Prologue – Nietzsche:

“How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you live it and have lived it, you will live once more and innumerable times’…” 1

Enter
Lear:

Lear as Manimal—frail, failing old man, wounded animal, berserker storm-walking archetype—having reached the primal point forming fusion between human pathos and the body’s animal origin and end.  A single sound repeating from the gaping maw: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” 2

Across

time, across the turgid Atlantic, Ginsberg will take up the cry, as protest against the antiseptic and mutating coffin confinement of capitalistic modernity.

Looking

into the mirror of imagination, or mirror of the demon’s prediction of eternal recurrence, I see the face of a Diaspora Jew, chanting madly as resistance to madness, merging into the face of a fabled, fallen king of mists, in death throes pulled back down again into the crushing blackhole of absurdity and the inhuman menace of time.

Ginsberg: “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 across the tops of cities… who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering

on tenement roofs”…  3

1.The Joyful Wisdom, Friedrich Nietzsche

2.King Lear, William Shakespeare

3.Howl, Allen Ginsberg