{"id":1157,"date":"2017-04-16T06:28:11","date_gmt":"2017-04-16T06:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/?page_id=1157"},"modified":"2020-03-29T16:49:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-29T16:49:54","slug":"howl-by-allen-ginsberg","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/howl-by-allen-ginsberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Howl – Allen Ginsberg"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Jongens – 1974, Akademie voor Beeldende Vorming Amsterdam<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

For Carl Solomon
\nI<\/strong><\/p>\n

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
\ndragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
\nangelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
\nwho 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,
\nwho bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
\nwho passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
\nwho were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
\nwho cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
\nwho got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
\nwho ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
\nwith dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
\nincomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
\nPeyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
\nwho chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
\nwho sank all night in submarine light of Bickford\u2019s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi\u2019s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
\nwho talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
\na lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
\nyacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
\nwhole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
\nwho vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
\nsuffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark\u2019s bleak furnished room,
\nwho wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
\nwho lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
\nwho studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
\nwho loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
\nwho thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
\nwho jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
\nwho lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
\nwho disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
\nwho reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
\nwho burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
\nwho distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
\nwho broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
\nwho bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
\nwho howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
\nwho let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
\nwho blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
\nwho balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
\nwho hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
\nwho lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman\u2019s loom,
\nwho copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
\nwho sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
\nwho went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver\u2014joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses\u2019 rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
\nwho faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
\nwho walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
\nwho created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
\nwho ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
\nwho wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
\nwho sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
\nwho coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
\nwho scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
\nwho cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
\nwho plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
\nwho threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
\nwho cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
\nwho were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
\nwho jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
\nwho sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
\nwho barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other\u2019s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
\nwho drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
\nwho journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
\nwho fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other\u2019s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
\nwho crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
\nwho retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
\nwho demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
\nwho threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
\nand who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
\nwho in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
\nreturning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
\nPilgrim State\u2019s Rockland\u2019s and Greystone\u2019s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
\nwith mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination\u2014
\nah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you\u2019re really in the total animal soup of time\u2014
\nand who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
\nwho dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
\nto recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
\nthe madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
\nand rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America\u2019s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
\nwith the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.<\/p>\n

II<\/strong><\/p>\n

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
\nMoloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
\nMoloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
\nMoloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
\nMoloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
\nMoloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
\nMoloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
\nMoloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
\nMoloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
\nMoloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
\nThey broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
\nVisions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
\nDreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
\nBreakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years\u2019 animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
\nReal holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!<\/p>\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carl Solomon! I\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you\u2019re madder than I am
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you must feel very strange
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you imitate the shade of my mother
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you\u2019ve murdered your twelve secretaries
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you laugh at this invisible humor
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
\nI’m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you scream in a straightjacket that you\u2019re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won\u2019t let us sleep
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nwhere we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls\u2019 airplanes roaring over the roof they\u2019ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we\u2019re free
\nI\u2019m with you in Rockland
\nin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night<\/p>\n

San Francisco, 1955\u20141956<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Carl Solomon I 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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1157","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2647,"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157\/revisions\/2647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronaldruseler.nl\/wp-tekst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}