Please Note that the content of this poem is VERY GRAPHIC. There is offensive language, sexual language, and descriptions of lifestyles some will not approve.
This is an important work in American Literature. While it describes an era in our history, much of the message of this poem is Timeless. I believe there is much a Christian can gain from this "secular" poem. While it is not Scripture, it can teach us, none the less.
If you are offended by offensive and crude language, please do not continue reading
"Howl," by Allen Ginsberg, is one of the most famous poems of the "Beat Generation." This was a period of American History where some people tried living an "alternative lifestyle" that didn't reflect corporate America or the America after WWII. Click here for more information about "Howl."
I know of no commentary on "Howl" from a Christian perspective. One may exist, but I have no knowledge of it. In order to distinguish my comments from the poem (as they will be written interspersed in the poem), I will keep the poem in this font, and my comments will be in red italics.
HOWL
by Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon - Allen Ginsberg met Carl Solomon in a Mental Hospital where Ginsberg was sent for petty theft. The 2 became lifelong friends. In the hospital, they discussed literature among other things.
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 machin-
ery of night,
It seems that those of whom Ginsberg is writing had the potential to be the "best minds." But, "best minds" are often tortured minds...spiritually, intellectually, and so forth. When one is wise, (s)he is constantly under attack, from others, but mostly from him/herself. These are some of the people who have the tendency to be great leaders, and if the Church at large would reach out to them, we would all benefit. Yes, ALL minds are needed. This is not exclusive. But, sadly, due to experiences and assumptions, those with the "best minds" often feel as if they do not belong in the Church. Instead they turn to atheism, drugs, alcohol, risky behaviors and other "quick fixes" to endure the monotony of life as they see it. These people could easily be the next St. Francis, the next Mother Theresa, but they need guided into that role. They need to see the relevance of Christianity as being more than a "Pie in the Sky" dream, but a reality for the here and now.
who 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,
Jazz was popular during this time period. But, Jazz and Christianity have so much in common. There's not 1 right way to do it. In Christianity, we have the basic belief in a Triune God, but from there our callings and missions differ. In Jazz, the musician has the basic chord outline but is expected to bring his/her own creativity to make the song "one's own." Jazz is also not like many other forms of music. It is meant to be listened to critically. It is meant to be analyzed. It is meant to give other Jazz musicians ideas. I am not the greatest Jazz musician, but I have played my fair share. When done "correctly" the Jazzer is in a prayer like state. Like Jazz, we need to contemplate Christianity. There is no unfair question. While there are doctrines in place, we improvise our lives around them into God's Kingdom.
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
This line shows the power of God. In this case, it's referring to a specific person's reading of the Koran, but it speaks to the thirst people have for meaning...for God! During this time, people would read religious texts from a variety of religions and philosophies. They were a search for meaning. As almost all (if not all) holy books have at least some truth in them, people are hungry for that truth. As Christians, we see the Bible as our truth. To read the bible, we need to read it on various levels - What is the story? What does it mean? How does it apply to me? and most importantly - How does it apply to us?
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
At the time this poem was written, just like now, our youth in colleges and universities, and in all reality, all of our young people reaching adulthood, are searching for the truth. College age young people are virtually cultural aliens to the universities, work sites, or existences they inhabit. They are no longer children, but they are not yet accepted as full adults. This age may truly be a "lost generation" only to be found when they reach some magic "ripe old age." Young adults are expected to know how to switch from childhood to adulthood in a moment's notice. Sadder still, they are convinced they "should" be adults at this age. Any experimenting against society's "norms" is considered taboo. Any rigid acceptance of societies "norms" by this age group is also frowned upon by the younger and older populations. Younger people see these young adults as "selling out," and older adults see them as "being pretentious."
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
We are in a "self-medicating culture." Millions self-medicate with drugs, sex, casual sex, etc. What have we as a society done to make people feel they must self-medicate just to get through the day? Risky behaviors are not just bad choices, they societal diseases. It's a longing for "something more." As creatures in God's image, we are bound to one another. Though this "self medication" may be seen as a choice (and it is...to a point), it is also a cry for help. The drunk, the junkie, the nymphomaniac suffer a disease in the most real sense. We need to find and treat the causes of these diseases just as we would any other mental or physical disease.
