I’m on a train, Italian, to Dublin, late. A phonecall – “can you speak on radio about Ginsberg and Howl? Tomorrow morning?”
Erm, “I’m on a train. Then, a plane. I’ve no books. I’ll think of something.”
A man comes in. Multicoloured mother-baked jumper, matted hair, beads adorning a wrist or two, smells of subway piss, might have dotted himself with patchouli on days-release, when on his meds, for even keel. But not today.
Nut this month.
He moans. Ah, he’s the one who was singing, last stop. A raddled schizophrenic vacuum gaze pierces my nape, my ears, my soul. His madness is tapping me on the shoulder and my madness doesn’t want to come out to play, today. I’ve got work to do. Can’t you see, I’m busy, writing about Mr Allen Ginsberg, a very important poet?
His call to alms is a cracked record. He’s hungry, he’s hungry. So am I. I scribble away. He ups his pitch and ante.
He lifts up a red and yellow umbrella and points it at my head. I become perfectly still. It dawns on me, a cold and winter grey dawn, that I am on my own with him, that shouting would be no use in the rattling empty carriage. He weighs his options, I weigh mine. He taps me on my right temple, three times.
“Fuck off,” I say, and in the circs, quite matter-of-fact. Hearing my English, he switches records, and declares he’s Saddam Hussein, that he knows where Osama is. But, he’s satisfied to get a reaction; slowly, teasingly, he puts down his umbrella and, in his own time – no rush – leaves.
A visitation. Enter Ginsberg’s world, and madness taps you on the temple, you get invaded, your defences are stripped away. Miss Liminality, 1956. On the borderline between this world and the next, between order and chaos. Body and spirit. Sanity and madness. An extraordinary mindfulness, an unbearable presence in the moment, a sensitivity to other dimensions that we only catch glimpses of. For very good reasons – to know those dimensions is to disintegrate. But Ginsberg celebrates, rejoices, listens. He is impossibly open. Dances like a sprite on the edge, plays “the actual ping-pong of the abyss.”
But for me – Ginsberg is a lover. He’s a man who loves taking it up the ass, and he writes about it so lovingly, that I can only rejoice. He loves sex, hard sex, tender sex, male sex, queer sex, and he brings a sensitivity and a gentleness to it that I don’t think has been bettered since.
In Howl, he speaks of those
“Who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy”
He dares us to be ashamed, embarrassed, coy, and takes our breath away, still. He is the naked terrorist, the man who literally takes off his clothes and harries a heckler from a hall shouting ““a poet always stands naked before the world!” Can we look at his body? Can we look at our own bodies, unflinchingly?
Here’s his poem “Sphincter” from 1986:
I hope my good old asshole holds out
60 years it’s been mostly OK
Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation
survived the altiplano hospital--
a little blood, no polyps, occasionally
a small hemorrhoid
active, eager, receptive to phallus
coke bottle, candle, carrot
banana & fingers -
Now AIDS makes it shy, but still
eager to serve -
out with the dumps, in with the
condom’d
orgasmic friend -
still rubbery muscular,
unashamed wide open for joy
But another 20 years who knows,
old folks got troubles everywhere –
necks, prostates, stomachs, joints--
Hope the old hole stays young
till death, relax
As well as his longtime companion, Peter Orlovsky, in his poem Death and Fame, written in the last year of his life, he celebrates his dozens of lovers, perhaps a hundred, more, and imagines them all meeting at his funeral, comically, “crowds surprised to see each other”, ceremonial at place of honour. From Neal Cassidy, the muse from On the Road and Howl, to “young boys met naked recently, in bed”.
“We’d lie under covers gossip, read my poetry, hug & kiss belly to belly arms round each other”.
I’d love to have known him.
On the plane to Dublin, the woman beside me confides, she’s not homosexual or anything, but she’s always felt an outsider, under her skin.
That’s being a human being. And Ginsberg names it. The only thing that connects us, the spark that crosses the abyss from one to another, is when we name what it is like for us in the unbearable moment, the unflinching close-up, in that cold-lit mirror.
This morning, my mother says helpfully that reading doesn’t work on the radio. Oh.