[In the following essay, Shechner determines the impact of Ginsberg's poetry on cultural and political events in the 1960s and 1970s and deems him “America's leading and perhaps only example of a power poet.”]

I. THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Living in an age of ornamental poetry in which the essential obligation of the poet is to produce allegories of his own sensitivity, we are likely to find ourselves out of touch with the audacious last line of Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry”: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What possible relation, we are bound to wonder, does our poetry have to legislation, to politics, to power? And if we could locate those elements in poetry that might bear some plausible connection to power, how would it be possible, in an age that neither honors nor even reads poetry, for a poet to become the legislator of the world, even an unacknowledged one?

Of course, Shelley's conception of poetry was a far cry from what we find when we open our Eliot, our Lowell, our Ashbery … whomever. His defense was rooted in the great dramatic and epic poets: Shakespeare, Sophocles, Plato (whom Shelley deemed a poet of ideas), Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. In the epic, the relation of poetry to the objects of this world is not a product of sensibility—the light cast by private intelligence upon a world of minor objects and tender emotions—but of a priestlike power to divine the spirit of the age from its great events and myths: war and peace, death and judgment, sin and salvation. Shelley's poet is the agent of vast invisible powers and, as such, a rival to those who hold the reigns of visible power. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words.”

They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.

This a heroic conception of the poet's calling and power, and we can scarcely survey the contemporary literary or artistic terrain and find such scope and ambition in anything but debased or parodic forms: the commercial hierophancy of rock stardom or the cinematic sublimities of the special effects workshop. No one undertakes serious epics these days; no one has the audacity to speak for the spirit of the age or to suppose that the power of words has anything but a subsidiary and ornamental relation to the power of armies or states.

Allen Ginsberg is the lone protester against the surrender of public poetry, having been, these thirty years since the publication of “Howl” in 1956, America's leading and perhaps only example of a power poet: a poet for whom the word is not only a medium of emotional power but a claimant to other forms of power as well. If his achievements have not rivalled his world-transforming ambitions, neither have they been self-deluding. Neither the Milton nor the Blake of our age, he has nonetheless, more than any other American writer since the war, crossed the border from sensibility to power and left his mark upon the events of his time.

My own initial experience of that power dates back to the events of Vietnam Day in Berkeley, California, in 1965. It was on November 20, 1965, that the first massive demonstration against the Vietnam War was mobilized in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was widely feared at the time that the Alameda County authorities (among whom was Edwin Meese, then an assistant district attorney) had deputized the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang to disrupt the march in order to disband and discredit it and had given the Angels carte blanche to do as they pleased without police interference. Ginsberg's role in the organization of that event was that of spiritual monitor: ordaining the spirit of the march, lowering its temperature, and above all, negotiating safe passage for the marchers into the Hell's Angels territory—Oakland—which he did at a public gathering by reading a poem, “To the Hell's Angels.”¹ The effect was precisely as Ginsberg had intended. Not only was the march not attacked by either police or Hell's Angels, several Angels joined it. A great social barrier was breached and a fragile synthesis of political rebels and social outlaws was effected that would last for four years until the organizers of the rock festival at Altamont employed Hell's Angels as security guards and were rewarded for their folly by violence, murder, and the symbolic death of the spirit of the sixties.

“To the Hell's Angels” and an introductory manifesto, “How to Make a March/Spectacle,” were published in the Berkeley Barb and distributed throughout the Bay Area as part of Ginsberg's campaign to secure a peaceful march by sweetening its mood, defusing public anxiety, and arousing media interest, and it was evident at the time that Ginsberg was the only person around with the moral credentials to do anything like that. On all sides, even among Alameda County officials, Ginsberg's authority to pronounce on matters of public conduct was unquestioned. For a moment, Ginsberg stood forth not only as the guru of the peace movement but as the unanointed priest and the unacknowledged legislator of San Francisco.

“How to Make a March/Spectacle” was a brilliant gesture toward transforming the culture of politics from one of conflict and confrontation to one of playfulness and innocence. It was a twenty-point call for the infusion of imagination and play into politics and a lesson in how to prevent an explosion by relaxing one's own reflexes and defusing one's own inclination to violence. It also demonstrated a shrewd grasp of the value of public relations and image making in the formation of a political movement. Seen in the context of the Marxist political culture in which Ginsberg was raised, it was conspicuous in its opposition to agitprop, seeking as it did to create a political spirit through a theater of relaxation rather than of agitation.

