The Beats - going deeper - and why they matter...

NOTE: I am working on an extended posting about the importance of the Beat poets - particularly Allen Ginsberg - as an inspiration for a new art form in rock and roll music. Yesterday, I set out the overall design of my concerns; today I will attempt to create an artistic and historical context.

INTRODUCTION
As our awareness of the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico matures, aided by photographs of endangered pelicans and plunging international stock markets, the words of Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl," cry out for a new hearing: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."

There is madness and fear everywhere: America's addiction to oil and conspicuous consumption is driving two wars in the Middle East. This addiction not only blinds us to the destruction we create but has convinced us that our way of living is sustainable. We have lost a common moral language and no longer know how to speak of greed or the common good. Within this vacuum, the politics of fear have ascended as evidenced by the fury of the Tea Party movement and the acrimony of the recent Arizona immigration law.

Fine tuning the economy seems irrelevant. Public inquiries into the root causes of the BP catastrophe feel insulting. For this is an apocalyptic moment - a time of collapse and potential rebirth - that demands a moral reckoning: "a national discussion... about the fundamental moral issues at stake, and perhaps even a national reflection on our whole way of life based on oil dependence and addiction." (Jim Wallis, Sojourners, June 3, 2010)

In 1956, Ginsberg prophesied to the nation in "Howl." He unleashed both the oft unspoken moral judgement against greed that is necessary for social healing and a wave of artistic creativity that took shape and form in the maturation of rock and roll. Reclaiming the passion of the Hebrew prophets for social justice and compassion - and reclaiming a name for the idolatrous enemies of Israel - Ginsberg wailed:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch 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!Moloch 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!

Here is something of the descent into brokenness and excess celebrated by Rimbaud; here, too, is Baudelaire's sensual and troubling honesty about our dark shadow.

It's Ennui! — his eye brimming with spontaneous tear
He dreams of the gallows in the haze of his hookah.
You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
Hypocritical reader, my likeness, my brother!

Here is the sacrament of erotic human love honored in Rexroth and Yeat's mystical encounter with all that is holy within the depths of our humanity:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

And here is Walt Whitman embracing William Carlos Williams as Langston Hughes looks on with words of challenge and encouragement:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)

And within all of this, too, is Ginsberg's ode to bebop and the immediate, intuitive and improvisational spirit of true soul music. "Howl" is a written and oral celebration of the sounds of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. It is an authentic jazz jeremiad about the totality of our humanity: sound and silence, shadow and light, debasement and enlightenment, fear and joy, politics and spirit, heaven and earth. Because, you see, Ginsberg loved - truly loved - God's creation and God's people. All of them - the wounded and the whole - the sinners and the saints - never just the winners but always the losers, too. Beautiful losers to borrow the words of another Hebrew prophet/poet Leonard Cohen, devoted to the blessings of real life.

Ginsberg was searching for a path of healing and hope amidst the darkness of America - a way beyond the madness that destroyed the best minds of his generation - a way of compassion that is still haunting. Like a Buddhist bluesman, an ancient Jewish prophet or an urban hipster on a quest for enlightenment, his lament continues to wail and moan:

(I watched those) who 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,
who 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, who 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, who 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...
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

As I read the NY Times - and weep over the destruction, the lies and the fear our addiction has wrought in the Gulf Coast, in the Middle East and Asia, within our First Nation lands, in the hearts and bodies of women and men and GLBTQ and children and animals and water, soil and air - I give thanks to God for Allen Ginsberg. He was broken and vile, holy and human, just like us all. He set our language and imagination free in ways that still reverberate through the best of rock and roll.