On top of a cliff, Alan the man who never saw his exterior, lives among villagers. The man has never heard a word from the view below him, the neighbors said. That’s what people do; gossip, criticize, comment. In brief, they like to speculate to elevate their lowest defects. And they mostly arbitrate the unknown, seldom their own flaws.
For his age, Alan’s size is a sensitive topic, he won’t catch a fly that flies too high but the fools should beware. Alan is armed with a flair to see the invisible. A power resides in his guts and his bloodhound sense of smell and white feathered wings can track adversaries approaching from many meters away. These differences of his are envied, avoided and threatening to the speculative villagers.
Alan doesn’t participate in their small talk but his intuition knows that unless one carries self pity pesticide, adversity is to be ignored, used as a motivator or counter attacked with hammers of love.
Besides, Alan’s sole desire is to walk the world alone, fearless and to believe its exterior is as angelic as his own interior. He doesn’t care about his adversaries, instead he lets them swallow their words until they swallow their own fear and self extinguish…
The bird. One morning, Alan’s denial that fear exists in the outside world was about to be tested and the less flattering parts of himself were about to be challenged by a bird, as an owl got delivered as a talking letter.
The owl said: “I’m representing The Balanced Universe of Love. Our bird’s eye view of your village is unbalanced because you ignore dark energies and your neighbours are ignorant of our love. Therefore, your avoidance of others disturbs them, they disturb you and all of you are disturbances for the whole universe.”
Sounding irritated but compassionate, the owl continued: “To restore balance in the universe, each man on top of a cliff has received the same message as you, on top of this village cliff, today, you are receiving it. Our goal is to restore balance within men, to harmonize both light and dark sides of every one of you and for this is to have a ripple effect on a universal scale. The goal of your mission is to restore balance within you that will have a ripple effect on your village.”
Alan replied: “Why on earth should I care about those barbaric villagers? I can’t see them, they can’t stand me, so it ain’t nothing to do with me. I’d rather hide somewhere nice, somewhere calm, instead of talking to these animals dressed in human bodies! What if their hearts can’t beat? And what if they bite me or beat me up?!”
The Owl insisted the mission must be completed, “Do as I said and I will increase your clairvoyant powers or risk living forever in regrets of what might have been: if you knew yourself better, if you still had your wings to fly over adversity… if you changed people’s perspective about what matters in their lives. Your heart is kind. It is time Alan, to aim for a higher mountain top. But first you must go back down to deal with your fears or else you will stay down forever with your fears binding your wrists.”
Alan felt that the bird was legitimate, his will was now set in stone. He decided to please the bird in order to please himself. He will be the one carrying the burden for his neighbors, for the universe. No choice was given to the man on top of a cliff, apart from an ultimatum, and for help the guidance of a bird and a map with on it a red spot named – ‘The Arena of Adversity.’
Having been blind for so long from the vision of his fears and adversaries, Alan has no more interest in doing so, especially after staring at the map’s red spot, now fear was starting to take hold of him. Alan wondered: What is adversity? Is it envy, jealousy, a disease, is it contagious? Alan wished his mind was contagious so he could contaminate others instead of always catching their repulsive ideas which mostly turn his blissful state into nightmares.
Interesting Book:
Novel, On The Road by Jack Kerouac – Most Famous Passage and Quotes:
They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars. Jack Kerouac
I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further. Jack Kerouac
At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will. Jack Kerouac
They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Jack Kerouac
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being. Jack Kerouac
Preparing to meet adversity. Alan boarded his transportation, his best friend, a caramel tanned frog, and departed with only his senses to guide the frog’s steps. On the road to the Arena of Adversity, to convince himself of his potential aptitude at mastering adversity, he didn’t practice his aptitude for punching or throwing rocks, instead, he informed the frog of his preconceived stereotypes with sentences that one might classify as an encouraging speech: “Watch out my friend, there will be bumps and there will be holes full of landmines, planted by men who speculate for a piece of your leg!”
Projecting his undesirable traits and emotions, Alan added: “People are scared of being reminded of what they hate in others because they hate it in themselves. All petrified of what they feel but not trying to understand in case it hurts. You see, they keep rescheduling to avoid the day when their lies will meet their guilt head on.”
They behave like robots as they show off charity donation cards like they are free passes that offset lending a hand to a friend. At least me, I am not in denial of my shadow self or avoiding my fears, it’s just that I simply have none. That bird is deluded but I like a challenge, I am the greatest and I bet they speculate about me because my tenderness scares their egos and their need to be first, but I will show them how great I am! I will reverse their beliefs that white feathered people breath only to be enslaved, to serve without receiving anything back in return, as if we were without backbones, goals and desires.”
As far as Alan was concerned, the time is now to demonstrate what kind of moves kindness is made of: “After all I’ve been through I have nothing to lose, it’s better than going to one of those dumb TV gameshow to win a holiday or to be locked up in a reality house as a muse for the masses because at least if I lose, the shame stays private.”
Finally, he concluded his self motivating rant with a Mantra: Adversity has no clue of the fact that; life is a chess board game and whoever strategically seduces the Queen not only becomes King but also gets to feel the warm kingdom of her heart, as opposed to posing as an accessory, left unloved in a frozen castle. As a result they are pawns, glued to their squares.”
Down his mountain, Alan and the frog crossed the village through the blizzard. There was a quiet emptiness, icicles on straw rooftops sighing in their loneliness whilst observing broken pieces of trees; awaiting a gesture of green.
And the plants have plastic bags for leaves surrounded by pigeons; no more than poo dumpers and rats of the sky to most people. In the middle of their chirpings, a greyed hair woman repents her soul’s sins by sharing the remains of what could have been her last supper, whilst singing:
Deep, the pain can’t reach the top,
deep down erodes,
the pain that slips,
that slits my wrists.
Deep down I resist,
the rope that slips.
It glides down
my wrists.
Deep down the fakes
and the frauds are still,
down my throat.
Deep down our love
chokes and dies and resurrects,
again and again,
again in the mess.
Deep down we dismiss our love,
deep down we resist,
afraid to end,
having to slit our wrists.
As the vein pain will be in vain.
Then suddenly the grey lady screams: “Watch out white feathered adventurer! Ahead there are gates… behind them you’ll find men putting each other down to go up in the world. If you have been disconnected from harsh reality, blow up your bubble before they burst you and your dreams out of it. I see through you, you are an idealist. So, be careful or like me you will wake up to regret what you once wished for…”
“I dont want to wait for death to find me amongst the pigeons, I’d rather die seeking truth than live in doubt.” Alan whispers.
Arrived at The Arena of Adversity.
Part 2: Keep Moving through Adversity, Guided by a Bird
Recommended Book:
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (PDF).
Howl
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Carl Solomon
I
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,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
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!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
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
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
San Francisco, 1955—1956
