The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Ginsberg likes to call his own well-known experiments with marijuana and the hallucinogens “pious investigations.” He often compares himself in this respect to the French Symbolist poets, and, like them, he has kept a faithful record of his investigations in poems and journals written over the years and under a variety of influences—ranging, in his case, from psilocybin mushrooms to his dentist’s laughing gas. The first of these records, a journal, covered the day he took peyote for the first time. Ginsberg, then twenty-four, was at his father’s house, in Paterson, New Jersey, and after gagging down the last of the peyote, which is terrible-tasting stuff, he sat down to a phantasmagoric Sunday dinner with a crowd of bickering, unsuspecting relatives. His published letters from Peru to William Burroughs (and Burroughs’ letters to him from a visit that Burroughs had made earlier) were written under and about yage, which is a hallucinogenic brew distilled by local curanderos from a vine called Banisteriopsis cappi. Part II of Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was inspired by a peyote vision that he had in San Francisco, staring out of his window one night at the tower of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and being reminded of Moloch by the tower’s grinning, mask-like façade; the long elegy to his mother, “Kaddish,” was the product of forty-odd hours awake on a combination of amphetamines; and the recent “Wales Visitation,” which he calls his “first great big Wordsworthian nature poem,” was written under LSD.

  In the course of more eclectic pious investigations, Ginsberg has also meditated toward satori with a Zen roshi in Kyoto, made fire magic with a North African witch doctor, shared hemp and nakedness with the burning-ghat saddhus in Calcutta, explored the spiritual transports of yogic breathing and “chant turn-on” with Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta, circumambulated sacred Indian mountains in California, burned butter to Siva with a teacher of Sanskrit at Columbia, and communed with the Oakland Hell’s Angels through a split sacrament of the “Prajna Paramita Sutra” and LSD. Lately, he has been writing poems with titles such as “Consulting ‘I Ching’ Smoking Pot Listening to the Fugs Sing Blake,” “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and “Holy Ghost on the Nod Over the Body of Bliss,” and he has been waving goodbye, on the way out of his apartment, to a little private shrine on a bookshelf above his television set. The shrine consists of his Tibetan oracle’s ring, an Islamic amulet, a small bronze laughing Ho Te Buddha, a miniature of Krishna and Radha, a Maltese cross, a zodiac poster, some holy cards depicting his favorite Christian martyrs, a package of cigarette papers, and a photograph of his roommate of thirteen years, Peter Orlovsky, posing as a Jain saint.

  One night at the hot springs of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Ginsberg, who was looking forward to a panel discussion on religion with Gary Snyder, Bishop James Pike, and Dr. Harvey Cox, of the Harvard Divinity School, found himself sharing a bathtub with a group of visiting Episcopal ministers and their wives. After a long talk about Christianity, punctuated by sulphurous splashings on all sides, one of the ministers asked Ginsberg what, exactly, his religion was. Ginsberg slid deep into the water and began thinking about this. After a while, he said that he was probably a Buddhist Jew with attachments to Krishna, Siva, Allah, Coyote, and the Sacred Heart. Then he said no—he was simply on a sort of pilgrimage, “shopping around.” In a minute, he corrected himself again, saying that he really thought all the gods were “groovy,” and so, in fact, he was more of a Buddhist Jewish pantheist. Climbing out of the steaming yellow water, he pointed to Orlovsky, who was perched on a railing by the ocean conversing in loud braying noises with the full moon. “I figure one sacrament’s as good as the next one, if it works,” Ginsberg said.

