Allen Ginsberg: Testing Human Mind Limits

His brother and him had to grow among a mentally unstable environment due to his mother’s mental illness, suffering from recurrent paranoia and psychotic episodes.
Allen’s mother’s political ideas and her mental condition carried a huge influence in Ginsberg’s poetry, as we can read from the biographer Barry Miles: “Naomi’s illness gave Allen an enormous empathy and tolerance for madness, neurosis, and psychosis.” It is specially remarkable the disruptive and bizarre bus journey he did taking his mother to a Rest Home in Lakewood, New Jersey; which would become later the long autobiographical poem “Kaddish”. His parents also took him and his brother to several meetings dedicated to the cause of International Communism during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which also inspired his
He finds himself in “a hungry fatigue”(4), hungry of knowledge and revelations, to fill his particularly shopping list he appeals to this “neon fruit supermarket”. This can be understood as a metaphor of what this society seem it can offer, however when Ginsberg gets deeper he is completely disappointed with what he sees,“What peaches and what penumbras!”(6) talking about the amount of disadvantages of this world in front of the good things. “Whole families shopping / at night!”(6/7), nobody is free of the dynamo of this society that sinks every single person in a hole of darkness, not being allowed to see what is actually happening. At the end of this paragraph we find a reference to Garcia Lorca, spanish poet assassinated because of his political ideas, “and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing / down by the watermelons?”(7/8), seeming surprise of seeing that even the greater defenders of the truth had to pass through that extrange circe where he was submerged