If imaginative, pragmatic, fun, gay, happy, secure Propaganda is issued to mass media in advance (and pragmatic leaflets handed out days in advance giving marchers instructions)

The parade can be made into an exemplary spectacle on how to handle situations of anxiety and fear/threat (such as Spectre of Hells Angels or Spectre of communism)

To manifest by concrete example, namely the parade itself, how to change war psychology and surpass, go over, the habit-image-reaction of fear/violence.

Calling for masks, costumes, toys, candy bars (to be given to Hell's Angels and police), flowers, mothers, children, grandparents, and musical instruments, it was a prescription for a gathering of the innocents and a showdown with fear and intimidation. The poem too, a rough piece of occasional verse at best, was a plea against violence and an invitation to the Angels to join the spiritual revolution.

To take the heat off, you've got
                    to take the heat off
                              inside yourselves—
                    Find Peace means stop hating yourself
stop hating people who hate you
stop reflecting heat
                              there are people who are not heat
                              the most of peace marchers are not heat
They want you to join them to relieve
                    the heat on you & on all of us.

Among the recollections I continue to treasure of those times this one stands out: that of Allen Ginsberg as the impresario of that moment when 100,000 people marched through the Bay Area guided by his spirit of play and his rules of peaceable conduct. At that moment, no one else in the Bay Area, maybe not in America, politician or priest, commanded the moral authority of this balding, bearded, libertine, homosexual, Jewish poet.

It goes without saying that to speak of Ginsberg this way is to speak of the man apart from his poetry, and it is true that while poetry has been the vehicle for Ginsberg's spiritual power, the power is something apart from the poetry and vastly more provocative. It is not beyond noticing that Ginsberg's reputation as a cultural figure over the years has exceeded his esteem as a poet, and it is apparently the case that the figure of the poet-shaman looms larger in the public imagination than the poetry. We can count in Ginsberg's collected works a handful of great poems—certainly “Howl” and “Kaddish” rank as great modern poems—and perhaps a dozen others that reward rereading. But by and large the Collected Poems, 1947-1980 is less the record of sustained creative achievement than a hectic tsimmes of landscapes, dreams, jeremiads, exorcisms, anathemas, and prophecies, some of them violent and electric, many of them excruciatingly dull.² Despite Ginsberg's conscious effort to be the Whitman of his time—bard, visionary, and prophet of adhesive love—Collected Poems is no Leaves of Grass; it lacks the discipline and sustained power. In Ginsberg's case, it is the example of the life, and the myth that surrounds it, that is destined to last, while the greater part of the poetry is likely to retain only documentary interest. More so than with any other contemporary writer, even Mailer, Ginsberg's writing is a background to the man, evidence of his moral character, rather than an object of primary interest.

II. THE CONVERT AS CULTURE HERO

Ginsberg's has been a mythic life, not only as he has lived it but as he has imagined it. He is a convert, who, by his own account, has experienced a moment of enlightenment and has devoted his subsequent life to recreating and justifying that moment. Not unlike Mailer, though in more profound fashion, Ginsberg has cast off the given terms of his being and recycled himself as a higher brand of being. He is the legendary man who escaped the initial ground rules of his life and created himself as a visionary figure. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Paterson, New Jersey, his father a poet and schoolteacher, his mother insane and institutionalized while he was still young, his own emotions askew and his sexual identity in tatters, Ginsberg was handed an unpromising life script. As his letters, journals, and early poetry all suggest, he was cut out to be an emotional cripple, a victim of injuries so vast that only the most resolute of wills was likely to overcome them.³ Ginsberg's youth was an apprenticeship in failure, and yet he altered the deadly prognosis: by way of Blake and Buddhism he became that mythic American, the self-made man. More bookish, more resolutely literary than any of the other beat writers, he rescued himself through books. What else shall we make of the Blake vision that set into motion his career as a poet but this—that here was a man on his way down who was saved by poetry? Little wonder that he is honored these days in the academy, to whose basic values—dispassionate toil, restraint, objectivity—he is seemingly so anathema, for he is a living defense of the literary vocation.

