Little Boy

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  AND looking back over the lost terrain, the great misrememberer with myopic vision sees only himself in the shorn landscape of half-overturned vehicles of desire and misread signs at country crossroads pointing different directions like Kerouac in Brittany looking for his lost family with wooden signposts pointing to tiny hamlets all beginning with KER- and him getting drunker and drunker on native calvados that Yanks used in their cigarette lighters in World War Two oh poor Karook believing in Baby Jesus drunk or sobered up wandering errant among the tangled branches of his family tree like our boy looking for his roots aye what a far-out search it was looking for lost hearts and You Can’t Go Home Again and all that no matter how many roots you dig up no matter how much he unearthed trying to reassemble it or piece together some mute Stone Angel in his own Recoleta oh what’s to be salvaged from the shards and broken pieces of marble with illegible inscriptions and a detached hand pointing skyward while all the while he’s growing up into a culture of consumer-gatherers motivated mostly by pure greed and why would he be attracted by the ideal of an anarchist society with no place to call home or wouldn’t he have been better off seeking humanity in new forms of art and so become a great artist and the mind of man and the brute instinct mingled in him ludic and ludicrous little man But the boy begins with feelings and emotions and the mind weaves them into his story his narrative and as we grow older our softer parts grow harder and our hard parts softer and our Inner Fish has the skeleton of a fish gasping on the beach listening to Benny Goodman blowing on his licorice stick in a big band and D. H. Lawrence holding Aaron’s phallic rod in his hand all reflected in the boy growing up in old Manhattan full of all the adolescent hungers and obsessions including the urge to waylay the buxom wife next door thrice his age no matter a breast is a breast wherever imagined in the mind of an urchin on the night streets the heartless streets the stone canyons with flashback memories cast upon the mind-screen of the fourth person singular who is your Other your inexpressible You who cannot be put into words And so am I here regurgitating the sound memory of my race my mind an echo chamber of everything ever said or sung in the history of man and/or woman or womban the incubator of mammal life sweet singer in my ear echoing all sentient beings in every tongue and tone while the Moving Finger writes and having writ erases all of it with the blackboard eraser of failing memory in an empty house at nightfall by an abandoned pumping station on a dry delta where still in the distance can be seen the bright pulsing lights of a riverboat casino with its steamboat whistle sending out cries of promised riches and naked nudes wailing with lust calling out to a solitary figure in the gloaming aye but still there must be in spite of all a way forward through the morass of life and who am I to say Pi is not God oh man just give us the dear flesh to live and breathe in forever aye mates too long at sea too long starved without the all-embracing blind heat of warm flesh pulsing in the deep night the libido itch in the crotch of love

  BUT far far from all that were we the night before D-Day the night before that great assault on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces yes the night before at Plymouth with the deep country lanes between hedgerows clogged with transport and troops and loaded weapons carriers and thousands and thousands of soldiers in battle gear all blacked out and silent And in the whispering fields all around were great encampments and whole armies bivouacked in tents with small hooded cooking fires And it was the night before Agincourt with the king visiting his men around campfires in the muffled dark and then before dawn the great movement started like a great beast moving stealthily in the dark the loaded ships began to move and to move out into the English Channel And we were so young but didn’t know it and we were running a ship yes Executive Officer Lt. Eugene Feinblatt USNR age twenty-four or -five was running it and it was a great sea boat and could go through anything before dawn June 6 1944 and we were blacked out as part of a convoy-escort anti-submarine screen steaming in formation east northeast in the English Channel toward the beaches of Normandy and we were thirty-three men and three officers on a 110-foot diesel-powered wooden-hulled subchaser at 5 a.m. on the blacked-out bridge of our little ship the first light just cracking the black eastern horizon the whole crew on deck at battle stations And in the very first light on the horizon we were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up from below the horizon with first just the tops of the masts and then the hulls—a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels steaming together from many separate ports converging with the first light off the Normandy coast as we could hear waves of Allied bombers going high over toward Utah and Omaha Beaches shrouded in darkness and then the distant explosions on the coast becoming a roar in the darkness as we stood at our stations binoculars trained on the French coast just coming into range in the dawn light the armada steaming full speed dead ahead for the beaches now And fair stood the wind for France…Aye mates it’s a far cry today from when we sailed the high seas before the mast beating past Cape Hatteras convoying ten-knot merchant ships in violent storms and me in the crow’s nest trying to see through the whirling fog or crossing the Pacific on an attack transport with ten thousand troops bound for Japan or zigzagging across the Atlantic in a convoy of rusty buckets and tin cans in a convoy of eighty-nine ships only sixty-three reaching Murmansk yes the Murmansk run in the dead of winter 1942–43 and the German wolf-pack subs shadowing us for the kill Aye mi boy it was a fine war I fought