Are We All Going Mental? From Ginsberg to Gins to Global Warming, How our Generation Is Being Failed By The System.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” says Allen Ginsberg in the first line of his widely celebrated poem “Howl”. Penned in the mid-fifties this controversial poem sardonically ridicules America’s oppressively "perfect" culture under McCarthyism. Ginsberg determines that, contrary to the preferred trope of “perfect domestic life”, where one could be fulfilled with a suburban home, a college degree and a job in an office, the strains of a materialistic society which valued profits over people, left the great minds of his generation howling for help.
It was the era of the television, and through the TV, society was being mass-conditioned the ideology of  nascent Capitalism, telling Americans to enjoy the liberties of Western society whilst simultaneously persecuting anyone who didn’t. Americans were living a paranoid existence under a schizophrenic state, their lives blighted by the constant fear of total nuclear annihilation, told to live correctly lest their country be blown up by an atom bomb or they be locked up in prison for non-American behaviour.  Allen Ginsberg’s poetry personifies America and the “concrete void” of Capitalist life; the “best minds” of that time were destroyed, says Allen Ginsberg in the Paris Review, under a Cold War climate of “Fear. Fear of total feeling, of total being.”[1] Allen Ginsberg points to the psychological interrogation tactics deployed by the so-called “free world,” mocking its ironies by showing how the terror rained down on Americans lead to not just atomic war but ideological warfare or what Ginsberg refers to as “the human war.”[2]
​Corner-stoning the Beat Movement, Ginsberg turns away from the political propaganda of “perfect America” and the hopes pinned on technological breakthroughs, turning an ear instead towards the “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering”[3] of his generation, exposing the cold, hard truth that post-war America was “in the process of a nervous breakdown.”[4]

But from the sixties to twenty-nineteen, Allen Ginsberg's poetry resonates with the fear, paranoia and destruction that our generation feel today. Scratching at the surface of something bigger, whilst being all consumed by a world which we ache over, our cortisol levels shooting through the roof, never working hard enough, fast enough, never being clever enough. We, generation X, Y and i, (whatever that means), young people who have grown up with endless streams of information, of a world wide web, and global news, of adverts, colour, noise, consumer happy ideals, of anxiety and depression and the bleak, cold reality that no matter how much you swipe down your news feed, you are left feeling perennially unfulfilled. 

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!​

Yesterday, I told my housemate that I can't keep up with "the admin of life." I am constantly replying to emails, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages, University announcements, text messages, missed phone calls. Just how many times does my over-priced estate agents need to inform me that they are coming over to the house to fix the dodgy oven knob? And when I try to breathe and remember that these are all small things in the grand scale of things, I am reminded that the grand scale of things is even worse, and there's even more admin for having an existential crisis.
I write this whilst needing to finish yet another essay for uni, don't get me wrong I am so lucky to be in the privileged position where I can be at university in the first place but where did that high education leave Ginsberg? One of my closest friends was institutionalised last year for mania, and looking at the statistics which say that there is a forty percent increase in mental health issues, it is often linked to student finance rises but I believe it is far more than that. From my experience, this sensation of feeling lost, lonely and anxious, in an ever changing world, has got as much to do with the external world as it has to do with our internal coping mechanisms. We, our generation, now, not only have to cope with paying exaggerated house prices, drug issues, concerns about "growing up", just like the Beat poets of the sixties and every other "youth" culture... but also just like the nuclear crisis of the sixties -the constant plague of Global Warming hangs over all of us. Even if we don't read the news or avoid the talk on political programmes, (which hardly mention the crisis) it is there, the background news, the background noise. In "Supermarket for California" Ginsberg writes to Walt Whitman, a poet of the 20th century;

 In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
         What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?​

Allen Ginsberg in "Supermarket for California" mentions Garcia Lorca. Lorca was  a Spanish playwright, poet and theatre director. He became increasingly interested in Spain's avant-garde. Several drawings consist of superimposed dreamlike faces (or shadows). He later described the double faces as self-portraits, showing "man's capacity for crying as well as winning", inline with his conviction that sorrow and joy were inseparable, just as life and death. Growing up in a rural farm in Spain, when he arrived in New York he was stunned by what he saw. The city was a perfect metaphor for his spiritual condition, its ''extrahuman architecture, its furious rhythm, its geometry and anguish,'' as he described it later, according to a biography by Leslie Stainton, ''Lorca: A Dream of a Life.''

Yet, right now as President Trump battles it out to place the first woman on the moon :

“The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts launched by American rockets from American soil,”
Said US vice president Mike Pence, at a meeting of the US National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama.​
Lorca's idea of the world seems ever more cogent:

Four sailors wrestled a planet,
a world of discernible angles,
an uncrossable world, save by horses.
One sailor, one hundred, one thousand,
wrestling the critical speeds of a planet,
and unaware, all of them,
that the world was alone in the sky. [5]

Our little planet is suspended all alone in the universe, and no Artificial Intelligence imagined up by Elon Musk, no grand infrastructure of super fast 5G internet or sexy electric cars can save us from ourselves, unless we do. My generation battle the shit-tide of fake news, but worse than that, the paranoid state which once broke open the minds of Ginsberg's rebellious kids of the sixties, is collapsing in on all of us as it begins to fall for it's own false rhetoric.
The house is not only burning but heating up like a furnace, let us be hopeful that we can take these fragments of toxic mercury and shape ourselves, our generation of young innovative and inspiring minds, into something as beautiful, versatile and robust as gold. A transition to a holistic, ideal world of diversity, autonomy and equal rights is all very well, but unfortunately none of our liberal and neoliberal ideas mean much at all, when the ship begins to go down. So play the violins and dance to the delicate tune, what we need now, is the lights and the paranoid bleeping "concrete void" of modernity to flicker to offline. And quietly, methodically we can begin to be carpenters of our own future, chiseling away at the toxic, archaic paradigms which separate us, and re-building the boat.

​In this poem Sunflower Sutra, Alan Ginsberg reflects on the ugly consequences of man's industry and the damage to the landscape of America. However, unlike Ginsberg's other poems it ends with a glimmer of hope, the beauty of Mother Nature cracks through the desolate and diseased pavements of peril, in the form of her purest beauty. Against all odds amidst the bleak industrial waste, a sunflower survives...

Sunflower Sutra
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
—I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!   
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen,
—We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
  
Berkeley, 1955.

[1] TYTELL, JOHN. “ART AND LETTERS: The Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution.” The American Scholar, vol. 42, no. 2, 1973, pp. 308–317. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41207113.

[2] Ginsberg, Allen. “America when will you end this human war?” In the poem “America”

[3] “Howl”, Allen Ginsberg, 1955

[4] Allen Ginsberg in the Paris Review, featured in TYTELL, JOHN. “ART AND LETTERS: The Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution.” The American Scholar, vol. 42, no. 2, 1973, pp. 308–317. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41207113.

[5] From Garcia Lorca's ''Poet in New York,'' translated by Ben Belitt, Grove Press, 1955