Why I love grocery shopping

Ever heard of the idea of eternal return?  It has been referenced in countless works in pop culture.  It's in The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and The Never Ending Story.  It's in the first line of Peter Pan and a major theme of the excellent TV show Battlestar Galactica.  It is the idea of cyclical patterns in the universe.  "All of this has happened before and all this will happen again."  Sounds very dramatic.  And poetic.

In a similar way, it's like saying that history repeats itself.  And in yet another way, it's like reading something from a long time ago and being surprised to learn that we can identify with it.  I remember being shocked in reading The Canterbury Tales.  Some of those characters could have made themselves at home at any trailer park.  Because the way human beings behave now is not so different from the way they behaved hundreds or thousands of years ago.  We are still innately selfish, we still make war, and we still do stupid things in the name of love. 

So when I was reading this poem by Allen Ginsberg, his feelings about the world he was living in are not so different from the way people view the world today.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

To understand this poem, you have to understand that Ginsberg liked to invoke Whitman when he was writing.  Whitman was almost like his muse, and Whitman's poems were usually of an observational nature.  He connected to things, people, nature, which is what he's doing in the supermarket in this poem.  He's interacting with the products, with the grocery clerks, while Ginsberg watches from a distance.  Ginsberg feels disconnected from all these things going on around him and all the people.  He can only connect with poets who have long since died (García Lorca was a Spanish poet who was murdered in the Spanish Civil War).  At the end of this poem, Ginsberg longs for the past and these poets' idealized versions of it that they wrote about.  In the supermarket, where he is "shopping for images" (Oh, Allen, I've been there),  he is bombarded by the busyness, all the choices of "neon fruit," and "brilliant stacks of cans," but he can't find what he wants.  He feels lonely and separate from the modern world.

Upon reading this, it made me think about how accurately that still portrays America today.  We are often listening to our iPods or on our cell phones when we are shopping.  We do this when we drive or ride the subway.  We avoid connecting with the people around us, whether it's out of fear or selfishness.  Sometimes if we're caught sitting at a table with a group of people all on their blackberries, we stop and reflect on this and someone will say that they yearn for a simpler time.  What simpler time was that?