《HOWL》如此真實地表達了細微個體生命的真實存在以及為不屈的靈魂提供了一個有意義地出口而不朽，從而影響了一個時代！

Howl ---Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical *,
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
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror
through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for 紐約,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada &
Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront
boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks
of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of
wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of
brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate
Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State
out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of
hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on
the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of 大西洋 City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in
Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no
broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand- father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively
vibrated at their feet in 堪薩斯,
who loned it through the streets of 愛達荷 seeking vis- ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown
rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard
to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and
ash of poetry scattered in fire place 芝加哥,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their
dark skin passing out incom- prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums * and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild
cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts,
who let themselves be *ed in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of 大西洋 and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering
their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond
& * angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed
shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual
golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can- dle and fell off
the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt
and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared
to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and * in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings &
especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up
out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open
to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of
the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates
of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of
gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their
heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where
they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up
clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of
sinis- ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the 布魯克林 Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the
ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas- saic, leaped on
negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic
European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or
Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find
out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver
& brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul
illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in
their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific
to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung
jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of
the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in- stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho- therapy
occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the
wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock- ing and rolling in
the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night- mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at
4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur- nished room emptied down to the last
piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing
but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the
catalog the meter & the vibrat- ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the
soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel- ligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his * and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come
after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of
