Howl at fifty

50 years ago, a San Francisco gallery poetry reading launched a literary renaissance that would change America’s consciousness. The spiritual and environmental legacy of Allen Ginsberg

by Jonah Raskin

He wanted poets to rival priests and poetry readings to replace Sunday sermons. His parents named him Irwin Allen, but he called himself Allen Ginsberg, and he wrote poetry with a passion. Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery located at 3119 Fillmore St. in San Francisco, he performed Howl for the first time in public and brought American poetry back to life. Jack Kerouac — then his oldest, closest friend — predicted that Howl would make him famous all over the Bay Area and that a poetry Renaissance would shake San Francisco.

Beyond the walls of “The Six,” and all across America, poets — with few exceptions — languished and despaired. At most colleges, English departments turned up their noses at living poets — and some dead ones, too. Even Walt Whitman went largely unread and, as the poet and critic Muriel Rukeyser observed in The Life of Poetry, men who wrote poems ran the risk of finding themselves branded homosexuals. Fifty years ago, America was still in the throes of McCarthyism and the Cold War’s big cultural chill. The conformist Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized American manhood. Even in San Francisco, Howl’s birthplace, the district attorney would prosecute the poem — for obscenity.

Lookouts and Dharma Bums

By the standards of today’s outrageous rappers and performance artists, the groundbreaking poets who performed at The Six fifty years ago might seem staid. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Phil Lamantia and Michael McClure grew up in white, middle-class families. They did not go hungry (except by choice) or homeless — though they explored homeless haunts. Ginsberg would come to be known as a gay poet, but in 1955 he was only beginning to shape his sexual persona and hadn’t come out of the closet. Snyder and Whalen (ex-roommates at Reed College) later became Buddhists, but in 1955 Snyder hadn’t yet been to Japan and Whalen hadn’t vowed to become a Zen monk. That summer, Snyder worked in Yosemite clearing trails (earlier he had been a lookout ranger in Washington’s Skagit range). At 25, he was unpublished. The carefully etched poems about mountains, valleys, rocks and streams that later appear in his first book, Riprap (1959), were unknown.

In October 1955, they were all beginners. Even Kerouac, who attended the event (but didn’t read), hadn’t yet received literary acclaim and recognition. On the Road would be published two years later and Dharma Bums, which recounts his backpacking adventures with Snyder and The Six reading, didn’t appear until 1958. Although no person of color and no woman read that night, The Six event inspired poets of color and women — Le Roi Jones, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, and Anne Waldman, to name a few — because it brought poetry down from the sacrosanct halls of the academy. It took poetry off the musty printed page into the lives of listeners.

It is unlikely that The Six reading — the inaugural Beat Generation event — could have happened anywhere else but San Francisco. The city boasted a lively poetry scene, a bohemian subculture, and radical political movements. The city’s thriving working-class history made a vast difference to Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, and Lamantia, a surrealistic poet in the tradition of the French poets of the 1920s. The city’s radicalism inspired Ginsberg and encouraged him to make fun of the FBI in Howl and in his hilarious 1956 poem, America, which stands up surprisingly well.

In San Francisco, little magazines, (mostly mimeographed) published unknown poets. Moreover, poets met in private homes. Robert Duncan, the Oakland-born, UC Berkeley-educated poet, read his own dynamic work in his cozy living room. KPFA, which began in 1949, helped create a community of artists and writers. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an ex-New Yorker, opened City Lights  the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. The following year he began his own publishing company and, in 1955, issued his own book, Pictures of the Gone World, as the first volume in the Pocket Poets Series.

Into this rich cultural stew came two Easterners, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who had known one another since the early 1940s and who had vowed to forge a new American literature. The Six reading reflected an intense cultural cross-fertilization between the two New York hipsters and their West Coast counterparts. Kerouac and Ginsberg came from urban, immigrant backgrounds; Snyder and Whalen grew up in farming communities and lived close to the land in the Pacific Northwest.

All of them wrote poems that borrowed from contemporary idioms, celebrated both life and death, and expressed a sense of kinship with the earth and a compassion for the poor, the outcast and exiled. Poetry, they believed, should communicate with an audience and convey intensely personal experiences. They were all craftsmen who cared about language.

Plans for The Six were incubated at 1624 Milvia Street in Berkeley, a rose-covered cottage that Ginsberg rented for a pittance. Kerouac joined him, later Whalen moved in, and Snyder often visited, bringing his hibachi to cook supper. Ginsberg, who had worked in advertising in New York and San Francisco, knew how to publicize an event. Accordingly, he printed and distributed posters and postcards that read: 6 Poets at 6 Gallery. It was a catchy phrase that lured the curious and cautious alike.

Ginsberg had only arrived in San Francisco the year before (largely unknown, and mostly unpublished) with a note from his mentor, William Carlos Williams, to Kenneth Rexroth, the Chicago-born anarchist, anti-war activist, poet godfather and gadfly of Bay Area literature. Rexroth had his own weekly show on KPFA and hosted a literary evening at his home on Scott Street in San Francisco. Ginsberg met Lamantia there, as well as McClure  then a 20-something artist from Kansas City  and Snyder in Berkeley. When he selected poets for The Six, Ginsberg chose those he knew and liked. Rexroth was the obvious choice for MC.

