what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination
Interpretation
This quote critiques the dehumanizing effects of modernity and the loss of creativity.
Allen Ginsberg's provocative quote reflects on the destructive impact of industrialization and modern society on human thought and creativity. By using vivid imagery to describe the 'sphinx of cement and aluminium,' he symbolizes the cold, mechanistic nature of contemporary life that stifles the imagination and leads to a loss of individuality. It challenges us to reconsider the values of society that prioritize materialism over artistic expression and genuine human experience.
In practice
In a discussion about the impacts of urbanization on human creativity.
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 the night.
Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.
Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.
What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
Sometime Iβll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.
One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.
Why not simply honor your parents, love your children, help your brothers and sisters, be faithful to your friends, care for your mate with devotion, complete your work cooperatively and joyfully, assume responsibility for problems, practice virtue without first demanding it of others, understand the highest truths yet retain an ordinary manner? That would be true clarity, true simplicity, true mastery.
An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [...] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
If you break your finger, that's on you, right? But if you get a chronic illness, if you get a serious illness or life-threatening illness, that's something I think we should all share the cost in because we all face the same unknowns and the same risks.
All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg no less than the truffle.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.