I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed...

Well, while I'm here I'll
do the work -
and what's the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow. - Memory Gardens, Allen Ginsberg

You would do yourself a favor if the only modern poetry you picked up and read was written by Allen Ginsberg. If you want some direction, try Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl,” classically considered his most famous piece of work. If you want some further direction, then listen to the words this man writes and float away on a cloud of LSD just as he did. Ginsberg wrote the way your mind works: he wrote as a run-on thought string, each memory perpetuating the continuation of the sentence. But, more importantly, Ginsberg wrote the way you wish you could say. He believed that it was the poets job, his burden, not to write what came into his mind while he sat down to write a poem, but rather to write about the thoughs that crept into the poet’s head while he lay in bed at night – while his mind was most free and most truthful.

What more is our struggle in life except the struggle to ease the pains that life brings us? And if we are constantly struggling, surely we must say that we are constantly working. What option do we have, then, in our lives, except to “do the work?” More specifically it is the “Work” that is our job to make life as enjoyable as we can for ourselves and those around us (work – capitalized, thus connoting this is our most elemental form of labor; this is our Heavenly Work). It’s Ginsberg’s suggestion that everything else we do in our lives should be considered play time, here noted as drunken dumbshow. Though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Ginsberg believes, in essence, that anything we do in life that does not ease the pain we experience simply by living is a waste of time. In other words, our thoughts and goals should constantly be tilted towards the easing of our pains. In other words, life on its own is pain. Our jobs in life is to enjoy it as best we can with disregard for the pain, acknowledging that it is there and it hurts us, but without letting the perpetuation of pain become our work.

Chemotherapy is obviously part of the beat culture along with Allen Ginsberg. I dig that. If we are to agree that our work is to ease the pain of living, then chemotherapy does work as it eases the pain of cancer. I find that as long as I do my “Work,” then chemotherapy does his. Sometimes phrases become cliches because they are true, like when a sports player says, "Well, you just gotta go out there and give it your all." That's a truth-cliche. It pertains to life in general and it is a good life lesson. Other times cliches are formed because people do not stop and ask why, like the phrase "When in Rome do as the Romans do." That is an untruth-cliche. I'm not a fucking Roman. If I followed that cliche as a lesson for life it would tell me that I should change my beliefs and practices depending on the beliefs and practices of those surrounding me. If I'm off my rocker I want people to know about it. Do as the Romans do is death to you as you. I'll live doing unlike the Romans because I can rest my head on the pillow knowing that I heeded Ginsberg's advice: "Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

"The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction." - Allen Ginsberg