Snyder wrote Whalen in Oregon that the reading would be a poetickall Bomshell. Whalen had better hurry to San Francisco, or hed forever rue his absence, Snyder warned. A person named Allen Ginsberg was on the program, he added, as an afterthought, and he wasnt to be missed. Snyders letter was prophetic. In a world obsessed with the atomic bomb and with blond bombshells like Marilyn Monroe, The Six exploded old ways of thinking and seeing and made a space for a new kind of poetry and performance art.

When Ginsberg Howled

Rexroth opened the evening  decked out in his trademark suspenders and pin-stripped suit  by lauding the Bay Area as an oasis of radicalism and creativity in the American wasteland of cultural and political conformity. Lamantia, whose Erotic Poems, had appeared in the 1940s, read the poetry of his friend John Hoffman, who had just died in Mexico. From the start, there was a palpable sense of brotherhood among poets both living and dead. And a sense, too, of the human links to the non-human world, especially when McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, a poem of outrage and indignation inspired by the wanton slaughter, by a platoon of American soldiers, of a herd of whales. An innovative kind of ecological poery, inspired by headline news about the latest catastrophe, was born. Whalen gave an ironic reading of “Plus Ça Change,” a short poem that captures the characteristic alienation and angst of the Eisenhower era. Snyder, bearded and in jeans, read from Myths and Texts, a long work-in-progress, and from the five-part poem “Berry Feast,” that celebrates the myths of Oregon’s Native Americans, especially Coyote, their mythological trickster hero. “His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators,” Kerouac noted.

On
any other night of the week, Snyder might have brought down the house. But October 7 belonged to Ginsberg and to Howl, with its long, confessional lines, surrealistic images and its quirky blending of the optimistic voice of Walt Whitman and apocalyptic vision of T.S. Eliot. And, of course, Ginsberg was a superlative performance poet who carried his audience with him from beginning to end, stanza to stanza.

He had been writing and revising his poem all summer. Although it began as an experiment with breath, literary form and language, it evolved into an epic political rant about the American nation itself and his own generation. Howl defied generals, senators, the FBI, and the whole “narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism.” On October 7, Ginsberg wasn’t sure if he had finished the poem, but at 11 PM, he took the stage to read what he had so far, intoxicated from drinking the red wine that Kerouac had purchased with dimes and quarters collected from the audience. He steadied himself and began to recite the intensely personal opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

Moving his body as he imagined a rabbi might move before a congregation, Ginsberg built up momentum and delivered the poem’s characteristic alliterative phrasing, “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy/ Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought/ them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain/ all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo.” He felt a “strange ecstatic intensity” well-up inside him, he would explain, and he came alive to the shouts and screams of intoxicated audience members, including Neal Cassady — the hero of On the Road and the “secret hero” of Howl — and to the cries of Kerouac, who wailed, “Go! Go! Go!”

When the poem came to an end, Ginsberg wept and so did Rexroth. McClure spoke for almost everyone at The Six when he said, of Ginsberg: “In all our memories, no one had been so outspoken in poetry before.” Audience members were shocked and dazzled by his verbal pyrotechnics. The next day, Ferlinghetti wired Ginsberg and asked for a copy of the manuscript, promising to publish it in the Pocket Poets Series. Ginsberg revised the section of the poem that he’d read. Then, he added two entirely new sections about the madness of war and materialism (and the promise of redemption, too), which made the poem much longer and far more challenging to read aloud. But he went on reading it from San Francisco to New York.

In 1956, when Howl and Other Poems went on sale for 75 cents, it caused a firestorm. The SF District Attorney prosecuted Ferlinghetti for publishing obscenity, and the little book went on to create an even bigger national and international stir. Howl and Other Poems became a bestseller. Since 1956, it has sold nearly one million copies in the Pocket Poets Series, and next year City Lights will publish a 50th anniversary edition.

Meanwhile, The Six reading attained the status of legend. Kerouac described it in Dharma Bums : “I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading… that night, which was, among other things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there.” Given its mythic force, it’s no wonder that poets look back longingly to the landmark Six Gallery for inspiration and validation.

Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsbergs Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. He teaches in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park.

Beat Mondays: October 3, 10, 17, 24, 31
Stanford Continuing Studies devotes five October Mondays to revisiting and honoring the poem Marjorie Perloff has called the most harrowing as well as the funniest of autobiographies. The evenings include: Stanford Assistant Dean Mark Gonnerman placing Howl between the shadow of Hiroshima and at the dawn of SFs Poetic Renaissance; Stanfords William McPheron, who curates Stanfords collection of Allen Ginsbergs Papers; Stanford teacher Hilton Obenzinger, author of American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania; Sonoma State Professor of Communication Studies Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsbergs Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation; and Steven S. Kushner, curator of the Cloud House Poetry Archives.

Beat Archeology: October 7
Re-experience in revelatory detail, the Holy Grail of Beat San Francisco/Bay Area  the Six Gallery reading by Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Phil Whalen, Philip Lamantia that included Allen Ginsbergs first public presentation of Howl. Transported by our Lumious Time Machine, reverberating the aura of the actual event, you will enter the howling vortex of spoken works, breaking dominant conventions that left Moloch Naked. This truly unique staged recreation/invocation is the alchemical collaboration of the Cloud House Poetry Archives & Harry Redl, the great iconic photographer of the Beats. Historic pictures will come alive and speak their mind-changing poetry that brought new worlds to 50s consciousness. This production of the SF POETMUSEUM is an act of wilderness preservation of our cultural being and the transmission of the poetic genome of the Bay Area. New College of California, 777 Valencia St. in the Mission.

Professor Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol said humans have evolved into accepting superstitions such as witches (Channel 4 ) Evolution keeps us superstitious. Now that’s lucky By Mark Henderson, Science Editor

HUMANS have evolved over tens of thousands of years to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs, a psychologist has claimed. Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive  despite the lack of evidence and advance of science  because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational, said Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. This evolved credulity suggests that it would be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been countered by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone. People ultimately believe in these ideas for the same reasons that they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects such as wedding rings or Teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil as if they are pervaded by a physical essence. Even the most rational people behave in irrational ways and supernatural beliefs are part of the same continuum, Professor Hood told the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich yesterday. To demonstrate his theory he asked members of the audience if they were prepared to put on an old-fashioned blue cardigan in return for a £10 reward. He had no shortage of volunteers. He then told the volunteers that the cardigan used to belong to Fred West, the mass murderer. Most hands went down, he said. When people did wear it people moved away from them. Its not actually Wests jumper. But its the belief that its Wests jumper that has the effect. It is as if evil, amoral stance defined by culture, has become physically manifest inside the clothing. Similar beliefs, which are held even among the most sceptical scientists, explain why few people would agree to swap their wedding rings for replicas. The difference between attaching significance to sentimental objects and believing in religion, magic or the paranormal is only one of degree, Professor Hood said. These tendencies, he said, were almost certainly a product of evolution. The human mind is adapted to reason intuitively, so that it can generate theories about how the world works even when mechanisms cannot be seen or easily deduced. While this is ultimately responsible for scientific thinking, as in the discovery of invisible forces such as gravity, it also leaves people prone to making irrational errors. In most cases, intuitive theories capture everyday knowledge, such as the nature and properties of objects, what makes something alive, or the understanding that peoples minds motivate their actions, Professor Hood said. But because intuitive theories are based on unobservable properties, such theories leave open the possibility of misconceptions. I believe these misconceptions of naive intuitive theories provide the basis of many later adult magical beliefs about the paranormal. This innate tendency means it is futile to expect that such beliefs will die out even as our scientific understanding of the world improves, he said. The mind is adapted to reason intuitively about the properties of the world. Because we operate intuitively, it is probably pointless to get people to abandon belief systems. No amount of evidence is going to get people to take it on board and abandon these ideas. Credulous minds may have evolved for several reasons. It was once less dangerous to accept things that were not true than it was to reject real facts, such as the threat posed by a nearby predator. This may have predisposed humans to err on the side of belief. Superstition may also give people a sense of control that can reduce stress. I dont think were going to evolve a rational mind because there are benefits to being irrational, said Professor Hood. Superstitious behaviour  the idea that certain rituals and practices protect you  is adaptive. If you remove the appearance that they are in control, both humans and animals become stressed. During the Gulf War, in 1991, in areas attacked by Scud missiles there was a rise in superstitious belief. I want to challenge recent claims by Richard Dawkins, among others, that supernaturalism is primarily attributable to religions spreading beliefs among the gullible minds of the young. Rather, religions may simply capitalise on a natural bias to assume the existence of supernatural forces.

Orange Crush

The execution of Theo Van Gogh

By BRENDAN BERNHARD

The most wicked woman in history

Queen and harlot, dark and fair, heroine and murderer, she has been an object of fascination for writers, artists and film directors down the centuries. Lucy Hughes-Hallett examines the many faces of Cleopatra

Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

Her infinite variety … Frances Barber, Elizabeth Taylor and Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatras. Photographs: Tristram Kenton/PA

Cleopatra and Antony had formed a partnership that was as much a political alliance between two mutually useful potentates as it was a love affair. But the story, as Roman poets and historians tell it, was that Antony had become so besotted with the queen of Egypt that he was willing to give up his chance of ruling Rome in order to enjoy the pleasures of her bed. So Antony, the canny politician and commander with empire-building ambitions to rival Alexander’s, was reinvented as a degenerate hedonist and a traitor to Rome. As a by-product of that successful exercise in news manipulation, Cleopatra was cast as the woman for whose love’s sake the world would be well lost.

Cleopatra – the gratification of every conceivable desire – has been repeatedly reimagined by writers, artists and film-makers in accordance with desires of their own. She was one of the most powerful women in the ancient world, and she was defined by the Romans and their heirs as the foreigner – at once the menacing stranger and the temptress, offering the chance of escape from the tedious limitations of one’s own known world. So sexual and racial politics have shaped the variations on her story, transforming her from serpent to dove and back again to suit her public’s yearnings and fears.

Her morl status fluctuates. Cecil B de Mille offered the leading role in his sumptuous movie about her to Claudette Colbert with the words: “How would you like to play the wickedest woman in history?” His question anticipated the answer: “Very much indeed, please.” “Wicked” was already, in the 1930s, a term of approbation meaning sexy, edgy, thrilling, an infinitely more alluring epithet than boring old “good”: the hypocrisy at the heart of our culture has been part of Cleopatra’s legend for most of 2,000 years. But back in 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer made Cleopatra the first heroine of his Legend of Good Women. To him and his contemporaries she was the paragon of feminine virtue, the proof of her goodness being that she didn’t wish to outlive her man. In an age when love-matches were rare and widowhood the only condition in which a woman could be truly independent, men, it appears, found it hard to trust their wives.