Ginsberg's myth of himself, then, is one of self-transcendence and transfiguration; he is the man who by vision, by will, by discipline brought himself back from limbo and converted his frailties into powers, his hallucinations into visions, his alienations into prophecies, his wounds into bows. “The story of Ginsberg's development,” observes George Dennison, “is the story of a great leap. I do not mean from one stage of mastery to another, but a leap of being which transforms life itself into a hazardous, yet brilliantly exciting, field of values.”⁴

The key to this transcendence is the famous Blake vision, of which we have perhaps a half dozen accounts, the fullest of which was in the 1966 Paris Review interview.⁵ In 1948, the twenty-two-year-old Ginsberg was lying on his bed in his apartment in Harlem, having just masturbated, looking out the window at the sky and the cornices of Harlem. Isolated, depressed, lonely, his pants open and a Blake book on his lap, he heard a voice reciting the lines of “Ah, Sunflower.” “Suddenly it seemed that I saw into the depths of the universe, by looking simply into the ancient sky.”

The sky suddenly seemed very ancient. And this was the very ancient place that he was talking about, the sweet golden clime, I suddenly realized that this existence was it! And, that I was born in order to experience up to this very moment that I was having this experience, to realize what this was all about—in other words that this was the moment that I was born for. This initiation. Or this vision or this consciousness, of being alive unto myself, alive myself unto the Creator. As the son of the Creator—who loved me, I realized, or who responded to my desire, say. It was the same desire both ways.

This was a moment of initiation, when a life of longing, isolation, and loneliness was suddenly redeemed by the trembling of the veil.

In an instant the meaning of Ginsberg's life was turned inside out: absolute purposelessness became divine purpose, the emptiness of daily life became the fullness of spirit, the despair of masturbation became the threshold of vision (and, by extension, sex of any form became a visionary threshold), tedium became exaltation, lovelessness (his abandonment by Neal Cassady) became divine love, poetry became prophecy, the son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg became the son of the Creator. It is not difficult to take a cynical view of such a vision, to see it patently as wish fulfillment, a desperate longing for love, direction, and purpose magically answered by the voice of William Blake in one's own room. To read Blake at such moments—in the depths of spiritual agony and open to ultimate realities—is to be susceptible to such epiphanies.

What elevates the vision from wish fulfillment into something more serious is the discipline it inaugurates: the renovation of oneself to affirm the vision and to fulfill the prophecy inherent in it. That is what distinguishes a conversion from an awakening: the vision is taken for a calling and life becomes a devotion to powers greater than oneself. In recompense for such subordination, one dons the mantle and assumes the powers of the devotional object. One begins as an acolyte and becomes a priest.

III. THE DISCIPLINE

In our time it is sometimes hard to distinguish a discipline of the spirit from a surrender to the flesh, especially where the discipline is one that attributes spiritual benefits to sexual indulgences: Reichianism, for example, or some of the Buddhist sects that have taken up residence in the transcendental corners of the United States: Colorado or Oregon. In Ginsberg's case, the alloy of ascetic practices and orgiastic surrenders makes it difficult to know where he has been putting his spirit to school and where just indulging his appetites, though to a Blakean the appetites are just handmaidens to the spirit anyway. But if a simple sensuality is to be one's discipline, why also bother to become a Buddhist? Why not just go out and get laid? Aren't there simpler ways to cultivate one's hedonism?

That is not answerable except by Ginsberg himself, and most of his own accounts of his spiritual odyssey are so opaque that it is virtually impossible to divine clear purposes from them.⁶ It seems that Ginsberg has been in pursuit of perhaps as many as three distinct disciplines which, though they appear integrated in him do not necessarily belong together: a discipline of the flesh, whose aim is pleasure and an intimacy with the passions; a vision quest, which seeks mystical knowledge; and a discipline of inner peace, which seeks to quell the inner riot, master the arts of harmony, balance, and calm, and marshall the scattered powers of the mind. The hedonism and the vision quest, with their Blakean sanction, are central to Ginsberg's life and writing up through the early 1960s. The spiritual tours to North Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in search of spiritual guidance and to Mexico and Peru in quest of more powerful hallucinogens, the ecstatic cross-country trips “to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out eternity,” all represent the same hectic rush for epiphany. But none of it suggests discipline, except insofar as the quest itself is one's discipline.

