Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs or Independence Day Manifesto (Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, selected essays 1952-1995, Part 1)

  I have my doubts that anyone will even read this in its entirety. But I thank you if you do. I’m posting an essay by Allen Ginsberg, a poet from the beat generation. If you’d like, skip ahead and read it. If you’d like to read a little background about me and my history, read on. I sincerely hope at least someone bothers to give this a read. Allen Ginsberg is my personal hero. I happened upon his works when I was 19. Depressed, suicidal, half insane from isolation and mental trauma, I would spend my days at the library, reluctant to interact with anyone, saving myself for the back of the building where the individual chairs were next to the windows, sheltered from view and sound by the imposing bookshelves lining the recesses of the back of the library where I would sit and read the comical adventures on Don Quixote, completely lost on the underlying metaphor for the self titled knight of chivalry being a farcical representation of the Spanish empire’s rise and eventual veritable collapse, having known nothing about it at that time. I saw a book sitting tucked, snugly between other forgotten tomes of poetry and political philosophy that caught my attention from the corner of my eye. I had been about to leave the archive of information when I saw the title as I passed by the shelves.

“Deliberate Prose”.

Something resonated deep inside me and I felt I had to know this book, it called to me, as if by the machinations of some higher power. It felt like fate. I had been suffering endlessly at the hands of a few choice mentally sick, profligate despotic souls who had no reservations about stealing the coin off of a dead man’s eye. I viewed the world in a pessimistic and derogatory manner, looking around myself and seeing nothing but things which terrified me. That book was something new, something that represented freedom, in its finest, unadulterated form and called out America on its endless hypocrisy.

It touched upon archaic furies and sacred revelations I held to the be essential to unlocking some of the highest truths that mankind at large holds buried in its seemingly infinite folly. To borrow the words of Albert Camus, “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” The corruption that had been apparent to me since I was nihilistic child, filling gigantic notebooks with comics of irreverent, humorous protagonists performing reprehensible absurdities with their strange powers, the corruption contagion that I knew had existed but had never been able to, or perhaps, not wanted to articulate as I got older due to the petrifying, overwhelming nature of its magnitude, was presented clearly to me with an articulate flair. He presented the mundane and prosaic nature of the mechanical reality which we have come to accept as conventional in our absentminded compliance with the implementation of our own worst enemies. Greed, repression, paranoia! Complacency, panic, force!

All around you they close in and envelope those around you at the behest of the faceless beast, losing the exposed and vulnerable to its spell. Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy, judger of men. Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbones 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 ears a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak! 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 am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

His own words will do him more justice than I ever could.

I have a copy of the book which I can’t seem to find in it’s entirety on the internet, a fact which I have no small amount of  suspicions about, and found odd. I searched for a PDF of the book… 404, File Not Found. I search for an essay of his, found it on a different site, click on it. Content removed. I find another PDF, which hasn’t been deleted. My suspicions are alleviated. I momentarily convinced myself I had just been being paranoid. But the alleviation soon passed.

“Obtaining this book Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 By Allen GINSBERG by on the internet in this site could be recognized now by going to the web link page to download and install. It will certainly be simple. Why should be below? Sooner you obtain the e-book Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 By Allen GINSBERG, sooner you can appreciate reviewing the publication. It will certainly be your resort to maintain downloading and install guide Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 By Allen GINSBERG in supplied web link.”

I started to feel sick as I read the nonsensical jargon. Incoherent writing is a sign of a download riddled with malicious viruses and spyware. And that is all I found. So I’m going to share the essays I can find here, for anyone who wants to read them.

Of course, there are better places to share this than on a suicide website, but nonetheless, I feel his words are sorely needed here. Although things have changed in some ways, and the issues of society have taken different forms, I feel the underlying message of unrestrained free thought in his essays is no less pertinent than when they were first written. Luckily I found his first essay from the book by writing down the first paragraph within, copying and pasting, and doing an internet search for it. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for every essay within, which contain controversial but relevant truths, and that is where my suspicions arise. With that being said, I present you with the first essay of Deliberate Prose.

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Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs
or
Independence Day Manifesto

July 4th, 1959

Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.

The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.

These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.

At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America — sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown. Poetry is the record of individual insights into the secret soul of the individual and because all individuals are one in the eyes of their creator, into the soul of the world. The world has a soul. America is having a nervous breakdown. San Francisco is one of many places where a few individuals, poets, have had the luck and courage and fate to glimpse something new through the crack in mass consciousness; they have been exposed to some insight into their own nature, the nature of the governments, and the nature of God.

Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy and public gaiety among the poets of the city. Those of the general populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene.

The poets and those who share their activities, or exhibit some sign of dress, hair, or demeanor of understanding, or hipness, are ridiculed. Those of us who have used certain benevolent drugs (marijuana) to alter our consciousness in order to gain insight are hunted down in the street by police. Peyote, an historic vision-producing agent, is prohibited on pain of arrest. Those who have used opiates and junk are threatened with permanent jail and death. To be a junky in America is like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany.

A huge sadistic police bureaucracy has risen in every state, encouraged by the central government, to persecute the illuminati, to brainwash the public with official lies about the drugs, and to terrify and destroy those addicts whose spiritual search has made them sick.

Deviants from the mass sexual stereotype, quietists, those who will not work for money, or fib and make arms for hire, or join armies in murder and threat, those who wish to loaf, think, rest in visions, act beautifully on their own, speak truthfully in public, inspired by Democracy — what is their psychic fate now in America? An America, the greater portion of whose economy is yoked to mental and mechanical preparations for war?

Literature expressing these insights has been mocked, misinterpreted, and suppressed by a horde of middlemen whose fearful allegiance to the organization of mass stereotype communication prevents them from sympathy (not only with their own inner nature but) with any manifestation of unconditioned individuality. I mean journalists, commercial publishers, book-review fellows, multitudes of professors of literature, etc., etc. Poetry is hated. Whole schools of academic criticism have risen to prove that human consciousness of unconditioned spirit is a myth. A poetic renaissance glimpsed in San Francisco has been responded to with ugliness, anger, jealousy, vitriol, sullen protestations of superiority.

And violence. By police, by customs officials, post-office employees, by trustees of great universities. By anyone whose love of power has led him to a position where he can push other people around over a difference of opinion — or vision.

The stakes are too great-an America gone mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to battle the world in defense of a false image of its authority. Not the wild and beautiful America of the comrades of Walt Whitman, not the historic America of William Blake and Henry David Thoreau where the spiritual independence of each individual was an America, a universe, more huge and awesome than all the abstract bureaucracies and authoritative officialdoms of the world combined.

Only those who have entered the world of spirit know what a vast laugh there is in the illusory appearance of worldly authority. And all men at one time or other enter that Spirit, whether in life or death.

How many hypocrites are there in America? How many trembling lambs, fearful of discovery? What authority have we set up over ourselves, that we are not as we are? Who shall prohibit an art from being published to the world? What conspirators have power to determine our mode of consciousness, our sexual enjoyments, our different labors and our loves? What fiends determine our wars?

When will we discover an America that will not deny its own God? Who takes up arms, money, police, and a million hands to murder the consciousness of God? Who spits in the beautiful face of poetry which sings of the glory of God and weeps in the dust of the world?

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Irwin Allen Ginsberg  (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet of Jewish origin, and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions. He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

Ginsberg is best known for his poem “Howl“, in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1956, “Howl” was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs. In 1957, it attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. “Howl” reflected Ginsberg’s own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that “Howl” was not obscene, adding, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. His poem “September on Jessore Road,” calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg’s tireless persistence in protesting against “imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.”

His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.