The emphasis of her story wavers as often as her claim to virtue. To the Renaissance painters, it was about sex and money. They produced quasi-pornographic images of her suicide. Although all the ancient historians agree that Cleopatra had herself dressed in all her royal robes before applying the asp to her arm, artists almost invariably picture her dying in the nude, with the snake at her breast. Or they show her presiding over a magnificent banquet, in the act of demonstrating her prodigality and her wealth by drinking down a pearl dissolved in vinegar.

To the English and German dramatists who took up the theme after Shakespeare, it was about the relative status of wives and mistresses. In the Protestant cultures of post-Reformation Europe there was a lively debate about the new ideal of companionate marriage, one which spilled over into Cleopatra’s story: the reason Dryden’s Cleopatra feels so feeble is that she lacks a wedding ring. Next, in versions written in the period leading up to the American and French revolutions, the story became about the clash between rival systems of government. In some dramas (notably those produced under Louis XIV and his successors), Cleopatra and Antony represent the feudal nobility as opposed to Octavius’s centralising and modernising regime. In others, Cleopatra stands for the decadence (and romance) of ancient monarchy contrasted with Roman republicanism.

The storyline shifts. So does Cleopatra’s appearance. For several hundred years she was blonde. She was a famous beauty, and so medieval poets ascribed all the conventional attributes of beauty to her: hair like spun gold, sky-blue eyes and breasts “as white as ivory billiard balls”. The tradition was persistent. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may have been darkened by “Phoebus’s amorous pinches”, but in Tiepolo’s magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn’t until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra’s exoticism became once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller, dark-eyed and tousle-haired.

Over the next century, as the European powers scrambled for territory in Africa and the Middle East, Cleopatra’s legend became the vehicle for theories about racial difference and justifications of imperialism. Artists represented her as an enticing Turkish dancing girl in gauzy harem pants and sparkly bra; lolling indolently on a divan, she became representative of a terminally decadent culture ripe for annexation by a benignly energetic western power. In the latter pose, she is usually surrounded by slaves bearing cups of sherbet and peacock-feather fans. Or, in many cases, writhing in agony on the floor.

In the 19th century the Cleopatra plot ceased to be the familiar, more or less historical one of Antony, Actium and the asp. In 1837 Pushkin revived a scurrilous piece of fourth-century gossip alleging that Cleopatra used to offer a night in her bed to any man willing to pay for the privilege with his life. He expanded on the theme. Cleopatra, presiding over a banquet in a mood of idle boredom, makes her terrible offer. Her courtiers are aghast, but a line of men beg for the prize. She rejects princes and generals, accepting instead a fresh virgin boy, whose execution she watches with relish the following dawn.

Romantics and decadents alike adored the story. Cleopatra was reborn as the femme fatale, the personification of the bourgeois male’s sexual guilt and the realisation of his most deliciously painful self-castigating fantasies. Plutarch had recorded that, in preparation for her own death, she tested poisons on her household slaves: the scene was represented repeatedly on canvas and on the stage, while Pushkin’s scenario became the basis for dozens of later versions. The tragedy of Cleopatra in which Sarah Bernhardt starred repeatedly over three decades (doggedly continuing even after she had lost a leg) was not Shakespeare’s, but one written to the actress’s order by Victorien Sardou, in which the queen is a sadistic voluptuary given to performing elaborate striptease. Meanwhile, the bestselling novelist H Rider Haggard came up with a new twist when he revealed that the youth Cleopatra took to bed was actually her own son.

Cleopatra had become the personification of vice, flouter of every convention, breacher of every taboo. She was barely human. Algernon Swinburne, in an essay that is part art criticism, part masochist reverie, enthused about Michelangelo’s drawing in which queen and asp seem to fuse into one Medusa-like being, while Gustave Flaubert called her “the pale creature with a fiery eye, the viper of the Nile who smothers with an embrace”. Ruthless, beautiful, bestial, this fantastic Cleopatra seemed to offer Europeans, feeling cramped in an increasingly regulated society, an escape into a Nietzschean wonderland of moral irresponsibility and violent pleasure.

By the time the Ballets Russes staged Fokine’s Cleopatra in Paris in 1909, she had become the figure of death. The dancer who played her, Ida Rubinstein, was carried on in a sarcophagus, wrapped mummy-fashion in yards of multicoloured gauze from which she was gradually unwound, her face chalk-white, her hair bright blue.

The fantasy of the death-dealing vamp flourishes in peacetime. In the face of the 20th century’s wars it came to seem a bit of a joke, and a sick joke at that. In 1917 the movie Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara (described by the Fox publicity team as the “Ishmaelite of femininity” and the “torpedo of domesticity”), bombed at the box office. In a world where young men were being slaughtered en masse, the femme fatale was redundant. Bernard Shaw scoffed at the idea of sublime passion, and wrote a Caesar and Cleopatra in which the queen of Egypt is a petulant teenager. Claudette Colbert played her as a flirty good-time girl and, in 1945, Vivien Leigh brought to the part, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, “the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag”. Cleopatra had become camp.

