How History Was Made by A Homosexual Zen Poet and His Friends

It was strange for me to realize that the beat poet Philip Whalen was not my generation.  In fact, he was born just a few years after my father.  I remember thinking when Whalen died in 2002, Damn - I never got to meet him.   That happens to me often, I'm afraid.

Whalen's obituary was in the New York Times, because he was part of the infamous Six Gallery Reading that launched Allen Ginsberg and his poem, "Howl," and led to a marvelous trial and the downfall of civilization as we knew it.  There is an excellent documentary about all that titled "Howl."  It is available on Netflix, and no doubt elsewhere.  That film that gave me a new appreciation of how the poem grew out of Ginsberg's life and his body and his then-illegal sexuality.  Ginsberg is on the right, Whalen on the left in the photo below.

 

How things change, and we change.  The Six Gallery Reading was in 1955.  That year I turned thirteen.  Though I was as interested in sexuality as any normal thirteen-year-old, I had never heard the word lesbian or met a man I thought was homosexual - the word that was used then.  At that time, I didn't notice the landmark lawsuit, which must have made national news, though no doubt was handled with asbestos gloves.  Some of it could not have been quoted on TV.

Forty years later I was teaching modern American lit at Ohio State.  Working from a big anthology, which we all had to carry in those antediluvian days, I put "Howl" on the agenda because its publication, and the lawsuit that led to, were events that changed the course of American literature and life.  I hadn't read it since I was an undergrad, but heck, everything was shocking in the sixties.  Sergeant Pepper was shocking.  I feel pretty sure certain lines were not read aloud or discussed in the classroom, even then, and I know certain words were not spoken.

Fast forward to the day we were studying the poem. I sat down to reread it to prepare, and this time I was paying attention.  I was shocked.  Most English grad students wouldn't have been, but I hadn't given up trying to be normal then.  Very normal, if you know what I mean.  And I was going to have to get up there and talk about it to a bunch of 19-year-olds, who look like they're in about fifth grade when you're in your fifties.  I recall beginning with a sort of apology and explanation, and hoping nobody would go to the Dean about it.

If you want to visit that poem, you can read it here.  You can simultaneously listen to an older Ginsberg read it, and he reads well.

And life goes on, and how we change. I keep getting less respectable, but Whalen went the other way, you might say.  There he is to the right in his robes several years before his death.  He had become a Zen priest.

And here is a link to a website with a Whalen poem that is one of my favorites, "Sourdough Mountain Lookout."  It is long, too, so if you choose to read it, you could light some incense and allow yourself time.  You will find it a nice antidote to "Howl."

Getting Through a Really Bad Day

“Jasmine/Never Sorry (for Ai Weiwei)” a light graffiti work by Vicki DaSilva

The above photo was published today in the NY Times.  This light graffiti will appear tonight 23 stories high on the side of a building in Times Square, a charming use of electricity, if you ask me.  It becomes more resonant if you know something about Ai Weiwei, (who is said to have 40 cats).

But I was going to write about getting through a horrible day.  Two of them, actually, yesterday and now today.  I'd expected to wake up much better, but I woke up dreaming about talking to a kindly spiritual advisor about how the class just wasn't working, and I wished he would visit more.  That got me remembering Dr. Paul Kerschner, minister of my youth, and that made me sad.  It was so long ago that he must be dead.  He appears nowhere on the internet, and he was a wonderful person.

Yesterday we went to church, hoping it would not be about Father's Day, and it wasn't.  The program was presented by a number of women connected to the School for Young Children at our church, and about play.  Letting them play.  Not judging kids, not pushing them, respecting them.

The more I heard stories of kids blooming under this treatment, the more I remembered my very lonely, strained childhood, the abuse I got constantly from my father and intermittently from my mother.  Later that afternoon we had a long talk with Tom's sister, who is just very down about their father's slow demise.  Today my father's ghost has been visiting, still tormenting me after 15 years despite lots of therapy and various mental tricks.  And poems.

Saturday I visited my friend Tina, who was just moved into hospice care.  We meditated together for years.  It was a good visit, short. She has terminal COPD and had to gasp to say two words.  She liked the hydrangea blooms I took her, pink and blue; she likes pink.  Had breast cancer years ago, and I noticed she was still wearing her pink elastic bracelet, though otherwise not adorned.

I am just not there Buddha-wise.  Tina is 76 and wearing out, and it's time for her to go, but it makes me sad. And it is always sad when people are not relaxed and happy about dying.  I think about John Tarrant's description of visiting a dying dharma buddy who accepted what was happening.  He calls it "just two men having lunch."  No sadness.  Well, okay, if you say so.  Maybe I'm resisting being a person like that. Though I'm still aiming for a relaxed death.  (Just not right now.)

Last night before bedtime the sky was illustriously beautiful, the air magic.  I wrote about it all this morning, for myself.  I looked up Allen Ginsberg's poem about Walt Whitman at the Supermarket, and read it to Tom.  We went and exercised.  Meeting my daughter for dinner soon.  Slowly the day has become less difficult. 

On staying disorganized

Contemplating space - not photoshopped

My friend Suzanne keeps Facebook alive these days by posting a question of the day.  Yesterday's was---If you could wake up tomorrow morning having gained any one ability or quality, what would it be? 
First thought, best thought I believe . . .

. . . and tracking down that phrase led me to a review in the NY Times of a book by that title, selections from Allen Ginsberg's interviews over the years. Wonderful where wasting time can take you.  Just this description of how Ginsberg worked in-spires me, fills me with the breath of creativity.

I suppose I was influenced by Ginsberg in my own method of writing poetry, as well as by an English major's immersion in the great modern poets and, like him, by Buddhist theory and practice.  It is a sort of mysticism.  The reviewer says--

Indeed, Buddhism taught him to eschew rationality in favor of ''ordinary'' or ''spontaneous'' mind, the vast sea of consciousness upon which our concepts and categories, anxieties and prohibitions, float like so much junk. Hence Ginsberg's compositional method, the moment-by-moment transcription of thoughts and images as they passed across his mind.

You can work like this in the visual arts, too.  Recently I marked some words by my current favorite artist, Joe Brainard, on how to make a collage.  He too was actively exploring the visual arts in the sixties, and developed on his own, with almost no academic training, a spontaneous way of working. His studio was a mess.

Back to Suzanne.  My first thought on seeing her question was, I'd like to be much more organized. To have everything in its place.  That would be in the material world - I am reconciled to a mind that is "a vast sea of consciousness" as long as it doesn't get to extremes.  And I realized as I wrote my reply to her that to be organized is fundamentally the opposite of being a spontaneous artist. (I am choosing that term, carefully - you do not "make spontaneous art," you live spontaneously, your discipline is being with, you are an artist.)  [Should that be parenthetical?]

I have sometimes thought of writing studies of the women I've known who were exemplary housekeepers, who kept their domiciles (they didn't feel like "homes") like new.  Not that one can argue from a few examples, just illustrate.  As far as I could ever discover in knowing them (relatives by marriage, alas), their minds were neat and sterile, too.  Interesting how men seldom or never concern themselves with the problem of housekeeping, isn't it?  Insert feminism here.  Have a day.