Moloch en América

Garry Wills ha escrito un elocuente artículo, invocando la figura de Moloch, a propósito de la matanza pertetrada por Adam Lanza en Newtown. Moloch, la terrible deidad de los amonitas, acorazado en bronce y con cabeza de becerro, a cuyos brazos de fuego lanzaban a los niños en sacrificio.

El artículo de Wills me ha recordado otra invocación de Moloch en América: la de Allen Ginsberg en su poema Howl (1956). Es sabido que Ginsberg tomó esa representación de Moloch del film Metropolis de Fritz Lang, asociando al ídolo con la civilización industrial.

Wills no le da esa connotación, pero se acerca a la idea del sacrificio de los niños como ritual de la civilización americana. En algunos poemas de los 60, Ginsberg apelaría a la misma figura monstruosa para aludir a las muertes de niños inocentes en la Guerra de Viet Nam:

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invencible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!”