In the notorious 1963 movie she arrives in Rome on a mobile sphinx as high as the Senate house, accompanied by belly dancers, whirling dervishes, wheeled pyramids that open up to release flocks of white doves, scores of chariots, archers and armies of well-oiled, buff attendants in fetching pink loincloths. Arriving before Caesar, Elizabeth Taylor, heavily made up in early 1960s style with lots of eyeliner, false lashes and pale lipstick, bows deeply, her bosom looming large around th edges of her deeply cut gold-lamé bodice. And then, looking up at Antony, she winks. The scandal generated by Taylor’s on/off-screen affair with her Antony, Richard Burton, was gleefully welcomed by the film’s producers. To the 19th-century Romantic, the wages of sin might be death. To the 20th-century entrepreneur, it was good publicity. To a postwar generation avid for life and pleasure, Cleopatra offered not a fatal passion, but history’s best ever holiday romance.

In the last three decades of the 20th century, Cleopatra got serious again. She was allotted a role in a debate about race relations. Afrocentrist historians, led by Martin Bernal, argued that the culture of ancient Egypt had been played down by racist scholars unwilling to acknowledge that Greek civilisation, and therefore all subsequent western civilisation, had African origins: it became fashionable to describe the pharaohs as black.

But whatever colour the pharaohs were, Cleopatra was not one of them. She was the direct descendant on her father’s side of one of Alexander’s generals, a Macedonian Greek. We do not know who her mother was: her ethnic inheritance can’t be fully established. But we do know that when the director of a 1990s production of Shakespeare’s play, who had cast a black actress in the role of Cleopatra, talked about emphasising her “earthiness” and “the kind of non-European regality which allows someone to sit on the floor”, she was imposing yet another set of anachronistic preconceptions on to the image of the Hellenistic queen. Already, only a few years later, that director’s remarks sound insulting: we do not now think of “earthiness” and a reluctance to use the furniture as particularly “black” traits. In fact, Cleopatra shocked the republican Romans by sitting not on the floor, but on a throne of solid gold.

More recently, Cleopatra’s Middle Eastern identity has come to seem even more interesting than her African one. In 1929 the Egyptian dramatist Ahmad Shawqui, a campaigner against the British authorities, made her a nationalist heroine struggling to defend her country’s independence. The theme is ready for further development. No one retelling her story today could do so without an awareness that she was the ruler of what is now an Islamic state, at the moment of its invasion by a western superpower.

In Cleopatra’s lifetime, racist Roman propaganda characterised Egyptians as self-indulgent, sex-fixated and unmanly in their readiness to treat women as their equals, while Romans congratulated themselves on their abstemiousness, the austerity of their religion and their readiness for war. The stereotypes are still recognisable, but their ascription has been reversed. A militant Islamicist from the region that Cleopatra and Antony once ruled must now think of the west much as Rome once thought of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

Cleopatra is still changing, and she will continue to do so as long as her name is remembered. The forces that have repeatedly transformed her image, the forces of anger and anxiety and covert desire, are still at their lethal work in the world.

· Giulio Cesare is at Glyndebourne (01273 813813) until August 26. Antony and Cleopatra is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 (020-7401 9919), until October 8, and at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0870 609 1110), until October 14.

· Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend (Pimlico).

记者无国界 2006年9月8日 中国 程翔对非法判决提出上诉 记者无国界今日发布消息，表示支持新加坡“海峡时报”香港记者程翔对为期五年徒刑的间谍罪判决提出上诉。 该新闻自由组织加入了香港记者协会，呼吁立即释放程翔。“我们坚信重判程翔旨在一个惩罚记者进行调查并在香港新闻界制造恐慌。 程翔的律师何培华向法新社证实9月8日已向北京一家法庭提出起诉。律师说“他和他的家人认为判决太严厉并且不公正。” 一直坚持自己清白的程翔给家人传出信息，说判决不公正。 记者无国界对法庭居然把程翔在香港一家报纸上发表文章的内容作为证供表示震惊。 所谓间谍罪的指控完全是基于程翔与台湾基金会研究人员业务上的接触，而即便程翔真的接受台湾基金会资金而写作关于海湾战略的文章，也根本不能构成间谍罪。 整个审讯荒谬且保密，所引用的证据是所谓程翔的招供和学者的观点，而获取这些证据的程序违反了国际司法标准。 此外，把程翔发表的此类新闻称为的“国家机密”显示了北京当权者的偏执，目前中国已经有多名记者、异议人士和大学教授因为泄露所谓“国家机密”而入狱。 台湾当局1日否认程翔为台北的间谍。不过当局也证实的确有香港记者与台湾研究基金会有业务往来。 除了监禁，法庭还对程翔判处30万元(30,000欧元)及31万港元(30,000欧元以上)的罚金。程翔的一些家属在中国的财产被扣押。程翔的夫人刘敏仪对此大额罚款表示惊讶：“他们似乎以为我们有很多钱。” 记者无国界授权六四天网翻译,请以法、英文版本为准

【2006年9月9日狱委讯】中央社报道/程翔的律师何培华告诉法新社，他已为程翔提交上诉书，抗议中国当局的判决不公平。  　　何培华表示：“今晨，我们向北京法庭提交上诉书。家属以及他本人，均认为这项判决过分严厉且不公平。” 　　他建议程翔的家属，如果上诉遭到驳回，他们可以医疗为由要求中国政府释放程翔，但是他表示，目前仍不是提出这项要求的时刻。  　　新加坡《海峡时报》首席中国特派员程翔涉因间谍罪于八月底在北京被判处入狱5年。

　

作者题记：本文写于将近二十年前，原载香港《解放月报》（现更名为《开放》）1988年11月号。1989年6月24日《北京日报》指控我为”黑手”， 这篇文章被作为主要的证据之一，称为”反共反人民”的”重磅炸弹”.并指控文中提的”四个代替”是我的”纲领性主张”.