since I never fired a gun except one burst of an antiaircraft Bofors at unseen planes lost in the clouds ten thousand feet above the Normandy beaches and later some depth charges that went off too soon and cracked all the heads on our own ship And that’s it mates the greatest generation fighting the Good War with the best of it spent on land in London pubs during the buzz-bomb blackouts or chasing the Scottish lassies around Loch Lomond after grange hall dances while we was in dry dock up some lock near Glasgow Rosneath it was and that’s the way it went and me enjoying every minute of it on sea or land with the big war going bang-bang over the horizon yeah and it’s all legalized murder or state-sponsored terrorism you better believe it Yet to tell the truth of what really happened to meself on the high and low seas I would just be peeling an onion to get down to zero tolerance or the final skin of truth and then you’d see me anew the true-blue me the eye at the center of our little disturbance on earth the eye at the center of consciousness and “the fly is where the eye was” as Erik Bauersfeld’s childhood friend said when he came upon a fly eating out the eye of a dead fish cast up upon a beach at night Oh the words that come at midnight the night-soil of living and dying the sound of the heart beating its thumping heard through flesh as with an ear to the ground the sound of breathing heard through a stethoscope the hope that all is eternal and we’ll live forever and ever if we are clever enough to outwit somehow the grinning reaper with the scythe ha-ha what an illusion what a farce when we know for certain all the time that time will tell and time will toll us under earth and the dearth and death of all we love etc etc while we go astray in the hay and what are ye going to do about it twisting and turning to get off the hook and the tick-tock of time louder and louder yes and so no help for it so why not have a gud time instead with the Stoics and the Epicureans and Lucretius and some Buddhists yes take off your skin and dance around in your bones until you lease a place forever in the sod of the turning world where landlord never dies they say

  WHEREAS to gather from the air a live tradition as Old Ez sed (and thereby promoted grave robbery as an art form) a poetic technique upon which he jerry-built his Cantos that couldn’t possibly be sung And isn’t it all another way of listening for the eternal Ur-voice the voice behind the voice of the race the voice of the fourth person singular inexpressible ecstatic at once coherent and incoherent sighing or babbling the voice of all of us heard and unheard loud and soft just as if there are only two kinds of poetry loud and soft and two kinds of people hard and soft and some have hard shells and some soft inside while the leaden wheel of time measures out our liv
es in ticks as it whirs inside its intricate watchworks with digital springs tick-tick-tick around and around we go with Vico or Grandma or little John or Baby Blue, and the glue sticking us all together might be love or lust or hate or blood or you name it whatever sticks you to your brother or lover or Significant Other And so here we are again ok save us from the Other, yet still I and my father are One son-of-a-gun on the run along a riverbank along a riverrun in sun or in deep shade under a bridge on the River Liffey where I once slept a broke student imagining myself Stephen Dedalus or mad Rimbaud and I was Apollinaire and I was Baudelaire and I was Villon and I was all the mad wandering tattered poets rolled into one sleeping under the bridges of the world and later as I was walking down Sackville Street or reading my way through bookstores I met all the other great writers and poets and great articulators of consciousness the great grey Whitman arm in arm with Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg and Djuna Barnes crossing paths with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Tolstoy and sexy tragi-romantic Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas sweet singer of Swansea Dylan of all my days

  SO that measure of madness that moves life in wild ways moved Little Boy away from couch-potato ease and political somnolence inhabited by Mencken’s booboisie, for there are some people who just can’t stand normal life (but why be normal when you can be happy?) and must always be itching to take off somewhere or blow off somewhere and can’t stand still mentally or otherwise like as if they had an ant up their blasthole or somewhere or they just have wild imaginations that can’t be tied up by conventions or Ten Commandments so that so that the status quo has always to be questioned and shook up or otherwise disturbed in pursuit of happiness and property and I was one of them, so ladies and gentlemen if you don’t want to be disturbed in such pursuits then you wouldn’t like my dear young upstart rebel or would-be rebel or possible revolutionaire my shadow self but who knows how he will turn out and will he ascend Mount Olympus or Mount Disillusion or Mount Monologue or Mount Analogue, and that’s the question for any young kid with his whole life laid out before him a bright young kid with a great head on him and he could become anything a president a great scientist or a great holy man or a druggie or a bum or a great rebel for there have been many heroes who were rebels yes so many and bravo to all of them viva to all of them all those who overturned the apple cart to find the rotten apple before it spoiled the whole harvest and found the golden apples of Apuleius yes and there was a talking dog whose owner sold it because it wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear and Italian papers reported their primal minister had a rectal dysfunction oh do they call that anal retentive and do they call him il cavaliere coglione and is not all of history a single parade with buffoons masquerading as statesmen and lamebrains and convenient idiots running the parade from beautiful capitol buildings and most all of them bought off by lobbyists before