The Indian trip of 1962-63 was a watershed for Ginsberg. He went to India as a free-lance visionary, a seeker after grand spiritual truths in the American fashion, by luck and by pluck, and returned with the makings of a systematic culture of the spirit—at least the terminology and the mantras if not always the rigor. He was not a Gary Snyder, who could dedicate himself methodically to the rigors of Zen. More restless and eclectic, more passionate and turbulent than Snyder, Ginsberg could never submit himself entirely to any discipline of renunciation. The best he could do was surround old appetites with new meanings and obey the counsel of Swami Shivananda, which he is fond of quoting: “Your own heart is the Guru,” a doctrine that, in effect, anoints the path you happen to be walking as the path of enlightenment.⁷

The practical effect of such a counsel would be to reinforce the Blakean dictum about the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom. This identity of excess and wisdom is a sustaining principle of Ginsberg's sense of himself as well as of his public identity as the man who has plumbed the depths of experience and surfaced with his innocence intact and with fresh insights into the human heart and its troubles. Surely that helps us understand why the extraliterary paraphernalia of Ginsberg's life—the letters, journals, table talk, and lectures—should matter as much to the public image as his poetry and occupy a special place in our literature.⁸ It is the documentation of a saint's life, recording in minute and often tedious detail the steps from innocence to experience, from beatness to beatitude, from weakness to power. Ginsberg is a hero for the therapeutic age, a saint of indulgence who has publicly subjected his heart to whatever it can bear and survived his ordeals not jaded but eager for more experience.

It has done no damage to the myth that Ginsberg has viewed his life in a didactic and missionary light and has sought opportunities to publicize himself through readings, lectures, rallies, and public appearances. More than any other writer of our time except Paul Goodman—and for reasons similar to Goodman's—Ginsberg has a special affinity for the young and regularly tours the colleges and prep schools with his harmonium and his entourage playing Blake songs, singing mantras, casting spells and charms, and reciting agitational poems about love and sex, war, and the fall of America. Ginsberg's fetishes by now have congealed into a curriculum, and his association with the Naropa Institute and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, has given him an institutional setting in which to pursue his calling as a teacher and his lifelong avocation of student. Perhaps in those contexts the teachings have the structure and formal unity of a discipline, but as seen through the writings they are scattered and unsystematic and, when examined closely, not so simple as they may sound. The Ginsberg curriculum is an impasto of antimilitarism, anti-authoritarianism (though there are some exceptions that bear examining), political anarchism, libidinal liberation, homosexuality, spiritual adventure, and carpe diem.

Though Ginsberg is not a Reichian through any formal allegiance, he nonetheless can be taken for an incarnation of Reich's sexually improved man, the genital character, who, by virtue of his unarmored erotic nature, will not tolerate a politics that is not consistent with his sexuality: open, democratic, communitarian. It does seem that for Ginsberg sex ordains a politics: that the polymorphousness of his sexual instincts demands a tolerant politics, not only because the political realm should draw lessons from the sexual but because such natures as his own can thrive only under conditions of maximum political toleration, conditions that obtain only in liberal democracies. For all Ginsberg's anathemas of American society, he understands that he thrives in America far better than he ever could in the “socialist” countries, two of which, Cuba and Czechoslovakia, saw fit in the 1960s to have him deported. Then, in the sixties, Ginsberg consistently represented his bad experiences in the socialist countries as simple reflections of his experiences under capitalism. Thus in “Kraj Majales,” his poem about being expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1965 after being crowned King of May (Kraj Majales) by Czech students, he wrote:

And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked,
and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy
and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for their own glamour
in the Future, but now drink vodka and lament the Security Forces
and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on airplanes but let Indian brown millions starve
and when Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is arrested or robbed or had [sic] his head cut off. …

The kingdom of youth and love and poesy—that is, sexual youth and the long hair of Adam and the beard of the body—is the counteragent to both:

And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
And I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard of my own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kraj Majales in the Czechoslovakian tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name. …

As if to resolve any ambiguity about his meaning, Ginsberg had the poem published in a broadside by Oyez Press in 1965, the text flanked by woodcuts of Ginsberg naked except for sneakers, standing inside of obelisks in the form of erect penises.⁹

“Kraj Majales” was a doctrinal statement for the sixties, a rejection of states and politics in favor of being “King of May that sleeps with teenagers laughing.” To be sure, sleeping with teenage boys is a far cry from anything that Reich himself countenanced in touting “full genitality.” Indeed, a glance at the indices of his major books suggests that Reich did not acknowledge homosexuality at all, let alone pederasty, as a vehicle for the “orgasm reflex.” But once you've singled out the orgasm as the sine qua non of mental health, to extend that axiom to voluntary coupling of any kind seems no more than a simple extrapolation from first principles.

