Not With A Bang But A Whimper

Dylan and Ginsberg. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

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 starry 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 . . .  

ALLEN GINSBERG First lines of Howl

Hell, they don't write apocalyptic poems like that any more! I'm not generally a nostalgic person — I prefer the raw tangibility of the present to the illusory past — but sometimes I catch myself thinking nostalgically about the Beat Generation of the 1950s, about Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Philip Whalen and Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac.

I have a feeling the best minds of our present generation are more interested in celebrity, self-promotion and social media than 'starving hysterical naked' or 'hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy' — but which is better, I'll leave it for you to judge.  

I saw the best minds of my generation

Vanish from dreaming spires and reappear

On I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

I saw the best minds of my generation

Abandon academe and join a party

With pop stars, porn stars and the glitterati.

THE SOLITARY WALKER