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 starvry 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 cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

……

When I was first was brought back to this poem back in October by an op-ed piece at the NY Times website it was just before the election and it seemed (while in my more histronic moods) that could be some prophetic vision of the liberals in this country (at least on the blogosphere), and then later after the election it still seemed to resonante, and especially after Obama made his now infamous compromise-capitulation.  Even more so with the “hallucinating Arkansas” moment of Bill Clinton taking to the podium to defend the tax deal and the “scholars of war” telling us “with Blake-like tragedy” we’d be in Afghanistan a little while longer.

The poem, however, for other reasons has woven itself into my recent ponderings about the label of “defeatist liberal,” a label which others here and elsewhere have applied to me (and at times with the liberal portion of the label called into question).  There are times when I not only accept such a label, but that I embrace it, although my inclination would to be to qualify the label with a “somewhat.”

The short explanation would be that being a defeatist liberal comes from concluding that I live in a country which does not broadly embrace a liberal perspective and therefore liberal socio-political achievements will be rare, if not non-existent at times.  In working on this blog, however, I have come to conclusion fully explaining what I mean by that simple sentence is far too complicated to be contained in the format of a blog.  Which is not to imply I am ducking the attempt to elaborate upon this statement.  Rather, it is is only to qualify that whatever I put forth is hardly the whole story.  Not even close.

I will admit that on one level such a blog is merely a self-absorbed exercise (and really what blog isn’t), that there is some therapeutic drive to such an outpouring.  We all blog (and comment on blogs) for our own particular reasons, some of which are similar to others, but are in the end uniquely tied to our own experiences.  Just like any engagement with any art form be it poetry, dance, or theater, whether as the artist or the spectator who is unable to separate the dancer from the dance.

To this extent, such a self-absorbed pondering is relevant to the collective discourse for it provides an opportunity for everyone to ponder the internal dynamics that each of us bring to politics or art or anything else of significance, and what is it that we believe we see when we get there.  One problem we face is that whatever conclusions we individually make about we perceive, we tend to assume that the conclusion is obviously clear to anyone willing to look.  Yet what is clear as a reality to one soul is not necessarily so to another.  And because we all drag along our own life with us, it can be said that none of us are capable of truly being able to clearly perceive what is there, let alone remember what has transpired.

At this point I have to point out that among the other labels I would attribute to myself, post-structuralist is one of the significant ones when it comes to understanding how I see, understand and articulate the socio-political phenonmenon around me.  This topic alone is more than one blog can contain.  The implications of the notion of Derrida’s nothing-outside-the-text alone deserves more than one blog. 

There are those who believe that language can be not only precise and definitive, but is also something concrete outside of us which we access in our attempt to understand and explain the world.  For these folks, clarity is not an impossible dream, whether it is the scientist or the preacher or whoever else.  For me, this belief that our reality is fundamentally a constructive feature of our language-based consciousness is a core liberal belief.   It is the counter to (for lack of a better term) the conservative view that we operate on perceptions of concrete reality.

To elaborate on this, I would turn to constructive nature of gender and how it manifests itself in cultures.  I would explore how we act as if there was a true distinct division between man and woman, and merge that binary view with culturally-defined roles, expectations,. and identifications.  And I would explore how these are infused in each of us in the development of identity, and how this facet of our identity is infused with other facets our identity like those related to our politics. 

But that is more than one blog can contain.  Yet to elaborate on this point I would turn to Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and its section entitled “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.”   Here is one of the word, “parades, which highlights the notion we all operate upon our motifs.

PARADES

People in Italy or France have it easy. When their parents force them to go to church, they get back at them by joining the Party (Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist, etc.). Sabina, however, was first sent to church by her father, then forced by him to attend meetings of the Communist Youth League. He was afraid of what would happen if she stayed away.

When she marched in the obligatory May Day parades, she could never keep in step, and the girl behind her would shout at her and purposely tread on her heels. When the time came to sing, she never knew the words of the songs and would merely open and close her mouth. But the other girls would notice and report her. From her youth on, she hated parades.

Franz had studied in Paris, and because he was extraordinarily gifted his scholarly career was assured from the time he was twenty. At twenty, he knew he would live out his life within the confines of his university office, one or two libraries, and two or three lecture halls. The idea of such a life made him feel suffocated. He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

And so as long as he lived in Paris, he took part in every possible demonstration. How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others. The parades filing down the Boulevard Saint-Germain or from the Place de la Republique to the Bastille fascinated him. He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

I might put it another way: Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival—in other words, a dream.

During her studies, Sabina lived in a dormitory. On May Day all the students had to report early in the morning for the parade. Student officials would comb the building to ensure that no one was missing. Sabina hid in the lavatory. Not until long after the building was empty would she go back to her room. It was quieter than anywhere she could remember. The only sound was the parade music echoing in the distance. It was as though she had found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country? She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

And all we’re talking about is parades.  Not something like freedom or justice or democracy.  Not policy issues like gun control, abortion, health care, or taxes to pay for more mental health services in every community.

 And when we consider the dynamics of how we define ourselves is dependent upon and influences how we define the world around us in a maddening loop (the topic of the impact of abuse of children on their socio-political development is just one branch which comes off of this), the notion that we can separate the personal from the political is ludicrious.  And makes it so very clear why we are always talking past one another.

One of the reasons we can’t listen is because we are unwilling to step back and actually hear the other person.  To keep it simple, I would offer the example of someone putting his or herself forward as candidate for president, who ideally presented just the right mix of economic populism and  social justice to unite the country, but then added that he or she was also a homosexual. 

