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Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem 441 in the evenness of flow and the unpredictability of where it will come to rest (even if only briefly). Furthermore, the long line can take unexpected turns (just consider how often Pound's verse, or Ginsberg's, will shift suddenly from exuberance to sadness, from outrage to tristesse, within a single line) as can the stream of consciousness. This, then, explains the relation be­ tween the verse that attempts to convey consciousness' operations as it per­ forms in extreme states and verse that employs long lines. And thus it is that the sequence of thought forms passing through the mind has been the constant subject of all Ginsberg's verse. As important as Ginsberg's long line—a line that flows with the move­ ment of thought—is, his use of juxtaposition has even greater importance, for parataxis allows the line to turn with the shifts in his thinking. Moreover, his use of juxtaposition continually refreshes his speech and revitalizes its flow, giving the impression of (to borrow that expression of James again) "the continual coming­on of novelty," that feature which characterizes somatic temporality. Many influences swayed Ginsberg towards this form of construction, but Ginsberg highlights one: While still a student at Columbia University, writing a paper on Cezanne for the distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro, Ginsberg went to New York's Museum of Modern Art sev­ eral times to examine the painter's watercolours. He noted that Cezanne often juxtaposed colours so that when the eye passed from one to another, it received a little jolt. Ejzenstejn made an entire aesthetic theory and cine­ matic practice out of this proto­Cubist device—and so in fact did Ginsberg. He began referring to the jolt as an "eyeball kick." "I got a strange shudder­ ing impression looking at his canvases, partly the effect when someone pulls a Venetian blind, reverses the Venetian—there's a sudden shift, a flashing that you see in C6zanne canvases."721 Part I of Howl contains an homage to Cezanne's method: "who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed ... jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus."722 Ginsberg attempts to recreate the jolting effect of Cezanne's construction byjuxtaposing words that have a gap—usually a con­ ceptual gap, but it can be a break created by an unexpected word—between them "which the mind would fill with the sensation of existence."723 In conjunction with the long line, such paratactical constructions also have the effect of giving the poem's represented material an ambiguous status; the poem's content (i.e., its "object matter") allows itself to be interpreted as either subjective or objective. Ginsberg's poetry, like Brakhage's earlier films, evidently grows out of quotidian speech; however, since the words of the poem are projected speech, they seem closer to thought than language ordinarily does, and this gives the strange impression that the material of the poem itself (and what the poem represents) is its maker's actual con­ 442 The Films of Stan Brakhage sciousness. We have already seen that Williams's imagery and Brakhage's visual forms have a similarly ambiguous status, and they, too, seem to be actual outerings (literally projections) of the contents of their maker's con­ sciousness. Ginsberg also came to Olson's recognition of the importance of living gracefully within one's skin, a recognition whose dawning he records in "The Change," perhaps his most important poem after Kaddish and Howl. The background of the poem lies in 1948, when Ginsberg, while still a stu­ dent, experienced a vision of William Blake; Ginsberg then spent the years between 1948 to 1963 trying to recreate the mystical experience he had that day. Attempting to recreate that experience involved him striving to get beyond the body, to break out of the body so as to attain a completed consciousness.724 Then, in 1963, while on a train between Kyoto and Tokyo, Ginsberg came to the recognition that expanding consciousness through psychedelic means was not important and, more significantly, that enlarging consciousness by whatever means was not the moral key to existence. He realized that he must accept the form he had been given, and must learn to love the forms of earthly beings. He realized he must learn to live in the present, and within limits. I am that I am I am the man & the Adam of hair in my loins...

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