Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  Rejoice in the Lamb: Jubilate Agno

  Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; give the glory to the Lord, and the Lamb.

  Nations, and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.

  Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.

  Let Noah and his company approach the throne of Grace, and do homage to the Ark of their Salvation.

  Let Abraham present a Ram, and worship the God of his Redemption.

  Let Isaac, the Bridegroom, kneel with his Camels, and bless the hope of his pilgrimage.

  Let Jacob, and his speckled Drove adore the good Shepherd of Israel.

  Let Esau offer a scape Goat for his seed, and rejoice in the blessing of God his father.

  It begins “let, let, let, let, let, let.” The entire manuscript was so messed up that by the time the twentieth century came around they didn’t know which page belonged where. It wasn’t until probably about the 1950s that an Oxford scholar arranged the manuscript in such a way that the facing pages echoed each other. The “let”s were echoed with the “for”s. After some of the best lines of the opening, it will go into the antiphonal form, which is a statement and a response. The statement is “let” and the response is “for.” That’s similar to “who burned in the hells of turpentine . . . who purgatoried their torsos.” The form is exactly the same as “Howl”’s form.

  Let Moses, the Man of God, bless with a Lizard, in the sweet majesty of good-nature, and the magnanimity of meekness.

  Let Othniel praise God with the Rhinoceros, who put on his armour for the reward of beauty in the Lord.

  Let Tola bless with the Toad, which is the good creature of God, tho’ his virtue is in the secret, and his mention is not made.

  Let David bless with the Bear—The beginning of victory to the Lord—to the Lord the perfection of excellence—Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from the hand of the artist inimitable, and from the echo of the heavenly harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty.

  Let Joseph, who from the abundance of his blessing may spare to him, that lacketh, praise with the Crocodile, which is pleasant and pure, when he is interpreted, tho’ his look is of terror and offence.

  Let Ucal bless with the Chameleon, which feedeth on the Flowers and washeth himself in the dew.

  Let Jebus bless with the Camelopard, which is good to carry and to parry and to kneel.

  Let Huldah bless with the Silkworm—the ornaments of the Proud are from the bowels of their Betters.

  Let Malchiah bless with the Gnat—it is good for man and beast to mend their pace.

  Let Mattithiah bless with the Bat, who inhabiteth the desolations of pride and flieth amongst the tombs.

  Let Asaph rejoice with the Nightingale—The musician of the Lord! and the watchman of the Lord!

  Let Zurishaddai with the Polish Cock rejoice—The Lord restore peace to Europe.

  For I meditate the peace of Europe amongst family bickerings and domestic jars.

  Let Helon rejoice with the Woodpecker—the Lord encourage the propagation of trees!

  For the merciful man is merciful to his beast, and to the trees that give them shelter.

  Let Amos rejoice with the Coote—prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.

  For he hath turned the shadow of death into the morning, the Lord is his name.

  Let Ephah rejoice with Buprestis, the Lord endue us with temperance and humanity, till every cow have her mate!

  For I am come home again, but there is nobody to kill the calf or to pay the musick.

  For I shou’d have avail’d myself of waggery, had not malice been multitudinous.

  For there are still serpents that can speak—God bless my head, my heart and my heel.

  He’s using biblical names and then scientific names for animals and then responding with funny, totally personal, madhouse prophecies. It’s good writing, good sounding. Some kind of completely eccentric individual bedlam humor, conjunctions of classical mythology and Colonel Draper.

  For I am a little fellow, which is entitled to the great mess by the benevolence of God my father.

  For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her infirmities.

  For I this day make over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her age.

  For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her poverty.

  For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I had the grace to obey the voice of Christ in my conscience.

  For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to run all hazards for the sake of the name of the Lord.

  For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to be called a fool for the sake of Christ.

  For I lent my flocks and my herds and my lands at once unto the Lord.

  For nature is more various than observation tho’ observers be innumerable.

  That’s really a knockout. That’s really totally cornerless mystery. Post-Einsteinian. He was very sharp and smart. Smart was smart.

  For my seed shall worship the Lord JESUS as numerous and musical as the grasshoppers of Paradise.

  The rhetoric of “Howl” comes straight out of “the grasshoppers of Paradise.” Remember I was talking about putting opposite abstractions together? The grasshoppers and paradise. Take paradise, which is a theory, and you put a grasshopper in it, and you have what would be in the twentieth century a surrealist combination. This kind of completely wild language combination is rare. You get it in Shakespeare, strangely. You get it in good poetry, but it’s abundant here. Hardly anybody writes as well as that. There’s a funny kind of insight in it.

