As told by Alice Minium

There are always those who dream.

That never changes across all of time.

The occupations of the dreamers change. The names of the nations change. The conflicts of the consciousness change. The rhythms of society change.

Throughout all of time, these sacred few, sit in public places and stare at things for no reason. They sit in windowsills. They laugh at things that aren’t funny. They write big letters on the window. They weep for humanity, without humanity knowing why.

They are here, always. They have never not been here. They will never not be. For they hold within themselves all the powerful emotive forces we could not bear to physically contain — they hold them not just for themselves, but for us all. They keep burning the candle of the soul, waking to feed it all hours of the night; a candle we would have long let the winds of time snuff out.

If it ever was to be snuffed out, that flame of the soul, the human spirit would be all but dead. We could not survive it.

Yet when the winds of time blow fierce like hurricane, we have come dangerously close.

Too often, we fear the keepers of the flame, for being so close with the fire. We do not trust them. They are weird, alien, we do not understand them. We do not like them. If they’re too loud, or too bold, we may even “put them down,” lest they wake the others who are sleeping.

Throughout history this remains unchanged.

America was a brand-new episode on a television series older than time. Its narrator was Walter. Walter Whitman, himself, was one of the first of our flame-keepers. He was a madman who sat naked in the wilderness. He was unashamed of the fire burning. He was loud. He was bold. He was controversial. He was unafraid.

Above all else, he was optimistic. He was optimistic, perhaps to a fault, about what America could, and should, be. America was kind. America was open. America was for everyone. America was a land where dreams came true.

One hundred years later came another flame-keeper, another narrator, called Allen Ginsberg. Like Whitman, Ginsberg was clinically insane according to the standards of his time. He, too, was a madman, scrawling poems on windowpanes.

Ginsberg’s narration was a different one. In Ginsberg’s America, these dreams had been dashed, desperately. Ginsberg’s America was wrecked and wrought with despair. It had been devoured by the materialism Whitman so feared. Ginsberg bore witness to the fruit of that materialism and was repulsed by it. He describes the capitalist-industrial complex. He believed its structural mentality was derelict to humanity’s soul, and that the soul could not be confined within buildings.

Whitman knew humanity’s soul could not be bound in books. Whitman knew we needed Nature, we needed each other, we needed the forests, we needed to stop and look at the stars, we needed to hug our mothers, we needed to admit we were wrong and a flower was a flower and enough was enough. Whitman knew this was a challenge for humanity. But Whitman believed it was a challenge we were up to. Whitman had faith. He had faith we could create this welcoming world.

Ginsberg bore testament to what it looks like when this doesn’t happen. Ginsberg personified the collective nausea compelling the youth of the ’50s to either excessively consume or violently expel themselves from society in absolute revulsion at what we had become. However, he heralds the same idealization of love, unity, acceptance, and the sanctity of the spirit — though his world looked different, the vision was the same.

These were dreams Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg shared — dreams both for America, their nation, and themselves. From Whitman’s world in 1850 to Ginsberg’s world in 1956, they shared the same ideal.

The specifics of how this ideal manifested were symptomatic of the climactic intercultural struggles of the transformative eras in which they lived. Each had a dream both emerging from and corresponding to the world around them.

Whitman lived in a time of great change. The American consciousness was severely affected by the abrupt transformation of the entire world due to the Industrial Revolution. This produced in people, such as Whitman, a kind of yearning to return to Nature and simpler ways. In a world now dominated by machines, Whitman reacts by being almost worshipful of Nature. “Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he remarks in Section 6:12 of Song of Myself, and he regards it playfully. That entire section is spent contemplating the grass, speculating over its nature as in line 8, “Perhaps it is a uniform hieroglyphic.” Whitman does not regard Nature as an inert object to be used for production; he regards it as very much alive. He engages with it directly. In Section 2:6-7, he doesn’t dream of technological progress, he dreams of the simplicity of Nature, the true America: “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked / I am mad for it to be in contact with me.” He sees Nature and simplicity are pivotal to life, pivotal to the actualization of that dream and fundamentally tied to the livelihood of the human spirit. Whitman’s attitude toward America and his own identity can be well-summarized by Section 25:53-58:

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

To behold the day-break!

The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,

The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,

Scooting obliquely high and low.

Now let us contrast that with Ginsberg’s. In Part 2 of Howl, he beholds his own “day-break,” and it looks like this:

Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!

skeleton treasures! blind capitals! demonic industries!

spectral nations! invincible madhouses! …

monstrous bombs!

He is not being metaphorical when he speaks of monstrous bombs. What the Industrial Revolution did to Whitman’s world, the atom bomb had done to Ginsberg’s. The Industrial Revolution was surely when man began most resolutely to compartmentalize himself away from Nature, but the atom bomb was when that came to fruition.

The atom bomb was what was born of that horrific disunion with Nature, the contorted baby of man’s affair with his mistress Materialism, and that baby was violence and death. That baby was absolute, irreparable severance from Nature itself.

We had split the atom. We had literally rent the fabric of the universe apart. It had blown up in our faces.

We had not just raped and split Nature, we had split the natural order within our souls. We had dismantled the most fundamental and basic unit of the physical universe. This had done the same to our souls.