  · · ·

  The day of the first Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In was hot and splendidly sunny, and the twenty thousand people who came to the Polo Field in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park were able to Be in their brightest, barest psychedelic costumes, without the dreary camouflage of overcoats and boots. In fact, according to an announcement that morning by Michael Bowen, a young Haight-Ashbury painter with an inspirational tale of having been rescued from an amphetamine habit by love, Tantric Buddhism, and LSD, Mexico had generously exchanged climates with northern California, at the intercession of his Mexican guru, in the interests of a thoroughly successful day. (Bowen said that it had snowed hard in Mexico.) Ginsberg himself came to the park in a pair of blue rubber bathing thongs, which he had picked up at a Japanese stall on the way over to the park, and a hospital orderly’s white uniform, which he likes to wear for ceremonial events. Seven hours later, with his dress whites muddy, sweaty, and stained by flowers, he was to be found hunting for his new sandals under piles of electronic-rock equipment on a deserted bandstand at one end of the field. It was a calm pink twilight. People were moving in slow, sleepy coveys toward the road. Ginsberg, who had just led them in silent meditation on the setting sun and in a closing mantra—“Om Sri Maitreya”—to the Buddha of the Future, stopped to watch some of them disappear over the crest of a hill bordering the field. He looked elated, exhausted, and a little sick to his stomach, from fruit, cookies, candy bars, cigarettes, Cokes, and peanut-butter sandwiches that had been pressed on him by his admirers, and he was covered from head to toe with gifts of beads, bells, amulets, buttons, and one enormous, dazzling flowered tie.

  It had been a beautiful day, Ginsberg told a boy who climbed up onto the bandstand to say good night and to admire the tie, which the poet held out proudly, saying, “Hey, look! Someone laid this groovy tie on me today.” He had arrived at the park at eleven, before the crowds, in order to chant some Buddhist dharanis, or short prayers, for removing whatever disasters might be hovering in the vicinity, and to circumambulate the field—a purification ritual that he had learned from the Hindus, who always circumambulate their fields before a mela, which is a similarly gala Indian gathering of seekers and holy men. The Hell’s Angels had pulled up on their Harley-Davidsons a little white later, as they had promised, to guard the generators and trunk lines for the rock groups who were going to play. Unfortunately, Freewheelin’ had presently fallen off a sound truck onto a ketchup bottle and cut his face in several places, but he had been the only casualty of the day. Someone had slashed one of the feed lines to a sound truck belonging to the Grateful Dead, but it had been repaired quickly, and one of the Dead musicians, who wanted to make a citizen’s arrest of a heckler “for destroying my sanity,” had been quietly persuaded by his colleagues that the destruction of sanity was a Constitutional prerogative. Timothy Leary and Jerry Rubin, a young Berkeley activist who had been bailed out of jail that morning expressly for the be-in, had both made short, loving speeches, to the relief of the planning committee. (Leary had spent most of the day on the bandstand playing pat-a-cake with a steady succession of stray children.) A young man in a black mask had floated down from the sky, attached to a Paisley parachute, and landed in the middle of the field, frightening a few picnickers but giving rise to considerable speculation among the others as to whether the Buddha of the Future had not appeared at last. A sulphur bomb, planted by a nonbeliever, had exploded under the bandstand at three in the afternoon, but the celebrants in the immediate area had been so euphoric by that time that they took it for a new brand of incense and applauded enthusiastically. Shortly before the bomb went off, Roshi Shunryu Suzuki, the master of the Soto Zen Center, in San Francisco, had arrived unexpectedly, carrying a wreath of flowers and followed by a human chain of brown-robed disciples, and had smiled his blessing on the vast, frolicking manifestation of illuminated consciousness. The costumes had been beautiful. There had been Colonial petticoats, buckskins and war paint, Arabian desert robes, Paisley body stockings on girls and Paisley diapers on babies, Hopi tops and Hindu bottoms, mistletoe escutcheons, bedspreads, capes, togas, and ancestral velvets. Roughly one-fortieth of the population of the city of San Francisco had spent the afternoon in the park together, and the keynote had been sounded by the poets: “Peace in your heart dear / Peace in the park here” (Ginsberg), “Let it go, whatever you do is beautiful
” (Kandel), and “This is really it, and it is all perfect” (McClure).

  Looking at the boy on the bandstand, Ginsberg grinned. The boy was wearing a suit of armor, which he had draped with rosebuds, daisies, and daffodils. He was a peace warrior, he said. “I guess you can tell by the way I’m dressed,” he added. “I kind of dig freedom.”

  “I wish I had a camera,” Ginsberg said. Then he jumped off the bandstand and ran up the hill to catch his friends.