  On page two [of “Howl”] my literary references are to Robert Fludd. “Who studied cabbala and Fludd.” He was a hermetic philosopher in England, who had a picture of the universal body in the design of man. Yeats depended a lot on Robert Fludd. He was the great English inspirer and an interesting character, seventeenth century, magician, hermetic alchemist. It was “cabbala and Wilhelm Reich,” originally. Gurdjieff, Reich, and orgones, I think. “Because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,” but that’s the best part of the line and I kept that straight. I changed that to “who studied Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy and bop kabala.” The reason I changed that was that it ran trippingly on the tongue. It was a beboppy line that way.

  Under Burroughs’s suggestion, I was reading a lot of cycles of history, realizing just at this time when the American century, the American empire was being proclaimed by the CIA and Henry Luce and his organizations. I was thinking a lot about the decline of the West and the decline of America, the fall of America. There are references to Giambattista Vico too. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is founded on Vico’s cyclical vision of history. Vico was a big, important reference point for a lot of twentieth-century modernist poets, a renaissance historian and scholar.

  While we’re at it, Spengler. The Modern Library edition of The Decline of the West is abridged, unfortunately.

  At this level all civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally, the land itself, whose best blood has incontently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up for awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the fellaheen.

  Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings. Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and
completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsüan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.

  This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from primitive barter-centre to Culture-city

  By “Culture-city” he means the time of greatest energy and vigor, when the original techniques and implements and inspirations and Faustian conceptions had muscle and strength, finally coming into a fruition. Then an imperial phase where the cities’ wealth is spent in imperial armies and expenditures on rockets and trophy horses.

  and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of Civilization—and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.

  As for the fellaheen,

  Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world-history, are the nations.226

  Kerouac was picking up on the fellaheen as people outside of history and therefore free of history, free to be themselves, free to look into each other’s eyes, smoke a little grass, listen to jazz, and have a good time. So he abandoned the Hitlerian-Faustian ambitiousness of Spengler and said, “The earth is an Indian thing.” The fellaheen were the Indians that would inherit the earth when the big world-cities had passed over with their mortars and tractors and petrochemical agriculture and had finally ruined their oasis, ruined the land, crumbled the land, and eroded the fertile land, drained and poisoned all the rivers, as happened in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, cut down all the forests as happened in China and India in the eleventh century. It happened to the Americas in the nineteenth century and ruined and made barren the actual habitable land as civilization declined. Wasting all their blood and money and raw materials on conquest and imperial wars just like the Romans. Extending their empire outward cost them more to maintain than they ever got out of it.

  “Who painted their pictures on fish paper.” In 1950 a lot of painters in New York were poor and were using fish-wrapping paper to paint their pictures on the Lower East Side. One nice line on page four is “returning to the magnetic reality of the wards.” That’s not bad. This gives an idea of how “Howl” was modified and changed.

  CHAPTER 44

  Ginsberg and Cézanne

  Kerouac shamed me into doing spontaneous writing by about 1953. I didn’t really get it on until I wrote “Howl,” though, that was the first time I accepted his message and worked on it. “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” that whole period was a breakthrough for me where I finally abandoned any prior idea I had of writing poetry and just wrote. I decided that I wasn’t going to write poetry, because whatever I wrote was going to be whatever I wrote and it didn’t have to have a name [like] poetry or prose or scribbling or anything. Why do you have to know what you’re doing all of a sudden? Like saying you’re going out to take a walk and you know every step you’re going to take in advance. Who needs that?

  I learned that from Cézanne, because Cézanne was interested in his method and wasn’t interested in other things. He had the idea that he’d like to paint those things that they put up in the museums, but he didn’t know how, so he just painted whatever he could paint. He became interested in this special kind of painting and then after a while he realized this was the same way Poussin worked. They put it in the museum after you paint it, but first you’ve got to paint it.

  The method I worked out finally was a compromise, because I don’t feel confident like Kerouac just to write a lot, giant pieces, and then put them out. My own method is that I keep a journal and anything that goes into the journal is anything that goes into the journal. Then a couple months or years later I’ll go through it and pick out the things that look like poems. Things that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and are in separate lines rather than paragraphs, and seem to have some kind of poem theme. Those I’ll separate out and type up and sometimes present them without any change. Sometimes I don’t realize that they are poems until they are typed up. Then I’ll read it aloud a lot, maybe for a year or two or three years until I’m ready to send in a manuscript, and in the course of reading it aloud I’ll find out what are the weak spots. I’ll find there are certain dead areas that I find a drag to read and I might cut them out or improve them. So I depend on the original spurt and cadence and structure and then over years I might make changes on the basis of reading. The poems I like best, the poems that seem to be strongest, are those which don’t require changes. And there’s quite a few of those.

