Wednesday, Jul. 30 2008 @ 6:00AM
Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
August 26, 1959, Vol. IV, No. 44
Poetry, Violence and the Trembling Lambs
By Allen Ginsberg
Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.
The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.
These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.
At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America - sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to Go, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.
Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown.