On the Saturday Beat...

When idle and desperate, I randomly google stuff…famous people, obscure events, passing references, funny names, puzzling words, crossword clues, lost worlds, unborn babies, dead ages, dormant fossils etcetra…and I inadvertently manage to find something interesting that offers to validate my existence (to me, in the very least).

And sometimes, the long lazy hours of writhing on the web yield gems…Allen Ginsberg, for example. Almost a year back, while putting together a hurried 1500 words on ‘American Poets and the Celebration of Democracy’, I had passed him over to look into the more optimistic works of Walt Whitman. A year on, I am older, hopefully wiser and definitely more cynical. So I put aside my ‘Leaves of Grass’ and took up 'Howl'.

What I discovered was delicious...acerbic bitterness of dreams gone sour.

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!

Whitman, who wrote during the mid-19th century, celebrated (without sounding jingoistic) the, as yet, young American democracy and the multiplicities that it served (or would serve) to unite under the spangled starry banner. (Sample 'I hear America singing' or 'Song of Myself'). While, Ginsberg gave voice to the nightmarish realisations, where Whitman's visions had found home, over an intervening period of hundred years.

Writing almost a century after Whitman, Allen Ginsberg arrived on the scene with the Beatniks of the 50s, who eventually became the hippies of the 60s...when the triumphalist euphoria, surrounding a once young nation, had gone kaput, having roughed two World wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the Red scares of Mc Carthy-ite era...women, blacks, homosexuals and minorities of all kinds, carrying on with a much oppressed, discriminated-against existence.

The 50s and the 60s were remarkable times...evident in the manner in which counter-culture surged to challenge conformist currents. Thye were interesting times, no doubt, (Note the rise of Communism, Civil Rights Movement, Sexual liberation, Rock n' Roll, Feminism, Black empowerment, MJ-crusading) in the company of some very interesting people (Fidel Castro, Che, Beatles, Doors, Hendrix, Dylan, Marley, Martin Luther King, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac and the list goes on).

And Ginsberg is a product of these times, to be sure...a witness, a critic and a poet in mourning.

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?
…
America you don’t 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 our garages.

Yet, what I personally found more interesting than the poet's trenchant critique of 20th century American society (or could it be 21st century India?!) and the brand of conservative blindness engendered by Capitalist mores...was how he transcends his location in time and space and finds relevance in contemporary ethos...minorities have still not found their voice, and them Pakistanis and them Chinamen are still plaguing human existence...we humans have managed to stand in the same waters twice.

Now before ones gets lost into a holier-than-thou mode, it is advisable I share the gem unearthed in the boredom of dreary saturday hours, and take leave. Presenting...the trigger - a video of Ginsberg, dressed as Uncle Sam (or so it seems), reciting 'The Ballad of American Skeletons', to the music of Paul McCartney. Theatrical, vitriolic...the old man is all afire!
(An alternate version containing the unedited lyrics in a live performance can be found here. As a plus you get to feast your eyes on McCartney strumming his guitar alongside)

Not a single line goes amiss!

And damn me if you don't end up tapping your feet to the Beat!