while you are not safe I am not safe

*Note: This blog will temporarily hold assignments for my senior seminar, which means fewer loose thoughts and more guided ones. Right then.

It's inappropriate to discuss Ginsberg in anything but a gruff monotone, so first imagine that. We've been talking in terms of the start-stop that the first section of Howl adopts in its quest for the success of the ethereal over the material, an endeavor that boasts the inevitable end of roughened pavement or toilets bowled over with an aftermath of glory. There is a cycle of uplift - through drugs, sex, art, etc - and land-heavy - back to the mechanized materiality of the wake up, with the only true resolution being the existence of the poem itself, the good to eat butchered life that lives and keeps living.

The second and third sections of this poem present a bigger, more emphasized repetition of this layout. To begin with, part II: Moloch, the incomprehensible prison that is reality. Transcendence, in Howl, does not come easily or without risk of penance. Part II is just that - the ultimate return; the machine in Fritz Lang's Metropolis that swallows up whole workers, toilers, lovers of mind. Never may one achieve the temporary solace of absolution through written word without the follow-up presence of the anti-imaginative force that is the downhill torrent of Americana. The pattern plays this way:

Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!

The whitewashing of the American high, the American brilliant, happens again and again (in Ginsberg, too: Your machinery is too much for me. / You made me want to be a saint.) until all is returned to the lowest street from which the material empire is constructed.

How then may one supersede this drowning, this jumping from roofs? Howl's third and final section offers up a coming home to and through the breakdown of the rational mind. In this, Carl Solomon becomes not the sheepish recipient of a legacy but a tool through which Ginsberg may achieve finality - a finality that is, yes, the best and worst insanity in its repudiation of the American collective. In order to reach that longed-for transcendence, one must, in a sense, experience the mental unscrewing or loosening of the rational, an act that is embodied by the rock-land, both the Rockland mental institution and the earthy juxtaposition to the metal sheen of Moloch. It is only in this supposed madness that Ginsberg is able to establish the poem's only real sense of togetherness (the repetitive I'm with you... / I'm with you...), a human connection that the first two sections aim at but ultimately fall short of.

It is perhaps this connection that allows the semi-safe passage of the "sea-journey across the highway of America" - a reference to the truth-drowning river of section II - even if it is only a success achieved in dreams. This coming-free of the mechanized American reason experienced in the third section allows the realization of the human holy in the poem's footnote (completed oddly before Howl itself), in which Ginsberg again documents (this time in the lighter tone of the miraculous) the dirty-wonderful of human experience.

post in several mouths

Anna-Lisa Marí translates an early poem of mine into Spanish. Thanks also to Luna Miguel.

now

a little late

but

a poem here

&

poem things here




also, news coming
also, new things coming



I've had two bouts of tonsillitis thus far this year, but now I'm getting regular steroids injections -- and things seem to be on the mend. However, I have not grown in height or gained any significant muscle mass, much to my own dismay. I'm having those sad puppies out in March if all goes according to plan, so, you know, happy birthday to me. One big happy healthy.