In his “Retrospect
on Beat Generation”
Gingsberg proposed
that all the Beat poets
had become “permanent”
because they all had
one “Gnostic” message
lifted out from Heraclitus
that change is impervious
and that all is change
and that all is emptiness
and that nothing else is
except for emptiness
changing into emptiness
and into nothing else
so that no one is real
except as a dream
that has just now ended,
and that’s the American
fabled Dream triumphant
over the thickheaded Soviets
and ergo—over everyone else.
No one else could understand
this dream and its maddened
metaphysical importance
better than the Beatniks,
Gingsberg piously fancied,
once you too terminate
your poetry and thinking
on the note that everyone
is just a dead dream’s rumor,
another lie empty spread
by Life who doesn’t and
couldn’t do better than
that or otherwise now
when all real is unreal
unless one lives a dream
that has been long gone,
a dream that before
used to pass for Life.
Though such a world
would still be making off
with rumors and dreams
and people dead and unreal
made only out of these—
yet people still divided
into those who know
they are dead and the dead
who don’t know and who still
dream that they live—even if
in graves only of their or
someone else’s dreams.
But Heraclitus himself would
have never written that or
that much—without killing
himself before long—
even ahead of killing his own
message—child of Logos
that is always one and true
that speaks of the soul
dying all her successive deaths
and yet ever going on and living
through all the forms and all else
whether awake or still asleep,
thus emptying death itself
whether it’s just a drop
or the whole sea of dead,
old dreams of put-on existence.
No, Heraclitus would have
never written that—that much
even without Fate’s assistance
in wisely cutting him short
and even editing him herself.
All the way down to those few
golden—inscrutable fragments,
just rightly vague and gaping
to let the soul enter and soar.
No comments:
Post a Comment