Hashimojo

I always thought Howl was Alan Ginsberg's best poem. It certainly is one of my favorites..... how better can you capture hyper intellectual angst of a misunderstood, precociously overevolved flock than something beginning like this:

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 ...

And continuing hysterically nakedly capturing, like no one could, a homo- non- erectus beatnik generation gloating on the evolutionary superiority that their Hash- toxicosis supposedly gave them.

I read this poem right after I had seen a documentary on Baba Amte's Bharat Jodo cycle rally of 1985. The contrast of emotion was startling. A generation looking for a fixation beyond the oral/ banal - confused on purpose of getting up and living another day, comparing it ever to the ethereal surrealism of last night's high.Drudging through the monotony of morning and afternoon, passing into evening and then the orgiastic revelry of night, till tiredness creeps in.

And another equally confused generation, wondering how cycling through Kashmir to Kanyakumari would convince an ultra radical militant to stop hating, nay start loving, a politician to be sincere, or even make the country a better place, all the same driving morning though afternoon passing into evening when tired legs rested and weary minds chatted about life, poverty, illiteracy and all that which sounds so cliche in this day, now that we hear it from the mouths of any goddamned Akhthar, Akshay and Anupam. And one young boy said , "I don't mind the strain or the monotony of just pedaling all day, for the high I get in the evening talking to people like me, with education like I have, parents like mine and houses like ours speaking a language thats so different, from a place thats so far, but from a country thats ours,with worries like I have makes it all the more worthwhile." These might not have been exact words, but that was the gist of it.

Anyways, Ginsberg says somewhere else that Kaddish and not Howl is his best work.I had never read the poem before. But when I did( it is about his mother Naomi's struggles with insanity) I couldn't help notice where his Insulin, Metrazol incantations came from( repeated again in Howl). How well he documents the frustration of preserved insight and the craze of its absence is realized when you contrast the two poems.So many great writers have chronicled medical conditions in such beautiful detail.W Somerset Maugham was the doctor who wrote knowledge fully.But Dickens was no medico, yet chronicled in accurate detail Steele Richardson syndrome and Pickwickian syndrome decades before these entities were scientifically described. Tolstoy almost goes through Elizabeth Kubler Ross' stages of realization of impending death in The Death of Ivan Illych, while his description of the menace of Syphilis in those times is reasonably accurate in medical terms, as is the picture he creates epidemiologically similar in some ways to the HIV epidemic of today, with all the moralistic intonations, however untenable they might be in this PC world. I would rather not go into the Robin Cook genre or the representation of medicine in literature, thats a vast topic and there are references aplenty, even an entire section in the Archives of Int Med.But would suffice to repeat what one teacher taught us long back....

"to be a good doctor, you have to be a good observer."