Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  but he cranked his head

  without an excuse.

  I told him the sky chases

  the sun

  And he smiled and said:

  “What’s the use.”

  I was feeling like a demon

  again

  So I said: “But the ocean chases

  the fish.”

  This time he laughed

  and said: “Suppose the

  strawberry were

  pushed into a mountain.”

  After that I knew the

  war was on —

  So we fought:

  He said: “The apple-cart like a

  broomstick-angel

  snaps & splinters

  old dutch shoes.”

  I said: “Lightning will strike the old oak

  and free the fumes!”

  He said: “Mad street with no name.”

  I said: “Bald killer! Bald killer! Bald killer!”

  He said, getting real mad,

  “Firestoves! Gas! Couch!”

  I said, only smiling,

  “I know God would turn back his head

  if I sat quietly and thought.”

  We ended by melting away,

  hating the air!191

  What’s weird about it is that the ultimate poetic moment comes when there are no more opposite combinations, just the words “couch,” “stoves,” “gas,” “firestoves,” “gas,” “couch.” The hottest point is just the simple words “firestoves,” “gas,” “couch.” He’s substituted incredibly odd and unexpected or discordant combinations of words, like “apple-cart,” “broomstick-angel,” or conceptions like “ocean chases the fish,” he substitutes these opposites or inside-out ideas or weird “fried shoes” combinations of language. We were hitchhiking and we had to pass the time, so we made up phrases to astound each other. In the course of trying to astound each other by the twists and turns of unlikely juxtapositions of words making strange, startling images, it went from ideas, which were upside-down ideas, like “the sky chases the sun” and “the ocean chases the fish,” from koan-like idea inversions to weird juxtapositions like “apple-cart,” “broomstick-angel,” to almost ordinary mind noticings. I remember saying, “mad street, no name.” We didn’t know where we were, a mad street with no name. He came up with “bald killer.” They seemed at the moment, in the hysteria of Salingeresque high school kids putting each other on, to be funnier and funnier. But finally the ultimate in funniness was when the words appeared in the air with no relevance at all but were totally ordinary facts like “gas” or “couch.” So the highest poetry in that were just the ordinary words. Of course it took a little preparation but that’s his basic method.

  We’d arrived at a point where contradiction was so obvious that reality itself was sufficient to be self-contradicting. Or reality itself was funnier even than contradiction. That gas, couch, just to say a single word like “gas” or “couch” was funnier than to say “pipe-couch,” “water-gas.” It was easy to do, but the couch sitting down in the middle of the road like that in our brains, just reality itself, a simple real word like “couch” was, in this context, total solidification of poetry.

  CHAPTER 36

  Corso and “Bomb”

  I think “Bomb” is one of Gregory’s greatest poems. “Marriage” is famous because it’s in all the anthologies, it’s obvious and it’s a good poem, but there are other poems just as good, just as funny, just as powerful, and just as suggestive in method of that series. They become more and more refined until you get to “Clown” and finally “Death.”

  Originally published by City Lights as a broadside, “Bomb” was printed in the form of a mushroom cloud. He begins Wagnerian, addressing the bomb: “Budger of history.” It’s already Gregory being funny. The bomb budges history, a very interesting phrase.

  Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb

  Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched-sky I cannot hate you

  Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass

  The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe

  Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone

  Ah and the sad desperate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart

  And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling

  Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you’re no crueller than cancer

  All man hates you they’d rather die by car-crash lightning drowning

  Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old ageold age O Bomb

  They’d rather die by anything but you Death’s finger is free-lance

  Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its

  categorical blue

  It’s a very funny approach, reminding everybody that they’re going to die anyway, so why are they getting all creepily scared about the bomb? The hysteria of the bomb is really hysteria at the universe itself, the bomb was just an excuse for further spitefulness and hysteria. Which is true, everybody’s gonna die anyway. “Death has long since distributed its categorical blue.” That’s the ultimate nature of things, a great blue empty.

  Gregory is an idea man and the opening of this poem, gorgeous as it is and full of humor, is a very clear, simple idea that bomb is no crueler than cancer, so he can not hate it. And you can’t hate people for the bomb either. It’s not up to man whether the bomb booms or not.

  There’s a long extravaganza imagining a bomb falling on New York and all the havoc and comedy that would wreak. It’s seen almost as a Marx Brothers comedy, like at the end of Duck Soup. Then a series of discord contradictions, how the bomb will disrupt “The top of the Empire State arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily,” or “Penguins plunged against the Sphinx.” A series of images like that. Then a little historical roundup in which the visiting team of the present and the home team of the past are put together in a final amphitheater of life and death, all booing and cheering to the end. Then an address to the bomb in very pretty language invoking an explosion of the bomb in very rosy terms.