IV. DICTATORSHIP OF THE POETARIAT

It is easy enough to dismiss the theorem that sex ordains politics as romantic, untestable, and downright simple-minded. But that does not rule out the possibility that there may be some natures for whom it is true. What is impossible for most of us may be mandatory for others. The fusion of sex and politics in Ginsberg reminds us of no one so much as Reich himself, and the insistence on the sexual realm as the prototype of the political and therefore a window of therapeutic intervention is not only a Reichian idea but the outgrowth of a similar nature, one that has globalized sexuality and made it a touchstone for all other forms of relationship.

But the proposition that sex ordains politics urges us to have a second look at Ginsberg's values and to ask whether they are precisely as we have usually taken them to be: libertarian, egalitarian, fraternal, adhesive—in short, Enlightenment values raised to the nth power by homosexuality and anarchism. For the sex, when it is made explicit, looks more like a tableau from the Marquis de Sade than an argument out of Mill's On Liberty. The model of sexuality that Ginsberg presents in his poetry is commonly one of mastery and submission, in which violence or the threat of it enhances the erotic frisson. Images of this are scattered throughout the Collected Poems, from the “best minds of my generation” who “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” to the abject entreaties, in the 1968 poem “Please Master,” to be treated in love like a dog.

Please master call me a dog, an ass beast, a wet asshole,
& fuck me more violent, my eyes hid with your palms round my skull
& plunge down in a brutal hard lash thru soft drip-fish
& throb thru five seconds to spurt your semen heat
over & over, bamming it in while I cry out your name I do love you please Master.(10)

Ginsberg spoke bluntly about the sexual/religious joy of submitting to power in the Gay Sunshine interview, telling Allen Young, “There's a mysticism when you screw somebody in the ass, or in being screwed. There's a great mysticism in being screwed and accepting the new lord divine coming into your bowels—‘Please Master.’”¹¹

If Ginsberg's sexual and social metaphysics are of a piece, as I suspect they are, such bedroom politics are bound to have corollaries in his social visions and practices. But what precisely are they? For on the face of them, the politics we are familiar with are apparently unrelated to “please master” sexuality. The familiar politics are those of malediction and of what Reed Whittemore has called “the thirties vogue of super-colossal system damnation.”¹² Thirty years of antiwar, anticapitalist, and anti-authoritarian poetry and pronouncements leave us no doubt about what Ginsberg abominates. From the rousing Moloch chant in “Howl” (“Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks”) in 1956 through “Kraj Majales” in 1965 to a 1980 jeremiad entitled “Birdbrain” (“Birdbrain is the ultimate product of Capitalism”), Ginsberg's maledictions against organized power of any kind, especially American capitalism, have remained consistent.¹³ Ginsberg occasionally changes his emphases, but he never changes his mind. Certainly one line of inquiry invites us to look at the Marxism of Ginsberg's youth, which formed his basic attitudes toward the American Moloch and schooled him in the rhetoric of invective. “America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” In that, Ginsberg, who sometimes gives the illusion of being a social tabula rasa who sprang full grown from a Platonic idea of himself, has been true to the visions of his communist mother and socialist father. “America free Tom Mooney / America save the Spanish Loyalists.” In his most fundamental political instincts, Ginsberg retains the Marxist vision of America as the capitalist juggernaut, which may account for the fact that though he celebrates Blake, Whitman, Pound, and Williams as his poetic mentors, an ear sensitive to the marching rhythms of depression-era poetry has no trouble picking up in Ginsberg's line echoes of Kenneth Fearing.

