A Supermarket in California

BY ALLEN GINSBERG

It was night time. I went and walked through the trees and saw the full moon. At that time I

felt sick in the end I decided to make a decision that my fatigue could be relieved with an accent.

Finally I went to the neon fruit supermarket. During that night, many families shop there. Every

place is also full of visitors who want to shop. The couples who are meet the alley in the

supermarket. The wives were in the place of avocado. Babies who were playing in the tomato

area and people filled all the places in a supermarket. While shopping at the neon fruit

supermarket, when I came home I saw an old man standing among the meats that were going to

be stored in the refrigerator. When I looked again it was Walt Whitman. He is a lonely old man

When I saw Walt Whitman, I thought he was an old man with no children and he was lonely

too. When I was thinking about Walt Whitman I was traveling and I also had a headache. At that

time, he was encouraging the children in the shop because he did not have children, so he wanted

to meet and encourage the children in the shop. When he encouraged the children he was

standing among the meat in the refrigerator he peeked at the children while encouraging them.

When she was encouraging the children I saw she was very happy about it considering she was

childless.

When he was encouraging the children he also asked the children some questions. He asked

about the meat because the shop where the children lived was a butcher shop. He asked them if

who killed the pig? How much is the meat? Even he asks are you my angel? When Walt

Whitman asked a question I noticed him. After that I followed him to the end down the corridor.
This was followed by the imagination imagining that a detective in the shop would approach

Walt Whitman.

 In Whitman’s day it would have been natural for the consumer of food to know where the

food came from, who killed it, and how it got to their table. What is unsaid, yet implied, is that

Whitman’s question would not be able to be answered by the store’s owners or employees.

Whitman had a similar vision - a society detached from nature and a humanity that lost its

individuality.

Finally I met Walt Whitman and said if a detective was spying on him. He took me away who

didn't know where to go because the shop doors would be closing in an hour. In his haste, Walt

Whitman just left without a clear objective. We went through the doors, having no time to think

about whether we would survive the detective. Even though the detective was only in

imagination, I could feel that I was in danger at that time. That night did seem like a dreadful

night because Walt Whitman and I had to run towards the shady, dark trees without any lighting.

Walt Whitman and I were just the two of us running around no matter what happened after this.

At that time, it seemed as if we had no hope of getting love from America because the love

that had disappeared from America. We thought if we wanted to get back to love from America,

should we pass the blue car? Or return to a lonely house?. At that time America was going

through a riot where there were people who didn't even know when the end would be

Whitman is the one figure in the poem able to bypass the demands of profit and payment that

the supermarket demands. Instead, he is able to taste the food, the symbol of the natural, without

having to pay for its pleasures. This is a tacit acknowledgment that the vision he is having cannot

last. Whitman’s glorification of the natural world cannot stand in the face of economic modernity
where everything is for sale and everything has a price. Ginsberg admits that he feels “absurd”

for having such an optimistic vision of seeing the esthetic beauty in a supermarket’s commodities

Charon was the ferryman who carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The

River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to

experience complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of

the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life.

The peach in the supermarket has no relation for those that buy it to the natural world from

which it came. Its past has been forgotten. This is the state of the world that capitalism and

modernity has brought. And Whitman, who once railed against such advancement, is left

stranded on the side of an unending river of forgetfulness. He is now a forgotten hero.