their first vote So what do you expect but universal fuckups and man too stupid and greedy to save himself from eco-catastrophe as the deep dusk falls Oh man there must be a better way to live and love and breathe Let’s strike out for the future with fife and drum as in this poster by Levi’s on street corners in San Francisco in the summer of 2009 that said “I am the new American pioneer looking forward never back No longer content to wait for better times…I will work for better times ’cause no one built this country in suits All I need is all I got Bruises heal Stink is good And apathy is death So with Old Walt I strike up for the New World A newer mightier world The one I will make to my liking For after the darkness comes the dawn There is a better tomorrow Look across the plains and mountains and see America’s eternal promise A promise of progress Go forth with me Go forth” And who was that speaking if not Whitman or every common man on earth or elsewhere who else if not an American certainly not a European with all his baggage of centuries like Pasolini said when he came to New York in the 1960s and met the New Left rads and wrote that he envied these Americans who could act without first having to wade through thirty centuries of intellectual baggage like what would Heidegger do or what would Descartes do or what would Plato say or Plutarch or Herodotus or Gramsci or some other great looming intellect haunting their old Euro heads yeah you can imagine what with the European Communist parties tied up in knots and eventually destroying the student revolution or revelation of 1968 And what Tarquin said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger and so today the messenger embodied now as the media spreads confusion and doubt as to any eternal verity as indeed so do the philosophers or other heavy-headed thinkers who spread doubt in every direction even as Socrates did So that so that today there is a veritable clearance sale of ideas strained through the semiliterate media which ends up giving us a kind of Gazpacho Expressionism or cut-up consciousness as in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or in John Cage’s cut-up of any classic text as he did Finnegans Wake annihilating the beautiful hushed talk of Irish washerwomen gossiping in the gloaming while doing their washing on a riverbank where field mice squawk and dusk falling and night descending into doubt and despair and fear and trembling O lord save us Blind in our courses we know not what we do or where we go O the semiconscious existential despair of not knowing who we are and the boy all his life looking for himself and for where he came from Father lost Mother in a madhouse and he the little kid wandering around knowing nothing having been told nothing of where he came from and who was to tell him the little kid plunked down on earth somewhere alone like a stray cat or pup without a collar or name tag and how was he to find himself in this twirling world spinning to the music of the spheres which is the sound of Om in which all sound is absorbed in which all thought all feeling all senses are absorbed yes and Om the sound of living itself the great Om of all our breathing the voice of life the voice of our buried life the voice of the voice of the blood then coursing through us through even the penis that strange appendage a peninsula of sorts a third arm or leg that so imperiously asserts its authority and inopportunely rises up and inserts itself into affairs personal or worldly and then so arrogantly lets us down at critical moments at the very gates of paradise or Nirvana or hell and refuses all our incitements “of mind and hand” as some Frenchie philosophe said even as he let down his pants in the queen’s chamber indeed indeed and we are left with the perpetual astonishment of man on earth when confronted with himself or his penis indeed what a piece of work is man and this his daybook his nightbook and I am not writing some kind of Notes from the Underground as if I had any idea where any underground is these days if I ever knew since I’ve always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off or picking my nose in hopeless cellars with fellow travelers or their ilk imagining I’m going to change the world or something and so I’m just some kind of literary freak and my mind the constipated thought of the race all too shallow to be called nihilism while all the while all I want to do is walk around the earth cooking the Joy soup What else is there to do with the rest of eternity and would you tell me what it is we’re all supposed to do on earth anyway I mean truly just sit right down and think of an answer to all that while there’s still time just give me a concrete answer as to what humans are supposed to do with all our time what on earth that is are we just to sit around like blobs of perspiring protoplasm or like chimps in trees scratching our fleas or whatever I mean maybe in fact it’s just dreaming that we’re supposed to do after everyone is fed after all is said and done oh no that’s just a big evasion of the basic burning question What I want to know is what in hell are we here on earth for anyway baby baby Am I your bedroom philosopher or Doctor of Alienation Am I a willing well-fed participant and protagonist in our consumer society a consumer-gatherer or a rebel antagonist revolutionary an enemy of the state or something in between neither fish nor fouling-piece Tell me tell me the night is young and you’re so beautiful pardon me if I am overdutiful Babeee and that’s what he was asking himself as he grew up into something new and strange at least in the eyes of some totally objective journalist sent d
own here to earth by some managing editor with a low tolerance for malarkey who wants the truth and nothing but the truth so let ’em have it tell us what is what and who we are and what we are doing down here anyway The top-dog editor wants to know the straight story and are you man enough to tell it or are you brain enough to tell it and are you man enough to say I love you man