Born in this world
You got to suffer
Everything changes
You got no soul....
Talk when you talk
Cry when you cry
Lie down you lie down
Die when you die
|
|
On April 5, the Lower East Side lost
one of its most brilliant souls.
Remembering him now, as I sit on a bench
in Tompkins Square Park drizzle, I see
Allen's ghost roaming the neighborhood
with curious eyes, bald head, grey beard,
melancholy shoulders, cheerful lips
chanting:
Born in this world |
|
Allen was a dear friend I knew from
the streets, and though I can't believe
that he's gone gone gone, the tears I have
for Allen are as much tears of joy as of
sadness...After all, he lived life to the
hilt, inspiring others to expand their
field of consciousness. He made every
scene there was to make, traveled the
whole world round, met everyone there was
to meet, kissed everyone there was to
kiss, said everything there was to
say--the way he needed to say it--and then
got the fuck out.
Allen Ginsberg began living on the Lower East Side back in the 1950s, along with his literary companions Jack Kerouac and William S. Bur-roughs. All were influenced by the Be-bop rhythyms of Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus--fellow neighborhood residents. The multi-ethnic cacophony and radical Jewish legacy of the East Side fired Allen's imagination as a young poet and social critic.
Into the Cold War darkness of 1955
Allen howled: I saw the best minds of my generation de-stroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the |
ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.... Smack in the middle of McCarthy's witch hunting season, Allen came run-ning naked out of the closet about his homosexuality--and his prophetic inner voice, which he decided to express loud, clear and uncensored. "The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and ass-hole holy!"
A radically new attitude of openess,
candor and spontaneous insight emerged
mid-century--a time of fearful conformity,
paranoia and closed public consciousness.
The "Beat Generation" as this group of
writers and artists came to be known,
emphasized com-passion for street level
souls who were expendable to the blind
corporate techno-culture that was America.
Pas-sionately articulate, thirty-year-old
Allen asked the Question: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and ima-gination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugli-ness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!...Moloch the |
incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch, whose build-ings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Ripping open the hermetically-sealed milieu of academic verse, Allen bum-rushed the guarded vaults of sa-cred poetry and liberated American language from its ivory tower prison. Stealing poetry back from the elite, he restored it to its rightful purpose: a vigorous method of communication available to one and all. When the 60s arrived, the seeds planted by Ginsberg and the Beats the previous decade began to sprout and, with the advent of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, they firmly took root in the mass consciousness of mil-lions of young people. Allen spoke out early against the military buildup in Viet Nam and encouraged countless others to protest the war. |
In 1965, he was crowned Prague
May King, then expelled by Czech police
and simultaneously placed on the FBI's
Dangerous Securities List. Allen's voice
was one of the first to warn of the
impending environmental catastrophe if
technology and industrial pollution
continue unchecked. His interest in Zen
Buddhism and meditation, which Kerouac
turned him on to in the 50s, deepened with
time and over the years, Ginsberg taught
thousands to STOP--relax and meditate as a
means of centering one's energies when
surrounded by winds of change.
An avowed pacifist, he walked the walk: During the bloody Chicago riot of 1968, Allen sat down on the grass and chanted "OMMMMMMMM" to calm himself and those around him. In a violent sea of chaos, an island of tranquility grew as hundreds of people joined his rhythmic chanting. Said Allen later: "It felt like grace. It felt harmoniously right that some psychophysical rarity should be happening on the political occasion as dusk fell on Lincoln Park and the Hancock Building lit up on the horizon. If there'd been panic and police clubs I don't think I would have minded the damage. Clubbing would have seemed a curiously impertinent intrusion from skeleton phantoms--un-real compared with the natural omnipresent electric universe I was in. This was the most interesting thing that happened, for me, in Chicago." |
|
The impact that Allen's poetry and
satirism had on rebellious youth cul-ture
was far reaching. As Rock & Roll came of
age musically, its lyrics matured beyond
pop bubblegum verse to a more
sophisticated and poetic vision. Bob
Dylan was greatly influenced by Ginsberg's
poetry, as were Beatles John Lennon and
Paul McCartney--all of whom became close
friends with Allen and rcorded with him
over the years.
In the mid 70s, Ginsberg cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world. Allen's presence was always visible to me--even as a child growing up on the Lower East Side. I was first made aware of him sometime in 1967 when I was an eight-year-old boy riding the 14th Street crosstown bus with my mother...The bus stopped on Avenue A, and a man with black-rimmed glasses and a big black beard entered alone and sat down in front of us. My mother leaned over and whispered in my ear that the man in front of us was a |
famous poet. I didn't know what to think.
