Neal Cassady's Footnote To Howl, Part I

Evil is distance, and integration redeems. By condemning those mighty things that had made America vast and cold, and elevating those individual earthy things that were subjugated in the former’s impersonal course, Allen Ginsberg fashions a new religion that challenges the accepted order. Part I of Howl presents the pain that prompted such a reaction, and Part II points a finger at the perpetrator. Part III moves toward some semblance of hope, while shifting the poem’s focus away from the confinement of the “best minds” to tout a new state of empowerment through unity. The footnote to Howl can serve to unlock a sort of rationale behind these progressions, while perfectly at ease with putting its madness on full display. To wholeheartedly join

The poem directly addresses Carl Solomon; fellow poet Neal Cassady is called “secret hero of these poems”; “who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war” is a directly self-referential line. With its partial retellings of the actual experiences of Ginsberg or his peers, Part I manifests as discontented journalism, an exposé, an outpouring of grievances. It flows almost unabated (save for the humanist line: "ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time") and is deliberately punishing, repetitive. Ginsberg is at first an observer ("I saw") of the destruction of the "best minds," and then becomes absorbed in it as the terror becomes personalized. Chief among the grievances is the forced disconnectedness of the “best minds”: They are “racketing through snow toward lonesome farms,” they “loned” in “the streets of Idaho” and in Denver,” and they “lounged hungry and lonesome.” They are “rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude,” and “crashed through their minds in jail.” Within the language of the poem, they are reduced and undercut by bodily adjectives and surrounded by everyday objects. The reference to materials such as stone and concrete is deliberate, as their weight is both literal and hanging on to the "best

It is an indictment of America, as referenced by “Congress of sorrows” and “the stunned governments.” The reader is immersed and enclosed as Ginsberg catalogues the characteristics of money and machinery and war, suggesting them to be so immense and so evil that any insane or self-destructive behavior by his peers could not ever be their own fault. “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” the poem asks, possibly suggesting that the Beat writers and associates had been offered in sacrifice to appease Moloch, which would imply an insurmountable imbalance of power as Moloch’s biblical victims had been children. The materials referenced within the first line of Part II are evidence of how Moloch has imbued the sense of distance and coldness - the granite steps of the madhouse, the body turned to stone, the sphinx of cement and aluminum, the vast stone of war, the rocks of time. Ginsberg has little interest in conducting an analytical review of the factors at work or implementing a rigorous solution, but rather focuses entirely on the more imprecise toll that Moloch takes on the individual, as well as the resulting sentiment. The abundance of exclamation points facilitates a release of anger until they lead to Ginsberg’s transcendent vision of the soul, but Part II ends with futility as the "visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles! Ecstasies!" all