Just like the infinitude of the everything may offer a sense of perpetual fall, so may human society grant a sense of never-changing-nauseous-state what with the seeming incapability to learn from past mistakes. Perhaps Allen Ginsberg came by some sort of kinaesthesia provoked by the collective’s insidious order prior to writing his most famous piece of poetry – a work that prompts its reader to accelerate word after word, line after line, page after page, much due to the quantum of characters and sceneries, and real-life references and sequences, that lead to a wonderment concerning the author’s state of mind and soul. Considering the time during which he wrote this, full of jazzy and bleak happenings, Ginsberg’s keen observations about the society of the United States of America during the 50s seem to highlight its chaotic circumstances and inevitable major changes.

Such ardent, contagious rhythm seems, feels, sounds conspicuous to one of Beat Generation’s phenomenon’s opus – and one may certainly welcome with ease the notion that “Howl” ought to reflect the thing that one always loses sense of, control of, knowledge of; that of human’s infinite number of possibilities inhabiting their ultimate condition of living in, for, and towards finitude. It appears as if the author himself was painfully aware of the fact that from where we stand, we may never be able to observe all that we interpret as amaranthine in all its plenitude, for we shall always be fated to regard and to marvel from here. Whenever distance makes itself apparent, it seems, human beings tend to lose themselves within theoretical and metaphysical considerations, speculations, and assumptions, so much so that our intellect tends to act simpleminded when wandering through the trinity of the great stances that compose human thinking: science, philosophy, and theology.

Thus, anyone who reads this poem should not expect anything less than to find a mixture of frustration and despair, and energy, and joyfulness when reading about the lives of the outcasts – artists, homosexuals, radicals, women, and the mentally ill – ornamented with disturbing and pictorial descriptions that plumbed the depths of politics, religion, war, capitalism, freedom of speech, creativity and inspiration, hope (for the young/er generation/s), drug culture, sexuality, and mental illness. Needless to say, such conjunction prompted this work into a censorship trial back in 1957. Nonetheless, its impact was sufficiently notorious for it ended up being considered by many as the piece of literature that set the day when the modern world actually began, one that was birthed from and through a generation that emerged right after the end of the Second World War.

The scenery shaped by the anterior descriptions may convey horror or enthusiasm, depending on who looks at it. In my case, I found it quite disturbing and jumbled, albeit literature-wise deeply alluring and paramount. In the case of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg’s work served as an inspiration. Furthermore, its acclamation led to it being placed alongside the major creations of other writers such as Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and William Wordsworth.

So the story goes that humans tend to carry each other’s lives as bittersweet adjectives under their tongues rather than naming reality as it is through the nouns that conceive life’s qualms and reassurances. Just as one tends to find the infinite hiding in plain sight whenever the night gives way to an unsettling dimension fabricated by unexplored thus unexplained darkness, it appears that Ginsberg tried to fill this book’s pages with all of that which the society as a whole (des)misses amidst all of the events that undisguisedly crowd the immensurable space that we dwell in.

Just like the infinitude of {the} everything

Traga[r]

drowning, I