 Of course the dynamic are more complex than that example.  But even that example highlights something like someone’s sexual orientation is a threatening phenomenon.  It isn’t just the hardcore religious fundamentalists who would have an issue with such a candidate.  One might argue at this point that we elected Barack Hussein Obama, so why not a homosexual.  Well, the reason why not is another blog (and yet one more reason I currently a defeatist liberal).

 Yet to touch upon the reason why not brings me back to Howl. 

The op-ed article that brought my attention back to this poem was Stanley Fish’s Literary Criticism Comes to the Movies.  Now with a title like that how could I not read it.  It turned out to be his take on the film Howl, which is as he describes: “not only about literary criticism but is the performance of literary criticism, an extended ‘explication de texte.’” which occurs in part

through a re-enactment of the Ferlinghetti trial which sought to prove that Ferlinghetti was “publishing and distributing an obscene work, that is, a work that appeals only to prurient interests, has a tendency to incite lustful thoughts and has no redeeming social or literary value.

According to Fish, Howl use of the trial to expand our understanding of the poem in this way:

Because the trial’s analyses of specific lines and passages interrupt (or are interrupted by) the movie-long declaiming of the poem, we have a chance to hear the same lines and passages twice and even three times, and, as a result, we experience the effect of deepening understanding that is produced by the classroom teacher who circles and surrounds a poem with information, references and multiple points of view.

To give another sense of this trial, here is A.O. Scott’s description of the trial scenes in the film:

During the trial scenes, when Ginsberg is absent (he didn’t attend), his role as explicator is taken up by attorneys, witnesses and even the judge. The trial turns into a seminar on literary criticism led by the befuddled prosecutor (David Strathairn) who, as he puts it, represents the “average man” trying gamely to figure out what these incantatory words and phrases might possibly signify, if anything. His method (quite reasonable) is to ask a succession of literary critics, brought in as expert witnesses, what does this line mean or why is this word relevant or why does this passage have literary value?

The answers are sometimes thematic (the poem is about “uprooted people wandering around,” says Mark Schorer, my department chair in the early 60’s), sometimes political (the poem is about despairing reactions to the post-World War II world), sometimes ideological (the poem is a protest against the depredations of capitalism), sometimes formal (the poem does not have a form, says a hostile critic; the words chosen convey the author’s intention says a more friendly one), sometimes evaluative (it’s not literature, says one witness; it stands the test of time and will be productive of other poems like it, says another). In one extended sequence there is an animated discussion of “Howl”’s relationship to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” And there is even an exchange between the defense attorney (played by Jon Hamm) and a wonderfully pompous English professor (played by Jeff Daniels) about the nature of originality and literary borrowing.

Today that this trial actually occurred in America is almost unthinkable, especially in San Francisco of all places.  Yet it did happen.  Fortunately, on October 3, 1957 Judge Clayon Horn found Howl was not obscene and Ferlinghetti was acquitted.  One point to make, however, is that the judge did not throw out the case as unworthy of the courts.  The notion that the state had the right to arrest someone over selling a poem that was deemed obscene was not questioned explicitly.

Ultimately this was a liberal victory.  A step forward in the march of free expression of the individual.  This trial became a landmark First Amendment case because it established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance.  But we cannot forget that the reason that Ferlinghetti was on trial was that Howl contained such lines as:

 ....who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.

Nothing much has changed.  If we put it to the people of this nation, how many Americans would say such a poem has “redeeming social importance”?  How many would say they would want their children taught the poem in high school or junior high?  And what relation would those answers have to the viability of a homosexual candidate for president?  And what does this have to do with everyone’s sense of gender identity?  And their intimate relationship to parades?

Which is another way of saying that the American populace (and by extention the American electorate) are not a sophiscated bunch.  They are like prosecutor in the Ferghenitti tiral as A.O. Scott puts it: 

Mr. Strathairn’s prosecutor humbly and touchingly confesses, in his summation, that he can’t quite understand what “Howl” is about, and rather than mock him, the film (like the poet) takes his confusion seriously. Ginsberg’s poem is shown to be not difficult or forbidding, but honest, generous and inclusive, containing multitudes.

The emphasis is mine.  That each moment, each experience, each perception contains multitudes is a fundamental notion of liberalism.  And thiis is what threatens too many.  They want their certainty.  Howl and homosexuality and host of others threaten that certainity.  In this sense, we are nation that does not embrace a liberal perspective.   And why I will continue to be a liberal defeatist and why I will continue to howl.  Who knows, I might even be destroyed by madness.

So to end this self-indulgent ramble, I would put forth a reworking of Michael Frayn’s Democracy when the East Germany Stasi agent Kretschmann spoke to the moll Guillaume about the democracy in the west to fit the U.S. today:

….The United States! Not just one so-called democracy—fifty separate democracies tied up in a federation like ferrets in a bag!  Fifty separate talking-shops all talking at the same time, with the federal talking-shop in D.C. trying to make itself heard above the rest of them!  Two political parties, in and out of the bed with each other like drunken intellectuals,…and three hundred and ten million separate egos.  All making deals with each other and breaking them.  All looking round at every moment to see the expression on everyone else’s face.  All trying to guess which way everyone else will jump.  All out for themselves, and all totally dependent on everyone else.  Not one United States. Three hundred and ten million United States.  The tower of Babel!

All those egos.  Bringing the whole of their history with them.  Which may something Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting make perfect sense.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

And you ask why I am I liberal defeatist howling in the forest?