In the sixties, the system damnation and global malediction guaranteed him a friendly reception by college audiences, since it put him in tune with the general revulsion against predatory capitalism that swept the campuses. In Vietnam, the mask of Yankee benevolence (the Marshall Plan, CARE, the Peace Corps) was off and Moloch was the face America showed to the world, and it was not hard to gain converts to the view that the basic American motive was profit and that all operations of American power were the brutal exploits of Daddy Warbucks on the march. In the post-Vietnam era, however, when manifestations of American power have been more ambiguous and when Ginsberg's own politics have been put to the test, his fidelity to the madcap improvisation and egalitarian anarchism of Vietnam Day has been called into question.

Ginsberg's ambiguities were brought into focus in 1975 by an event of near-mythic stature by now in the poetic community, involving Ginsberg, the poet W. S. Merwin, and Ginsberg's spiritual mentor since the early 1970s, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (Rinpoche being his title, like “the honorable” or “his excellency”).¹⁴ Trungpa founded, in 1974, the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, under whose auspices Ginsberg directs the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A direct descendant, by a mystical inheritance akin to apostolic succession, of the Kagypa and Karmapa orders of Tibetan Buddhism, Trungpa is to the Dalai Lama more or less what the Archbishop of Canterbury is to Rome. Born in Tibet in 1938 and identified in his infancy by the monks of the Surmang monastery as the eleventh incarnation of Trungpa Tulku, he was raised to be the supreme religious leader of the Karmapa order. When China invaded Tibet in 1959, Trungpa fled across the Himalayas to India and from there to Oxford to study. After leaving Oxford he settled in Scotland, where he founded the Samye-ling meditation center. In 1970, he established the first Tibetan meditation center in America, Tail of the Tiger in Vermont, where he began to make contact with American poets. In 1974, Trungpa moved to Boulder and founded the Naropa Institute, which has become the center of Buddhist teaching and organization in America.

During his travels, Trungpa picked up a number of poet-disciples who interested him in attaching a program in poetics to the Naropa Institute. That eventually became the Kerouac School, whose annual summer program, featuring the brightest stars in America's poetic firmament, is the closest thing we have had to an American Helicon since the closing of Black Mountain College. The relation between Naropa and the Kerouac School has not been without its strains, however, and the locus classicus of them was a party held at the Vajradhatu Seminary in Snowmass, Colorado, in 1975. It was a wild and drunken party—Trungpa is a notorious drinker—at which some people were forcibly undressed by Trungpa's bodyguards and Trungpa himself removed his clothes and tied a red scarf around his penis. The poet W. S. Merwin was there with Hawaiian poetess Dana Naone. Appalled at the goings on, they retreated to their room early that evening. Noting their absence, Trungpa ordered his guards to fetch and bring them down, by force if necessary, which led to a smashing down of their door and a violent confrontation between Merwin and the guards. Merwin, a pacifist, attempted briefly to defend himself with a broken beer bottle but was overcome by force and the sight of blood (he cut one of the guards) and submitted at last to the dharma police.

Confronted by Trungpa and surrounded by a crowd of partying acolytes, Merwin and Naone were chastised for their rudeness in declining Trungpa's hospitality. During one exchange, Trungpa threw sake in Merwin's face and made disparaging remarks about Naone's consorting with a white man. Trungpa invited the couple to make amends by disrobing, and when they refused, he ordered his guards to forcibly undress them. Merwin later wrote an account of the event in a letter to Ed Sanders' “investigative poetry group,” which conducted and published an inquiry into the incident in 1977.

They dragged us apart, and it was then that Dana started screaming. Several of them on each of us, holding us down. Only two men, Dennis White and Bill King … said a word to try to stop it, on Dana's behalf. Trungpa stood up and punched Bill King in the face, called him a son-of a-bitch, and told him not to interfere. The guard grabbed Bill King and got him out of there. One of the guards who'd stayed out of it went out and vomited, as we heard later. When I was let go I got up and lunged at Trungpa. But there were three guards in between, and all I could swing at him, through the crowd, was a left, which was wrapped in the towel, and scarcely reached his mouth. It didn't amount to much, and I was dragged off, of course.¹⁵

The public humiliation of Merwin and Naone apparently satisfied Trungpa and released a pent up hedonism in the others, who then began to disrobe and return to the party. Merwin and Naone fled back to their room but inexplicably stayed on at Vajradhatu for three more weeks of teachings.