What did this mean? What did a famous poet
do all day....write poems? As the bus
slowly moved forward I sat quietly,
looking at the back of his balding head
and wondering what he was thinking as we
rolled west on 14th Street.
As a teenager I began reading Ginsberg's poetry and dug it immediately. Until this time, most poetry sounded etherial and left me cold, but Allen spoke in an earthy language that I understood. He wrote in vivid word-pictures that I recognized as part of my world, stirring up strange emotions I didn't know I had. The first time I ever hung out with Allen was during the long hot summer night of August 6, 1988. A tense stand-off between the police and protestors was ominously growing in front of Tompkins Square Park as the police tried to enforce a midnight curfew for the first time in the park's history. A few moments before riot cops clashed with the angry crowd, a taxicab pulled up on Avenue A, and out stepped Allen, bald and bewildered. He was returning to the city after a trip abroad and was unaware of the conflict that was presently erupting into a full scale riot. I ran up to him and quickly ex-plained the situation: Local real estate interests had |
|
pressured the police to patrol and curfew
the newly gentrified Tompkins Square
district and sweep out the homeless,
punks, radicals and late night revelers
who were keeping property values down.
Suddenly, the crowd went wild as an army of helmeted cops on horses charged up the avenue, swinging nightsticks and attacking protestors and bystanders alike. Allen and I abruptly turned up 11th Street and continued our conversation about real estate, drugs and police corruption. We heard a thunderous sound from above and felt a hot wind blowing from a police helicopter hovering low above us. Amid the sound and fury of this midsummer apocalypse, Allen calmly recited poetry (Blake...or Wordsworth?) as we wandered down the midnight street. By this time the riot had spilled out into the neighborhood at large and the police were out of control--clubbing anyone in sight. When we reached Second Avenue, a shirtless teenager staggered toward us in shock. We noticed long red marks on his back from billy clubs. Allen gently approached him asking if he was alright. The boy was clearly disoriented and frightened. Allen took him by the arm and helped him away as the police charged again down Second Avenue, and I lost Allen in the shuffle. |
A couple of years later when I bumped into Allen on the sidewalk and he realized that I was the artist who had drawn so many of the political posters in the neighborhood, he admitted that for years he had been peeling them off brick walls and collecting them at home. He suggested we do a poster together, which we did. Over time, we collaborated on many projects, bouncing his words off of my pictures. Last year, we published a large book entitled Illuminated Poems (By Four Walls Eight Windows), which contains dozens of Allen's poems and songs illustrated by paintings, drawings and strips which I la-bored on for over three years. The last time I saw Allen was four months ago when he called me on the phone and asked me to join him for Chinese food at Mee Noodle House on East 13th Street, his favorite restaurant where we would often meet. When I arrived, there was Allen sitting with Peter Orlovsky, his poet friend and lover of forty years. As we ate, we discussed current events as well as my recent slide lecture tour of Europe. I had visited as many art museums as possible over there and Allen was familiar with the works of my favorite painter, Pieter Bruegel. The subject of "The Triumph of Death" by Bruegel arose, and I attempted to analyze the painting as an historical allegory to the Black Plague that swept Europe during the Middle Ages. Allen shook his head, saying that No, |
|
the
painting's theme was much broader....that
the actual subject was the inevitability
of death from which no one escapes.
He paid the check and we split for Allen's new apartment across the street. After twenty years in a 12th Street tenement, he moved uptown one block to 13th Street in a daring act of upward mobility. (He was having serious heart problems and this new building had an elevator in it.) Allen gave me a grand tour of his new loft space, excitedly leading me from one room to the next, grinning like a kid with a brand new toy. The joint was nice alright, lots of space, light--and the downstairs lobby didn't smell like piss. Then Allen turned to me wistfully and said "But you know...it's really too bad." "Whatta ya mean?" I asked, |
"Allen! You've
finally arrived!" He had a bittersweet
expression on his face. "Yeah, but I
could've really used a nice big place like
this when I was younger--I could've had
great parties in here!...And now...I'm not
gonna be around much longer."
He walked me to the elevator and kissed me goodbye. The door swung shut and a minute later I was back on the street again. As I wander the neighborhood now on this rainy day, I feel the world to be a slightly dimmer place without Allen around--and yet I feel his energy has been transfered to us--Yes! All of us need to turn up the heat several degrees, as we step out of this holy millenium into the next. ***** |
SHADOW|SHADOW Mail Order|SHADOW Staff|MediaFilter|"> PoMoWar|Artists on MediaFilter|CHAOS|WarZone MediaFilter Chat