时逢毛泽东死忌三十年，中共媒体又在大肆怀念暴君的亡灵。故而，特重发此文。

不论从什么角度看”文化大革命”，它都是中国历史上、也是世界历史上的前无古人、也许还是后无来者的一大奇观，而这场革命的发动者毛泽东也成为一个神秘的人物。因为，在毛泽东生前，中国无人能够对他进行哪怕是猜测性的评价，而他死后，仍然以幽灵般的魔影徘徊于中国大地上。

历史过去后，不会再给人以第二次选择的机会，即使后悔万般，也无可奈何。再也不会有一个毛泽东生于中国土地上，再也不会有十亿人对一个人如此虔诚的相信、如此狂热的崇拜，再也不会有一个人的形象、声音、动作、文字，能够具有毛泽东式的绝对权威，以至于，在毛泽东的生前，无人敢向他说一个”不”字；他死后，也只能以七分成绩、三分错误来盖棺论定。对于他，中国人都没有公开鞭尸的勇气，在对他的否定时，一副羞答答的样子。

一 毛泽东令历代帝王黯然失色

“毛泽东情结”已成为当代中国人的先天遗传。这一方面说明了中国人的愚昧已经到了受尽蹂躏还要三呼”万岁”的程度，另一方面也说明了作为个人的毛泽东的成功已经使中国历史上的所有帝王黯然失色。

本世纪初，毛泽东这个来自湖南乡间的土里土气的农民刚进北京城时，曾受到当时许多颇有声望的文化名流嘲弄和蔑视；即使他参加共产党后，也一直被党的高层所排斥，直到”遵义会议”，无人敢挺身而出收拾长征后的烂摊子时，毛泽东才以他的魄力与冒险精神，征服了这个排挤他的党，并使另一中共强人张国焘被边缘化。而且，那些文化人和共产党的高级官僚们万万没有想到，一九四九年以后，他们一个个成为毛泽东手中的玩物。毛泽东在”与人奋斗”和做政治游戏时的手法之高明，已达到”无法之法，乃为至法”的最高境界。

如果仅仅限于中国的范围内，从中国历史的角度评价毛泽东，他无疑是到目前为止最成功的一个人。没有人比他更了解中国人的性格，没有人比他更熟悉专制政权内部的相互倾轧的艺术，没有人比他更心狠手辣、善于应变、流氓成性，更没有人能够把自己装扮得像红太阳一样光辉灿烂。中国传统的民本思想在毛泽东的手中变成了”人民万岁”和”全心全意为人民服务”，而他又能通过一系列运动使人民一无所得。他似乎以一个人的力量与整个中国对抗，就像一个高大强壮的男子汉和一个柔弱顺从的小女子的关系一样。

中国历史上的哪一个皇帝的权力和威望能够与毛泽相媲美呢？他把中国传统的专制政体、把中国人的愚昧和软弱推向了前无古人的极端。在一次次的权力角逐中，他充分利用了中国人的性格弱点，打击对手犹如猫捉老鼠，多少曾经在共产党内权力比他大、职位比他高的人，都一个个地拜倒在他的脚下。”问苍茫大地，谁主沉浮？”的早年野心，果然在几十年后变成现实。他一旦登上权力的宝座，便终身受用。

在中国，他可以蔑视一切，他的每一个动作都有合理的依据，他的每一句话都是神的启示，他创造了一种独一无二的艺术：不讲理就是唯一的真理。

二 毛泽东并未影响世界历史进程

但是，如果就整个世界的范围而言，从世界历史的进程上看，毛泽东彻底失败了。他没能把一个全新的中国推向世界，没能改变世界历史的进程，没能成为左右国际事务的全球性政治领袖。他仅仅是在重复数千年延绵不绝的中国历史，陷入那个轮回式的恶性循环而无法自拔。他不是没有称霸世界的野心，否则的话，他不会与苏联决裂，更不会迫不及待地制造”中国是第三世界革命的中心”的政治神话，也不会为了个人的国际地位而去慷本来就一穷二白的国家之慨，将大把大把的钱白白送给那些落后的国家。

想成为美国和苏联之外的超级大国的超级领袖，确实是毛泽东的野心。无奈他野心有余而能力不足。他没有力量和智慧创造一个强大的中国，以与美苏对抗，也就自然没有力量把自己提升到国际领袖的位置。毛泽东的所作所为，无一不符合传统中国独裁者的一切，却没有丝毫走向现代世界的迹象。他被人类的先进文化抛到远远的地方，只能封闭起来，龟缩在自己的躯壳内，在对内的整肃中发泄他的无限权力占有欲。玩中国，毛泽东易如反掌；而玩世界，他却像个只知道死守二亩三分地的土财主，唯恐被什么人抢去。这完全是一个农民起义首领的性格。

