Beatnik Writers

The Beat Generation by Megan Feider


With such means at his disposal, the poet can enter on a career as a prophet and revolutionary, a cultist or a populist by turns. Or he can, in a more profound sense, become the person who keeps raising alternative propositions, eluding the trap of his own visions as he goes. (Jerome Rothenburg)
These revolutionary people who kept "raising alternative propositions" were the creative and suffering members of the Beat Generation. Many scholars and literary figures believe that up until the Beat era of the 1950's, poetry and social politics had frequently followed those who conformed to the standards that American society established.
From this era came extraordinary literary works from a generation of a professed bohemian writers, leading a lifestyle that raged against the economic conformity of the postwar 1950's. Rising from the epitome of a false and conformist America, they formed alternative ways of thinking and a new way of life. This group of "beat" writers, who formed in New York City, were at first few in number, but grew to have an impact on American society, especially in literature and politics, that still lasts today. Founders of this Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, not only started a new style of American literature but ignited the rebellion against social conformity in the 1950's through their poems of social and political criticism.
The materialistic decade of the 1950's was also a decade of conformity. The acquisition of material goods, which had been scarce in the Great Depression and during World War II, became the main focus of postwar lives. Material goods such as cars and other household items had become more affordable to middle class families and was viewed as an important addition to the suburban family. This significant acquisition of goods was driven especially by the new way the media of television and advertising portrayed the suburban family life as the ideal.
Conformity was everywhere in America - from cars to clothes, from social behavior to politics. Most women had one choice: conform to be a housewife and mother. During the Cold War, the United States led its allies against the communist Soviet Union. This allowed for American condemnation and even for the persecution of dissidents and social nonconformists as threats to U.S. national security. It was in this atmosphere that a group of writers came forward to declare their alienation and disgust from what they saw as the epitome of deplorable suburban conformity through their poetry and lifestyles: The Beats.
Jack Kerouac
The term "Beat Generation" was first used by poet Jack Kerouac in the late 1940's. It was while attending Columbia University in New York City that Jack Kerouac first met Allen Ginsberg. Together they were drawn to literature and began using drugs like benzedrine and marijuana in their dormitory rooms to inspire them to create what they called a "New Vision" of art. Kerouac, born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, was attending Columbia University on a football scholarship. During the outbreak of World War II, he dropped out of school and enlisted into the U.S. Navy, only to be soon discharged as an "indifferent character" after he refused to accept Navy discipline
This "indifferent character" of Kerouac's was a perfect match for the character of Allen Ginsberg. Born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg attended Columbia University on a scholarship from the YMCA. Like Kerouac, Ginsberg's rebellious and early insecure nature got him into much trouble. Twice he was suspended from the University. Once he was suspended for writing obscenity on a dirty dorm room window about the President of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, and the second time for letting Kerouac sleep in his dormitory room overnight. Ginsberg's temperamental emotions and his mother's depression and frequent nervous breakdowns played a large role in Ginsberg's life and became the subject of many of his infamous and revolutionary poems including "Kaddish" and "Howl." These two poems would later prove to be some of Ginsberg's most influential poems for America ever written.
According to Kerouac, the word "beat" had various definitions and connotations for the writers such as despair over the beaten state of the individual in mass society and belief in the beatitude, or blessedness, of the natural world and in the powers of the beat of jazz music and poetry. Later in the 1950's, the term "beatnik" was referred, often despairingly, to the people who held the ideas and attitudes of the Beat writers. Scholars during this decade described the lifestyle associated with the Beats as deviant. Kerouac, seeming to be the spokesman of the Beat Generation, was piled with questions and requests to explain it. Soon, a stereotype merged in the media showing beatniks to be spaced-out, always dressed in black and pounding on bongo drums muttering gibberish as poetry); nevertheless the media had no idea of what the Beat Generation would have to offer American society and politics in the late 1950's.
William Burroughs
William Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch" and "Junky" was an influential beatnik writer along side Jack Kerouac. The lifestyles which the group of beatnik writers adopted were against typical suburban, conformist family life in the 1950's. Beat poets would hold poetry readings at local cafes, coffee houses or art galleries where they would read their latest revelations to other members of the beat circle. These other beat artists and poets included William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady and Carl Soloman; but this circle was still quite small in number. The women in the beat circle which included Diane di Prima, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Joan Kerouac and Elise Cowen were then a large part of the Beat Generation; but ironically, were to a large extent eminently marginalized and ignored as prominent figures by journalists later on. Anne Waldman, an aspiring writer during the 1960's, wrote about the beat women: "The women of the Beat were considered the epitome of cool. They were black-stockinged hipsters, renegade artists, intellectual muses, and gypsy poets who helped change out culture forever. They were the feminist before the word was coined, and their work stands beside that of the men."
Jack Kerouac, who had many women in his life, concluded that, "The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame them and it's all our fault." For women, nothing was more exciting than leaving behind the boredom, safety and conformity found in most of the lives of a typical American women for the life of creativity. Long before feminist movement in the 1960's and 70's, the women of the Beat Generation dared to create a life of their own.
The Beats were one of the first groups in American history to partake in casual drug use. Among the more popular of these drugs were marijuana, benzedrine, heroine and amphetamines. While some experimented with drugs, some also experimented with sexuality. Allen Ginsberg, struggling with his own homosexuality, strived for a more open life. Being openly gay in the 1950's was not only uncommon, it was inadmissible. The lifestyles of the Beats were the most untamed, free-spirited lifestyles that were widely unaccepted by American social standards. Jack Kerouac was one of the first beat poets to have literature on this unconventional lifestyle published and recognized nationally.
In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote his best-known novel, "On the Road", a collection of stories about hitchhiking from coast to coast, living a "beaten" lifestyle. Published years later in 1957, the book celebrates freedom from conventional responsibilities, the emotional intensity of a life of hitchhiking, casual sex and recreational drug use. However, Kerouac retreats from these abundances, hoping to find the stability and security he needs for his writing. This novel was the start of the Beat Generation's journey into America's attention as journalists gave it much press, which for the most part was negative. Many classical and traditional literary scholars and poets disliked this "New Art" literature and lifestyle that Kerouac wrote about. Poet George Barker comically writes, in traditional British style, how he feels about Kerouac's works:

