Molok. Lonely! Filthy! Ugly! Trash cans and unattainable gold dollars! The children are screaming under the stairs! Young people cry in the army! The crying old man in the park!
Molok. Molok. Nightmare Morlock! The fickle Molok! God of the soul! Molok, the harsh judge of mankind!
Incredible prison, Molok! A soulless cell with crossed thighs and a sad congressman! This building is the verdict, Molok! A huge war stone, Morlock! The unconscious Molok!
Thought is purely mechanical, Molok! Blood is money, Molok! Finger is the first of the ten armies! Molok has a man-eating generator in his chest! Vulcan with smoking ears!
Molok with a thousand shutters! Skyscrapers stand on long streets, like God's boundless Vulcan! The factory is dreaming and cackling in the fog! Chimneys and antennas hang over Molok City!
Love is endless greasy flint! Soul is the Vulcan of electricity and banks! Poverty is the ghost of genius, Molok! Fate is a gender-neutral hydrogen cloud in Morlock! Molok whose name is "Brain"!
-allen ginsberg's Howl
Sing Whitman's songs and turn him upside down. allen ginsberg is everyone. No matter whether a person is educated or not, his body will shrink back in front of a cold, shiny and very strong thick plate made of metal, glass, concrete or synthetic materials that can't be tolerated by sight or touch, and will also shrink back in front of the hidden power behind that armor. In this way, a caterpillar adapted to the rough and porous structure of plants was at a loss on the waxed car roof; A bee's strange effort to hit the glass window shows how unprepared it is to meet a transparent obstacle that almost freezes the air. The plank, wall or steam drum starts to move by itself. Its movement is unique, mathematically inevitable and getting closer-so you wake up in a cold sweat after a shattered dream. Of course, from the plane, this continent is desolate, with the skins of wild animals before the flood, linen, light blue, yellow, and sometimes the fur of the forest; Sometimes after an hour, it is impossible to prove that the land below is inhabited. I only see that the mold layer in the cities here and there is thickened, and colorful light is scattered at night. There are huge neon hives in three megacities in the east, west, central and western regions. Of course, there is a layer of bushes, green lawns, wooden houses, fences and swaying weeds on rusty cars in America. However, signs of Morlock are still everywhere. All cities are just one city, all roads are just one road, and all stores have only one store. Wan Li Road is also boring, because no matter where you go, you will encounter the same moving wall.
Why should a person tremble, shrink back and shrink into his fragile and threatened body? After all, everything around him is his creation, his actions, and he brings it into existence from himself and regards it as his own contradiction. However, this is not the case-he can touch himself personally, and the colors of his eyes and hair appear in the mirror, but he cannot assume the role of expressing reasons. He's right. It is not him who is responsible, but another person who acts as a typical statistic on him; He has been mastered by others and wants to master others. In the most humane way, he succumbed to his own needs and desires and created something inhuman and beyond human nature, which ran counter to his own needs and desires and escaped his control. This thing is standing in front of him. Although it seems to belong to him, it is not. It's "outside" I said a lot of things for nature, not by accident. The biggest trick of demons on this continent is to give up nature and admit that they can't defend themselves. However, what replaces nature is that kind of civilization, which seems to be nature itself to its members and is endowed with almost all the characteristics of another nature. For me, a lonely tangible person, it is strange and hostile, and it is unpredictable in terms of its opposition to meaning; It has its own laws, which are different from mine. The difference is that the old nature presents an attractive side and is ready to yield at any time. We can dig tunnels from the mountains, irrigate thirsty plains, and plant orchards and vineyards where cattle and sheep eat grass. The new nature contains so much energy and achievements that it is much stronger than the individual. It makes me, you and everyone weak and escape everywhere, relying only on record player music and fire.
