Rest assured, I'm fine. The post incorporated portions of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which is a 25-minute performance piece (though it varies) written in 1955-56. The poem encapsulates virtually all the vices that underlie the western experience of life, and when embraced or spoken aloud is tremendously cathartic ... at least for those who are not afraid of concepts such as anger, drugs, heterosexual and homosexual themes, hatred of government, hatred of conformity, hatred of money and despondency in the face of impossible odds. When I feel despair, it is the poem I turn to, just as I turn to Shakespeare's 57th Sonnet when I am washed with love, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner when I am in over my head, Kipling's 'Heathen when I'm kicking myself to get better and anything by Ogden Nash when I need a laugh.
Catharsis is healthy. For a time we soak ourselves in the misery or helplessness of a film, we scrub ourselves with a true novel of human suffering, we steep ourselves with a charity's personal experience of seeing what it is to be poor and misbegotten and wanting, we coast along the corridors of a hospital and remind ourselves of our mortality, in the face of an experience that can't be denied ... and so we come to grips with unhappiness and in that, find an approval for the life we're leading, for the things we're trying, for the wars we're waging and the hills we're ready to die upon.
So I engaged in a little catharsis. I'm all right.