Now Jack, dear Jack
That ain't fair wages
For laboring through
Prose that takes ages
Just to announce
That Gods and Men
Ought to study
The Book of Zen.
If you really think
So low of the soul
Why don't you write
On a toilet roll?
(Charters xxiii)
Hoping to expand his knowledge and circle of beat friends, Allen Ginsberg later enrolled at the University of California - Berkeley in July of 1955, where his small group of poetic friends from New York would find expansion. This new circle of friends in San Francisco included poet Gary Snyder, writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure among others. In early August of 1955, Ginsberg started writing a poem about his life. This poem was Howl, which gave him the courage to give up graduate school and make poetry a full-time career. Shortly after Howl was written, Ginsberg organized a poetry reading for October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The reading was called the "Six Poets at the Six Gallery" and was the catalyst that brought together the literary style between the East Coast and the West Coast poets. It was finally when the East met the West that America started to take the Beat literary movement seriously. Michael McClure, who was at the Six Gallery poetry reading that night expresses:
150 people in the audience that night cheered
on Allen Ginsberg as he came to Howl's
conclusion. Everyone knew that a human
barrier had been broken, and that a human
voice and body had been hurled against the
harsh wall of America and its supporting
armies and navies and academies and
institutions and ownership systems and
power-support bases (Charters xxi).
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who also attended the Six Gallery that night, sent Allen Ginsberg a telegram offering him to publish his poetry, featuring Howl in the Pocket Poems Series, published by his new company, City Lights. Soon after, a policeman got a copy of the poem, and seized it on the grounds of obscenity. Ferlinghetti and his one employee were charged with publishing and selling an obscene book, but Ferlinghetti strongly defended Howl, saying that "it is not the poet, but what he observes which is revealed as obscene." When Judge Clayton Horn came to a verdict, he ordered a release of the book and declared it to have literary merit. The Howl trial in San Francisco was widely publicized, bringing in attention from around the nation and also selling thousands of more copies. America now, more than ever before, was giving its attention to the Beats and their writings.
Through their journey of social revolution, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac began their quest with one idea for America in mind: Truth. Allen Ginsberg once proclaimed, "The original task was to widen the area of consciousness in America", and that is exactly what he did. From the age of conformity in the 1950's, through the political and social revolutions of the 1960's and 1970's, and until Ginsberg's death in 1997, the reforming minds of the Beats established themselves in the foreground of American minds. The visions of Kerouac and Ginsberg, along with their groundbreaking poetry and principled lives, inspired other revolutionary American poets and activists for five decades.
The Beat poetry and literature that scholars once scorned are now a large part of college curricula. In 1974, Ginsberg was awarded a National Book Award for poetry and became known as an antiestablishment media hero. Jack Kerouac, however, became severely depressed and died of alcoholism at the age of forty-seven. Nonetheless, before his death, Kerouac achieved recognition for his experimental prose style and phenomenal formulation of the beat literary movement. These accomplishments of the two original beat poets were not easily acquired. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were forced to overcome endless societal obstacles in order to accomplish their journey of liberation. Although these two poets faced much criticism and even severe condemnation, they never once gave into the America that would not listen to them.

amrica

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Howl

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 the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant 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,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning 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, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless 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 Brooklyn, 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 afternoon 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 Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion 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-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway 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 grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary 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 Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight 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 nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who 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,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, 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,

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 manuscripts,

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 rosegardens 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 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 were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

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 petticoat 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 hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment 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 full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment 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 the 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 an 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,

who 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,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch 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 hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy 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 madman 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, 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,

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 furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

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 vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 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 intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing 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 incarnate 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 butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium 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 judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch 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!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke 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! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! 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!


III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel 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 humour

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 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 twentyfive thousand mad comrades 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 collapse 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

THE MAN WHO TAUGHT HIS ASSHOLE TO TALK

THE MAN WHO TAUGHT HIS ASSHOLE TO TALK

By William S. Burroughs
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Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his ass to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called "The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, "Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?"

"Nah! I had to go relieve myself."

After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in- curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built and act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth.

Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: "It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit."

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous- except for the eyes you dig.

That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eyes on the end of a stalk.