To Generate the Free Brain: Pantheism and Altered Being in Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight

From "To Generate the Free Brain:" We learn that Jetter has lost his "soul" before he has ever murdered, or at least, before he has ever murdered for the State. That the State, moreover, still "demands" that Jetter, as allegorical "modern man," remain a "killer," renders his psychosis symbiotic and inextricable with ever present war, and perhaps also with the capitalism that Patchen elsewhere defines as murder. Thus, we cannot determine whether Jetter wants to "blot out" the war that is in his head, or the actual war that continues to demand that he murder. Perhaps the perversion that seems uniquely Jetter's actually is everyone's. Perhaps if war and capitalism can be abolished, then even the madness of murderers like Jetter can be redeemed. Perhaps Patchen means to signal that we cannot know whether man has hope until we reverse the contemporary corruptions that are conditions of consciousness and being.

Like Kenneth Patchen, I too wish to purge madness from every grain of sand.