The relevance of this event to Ginsberg was that, as Trungpa's disciple and associate, he was presented with a challenge to clarify his values, to reaffirm his commitments to nonviolent and noncoercive relations, and to distance himself from the politics of humiliation and force. His reaction was a disappointment to much of the poetic community.

In an interview with Tom Clark, who had conducted the excellent 1966 interview of Ginsberg for Paris Review, Ginsberg spoke candidly about his relations to Trungpa and his views of the Merwin incident and admitted to mixed feelings, though not before admonishing Clark, “You know, you're talking about my love life. My extremely delicate love life, my relations with my teacher.”

It's really complicated. And as all love lives, it's shot through with strange emotions, and self questionings, and paranoias, and impulses. So to reduce it to discussion with reference to cultural artifacts like the Bill of Rights. …¹⁶

On the one hand, the charge of Buddhist fascism that Merwin would later raise struck a chord in Ginsberg, who ruefully conceded that he may have led the poetic/bardic movement into a cultic trap.

I accuse myself all the time of seducing the entire poetry scene and Merwin into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship which they'll never get out of again and which will ruin American culture forever. Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the Tibetan monsters. All the monsters of the Tibetan Book of the Dead might come out and get everybody to take L.S.D.¹⁷

On the other hand he was not above expressing outrage over Dana Naone's crying out, in a moment of terror, “Call the police,” while divine mysteries were being revealed.

In the middle of that scene, to yell “Call the Police”—do you realize how vulgar that was? The Wisdom of the East was being unveiled, and she's going, “Call the police!” I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip 'em naked, break down the door!

And rising to bardic levels of invective, Ginsberg condemned nothing less than the principles of liberty, privacy, and individual choice which, alongside those of illumination and transcendence, appear to be the ideologies of a corrupt American theocracy.

So, yes, it is true that Trungpa is questioning the very foundations of American democracy. Absolutely. … So he's pointing out that “in God we trust” is printed on the money. And that “we were endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That Merwin has been endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trungpa is asking if there's any deeper axiomatic basis than some creator coming along and guaranteeing his rights.

Because one of the interesting things that the Buddhists point out is that there's always a sneaking God around somewhere, putting down these inalienable rights. Urizen is around somewhere. And they're having to deal not only with the communists and the fascists and the capitalists, they also have to deal with the whole notion of God, which is built right into the Bill of Rights. The whole foundation of American democracy is built on that, and it's as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

It isn't just the image of Allen Ginsberg as our leading anarchist that was shattered by these events; so was the Reichian myth of unfettered eros as the guarantor of free and democratic politics. It may be objected that Ginsberg was the wrong test case for a sex-pol morality and that his homosexuality, with its insistent dynamics of mastery and submission and its currents of sadism and masochism was not the brand of sexuality Reich and other sexual millenarians have envisioned. But that won't wash. Sex-pol morality was always, at bottom, a morality of measure, number, and degree that, transubstantiating quantity into quality, implicitly equated the gratifications of frequent orgasm with the creation of a democratic and libertarian spirit. The cornerstone of sex-pol doctrine is that this displacement upward is automatic and that a heightened consciousness flows like water or élan vital from the gonads to the heart and mind. The gratified man, for Reich as for Blake, has no truck with kings or apparatchiks or bankers or rinpoches.

The example of Ginsberg should be enough to shatter that myth once and for all. His religious life and his sexual life would seem to be cut from the same cloth, whether or not Trungpa is, as Ginsberg intimates in the Clark interview, his lover. From those hierarchical power relations has grown a tolerance for spiritual monarchies and a diminished appreciation for such imperfect works of the secular mind as the Bill of Rights.