  Stick angels on your jubilee feet

  wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat

  You are due and behold you are due

  and the heavens are with you

  Then a long section of apocalyptic rhetoric done in humorous style about the horrible effects of the bomb.

  From thy nimbled matted spastic eye

  exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls

  From thy appellational womb

  spew birth-gusts of great worms

  Rip open your belly Bomb

  from your belly outflock vulturic salutations

  Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps

  along the brink of Paradise

  Mouthfuls of language there. Then after this climactic explosion of language a quiet legato section where he examines what he is doing.

  That I lean forward on a desk of science

  an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose

  half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs

  That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love

  That I can’t exist in a world that consents

  a child in a park

  So what’s so weird about a bomb? It’s the same trick he [always] pulls. Simple, ordinary, odd as wearing shoes, it is as astounding as a child in the park, a man dying in an electric chair. Those are as astounding as the vast drama of the poetic bomb.

  That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man

  knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men

  and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship

  The ambitiousness and brashness of the language is just the common heart of everybody. A common chord tha
t everybody actually feels, a common fantasy of wanting to be above the bomb, or wanting to be more beautiful than the bomb, or wanting the imagination to surpass the bomb. And then he says “and my unwords,” the things he doesn’t say, “no less an acquaintanceship.”

  That I am manifold

  a man pursuing the big lies of gold

  He’s admitting it. His rhetoric is always these great big lies of gold. “Or a poet roaming in bright ashes,” which is what this poem has been doing. “Or that which I imagine myself to be.” And now he goes out again on discordant, imaginary constructions. He imagines himself to be “A shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams.” Then he says,

  I need not then be all-smart about bombs

  Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars

  I’d doubt not they’d become butterflies

  Then he puts them all in hell and makes fun of the bombs. Finally he gets right at it and gets into the bomb with his mind, begins mind fucking the bomb itself.

  I am standing before your fantastic lily door

  I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk

  Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven

  Welcome me fear not thy opened door

  nor thy cold host’s grey memory

  [ . . . ]

  Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall

  or even contend celestial fire goes out

  Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb

  that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born

  magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful

  and they’ll sit plunk on earth’s grumpy empires

  fierce with moustaches of gold192

  All that rhetoric boils down [to the fact that] the bomb comes out of men’s hearts. That if men created the bomb, they’re going to get what they deserve. And it’s not the first time and it may not be the last time. Even more monstrous projections of the imagination will be created that we’ll have to deal with and if we can’t deal with them, then we’ll get what we created. If we’re going to hate it, we’re gonna have to hate ourselves and our own imagination for being capable of creating universal death. It’s not enough to get resentful that the whole universe is gonna go out, the celestial fire is gonna go out, we’re going to kill God with the bomb. Since we created the whole shebang anyway, the imagination which created the bomb is bigger than the bomb. The poetic imagination is beyond the bomb, because the bomb is only a piece of noisy poetry after all. It is of man’s mind and man’s creation is poetry. Everything is poetry in the sense that we’ve imagined it, we’ve figured it out and we do it. So the bomb is just a noisy epic.

  Gregory’s asserting his imagination. Specifically this poem is more expansive than the bomb, more explosive in the imagination than the bomb. It’s the first poem that I know of that faced the bomb with imagination and was unafraid of the bomb. And probably the first poem that did any good in “fighting” the bomb, because it freed minds from the fear-thrall of the bomb. The thinking that the bomb was some great god independent of us.

  Corso is the most inspired and intelligent and excellent of all the poets. He’s the poet’s poet, the perfect poet in a way. Traditional classic poète maudit, that is to say, poet whom society puts down because of his bad behavior. He’s an offensive poet, an outrageous poet, a drunken poet, a strung-out poet, an insulting poet, a bedbug poet, a tragic poet, but he survived instead of dying young. Survived to haunt everybody. And he sees himself as kind of a holy fool or tragic clown.

  “How Happy I Used to Be” may be a little difficult to understand, but I remember him writing it and I enjoyed the process of him writing it, because we were all high on grass and every time he had a new line it was really interesting. So the idea is Gregory the orphan.

  How Happy I Used to Be

  How happy I used to be

  imagining myself so many things—

  Alexander Hamilton lying in the snow

  shoe buckles rusting in the snow

  pistol shot crushing his brow.

  Behind a trail of visiting kings

  I cried:

  Will Venice and Genoa

  give welcome as did Verona?

  I have no immediate chateau

  for the Duke of Genoa

  no African bull for the Doge of Venice

  but for the Pope!

  I have the hideout of the Turk.

  Informer? No—I’m in it

  for the excitement;

  between Afghanistan and Trinidad

  intrigue and opera are electrified

  everywhere is electricity!

  The mad spinning ballerina

  sees me in the audience and falls into a faint,

  I smile I smile I smile —

  Or yesterday when I heard a sad song

  I stopped to hear and wept

  for when had I last imagined myself a king

  a kind king with ambassadors and flowers and wise teachers —

  What has happened to me now that

  everything has been fulfilled?

