I genuinely learned a lot from this assignment—I’ve seen Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York many times over (as one has to in order to truly grasp its meaning), but I haven’t once thought to look up what the word “synecdoche” meant. After that, I’ve been seeing it everywhere, especially in my literature courses. Faulkner uses tons of literary synecdoche in his short story “Barn Burning,” for example. Lighting has always been a subconscious thing for me until this point—I didn’t realize how much of an impact a films lighting can have on the aura the film gives off. In Requiem for a Dream, for instance, I’ve realized that the lighting has a whole lot to do with the film’s feel. And while I’ve known what a metaphor was for a while, it actually took me a bit of thinking to get my head wrapped around the depiction of a metaphor in visual format. The notion of “visual metaphor” is now in my visual interpretation toolkit; hopefully I can spot more of them in the films I’ll see in the future.
Communication: Lighting
This is a youtube video of an anonymous caller who claims to be in possession of a highly sensitive piece of video footage. In order to preserve his identity and anonymity, he is silhouetted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o160kbVvzOQ
When one speaks of the lighting of an image that person is commenting on how the lightness and shadows work with an object or action to create certain vibes and feelings that would otherwise be absent. For instance, fluorescent lights are typically associated with harshness and the unnatural, so when an image is taken in a fluorescent light it will carry those attributes with it. That’s why dystopian films like Visioneers use fluorescent lights to create a sterile, bland, and flat vibe/feel. A lack of lighting—or shadows—can be used to completely erase one’s identity, at least on camera. In the example video above, some guy wants to preserve his identity by having his talking head silhouetted in darkness. Without lighting, as we can see (or not see), this man would have to either keep his absurd secrete to himself or reveal his identity for his perceived ‘greater good.’
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Communication: Visual Synecdoche
Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay/Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation uses Synecdoche as the basis for the films plot/theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HtZ2M4e_AM
As mentioned in class, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is one big visual synecdoche, yet his second major motion picture screenplay, Adaptation, he does the same thing in another manner. Adaptation is a metafictional film about a man’s desperate attempts to adapt a non-fiction memoir about orchids (The Orchid Thief) into a screenplay adaptation. Synecdoche is when some part of something comes to represent the whole of whatever it is a part of. In Adaptation, Kaufman’s impossible endeavor to adapt a meditation on flowers into a feature length screenplay is only part of the movie at first, yet as the film progresses, we see that this endeavor—this small part of the film—comes to represent the whole film, hence the films title. Using synecdoche, the smaller part—Kaufman’s attempt to adapt the impossible—becomes the larger part—the movie Adaptation. This creates an intricate display of an endeavor that morphs into its own solution–the part becomes the whole.
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Communication: Visual Metaphor
A visual metaphor can be seen in Bob, the antagonist in the Twin Peaks saga:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj_ozZOBTGg
In surrealist visual artist David Lynch’s cult TV saga, Twin Peaks, the notoriously crazy-eyed “Bob” is an entity from “the Black Lodge”—a spiritual realm that embodies everything evil. According to my interpretation, Bob being sent down from the Black Lodge to wreak havoc on the Palmers is a metaphor for the inexplicable and mysterious origin of evil, providing the audience with a visual representation of such ineffable acts (i.e., Leland Palmer’s incestuous murder of Laura Palmer). To create a metaphor is, essentially, to draw a connection between two things—a parallel of sorts. Usually an object or action that is difficult to describe (sometimes even ineffable, as with justifying incest & murder) is related to another object or action (a crazy spirit man) that is perhaps more familiar or comprehensible to the viewer, thus clarifying and further elucidating the former action or object, giving it more depth. Obviously there is a lot more going on in Twin Peaks and Bob than just metaphor, but for the most part this Bob entity is a visual metaphor for the human potential to rape and kill one’s own daughter.