三 毛泽东把中国人降格为奴隶

在国内，从他在天安门上宣布中华人民共和国成立的第一天开始，他就不停地折腾，一次比一次精彩，一次比一次开心，直到”文革”达到他一生的最高潮。毛泽东不仅利用了中国人的愚昧，还利用了中国人被长期压抑、无处渲泄的攻击欲和破坏欲，他所建立的制度和所发动的革命，不是把人的生命力导向创造性和建设性的方面，而是导向破坏性和毁灭性的方面，而且是大破坏和大毁灭。

“文革”也是中国人生命力的一次爆发，特别是青春的激情和过剩精力，通过无所顾忌的打、砸、抢，也通过一次次盛大的革命庆典，使参与者们得到酣畅淋漓的宣泄，从中感到一种生命力释放的满足。但是面向世界，毛泽东一次又一次的失败，甚至虚弱到不敢正视自己的程度。

毛泽东的确有资格去嘲笑秦始皇、汉武帝、唐太宗、宋太祖以及驰骋欧亚大陆的成吉思汗，这些帝王与他相比，确实有智慧上、人格上的低能之处。但他没有资本去与那些世界性的政治领袖相比，因为这些人所创造的政治体制是属于全人类的，而毛泽东只属于中国，且罪孽深重。在这点上，我以为毛泽东也极为可怜，因为在中国他所面对的对手素质太差，甚至就根本构不成对手。毛泽东与一个总是输给他二十一比零的选手在打乒乓球。这种对抗，固然可以使他飘飘然，但也使他的胜利变得毫无正面价值。

在毛泽东的统治下，每个中国人都是零，十亿个零加起来仍然是零，因而毛泽东最后也变成了零。

毛泽东的这种处境，与整个中华民族的处境完全一样。关起门来看自己，真觉得艳美无比，俨然仪表堂堂的男子汉，几千年悠久的文化灿烂得令人目眩；打开门再看自己，顿时相形见绌，非但谈不上艳美，反而倒像个满脸皱纹、拄着杖却又要吃母乳的老小孩，源远流长的文化就像一身俗不可耐的古装，除了作为陈列品之外，便毫无用处。说得挖苦点，中国人在近现代世界史上不是作为人，而是作为奴隶而生活的。毛泽东所一手发动的一系列政治运动，在满足了他的个人欲望的同时，却把自己连同所有的中国人从人类中开除出去了。

毛泽东所能做的一切，一方面是他个人的魅力所致，另一方面是中国文化的恩赐。愚昧的软弱的中国人和千古不变的专制政体，为毛泽东提供了一展才华的最佳舞台。他在这个舞台上所导演的戏剧，固然有”反右”、”大跃进”、”四清”等轰动一时的剧目，但是这些都是模仿之作，完全是另一个专制魔王斯大林手法的翻版。属于毛泽东个人独创的杰作是”文革”.这是一部以全民族的巨大牺牲为代价而创造的作品。它的独一无二就在于把专制主义发展到了前无古人的境地。因而，对于中华民族来说，毛泽东不啻千古罪人。由否定”文革”到否定毛泽东是历史的必然。

四 不能只反昏君不反专制

但是，对于有几千年的封建传统的中国来说，彻底否定毛泽东并不容易，正像中国近代史上的一次次反封建运动都以失败告终一样。在当代的中国，我以为，难以彻底否定毛泽东的主要原因有以下两点：

首先，只反昏君、贪官而不反专制、皇权是中国人的文化遗传。在历次改革之中，人们都把腐败归结为某个统治者的道德人格的堕落和思想上的错误。寻找”明主”和”清官”是中国人做了几千年、至今仍然在做的梦。否则的话，人们怎么会在1949年以后一直把希望寄托在毛泽东等人身上呢？换言之，只要人们还相信只有专制文化的社会主义和教条的马克思主义才能救中国，那就是相信政治专制和思想独裁才能够救中国，即便毛泽东被否定后，还会有第二、第三个毛泽东。

不是昏君、贪官使专制政体腐败，而是专制政体先天性地产生着昏君、贪官。如果没有民主政治的保证，任何人在专制政府中都将成为昏君、贪官，这甚至与个人品质无关。最卑鄙的政治家也无法在民主政治中为所欲为，而最高尚的政治家在专制政体中也将为所欲为。没有宪政制度的保证，任何掌权者都将走向独裁。

因而，如果仅仅把毛泽东作为一个昏君暴君来否定，而不是把他作为腐朽的专制主义的当代代表来否定，那么就等于什么也没做，其结果只能是以新的独裁者代替旧的独裁者。幸运的话，是以一个开明的独裁者代替昏庸的独裁者。

但是，无论怎样，专制还是专制，它决不会因为独裁的开明而变成民主制。从这个意义上讲，最重要的不是否定作为个人、作为昏君的毛泽东，而是否定作为整个专制政体的总代表的毛泽东。但改革以来对毛泽东的批判，仍然停留在”只反昏君而不反专制”的水平上。更可笑的是，人们在对昏君和贪官的否定中都争相标榜自己是”明主”和”清官”.

