Tag: Allen Ginsberg

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September 26, 1969 – Death on All Fronts, says Allen Ginsberg

On this day, September 26, 1969…the American poet Allen Ginsberg Death on all fronts

Death on all fronts (English)

“The Planet is Finished”

A new moon looks down on our sick sweet planet

Orion’s chased the Immovable Bear halfway across the sky

from winter to winter. I wake, earlier in bed,

  fly corpses

cover gas lit sheets, my head aches,

  left temple

brain fibre throbbing for Death I created

  on all Fronts.

Poisoned rats in the Chickenhouse and myriad lice

Sprayed with white arsenics filtering to the brook,

  City

       Cockroaches

stomped on Country kitchen floors.

  No babies for me.

Cut earth boy & girl hordes

  by half & breathe free

say Revolutionary expert Computers:

Half the blue globe’s germ population’s

  more than enough

keep the cloudy lung from stinking pneumonia.

I called in the Exterminator Who soaked the Wall

  floor with bed-bug death-oil.

Who’ll soak my brain with death-oil?

I wake before dawn dreading my wooden

  possessions,

my gnostic books, my loud mouth, old loves silent,

  charms

turned to image money, my body sexless fat,

  Father dying,

Earth Cities poisoned at war,

  my art hopeless —

Mind fragmented–and still abstract–Pain in

left temple living death —

Sept. 26, 1969

https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/en/Ginsberg,_Allen-1926/Death_on_all_fronts

Also on this day: 

September 26, 1989 – Australian Union body tries to add green to red…

September 26, 1998 – Howard decision only to ratify Kyoto if US does leaks.

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July 26, 1967 – Allen Ginsberg tells Gary Snyder it’s “a general lemming situation”

On this day, Allen Ginsberg wrote to his friend Gary Snyder, about what he’d heard at the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference, from Gregory Bateson.

Ginsberg’s letter of 26 July 1967, sent from New York to Kyoto where Snyder was then living, in which he notes, in a telegraphic style the poets sometimes used in their correspondence:

 Now International Dialectics of Liberation—[Stokely] Carmichael angry and yelling, I stayed calm and kept chanting prajnaparamita. Gregory Bateson says auto CO2 layer gives planet half-life: 10-30 years before 5 degree temp rise irreversible melt polar ice caps, 400 feet water inundate everything below Grass Valley 58—to say nothing of young pines in Canada dying radiation—death of rivers—general lemming situation. (Ginsberg in Morgan, 2008, p. 418)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Bateson had been reading Barry Commoner’s “Science and Survival” published the previous year.  The book was extremely influential in its own way, and helped get people switched on to the carbon threat.

What I think we can learn from this is that about the carbon dioxide build up,there was ‘common knowledge’ from earlier than folks realise…

What happened next

Ginsberg was on TV in September, and gave one of the first warnings about the greenhouse effect.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.