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The Beat Generation Collage
My Beatnik Pastiche: http://www.glogster.com/glog/6l3prdahmuu86g604076ja0
A superbly produced documentary on the Beat Generation:
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Sylvia Plath – “Daddy”
Daddy by Sylvia Plath You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Sylvia Plath was one of the first poets who really caught my eye, who made me appreciate poetry as more than just nonsensical wordplay, although her poems do often come off like cryptic riddles or sardonic nursery rhymes. For instance, her poem “Metaphors”—one of the first poems I truly fell in love, both stylistically and thematically—begins, “I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” after which she gives the reader 8 more 9-syllabled lines, all of which are metaphors for pregnancy and a woman’s potential fears or doubts which may plague some women as they move forward through those 9 months. Plath’s raw emotions are presented to the reader in Rubik’s cube form, creating a paradox between the poet’s structural liveliness and her visceral anguish. Personally, I think the best example of this is seen in “Lady Lazarus,” probably my favorite Plath poem. It’s so powerfully depressing—in a good way—because it is a poetic riddle about her attempts at suicide…and only a short time later they found her dead in her kitchen, head in the oven, “doing it again” as she had done “every ten years.” “Dying is an art,” she writes, that she “does exceptionally well…I guess you could say I have a call.” Plath takes morbid poetry to a whole new level, putting her agonizing life into beautifully haunting words that, to a certain extent, were the words of a beautiful suicide note.
Anyhow, while “Metaphors” and “Lady Lazarus” are certainly captivating poems, Plath’s seminal poem “Daddy” is particularly evocative, especially because I myself am at a similar point in life, trying to escape and, as Plath puts it, “to kill” the bleak paradigm I’ve inherited from my parents. I know that prior to reading her poem over BBC Radio back in the ‘60s she said that the poem concerns “a girl with an Electra complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God” but let’s be honest, we know that Plath is talking about her own father. After all, she is one of the foremost confessional poets. That said, deciphering this poem is like deciphering Plath’s psyche, a mind depressed and agitated by its former dependence and attachment to a false image of her father, her daddy who “died before [she] had time to kill [him].” Plath’s eager need to “kill” her father is metaphoric of course, meaning that she wants to get rid of all the subconscious fears, sorrows, worries, and anxieties that her father gave her when she was just a young girl; and seeing as young children are sponges, absorbing everything that a parent does—whether the parents openly expresses it or tries to hide it from the kid—she has lived within this grueling paradigm for all her life. She is sick and tired of living like shit, feeling anxious in front of people and worthless to the world, a problem that a lot of repressed women had to deal with after World War II ended and the 1950s consumer culture picked up, subsequently cornering women in the kitchen where patriarchal society said they belonged. No time to even write, they said.
However, Plath and other female poets of the time, like Adrienne Rich, could no longer contain themselves, resulting in the splash of poignant and powerful female voices that emerged in the ‘60s and beyond. Getting back to “Daddy,” Plath says, “I used to pray to recover you,” insinuating that she used to, until recently, look up to her father and desperately wish that he would come back to her. This desire for her father’s love, perhaps a Freudian desire, began when she “was ten” and “they buried [her dad]” and lasted beyond her twenties, as she says, “at twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do,” conveying that she attempted suicide when she was 20 years old because, at the time, she thought that the only way to gain her dead father’s love was to also die: “I thought even the bones would do.” She was pathologically set on her father, depending upon him, dead or alive, to give her comfort, happiness, and love. All we need is love (cue The Beatles). Anyhow, they threw her in a mental ward after she tried to kill herself, “suck [her] together with glue”—that is, the innumerable psychiatrists she’s seen have used their far from perfect skills/technology to help her get back to a state of mental balance. This help is impermanent though, it is the “glue” of the psychotherapeutic and/or electro-shock sessions she was likely given. Not to say that today’s pharmacological approach to depression isn’t any less “gluey.”