  When I was hanging around with Kerouac in the 1950s, I always felt like a shabby, shoddy, shallow liar all the time. How was I going to live up to his ideal? But then Kerouac said, “I myself have trouble covering up my bullshit lies too.” He felt that way too, so it was a question of courage, being a liar and having the courage to go on, and reveal yourself inadvertently, let it go anyway.

  CHAPTER 45

  Ginsberg and the San Francisco Renaissance

  We’re now up to the period of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Having prepared the ground with William Carlos Williams’s style [of] realistic description, then the next stage was to expand on that, take a combination of “The Green Automobile,” making use of the imaginative expansion, the notion of swift mind jumps, to allowing the mind to free play and using a basic realistic theme we arrived at “Howl” and later poems. In “Transcription of Organ Music” it’s an attempt to sketch.

  In the same mode, “Sather Gate Illumination.” Sather Gate is at the University of California in Berkeley. It’s the gate that leads down to Telegraph Avenue and it’s a plaza where people meet and sit and read and talk and gossip or write poems.

  We were back and forth to Europe and on the return a summary poem, July 1958, so I’m skipping two years. “‘Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square’” is an old Zen or haiku-ish poem, returning to Kyoto dreaming of Kyoto.

  ‘Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square’

  Let some sad trumpeter stand

  on the empty streets at dawn

  and blow a silver chorus to the

  buildings of Times Square,

  memorial of ten years, at 5 A.M., with

  the thin white moon just

  visible

  above the green & grooking McGraw

  Hill offices

  a cop walks by, but he’s invisible

  with his music

  The Globe Hotel, Garver lay in

  gray beds there and hunched his

  back and cleaned his needles—

  where I lay many nights on the nod

  from his leftover bloody cottons

  and dreamed of Blake’s voice talking—

  I was lonely,

  Garver’s dead in Mexico two years,

  hotel’s vanished into a parking lot

  And I’m back here—sitting on the streets

  again—

  The movies took our language, the

  great red signs

  A DOUBLE BILL OF GASSERS

  Teen Age Nightmare

  Hooligans of the Moon

  But we were never nightmare

  hooligans but seekers of

  the blond nose for Truth

  Some old men are still
alive, but

  the old Junkies are gone—

  We are a legend, invisible but

  legendary, as prophesied227

  So that covers that.

  In a more recent poem called “Today” I was very much influenced by Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. The key here is to write different kinds of poetry, so you don’t have to be stuck with one kind of poetry. This is the kind of poetry you write when you can’t think of anything to write. Suddenly you realize, well, why not the world as it is? Why do I have to wait for a big inspiration or fake it?

  CHAPTER 46

  John Clellon Holmes

  In 1948 I had a visionary experience. I talked about it quite a bit both to Kerouac and to John Clellon Holmes and Holmes made use of it in his book Go, published in 1952. It was probably written the same time as On the Road although it was published first and used many of the same characters as Kerouac. It was a laborious novel and Holmes has the character of David Stofsky, who was modeled on myself, as well as [characters modeled on] Neal Cassady, Huncke, and Kerouac.

  Holmes had an apartment on Lexington Avenue at 56th Street where several novelists and intellectuals hung out between 1946 and 1950. There was Alan Harrington who was a very interesting minor novelist, A. J. Ayres the philosopher, Neal Cassady the automobile driver, Kerouac, myself, all of us mixing together in the apartment. Holmes was a very dignified fellow whose idea was to be a novelist, like a novelist novelist, like Steinbeck or Dos Passos or Dostoyevsky. [He wanted to] write big books about major cultural tendencies. His novel Go is one of the best sociological, historical novels dealing with that period of 1947 and 1948. I don’t like the novel, in fact I can’t stand it, and I don’t like my own character in it. It tends to flatten out or make garish and vulgar certain very delicate matters, like visionary experience. Holmes’s prose was a little exaggerated and not quite as delicate as I thought Kerouac’s was. I was upset when I first saw the book. I tried rereading it recently and I got equally upset. I was supposed to write a preface, being an elder statesman, but I was too ashamed of the prose to do it. So Holmes, whom I love, got mad at me.