The weeping song

It seems that throughout centuries of struggling with our doubts and fears, we have reached the place where there is nothing left but to sit and cry. We are disappointed in our hopes to find our place in this much-to-fast world. What is more, the harder we try to use the reason and knowledge, the less we understand our emotions, the further we wade through the technological-political labyrinth, the more lost we actually are. Most people surrender to this rush of events without questioning it, or without even realizing it, however, there are those who spend their lives in effort to oppose the Moloch, such as Ginsberg himself.

The very title reveals the mood of the whole work. Howl being a long loud cry of pain, anger or sadness, is a perfect description of emotions evoked in the sensitive units by the unfriendly environment. Ginsberg in his poem employs stories of many of his artist friends, underappreciated in their times, “destroyed by madness”, to show what today’s society is doing to people who are reluctant to subdue to its ideals. These are stories of people who could not/would not accept their role as a money-making device and a mechanical animal. No bright future was awaiting the characters, but rather the slow rolling down from the acceptable, to what only could be labeled as trash in the public eyes.

The poem may be considered a manifesto of the Beat Generation, which is characterized by the feeling of disappointment together with a rebellion against ‘The Establishment’. Although associated with reckless and care-free attitude, their works bear a tone of melancholy. The Beats were partial to hallucinogenic substances that served as a way out of the unsatisfying reality, and as a means of obtaining the highest truth, reaching the spiritual - a state similar to Buddhist nirvana. They seemed not to be afraid of taboo subjects either, for their writings are full of mirages of transgressive sex and narcotic orgies. Consequently, such disposition of mind undermining the traditional values of a ‘decent’ society is a threat and should be suppressed. No wonder the inaugurative reading of “The Howl” ended up with the arrestment of the owner of the place where the reading was held, on obscenity charges.

The modern, high-technologized society is not a homely surrounding for such individuals. It kills their spirit and this spiritual death is followed by physical one.

“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”.

These lines set Ginsberg in the position of an observer, whose eyes follow the flow of the jagged images of fall and decay. The poem has been divided into three parts, the first, already mentioned, being a sort of a collage made of different expressions of resignation and purposelessness. Immersing into weird narcotic or sexual experiments, law-breaking, run-away journeys, participating in communist pamphlet propaganda – all these are desperate efforts to wrench oneself free out of the claws of the omnipresent Moloch. The repeating lines “who…, who…” multiply the victims in the reader’s mind and make them physically feel the overwhelming despair.

To understand the next part we have to refer to the biblical symbolism. The Moloch which is here being accused of causing such devastation in human minds, refers to the deity to whom child sacrifices were made throughout the Middle East. The laws given to Moses by God expressly forbade the Jews to do what was done in Egypt or in Canaan. Here Moloch is epitomized by the capitalist society and its values, that have no respect for individuality, spirituality or originality.

“Moloch the incomprehensible prison!(…) Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch in whom I sit lonely!...”

The lines indicate that humans are still being sacrificed to false idols, only the face of the god has changed. Ginsberg blames the American society and ideals for depriving its members of the ethereal dimension of human existence:

“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Down to the river! Into the street!”

The last part brings a significant change in the expression of the poem. Here the narrator does not speak of hundreds of nameless people, but introduces the figure that played a very important role in Allen Ginsberg’s life. To make a digression, it is interesting that all Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg traveled with their mental guru’s: Kerouac with Neil Cassidy, Burroughs with Herbert Huncke, and Ginsberg with Carl Solomon. Ginsberg’s mentor was his friend and inspiration, he had a interactive intelligence, and was able to instruct the writer. Through the family connections he helped publish the unpublishable then authors, as Burroughs and Kerouac.. Solomon was also a patient of the psychiatric hospital in Rockland, which is an important footnote to the last part of  “ Howl”. Here the author imagines his soulmate behind the walls of the madhouse and unites with him in his experiences.

The psychiatric institution may be perceived as a spiritual asylum from the external world, where the visions and imagination have their kingdom:

“ 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 (…) where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void” 

This place is a rest from the mainstream American culture that has imprisoned its believers. There is no eternal escape from the Moloch, however. Even the sterile environment of the hospital is being attacked through the medical treatment that aims at putting the insane ones back on the social track:

“ 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 collapse(…) O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here”

The final conclusion is drawn that there is no refuge, we are all condemned in our fate. The narrator makes a journey on the highway across America, in tears, to the door of his cottage in the Western night. The only thing that is left for ‘the howling one’ is to look for alleviation in the Eastern religion and philosophy, and that is, apart from drugs and obscenity, the feature the Beat Generation is associated with. They turned to the Buddhist wisdom to find their shelter from the world’s shallowness, their nirvana.

This last section is followed by the poem “Footnote to Howl”, in which the name of Moloch is replaced by the word ‘Holy’. I personally see it as a bitter irony of how the society itself perceives its degradation. Here everything is great, is worth, is profitable, is good, is holy.

“ Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! (…) the world is holy! The soul is holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman's an angel!”

Ginsberg has developed a specific writing style by combining everyday English, often with swearwords, into a poetically sophisticated metaphors. He juxtaposes the names of the everyday use objects with the terminology from philosophical and religious systems. The sentences often form one continuous flow that creates a stream of images passing slowly before the reader’s eyes. Therefore, the vision painted with narrator’s words stays with the reader a long time after they have finished their reading.

The picture created in „Howl” makes this piece of art as applicable in the 1950s as in the present. The crisis that is being discussed seems to have started long before the poem was written. This is just another one of the malign reincarnations of the modernity crisis of identity, purpose and truth, and “Howl” is a record of another battle between the nature and culture, between the reason and heart, and between the blind and the enlightened.





/All quotations in this essay come from Ginsberg, Allen, „The Howl” and "The footnote to Howl", http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Allen-Ginsberg/