To what extent one plus one can influence the new second nature and give it a direction is impossible to explore here, because the fantasy of any political paper has been ruled out in advance. The weakness lies not only in consciousness, but also, without exaggeration, deeper than consciousness. The higher the consciousness, the more you can understand the meshing of gears, and the incompatibility between the river that was once classified as a raging torrent and the torrent that has overflowed the old river becomes more and more clear. Fashion of thought, slogans and slogans, and the program of uniting the people have all been weakened from the inside by their temporary silence under one banner or another. There are many such things, but they are all digested, disintegrated and absorbed by a behemoth with all the indifference of second nature; They are becoming more and more like the original. A low-level consciousness believes in civics textbooks, but they are only satisfied with arithmetic, one plus one, and do not pay attention to the complex determinant hidden behind arithmetic. However, it is precisely under the threshold of consciousness that there is a suspicion, perhaps because of the peasant background, that there is any possibility of change-the powerful people behind the scenes often conspire constantly, which seems to predetermine a social order, as regular as the seasons. However, this is naive; Higher consciousness knows that there is no such conspiracy, and function produces function for function. It is this huge non-human obstacle and its slow speed that scares the higher consciousness.
Weakness and blood, how can a person (not a conceptual person, but a concrete person) resist? As a unique creature, the boundaries between people, as a zero sum and a co-creator, have never been so clear. Perhaps it was the inner impulse of illegitimate children in America and Europe that created a fable with universal significance.
(Lu Yuan translation)
Precautions:
Molok: The ancient Phoenician god of fire who sacrificed children.
Jehovah: God in the Christian Bible.
Make an appreciative comment
In this essay, milosz chooses to start with Ginsburg's famous long poem Howl, in which an image is repeatedly mentioned: Molok. Molok, the god of fire believed by ancient Phoenicians, sacrificed children directly, which was a metaphor for the terrible power that demanded great sacrifice. Ginsberg directly compares American capitalism to the god of Morlock here. Its mind is a pure machine, and money flows in its blood. Molok swallowed up his youth and made the poet become an unconscious walking corpse, in order to accuse the evil deeds of American capitalism: alienation of human beings, destruction of natural environment, distortion of itself by industrial civilization and so on. This has always been a favorite theme of poets, and Ginsburg and milosz are no exception. The title "The Portrait of the Beast" shows that the purpose of milosz's writing this article is to paint a portrait of the beast in capitalist America.
Milosz is not a native American poet. He was originally from Poland and became an American citizen after being exiled to the United States. During his stay in the United States, his status as an exiled poet enabled him to look at the changes in American society objectively. The harm of industrial civilization to the living environment is first reflected in the variation of natural organisms. In the first paragraph, the author lists the puzzles of tiny creatures such as caterpillars and bees when they face synthetic materials such as reinforced concrete. In the "strange effort" that bees keep hitting the glass window, the author sees an invisible and moving wall, which symbolizes the destructiveness of industrial civilization, and it will eventually push people to nowhere and make this land in the United States a wounded animal.
This moving wall also symbolizes human stupidity. The industrial civilization created by human beings (which has now developed into post-industrial civilization) turns out to be "a person should tremble, retreat and shrink into his fragile and threatened body". In capitalist society, not only the indifference between people reaches the most serious degree, but also the division between people and themselves is almost unimaginable: people "alienated" into another person, who created himself, but seems to stand outside themselves; The consequence of surrendering to needs and desires is that people feel that they have become "inhuman", or that an "alien" has been born in the world, and this "alien" will eventually turn around and face the opposition with people themselves. Milosz, with his keen sense as a poet, felt that the "dissident" group had its own survival rules, which seemed to be reasonable and unified, but in fact it was "not the same thing" as the real principle of human survival. This law is the mechanical principle and interest principle of capitalist industrial civilization that has been criticized repeatedly but still stubbornly exists. In the face of this principle, people are fragile and worthless. Taking nature as a metaphor, this "new" nature contains much greater power than individuals, which makes me, you and everyone weak and escape everywhere, and only rely on phonograph music and fire to be alone. "
Prediction has always been a poet's bounden responsibility. Milosz seems to see all the realities that the United States will face in the future: the weakness and inability of human beings to resist in the face of mechanical and technological civilization will eventually make the new order prevail. Under this new order, the survival of individuals and their flesh and blood is not considered, and those "dissidents" who seem to exist but are not real have survived. The United States will become an "unmanned" society, and the boundaries between people and non-people will be extremely clear. Therefore, this article is not a political paper, but a "fable with universal significance".
(Kan Mu Ye)