  Will I again walk up Lexington Avenue

  or down it

  feeling warm to Richard the Third

  and the executioner

  whose black hood is oppressive to wear?

  Am I not music walking behind Ben Franklin

  music in his two loaves of bread

  and Massachusetts half-penny?

  I knew 1768 when all was patched eyes and wooden legs

  How happy I was fingering pieces of eight, doubloons —

  Children, have you not heard of my meeting

  with Israel Hans, Israel Hans—193

  He starts with kind of grammar school mythology, imagining himself in different roles out of history. “Alexander Hamilton lying in the snow.” Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, so Alexander Hamilton lying in the snow. Either Gregory read it or he figured out that it was a winter snowy scene.194 Immediately his first thought was to take the abstract historical event but put in the snow and have shoe buckles rusting in the snow. You’d have to be high on grass to imagine shoe buckles rusting in the snow, rather than just leaving it. He detailed it, particularized it, humanized it, put a little shoe buckle into it.

  “Behind a trail of visiting kings I cried: Will Venice and Genoa give welcome as did Verona?” So now he’s imagining himself a Renaissance artist or prince. “I have no immediate chateau for the Duke of Genoa,” everybody giving out presents. He’s imagining himself through history, giving out castles to Genoese dukes. “No African bull for the Doge of Venice,” a present of an African bull. “But for the Pope! I have the hideout of the Turk.” He’s a spy actually, so what he has is secret information on where the Turks are hiding out with their armies. “Informer? No—I’m in it for the excitement; between Afghanistan and Trinidad intrigue and opera are electrified everywhere is electricity!” That’s a very high funny idea. The Renaissance and former poet, diplomat, spy, in it for the excitement, traveling “between Afghanistan and Trinidad,” that’s pure sound. Intrigue and opera.

  Then all of a sudden a hypnotic movie image, “the mad spinning ballerina sees me in the audience and falls into a faint.” I don’t know where that came from, maybe from some old movie like Dead of Night, where there’s a phantom face that haunts the hero.

  “For when had I last imagined myself a king.” I thought it was a great line when I first heard it. He’s boasting about the power of imagination, boasting his poetic imagination. His genius here is not only being smart about history, because he’s smart about history, but also imaginatively interested [in the details]. There’s a very famous image of the hooded executioner with the ax, but Corso knows that the hood is oppressive to wear, it’s all sweaty inside the hood of the executioner. How many people have actually empat
hized inside the executioner’s head and tried to figure out what it would feel like [to be] in that role. “When did I last imagine myself a king?” Beyond imagination there’s a quality of extent of Mahayana bodhisattvic compassionate empathy, of extending awareness out into strange interesting places. Everybody in grammar school knows about the executioner, but nobody thinks [about how he] feels. Everybody hears about Alexander Hamilton’s duel, but nobody connects it with some living reality like the shoe buckle in the snow, which is a very brilliant idea. Make the duel and the death real, a shoe buckle in the snow. The humor and intelligence and jump of the mind [are] amazing.

  Am I not music walking behind Ben Franklin

  music in his two loaves of bread

  and Massachusetts half-penny?

  This is all 1930s grammar school mythology, Ben Franklin walking into Philadelphia with two loaves of bread and a half-penny. It’s some kind of subliminal American archetype that he must have read or seen a little drawing of in the Reader’s Digest in 1935.

  I knew 1768 when all was patched eyes and wooden legs

  How happy I was fingering pieces of eight, doubloons —

  Children, have you not heard of my meeting

  with Israel Hans, Israel Hans —

  He thought of children. It’s the poet talking to another generation, saying haven’t you heard of the great deeds that I did? I’m that old that I’ve met Israel Hans. “Who’s Israel Hans?” I kept thinking, “Who’s Israel Hans?” because it’s somehow interesting. Israel Hans apparently was some figure of the American Revolution. Oddly enough, Corso was quite learned in old, funny history.195

  There’s an element, a motif underneath it, that is Gregory as an orphan. Somebody completely dispossessed and disinherited and yet completely genius, a voracious reader, displaying his trinkets and toys of the mind, displaying his empathy. Maybe because he was in prison and had to develop a more powerful imagination. He’s an orphan prisoner saying, “Children, have you not heard of my meeting with Israel Hans?” The time George Washington and I played cards? The time I lent money to Thomas Paine? And the repeat of Israel Hans is heartbreaking. I always liked that poem, it’s such an odd thing, but it is a great display of imagination. He wrote it in Amsterdam in 1958 when we were all living together in a furnished room meeting Dutch poets. I guess Israel Hans had originally been Dutch, I think that was the connection, he was some sort of Dutch, Jewish American revolutionary. That’s how Gregory knew about it.