Yet Plath, declaring her independence by stating that she is a Jew, says she has a newfound understanding of her father is as “a German,” a “Nazi” oppressor, a “man in black with a Meinkampf look.” Using the Jew/Nazi dichotomy, Plath separates herself from her father when she says that her father is chuffing her off like a “Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”; that is, her father is the oppressor who torments her in the concentration camps of her psyche. In the final two stanzas, she writes that her father is the “vampire who said he was you / And drank [her] blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” I believe the seven year comment refers to when her father died…at age seven? I’m not quite sure, but that seems to be the case for the poem’s speaker nonetheless. By declaring her father a vampire who has sucked her blood for seven years, Plath is revealing, both to us and to the reader, that the idealized image of her father—the attachment which drove her to multiple suicide attempts—is truly an ugly monster that has been feeding off of her blood, or happiness, since he died when she was seven. “The villagers never liked you,” Plath says, likely referring to the people in her own life that have suffered from Plath’s depression—all the people she drove away because she was carrying the vampire of her father with her, probably making her unbearable to be around, unfortunately. Yet it wasn’t her, it was daddy’s paradigm, and so the village will be happy when that vampire is dead, when Plath’s inner angst dissipates into an illusory fog. On another level, the villagers could also represent the various elements of Plath’s subconscious that have been shouting out for help, manifesting themselves upon Plath’s conscious mind. Explicitly ending her obsession and desire for her father’s approval and love, Plath ends the poem with a powerful affirmation of independence: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” It’s odd how the family unit so deeply defines one’s view on the world and, consequently, their lives.
Extra:
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Jack Kerouac – “The Vanishing American Hobo”
The American Hobo has a hard time hoboing nowadays due to the increase in police surveillance of highways, railroad yards, sea shores, river bottoms, embankments and the thousand-and-one hiding holes of the industrial night. — In California, the pack rat, the original old type who goes walking from town to town with supplies and bedding on his back, the “Homeless Brother”, has practically vanished, along with the ancient gold-panning desert rat who used to walk with hope in his heart through struggling Western towns that are now so prosperous they don’t want old bums any more. — “Man dont want no pack rats here even though they founded California” said an old man hiding with a can of beans and an Indian fire in a river bottom outside Riverside California in 1955. — Great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights) are likely to bear down at any moment on the hobo in his idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy. — There’s nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.
….
In America there has always been (you will notice the peculiarly Whitmanesque tone of this poem, probably written by old Goddard) a definite special idea of footwalking freedom going back to the days of Jim Bridger and Johnny Appleseed and carried on today by a vanishing group of hardy old timers still seen sometimes waiting in a desert highway for a short bus ride into town for panhandling (or work) and grub, or wandering the Eastern part of the country hitting Salvation Armies and moving on from town to town and state to state toward the eventual doom of big-city skid rows when their feet give out.
…
Today the hobo’s made to slink — everybody’s watching the cop heroes on TV.
Benjamin Franklin was like a hobo in Pennsylvania; he walked through Philly with three big rolls under his arms and a Massachusetts halfpenny on his hat. — John Muir was a hobo who went off into the mountains with a pocketful of dried bread, which he soaked in creeks.
Did Whitman terrify the children of Louisiana when he walked the open road?
….
Oh the poor bum of the skid row! There he sleeps in the doorway, back to wall, head down, with his right hand palm-up as if to receive from the night, the other hand hanging, strong, firm, like Joe Louis hands, pathetic, made tragic by unavoidable circumstance — the hand like a beggar’s upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips, as though on the tip of the tongue he’s about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldnt say awake: “Why have you taken this away from me, that I cant draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling stoop I have to sit waiting for the wheels of the city to roll,” and further, “I dont want to show my hand but in sleep I’m helpless to straighten it, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I’m alone, I’m sick, I’m dying — see my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the emerald mountains beyond the city, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile — I’m too tired now of everything else, I’ve had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night — take me home, lock me in safe, take me to where all is peace and amity, to the family of life, my mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend — but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I’d give a million dollars to be in my own bed — O Lord save me –”
-from Jack Kerouac’s “The Vanishing American Hobo”
Kerouac envisions the “poor bum of the skid row”—the titular “Vanishing American Hobo”—as a Christl-ike soul suffering in beatific “holy privacy” despite the grating reality of modern existence. He sees the American spirit embodied in those American vagabonds and romantics whose unconventional lifestyles are actually rooted in the “Whitmanesque” ideals of hobos, that inner yearning towards the “idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence and holy privacy.” Making numerous allusions to a medley of historical and/or mythical figures—ranging from Buddha to Benjamin Franklin, from Johnny Appleseed to Walt Whitman—all of whom he says have at one point or another hit the open road or wilderness as a hobo. That is, walking the land and diving into life and Nature firsthand used to be a very commonplace and natural thing to do. This all hinges upon the broad context and semantics which frame Kerouac’s particular use of the word “hobo” in a positive light, despite the increasingly negative aura surrounding hobos and hitchhiking—a decline that Kerouac observed firsthand as his spunky sojourns on the road were hindered in the late ‘50s as the mainstream media began disseminating fear-mongering news that made the American hobo out to be a vile creature; as Kerouac puts it, as “the rapist, the strangler, child-eater.—Stay away from strangers, they’ll give you poison candy.” Cynical sentiments of external distrust were, in Kerouac’s short lifetime, becoming an ingrained American quality that makes “mothers hold tight to their children when the hobo passes through town because of what newspapers.” What was once “natural” had, within just a couple of years, become a taboo that persists to this day. Nobody picks up hitchhikers anymore because the media has made them out to be creepy predators; either that or because we have become such an angsty, antisocial society that even the thought of having to sit through an awkward ride with some crusty 28-year-old, as harmless as he/she may be.
