg’s mother? Or does it mean what Whitman signifies
when, speaking of the atmosphere, he says “I am mad for it to be
in contact with me”? In other words, does it signify not pathology
but intensity of experience and of opposition to the system? Like
On the Road, Howl celebrates outsiders, living in the moment. The