五 中国人要敢于自我否定

其次，只否定少数当权者而不否定大众和每个人自身，也不是对以毛泽东为代表的专制主义的真正否定。如前所述，”文革”的发生是专制主义的极端化所致。专制主义的极端化，一方面是因为以毛泽东为代表的当权者们极端化独裁，另一方面是因为广大的被统治者的极端化愚昧和软弱。毛泽东再有力量，也不能一个人进行”文革”.毛泽东的力量来自于人民的愚昧和软弱，他是十亿中国人之愚昧的集大成者。

也就是说，任何一个专制政体的产生和延续，都是统治者和被统治者共同创造并加以维持的。没有顺从独裁的被统治者，也就不会有专制统治。具体到中国的历史和现状，没有深厚的封建主义传统所培养起来的中国人的奴性，中国的专制主义决不会如此长久、如此肆无忌惮。

在”文革”中，没有亿万只手臂高呼”毛主席万岁！”，没有覆盖中华大地的红色语录本，没有遍布每一个角落的”早请示，晚汇报”，没有十亿人齐声高唱《东方红》，毛泽东的名字怎么会成为永远不落的、普照人间的红太阳呢？所以，否定毛泽东也就必然要否定把毛泽东视为”大救星”、”红太阳”的十亿中国人，否定十亿中国人必然要从每个人、特别是从那些有文化的知识分子的自我否定开始。

过去，我们的理论一直把反对建的革命仅仅理解为推翻皇帝或统治者，因而也就把中国历史上无数次大大小小的农民起义称之为推动历史前进的革命。但是，事实证明，农民推翻皇帝的革命，只造成了中国历史的封闭循环和专制主义的长命百岁。

而真正的反独裁革命，必须是对以专制主义为代表的整个社会（所有的人的生存方式、思维方式）的革命。这个革命不仅要打倒皇帝，更要消灭皇权赖以生存和维持的小农文明：专制与小农的生存方式是一个有机整体——农业文明，现代化就是要从生存方式上消灭农业文明，如果做不到这一点，那么任何企图推翻专制主义的革命都将失败。

六 否定毛是全民族的一次脱胎换骨

只反皇帝而不反小农生存方式的运动，只能是动乱而不是改革。对于中国来说，打倒一个皇帝、否定一个毛泽东都不困难，人为不行时，还有天助（毛泽东总要死），困难的在于消灭汪洋大海般的小农意识。也就是像早期的鲁迅那样无情地批判国民劣根性。然而，中国当代史上的启蒙者们，大多数都是骂皇帝的英雄，一旦面对大众，便是一脸媚态，向愚昧微笑、鞠躬。而这种现象表面上看是站在与专制主义相对立的人民大众一边，而实际上是想在骂倒皇帝之后自己当皇帝，当人民的救世主。得志时，自奉为上帝；不得志时，人民是上帝。毛泽东就是用玩弄”人民崇拜”来奠定其至高权威的高手。

这种把戏中国人玩得纯熟、玩得心花怒放，从先秦时代的”民本思想”一直玩到毛泽东的”人民万岁”、”全心全意为人民服务”，服装可谓花样翻新，却永远裹着一个臭皮囊。

“文革”结束后，又有多少被誉为改革先锋的人物仍然高举着”为人民服务”的金字招牌招摇过市呀！又有多少在”文革”中写过最最革命的大字报的人把自己标榜为反”四人帮”的英雄啊！又有多少被平反的”右派”、”走资派”变成了新时期的”极左派”呀！除了”四人帮”、毛泽东及其少数死党外，其余的中国人个个都是”文革”的受难者和”反文革”的英雄。

中国人逃避责任、进行自我美化的本领真是举世无双。笔者作为中华民族的一员，真该为此而骄傲、自豪和光荣。

类似上面所列举的民族劣根性还很多，诸如”愚忠”、”群体至上”、”平均主义”、”民族主义”等等。但是，就中国的现实而言，所有这些都可以归结为这样一点：即不能从专制主义的内部来寻找否定专制主义的力量。

具体地讲就是：在政治上不能从一党独裁内部寻找力量来反一党独裁；在经济上，不能从公有制、计划经济内部寻找动力来改革经济；在思想上，不能从教条化的马克思主义内部寻找新的思想；在广义的文化上，不能从中国传统文化内部来寻找所谓的精华。而只能用多党并存的民主制代替一党独裁，用私有制、市场经济代替公有制、计划经济；用多元化的言论、思想的自由来代替思想一元化；用世界的（西方的）现代文化来代替中国的传统文化。

否定毛泽东，在最根本的意义上是否定中国人几千年来的小农式生存，是一次全民族的脱胎换骨。尽管，这种否定不会一蹴而就，很可能是个极为漫长的历史过程；但中国人必须从现在开始启动这一进程。

我以为，这也许是世界历史上最漫长、最艰难的否定过程，因为中国专制主义的生命力之顽强堪称世界之最。尽管，在这个漫长的过程中，痛苦之巨大甚至可能是难以忍受的，但是，除了忍受痛苦的煎熬之外，当代中国人别无选择。

否则的话，尽管毛泽东已经魂归西天，但他所代表的专制主义仍然是永远不落的红太阳。

写于1988年10月

── 原载 香港《解放月报》1988年11月号

中国的政治清明，社会有序有赖于做出许多努力和牺牲。

2002年12月11日北京晴，武汉晴，潜江多云。<