But why did this happen? The unwarranted mistrust held by the general American public was a perception constructed by “the cop heroes on TV” and “the newspapers” that were becoming all the more prevalent, especially as the latter half of the 20th century crept up on America and the Beats. Hobos, as Kerouac beautifully describes, found a profound sense of contentment out on the open road, “that secrete eternal hope you get sleeping in empty boxcars fling up the Salinas Valley in hot January sunshine full of Golden Eternity toward San Jose,” going nowhere but someplace else, talking to nobody except someone else, seeking everything by doing nothing—by purely existing as humanity used to, roaming the earth in an endless quest for experience, as oppose to the endless quest of capitalism and the 1950s consumer culture it produced.
In the hobo shantytowns which ostensibly makeup the absolute dregs of America, Kerouac sees the sick and dying American dream, the original America that Whitman idealized about and Thoreau walked amongst. Instead, the “white-picket fence” American dream has been superimposed over the corpse of the agrarian American dream. “There’s nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom,” Kerouac writes in his simple yet driven steam-of-consciousness style. He says this, however, through the nostalgic lens of retrospect, as if lamenting the final days of the true American dream and that romantic aspiration for total self-reliance which the American hobo so seamlessly embodies. Thus, Kerouac’s final punch, as it were, is slammed into our consciousness with the vivid image of a beggar’s hand “upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips.” The American hobo’s unconsciously outstretched hand—symbolically coming together in a meditative posture, what’s called the “Gian Mudra”—is driven by his/her beatific desire for “the emerald mountains beyond the city” and the natural human urge which desperately begs for divine love and salvation, “I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night[…]O Lord save me.” This is a hopeless yet beautiful howl, a united voice of the “Vanishing American Hobo”—and the Beat Generation, in a sense—that’s directed both to society and to the infinite spirit of God as a plea for help, a cry for rationality in a time of consumer madness and material disillusionment. Yet the hobo still stands tall like Johnny Appleseed or Walt Whitman, living a practical and unadulterated life in Nature, ‘living off the fat of the land’ even in the face of an oppressive society which continues to threaten the American individuality which is so quintessential to the spirit of freedom that imbues the very foundation of this democratic experiment: America.
Extra! – Footage of Kerouac reading a bit of “On The Road” on The Steve Allen Show:
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Allen Ginsberg – Howl
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,
A cacophony of hyperbolic images and juxtaposed lifestyles, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is a rhythmic howl of anguish, a poignant rant on post-WWII American society and the homogenously restrictive 1950s culture it engendered. Quite absurdly, the disturbing depravations of World War II were met with ubiquitous rows of suburban housing developments, stylish yet affordable automobiles, celebrities like Marylyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, reasonably priced and highly disseminated television sets, tree-lined avenues of white picket fences strewn with 5-cent lemonade stands and peppy milkmen—all of the kitschy products of ‘50s American consumer culture. What appeared to be a booming society of likeminded conservatives was, in reality, a politically constructed and propagated way of life aimed at repressing the social turmoil incited by two consecutive global wars.