America's * mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to
the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose
buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless
Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the
cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the
specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cock*er in Moloch! Lacklove and
manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me
out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral
nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which
exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De- spairs! Ten years'
animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the
roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of
the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against
the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from
the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas
of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs
all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse O skinny legions run
outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

對於我淺薄的閱讀經驗來說，《HOWL》無疑是一種全面的顛覆。因為我從來沒有在一種正式的文學範本中看到這麼多對性、吸毒、荒誕體驗的肯定。
對於有著強大慣性的平庸日常而言，《HOWL》更是一種異質的聲音：充滿了憤怒、輕蔑、反叛和——癲狂！
我不得不應用這樣一種體制的稱謂對《HOWL》進行介定：垮掉！但我同時感到了這個詞的無力。
魯迅先生說：「當我沉默的時候，我覺得充實；我將開口，同時感到空虛。」
《HOWL》給予我的震憾恰恰如此！
《HOWL》的開篇這樣寫道：
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical *,
dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn look-
ing for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly con-
nection to the starring dynamo in the
machinery of night ……
《HOWL》發表之初，在美國得到的更多是譴責。批評者認為《HOWL》是一個淫蕩和不道德的作品。認為詩中描敘地「the best minds of my generation」不過是一群吸毒者、毒販子、竊賊、酒鬼、濫交者、*者等社會渣滓；而GINSBERG的詩歌實際是吸毒產生幻覺發出的囈語，充其量是一種瘋狂的自白。對於詩中的反叛精神，批評者則認為是企圖以吸毒、濫交、*、流浪、犯罪來取代和諧的社會軼序和優良的傳統道德觀。
就像一枚金幣的正面和反面，在《HOWL》對主流、社會、文化和體制的反對上，當時的贊同者也和反對者達成了驚人的共識。贊同者認為GINSBERG是一個「城市惠特曼」（urban whitman），詩中描寫的性慾、吸毒、酗酒、鬧事等等「劣跡」不僅是用反傳統、反價值的方式向壓抑人性、*自由的社會提出最強烈的抗議，也是用一種「新的身體語言」來喚醒「全體美國人民的潛意識」。
後來《HOWL》因此獲罪，出版商和GINSBERG都被起訴。雖然最終被判定無罪，GINSBERG也因此一舉成名。但時至今日，《HOWL》仍逃脫不了被人奉為意識形態鬥爭工具的命運！
而《HOWL》對存在的追問、焦慮；對所謂價值的否定，疑惑；對個人生存體驗的肯定和認同卻鮮有人提及甚至被逐漸遺忘！
也許日後功成名就的GINSBERG也在各種光環的掩映下逐漸失去了做為一個偉大詩人的部份勇氣吧！一直以來，我總以為無論是GINSBERG後來的《加利福尼亞超市》還是他的詩集《kaddish and other poems》、《Empty mirror》等等都無法超越《HOWL》。
《加利福尼亞超市》雖然在形式上與《HOWL》有相似之處，但在語言的張力以及內容的震憾性上，似乎比《HOWL》弱很多。儘管有評論認為Gingsberg在《加利福尼亞超市》中表達了對美國自惠特曼時代以來物質極大豐裕和精神極度貧窮的悲嘆，但我覺得《加利福利亞超市》在一系列感嘆和疑問的形式下，比之《HOWL》少了不知多少才情和迷狂！
也許《哀悼祈禱文》是GINSBERG後期唯一可以接近《HOWL》天才絕唱的詩歌吧。我手頭關於GINSBERG的評論資料中有這麼一段話：《哀悼祈禱文》是「一個痛苦的吶喊，一個回憶的呼喊，一個愛的呼噢，也許是垮掉派最優秀的詩作」。雖然最後一句讓人噁心，但也確實部份的道出了《哀悼祈禱文》之所以優秀的原因。
但只有《HOWL》真正讓GINSBERG成為了那個狂放的、大膽的、不羈的GINSBERG！
在《HOWL》的序言中，這個天才而迷狂的GINSBERG寫道：
「抓緊你們的裙子，女士們，我們開始下地獄啦。」
多年以來，這句話被反覆引用，並一再被註解為：GINSBERG在詩中描寫的地獄就是美國。
一個富含巨大張力的象徵從此肢解，變得實際而功利。整個《HOWL》也開始被噩夢般的誤讀：存在的焦慮不見了，對價值的否定不見了；對生和死的追問反思，對個人極致體驗的肯定認同統統化歸為一個平淡而實用的目標，即對一種邪惡社會體制的嘲諷。
不知道GINSBERG有沒有看過薩特的話劇《間隔》，並在其中受到啟發，創造了自己的隱喻？：三個死去的人被打入地獄，但這個地獄與神話中描繪的全不一樣，只是一個出不去的房間。這三個人，一個男人是報社記者、膽小鬼加爾森，兩個女人分別是*者伊內絲，**、殺嬰犯艾絲黛爾。他們無法避免互相衝突，互相折磨，發現自己總處在他人的注視之下，他人就是地獄。
當他在《HOWL》中真實記錄了自己以及凱魯亞特、巴勒斯、沆克、卡薩迪、所羅門的生活，並悲嘆他這「一代人的菁英」，卻「被一種瘋狂毀滅」，淪為流浪漢、癮君子、邊緣人和「垮掉的一代」時，不知道他心中的憤怒和輕蔑是否也和地獄一樣無可比擬地深？
當molock凶神無所不在時，年輕的GINSBERG是否也充滿了絕望呢？
也許一切都是猜測。因為真正的詩就是不能確切可指的。當我在第三節讀到這樣的詩句：
Carl Solomon! I』m wish you in Rackland
Where you』re madder than I am
I』m with you in Rockland
Where you must fell very strange
I』m with you in Rockland
Where you imitate the shade of my mother
I』m with you in Rockland
Where you』re murdered your twelve secretaries
……
GINSBERG 對所有叛逆鬥士/犧牲者/獻祭者的愛意和憐惜通過給Carl Solomon的這些語感像冰雹一樣密集的詩句一下子擊中了我。
也許凱魯亞克（Jack kerouac）才是知悉青年GINSBERG偉大心靈的第一人。當1955年旅居墨西哥的凱魯亞克收到GINSBERG寄來的長詩將此詩題名「howl」時，也許他已深深感到詩中所表達的所有思想與情感全都發自人類的心靈深處。
讓我們簡單回顧一下Allen Ginsberg不凡的生平：
ALLEN GINSBERG，出生於紐澤西州的諾瓦克市佩特遜鎮。父親路易.金斯堡是一位中學英語教師，也是當地小有名氣的詩人；母親諾米.萊維.金斯堡曾是美**員和激進左翼組織的成員，還在金斯堡的孩提時代，就因美國政府對*人的殘酷*得了精神恐懼症，住進精神病院，直至去世。母親的不幸遭遇在金斯堡幼小的心靈里留下了巨大的創傷，並極大地影響著他後來的生活與創作。
1943年金斯堡進入紐約哥倫比亞大學，在萊昂內爾.屈林等著名文學教授影響下開始對文學發生濃厚興趣。1945年金斯堡應徵入伍，但很快因第二次世界大戰結束而退伍，並重回哥倫比亞大學，同時開始練習寫作。1947年1月金斯堡結識了尼爾.卡薩迪，一位對「垮掉的一代」產生重要影響的人物。兩人隨即發生*關係；不久他又認識了毒販子赫伯特.沆克，從此麻煩不斷。1949年4月22日沆克因涉嫌偷盜而被捕入獄，並判刑五年。金斯堡也因窩贓同謀一同被捕，後以精神障礙為由進哥倫比亞精神病院治療。在精神病院他結識了同為病人的卡爾.所羅門。在金斯堡眼裡，所羅門是一個「瘋聖」，其怪誕的行為表達了對理性社會的反叛和對人類苦難的洞察。1955年10月金斯堡在舊金山的「六號美術館」舉辦了一次詩歌朗誦會，並在會上朗誦了《HOWL》一詩。第二年，舊金山的「城市之光」出版社發表了詩集《Howl and Other poems》，金斯堡一舉成名。
也許《HOWL》的題獻者Carl Solomon只不過是Ginsberg心中所有洞察人類生存苦難的反叛者——包括Ginsberg本人——的縮影吧！
Ginsberg因《HOWL》而偉大，《HOWL》也因如此真實地表達了細微個體生命的真實存在以及為不屈的靈魂提供了一個有意義地出口而不朽，從而影響了一個時代！
在拙文的結尾，我其實更願意用《HOWL》序言中的那句話做個了結：「抓緊你們的裙子，女士們，我們開始下地獄啦！」