It is twenty years since the Vietnam Day march, and the spirit of play that animated that event now seems a relic of forgotten innocence, of a belief in the redemption of politics through brightening of the human spirit. Ours is a less optimistic age, and Ginsberg himself, approaching sixty (as of 1985), seems a less optimistic and certainly a less transcendent figure. If he still mesmerizes his audiences with the harmonium, the chants, the finger cymbals, and the Blake songs, he also plies his trade in a three-piece suit, looking as though the dharma had joined forces with the corporation and enlightenment were henceforth to be conducted as a business. (At Naropa, as everywhere else in transcendental America, revelation is run by lawyers and accountants.) Perhaps it is that the poetry has lost some of its authority; certainly no poetry since the cross-country “vortex” poems of the mid- and late sixties is charged with any great force, and force has always been Ginsberg's particular métier as a poet. Perhaps too it is that his spiritual life has come to rest in a Buddhism that looks disappointingly mundane to an outsider, undistinguishable from a dozen transient cults that have come and gone since the sixties, all boasting the keys to sacred knowledge and inner peace and all looking remarkably like IBM or the United States Marine Corps in their corporate structures. Or the CPUSA Ginsberg knew as a youngster. It is not beyond speculating that some fatal conjunction of a nostalgia for political authority and craving for sexual authority has bound him to a theocratic institution that he has mistaken for an antidote to an imperfect American democracy.

Ginsberg's distinction for many of us twenty years ago was his appearance of having stepped out of time and taken up residence in a higher world, despite the vehement earthiness of his poems and their insistent tale of pain, confusion, and mortality. But that appearance was an illusion. Even when he was locked in bitter struggle with it, Ginsberg was always quintessentially a man of his era, even if he had to invent that era, as in some measure he did, in order to get in step with it. Now, in the eighties, his acceptance of the discipline, the ritual, and the corporate structure of an organized religion would seem to put him in tune with the Zeitgeist he once appeared to defy. But he defied it, we now see, in much the way a helium balloon defies gravity, by obeying it according to his own nature. And helium now appears to be in short supply.

Our last icon of the sixties, Ginsberg has shown himself to be fallible, like the rest of us, and not finally a moral exemption whose errors are windows of revelation. He is a man rather whose mistakes are symbols of limitation and need—like the rest of us. Our leading transcendental poet, he now comes into focus not through his charms and spells, his rites of the spirit or doctrines of the breath, but through his confusion, his fallibility, and his mortality, as a man of this world, neither more nor less. And that is the best way to think about Ginsberg.

Notes

1. See Allen Ginsberg, “Berkeley Vietnam Days” and “To the Hell's Angels,” Liberation (January 1966): 42-47. The poem appeared in the Berkeley Barb as “To The Angels” and is reprinted in Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels (London: Penguin, 1967), 258-65.

2. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Hereafter abbreviated CP.

3. See Mark Shechner, review of Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties; As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady; and Mind Breaths; by Allen Ginsberg, Partisan Review 46:1 (1979): 105-112. Revised and reprinted in Lewis Hyde, ed., On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 331-41.

4. George Dennison, “Remarks from a ‘Symposium on the Writer's Situation,’” New American Review 9 (April 1970): 105-12. Reprinted in Hyde, 451.

5. Interview with Allen Ginsberg, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 279-320. The passages on the Blake vision are reprinted in Hyde, 120-30.

6. The search for definitions would have to start with Ginsberg's own journals, the Indian Journal: March 1962-May 1963 (San Francisco: Dave Hasselwood Books and City Lights Books, 1970) and Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: Grove Press, 1977).

7. See the dedication to Indian Journal, p. 4.

8. In addition to the journals there are Ginsberg and William Burroughs, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963); Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974); Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine Interview with Allen Young (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1974), and As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady, ed. Barry Gifford (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977).

9. This broadside is reproduced in CP, p. 355.

10. CP, 94-95.

11. Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine Interview, 37.

12. Reed Whittemore, “From ‘Howl’ to Om,” review of Indian Journals, New Republic 163 (July 25, 1970): 17-18. Reprinted in Hyde, 200-202.

13. “Howl,” CP, 126-33; “Kraj Majales,” CP, 353-55; “Birdbrain,” CP, 738-39.

14. There are several versions of this event and accounts of Trungpa and his operation. The first and most thoroughly documented is The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary, prepared and written by members of the Investigative Poetry Group under the direction of Ed Sanders (Woodstock, New York: Poetry, Crime and Culture Press, 1977). Others are Tom Clark, The Great Naropa Poetry Wars (Santa Barbara: Cadmus Editions, 1980); Peter Marin, “Spiritual Obedience,” Harper's 258 (February 1979): 43-58; Eliot Weinberger, review of The Party and the Great Naropa Poetry Wars, Nation 230 (April 29, 1980): 470-76.

15. The Party, 86.

16. Clark, 53.

17. Clark, 54.