Howl voices the marginalized generation of displaced Americans—the avant-gardes and intellectual experimentalists who quickly became known as the “Beat Generation” or, more loosely, “beatniks.” Precursors to hippies and the catalyst for the ’60s counterculture, beatniks were one of the many marginalized groups of Americans who “forced on the reading public an awareness of other culture: drug experiences, lives in prison and mental institutions, homosexual and lesbian sexualities, liberal politics, spiritualism not necessarily housed in suburban Protestant environ” (2579). Above all, they sought truth and contentment in a century plagued by global warfare, authoritative corruption, the increasingly blatant fear mongering political tactics, an obsessive materialism triggered by capitalist marketing ploys brought on by the newfangled ‘50s consumer culture. Appropriately, the term beatnik carries a mixture of connotations: their writing has a musical cadence, the beat which makes it so pleasing to read or hear read aloud; beat as in the Catholic Beatitudes, or the “supreme blessedness” of the God’s love, represented in Howl as “Eternity,” “Heaven,” “the ancient heavenly connection to starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” “the cosmos,” or, in the “Footnote to Howl,” as “Holy!”; and finally, beat as in they are fed up with this corrupt society that they’ve been born into and therefore express that suppressed rage with the raw imagery and biting humor so characteristic of the Beats.
Ginsberg breaks or at least begins the fragmentation of what was formerly perceived as a unified vision of American culture: the highly prosperous and militantly victorious “American Century,” as it became known as. Yet as Paul Lauter points out in his essay on “The ‘American Century’: From Victory to Vietnam,” a culture “that appears ebullient and victorious on the surface is invariably masking misery” and that “although the United States was the most powerful nation on earth, within its borders were powerless groups of people.” (2245). As Ginsberg relentlessly details, “the best minds of [his] generation” are social outcasts, a motley collection of post world-war misfits who, having seen the horrors of two massive world wars—all within half a decade, mind you—are “destroyed by madness.” The violent realities that they’ve been exposed to throughout their lives have left them “burning alive in their innocent flannel suits” and waiting to be “run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,” further provoking them to revolt against society in the innumerable ways described throughout Howl.
Living in a post-world war America, these aimless pariahs could no longer pretend to live in this society that they now saw as a monster, as something from which the individual must separate or die, as “Moloch!” In his “Footnote to Howl,” Ginsberg reverses Part II, bellowing “Holy!”—an embodiment and affirmation of love, both human and divine—as opposed to “Moloch!”—an embodiment of the tyrannical, repressive powers of post-WWII American society and the 1950s consumer culture.
Though structurally analogous to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Ginsberg’s Howl is the thematic counterpart to Whitman’s seminal poem, almost a lament to Whitman about the death of the American soul and/or dream. What happened after WWII to change the American dream from self-sufficiency (the agrarian dream) to a prosperous suburban existence (the white picket fence American Dream; the post-1950s American Dream)?
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 balled in the morning in the evenings in rose-garden and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
Ginsberg’s outrageous humor and brazen wordplay is scattered throughout the poem, as seen here. Even by today’s standards—in a society where soccer moms openly rave about erotic trash novels like Fifty Shades of Grey—Ginsberg’s blatant sexual or macabre imagery, when sharply juxtaposed with such cultural clichés as a casual stroll through the park, collides into a richly witty poetic statement that not only evokes laughter, but comments on the Beat Generation’s hedonistic sexual experimentation and their complete openness to gay and lesbian relations. The term “balled” refers to the slang terms for engaging in sexual intercourse as well as the act of crying, or “bawling,” thus clashing the Beats’ sense of misery with the sexual liberation that they unreservedly engaged in. Moreover, the word “come” is a double-entendre, meaning both to go somewhere assumed to be near the speaker and to reach a sexual climax in which, for a man, he “scatter[s] their semen freely to whomever come who may.” Raunchy, yes; but Ginsberg is being brutally honest here, sincere yet shamelessly open about some of the experiences he has been through, whether it be sexual experiences, drug induced hallucinations, or spiritually-charged visions.
….
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—
….
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 sabachtani 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.
….
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skull 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!
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20th Century Literature 