When you split the atom, the energy can be harnessed to create an explosion literally vaporizing every entity in sight into non-existence, else burning them into morphically deformed humans, hideous beyond recognition.

America did this to many people. America also did this to its own soul, and to the identity of an entire generation.

The soul was microwaved, malformed, dysmorphic. We had raped Nature like a hot dog left too long in the microwave so that it explodes entirely down the center and is not even recognizable as a hot dog at all.

The severance was so deep and so severe we had begun to think and behave like the machines we worshipped. We lived in robot apartments. In his cry to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg mourns the abuse and loss of the poor soul of man:

I’m with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent

and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed

madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its

body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

“The soul is innocent and immortal.” Ginsberg, despite his despair, has not given up. He believes in the soul, a soul that cannot be defiled, cannot be severed, cannot die, and cannot be profaned. In his footnote to Howl, he cries again and again and again, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!” He believes in this dream.

Ginsberg cries, again in his footnote:

The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!

…

Everything is holy!

A hundred years prior, Whitman cries, in Section 3: 19-21:

Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,

Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

Both prophets exalted the inherent purity of the body and being. While both lived among transformative times, and both heralded simplicity, despite the cries of suffering, even the robot apartments were worthy of love.

In his footnote again, Ginsberg says, “Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements!” Even the constructs of the modern city were holy.

Whitman, in 42:17-18; 26-27, exalts the holiness of the materialist thinkers he had mocked earlier in Section 3 (“the talkers…talking”), for even they are holy and the embodiment of all good things.

[those] … with dimes on the eyes walking

to feed the belly of the brain liberally spooning…

I am aware who they are, (and they are positively not worms or fleas,)

I acknowledge the duplicates of myself…

The images that constructed the landscape of the soul were different for Ginsberg and Whitman, as were the worlds in which they lived. Yet the Soul remains the same. The dream remains the same — that the Soul, and its actualization, America, is for everyone and contained within everyone, and it is pure, it is spiritual, it is so very much alive and cannot be severed by materialism. The soul itself is the flame they carry. They saw the beautiful reflection of that soul, even in a world that so desperately seemed to want to kill it. You cannot kill the soul, defile, rent, or remove it. It is our unity and our birthright. And that, above all, was America’s dream.

We were a culture in despair. We were bulimic. We wanted to eat the world, yet we wanted to be pure. We wanted to feel all the magical psychedelic dimensions of reality, yet we wanted stability. We wanted a New Thing, yet we ached for the Old. We ached. We ached to find a union of the two.

We stumbled drunk and disorderly across the nation with “blood in our shoes” (Howl, sec. 2), unsure of who, how, or where we were. For Ginsberg, and for many, it was better to have no idea what was going on than to see the chaos that had become the status quo. It was better to be ignorant and happy than to recognize the repulsive Moloch monster (Howl, sec. 2) of greed that was in itself our own reflection. As David Foster Wallace said (paraphrased), “That thing you fear in the darkness is you.”

Ginsberg still believed Whitman’s “America” was real. In his poem “Song,” he idealizes Love as the force which compels and inspires all, “yet we bear it wearily / No rest, without love. No sleep, without dreams.”

“America” was a concept that was in itself a dream. No dream can ever be entirely realized. Yet it is good to dream, nonetheless. We must dream. Whether or not America is the land “where dreams come true,” it is a land filled with dreamers, nonetheless.

Those dreamers are indispensable. Whitman articulated a dream. Ginsberg also articulated a dream and burst with the lack of fulfillment experienced with the American identity. A dream unfulfilled is despair.

The eternal march of capitalism is, perhaps, a symptom of humanity’s collective death drive. Or perhaps, like gasoline on a fire, it only compels the flame to burn brighter. It erupts into violent profusion of passion with the springing up of poets like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Snyder.

Perhaps, as Whitman cried in the wilderness, we knew we were capable of more. Perhaps the violence of that lack will only emit more desire to fulfill it. Perhaps this unfulfillment will only compel us more fiercely toward immediate actualization of destiny. Perhaps this waking nightmare will awaken Whitman’s yelp of joy at what’s to come, and Ginsberg’s howl at what was not … and the sound we make today, in response, will compel itself perhaps to a guttural, reality-renting shriek — a shriek to shatter worlds and inspire poems and silence humming social structures that have yet enslaved the American mind for centuries.

The dream still exists. The dream does not die. The “America” is less of a nation and more of a conceptual dream. We get to decide who and what that is. Or perhaps, as our flame-carriers did, we reflect it. Perhaps, like Whitman and Ginsberg, we personify the collective voice of a people suffering. Perhaps we can perceive the spiritual temperature of our nation through our flame-keepers, our shamans, our poets.

So long as they exist, so long as they cry, even if it is not a song of hope, but a howl of pain, so long as they are saying something — the dream exists. So long as they are speaking, it is real. And that, above all, is the story without end, of eternal transmutation. That is the dream of the dreamers.

Citations

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl & Other Poems. Mansfield Center: Martino Publishing, 2015. Print.

Whitman, Walter. Song of Myself. Berkeley: Counterpoint Publishing, 2010. Print.