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote 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 Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who 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,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
I have seen no greater description of our self-imposed imprisonments. That imprisonment can be to a geographical area or to a state of mind. Our poor in urban areas are herded into sub-standard housing developments and forgotten. The lonely are ignored as "freaks." The exile must end. The captive must be set free. If we want urban crime to stop, if the privileged want to not feel "fear" from the "ghetto," then it's time we acknowledge our collective guilt in the problem. When we realize the brother/sisterhood of all humans and the dignity of every life, we will see that the conditions of the poor and lonely are not acceptable. We make ourselves feel "pious" by donating money to charity, but will we actually go out to those who need us most and make personal relationships.
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who 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,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
The answer is not found in geography. Quests to find meaning will be fruitless if people insist they must travel to a shrine/holy place to receive that meaning. Only when one has found meaning will these places give location to that quest. The meaning, of course, is God.
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
The pacifist and the questioners of Capitalism are often seen as unpatriotic or anti-American. Some probably are. But, many are looking for a way of justice and peace. Dissent is not unAmerican! Dissent is written into our Constitution. Dissent is not unChristian. Great Christians have always dissented. Dissent should not be violent or confrontational. Dissent should be charitable and loving. Questioning the status-quo should be ongoing. Jesus did it. Why shouldn't we?
who 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,
The politically "unorthodox" are not the enemy. The politically unorthodox are a voice to be heard. There is wisdom in radicalism - radicalism with concern for the wellbeing of others (i.e. Nazism/Fascism would be obvious exceptions). Not all radicalism has to be embraced, but it should be heard. Some of the greatest ideas and innovations have come form someone labeled as "too radical."
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who 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,
who 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's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle 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,
who 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 sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
Ginsberg is vividly describing the searching for the "meaning of life." People will look anywhere. People will look from self indulgence to self denial and everywhere between. Ginsberg shows that this "well-intentioned" search often ended up being futile. No meaning was found...only temporary satisfactions and long term scars.
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who 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 unemploy-
ment offices,
who 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 steamheat
and opium,
who 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,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
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 unsuccess-
fully, 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 sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, 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 steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who 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,
who 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,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who 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,
who 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,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who 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 in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with 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 fur-
nished 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
Alienation is a problem that affects many people. While we "seem" to belong, we have to ask ourselves if we let others belong. Do we let those who are different from us belong to our Churches? Our lives? Our circles of friends?
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
What is Carl and Ginsberg "not safe" from? What is torturing them? What is the "animal soup of time?" Again, this points back to alienation. Did they alienate themselves? Did society alienate them? Do we alienate ourselves? Do we alienate others?
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who 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
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
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
"eli elie lamma lamma sabachthani" - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22 - What Jesus quoted on the Cross). Does the alienation that some feel from society actually feel like an alienation from God? What is the church's role in restoring the alienated? Think about the Sermon on the Mount starting in Matthew 5.
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Spynx of Cement - Is Ginsberg saying our cities have destroyed minds? There is a lot to be understood here. Cities - places of business, places of poverty, places of entertainment, places of violence. Have we let our cities (a symbol for our society) eat up our minds and imaginations in the name of self-promotion, money, losing compassion?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable 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 stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
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!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch 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!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
Moloch was an ancient Middle Eastern pagan god. This god was worshipped through child sacrifice. In modern times, "Moloch" refers to something that requires a heavy personal sacrifice. This seems to be Ginsberg's cry that American (and maybe World) society was losing its purpose. Rather than living life, we are "completing checklists." We are slaves to money, war, and other destructive forces that are essentially destroying us and our children. We need to claim our lives back from that which holds it hostage.
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Why had the "supernatural" or religion been deemed "bullshit" by so many? Is it because of their fundamental beliefs? Or is it because of the followers of these religions? Does religion promote hate and defeat of others? Or does religion promote love and understanding and peace and reconciliation?
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real 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!
Has "religion" caused people to "bid farewell?" The church has forced groups of people out because they don't "fit in." Did Jesus fit in? Did the prophets of the Old Testament fit in? No!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland Rockland is a reference to the hospital where Ginsberg met Solomon
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in 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
I'm with you in Rockland - Tortured minds that see a connection. Mental illness is the great "unspoken" issue. Mental Illness is not an issue that we should be scared of. Jesus healed demoniacs - Mental Illness is demonic. The church needs to reach out to these tortured souls.
Not sure I agree with all of this interpretation, it doesn't seem like the text completely justifies it.
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