  Ginsberg was due at Bowen’s place on Haight Street for a macrobiotic supper and some chanting, and half an hour later he was standing in front of one of the fancy, battered Victorian buildings that lined the street and managed to give it a somewhat less belligerently shabby face than the hippie enclaves in Chicago and New York. He was with a girl called Maretta, a gaunt, shy sibyl of twenty-four with long, blond hair who had been travelling with him ever since she returned that fall from India, where she had spent two years in a relentless search for her sadhana, or true path. Maretta had hitchhiked from Europe to India, and had eventually been converted to Tibetan Buddhism, which was the favorite Buddhism of visionary people then. At the moment, Maretta was talking to Ginsberg about her sadhana, which she believed to be hashish this time around in her cycle of rebirth. They had been watching the street for Peter Orlovsky and Peter’s older brother Julius, both of whom they had lost track of during the afternoon. Peter Orlovsky, who has described himself as a loony lyric poet of manic compassions, was in the habit of wandering off with a rag and a big bottle of Lysol to scrub down cars, stoops, windows, and sidewalks, in line with his own sadhana, which was keeping the universe clean. His brother also had a habit of disappearing. Julius had once spent twelve years of his life in silence, and even now, with Ginsberg and Peter looking after him, he rarely said a word. Ginsberg told Maretta that he suspected Julius of having taken off at the be-in to have a talk.

  Ginsberg and Maretta waited on the sidewalk for five minutes, and then left messages for the Orlovskys with an assortment of hippie pedestrians and climbed a flight of stairs to Bowen’s apartment, where the post-celebration celebration was already under way. Bowen greeted them at the door—a big, gangly young man with a mop of fuzzy brown hair, rosy cheeks, and a boyish gap between his two front teeth. He had thrown off his dress shirt—an elaborate purple jerkin—at some point during the be-in, but he still wore several strands of beads and a pair of expensive-looking brown suède pants. Maretta admired them, and Bowen complimented her on her own costume—she had on flowing houndstooth culottes, red on one leg and green on the other, an orange middy blouse, and a red fringed head shawl, and she was trailing a length of gauzy purple sari cloth. Then he announced that, according to a calculation by Gavin Arthur, a grandson of Chester A. Arthur who was a local clairvoyant, the population of the earth at that particular moment in time was equal to the total of all the dead in human history. “That means we’re all back, we’re all together,” Bowen said.

  “Beautiful,” Maretta murmured.

  “Groovy,” Ginsberg said. “Are we too late for dinner?”

  Bowen pointed down the hall to a brightly lit kitchen, where a young woman in a long green corduroy skirt was standing over a stove dishing out brown rice to a line of wan and softly chanting hippie girls. The young woman, who will here be called Lavinia, had abandoned her own last name—she felt that it did not express the “real” her—when she first left home for San Francisco, and now, at twenty-one, she was a veteran hippie householder. She had settled down with Bowen in the fall, after several months of purifying meditation alone in a tent at Big Sur, and her experience in the woods as a hunter-gatherer-meditator had made her a heroine to the newer arrivals in the Haight-Ashbury, who regarded her retreat as a kind of ultimate gesture. Whereas Bowen was admired for the aphorisms of hippie life that he regularly loosed on visiting reporters from the news weeklies—“The psychedelic baby eats the cybernetic monster in San Francisco” and “We are building an electric Tibet in California” were two of his favorites—Lavinia was famous locally as an expert on nonpoisonous berries, outdoor mantra chanting, latrine digging, and all-weather dressmaking. Ginsberg had known her since the fall of 1966, when they had gone, with Snyder, on a five-week camping and climbing trip through the Northern Cascades, and he greeted her warmly while helping himself to a slice of damp, leaden homemade wheat-germ bread that was lying on the kitchen table. Then he introduced her to Maretta, who said, “Got any hashish, man?”

  “My yoga at the moment is cooking,” Lavinia answered dryly. “Feeding everybody with natural breads and oats and corn. Seeing that the people here get wholesome, vegetarian food.”

  “My yoga is giving up smoking—that is, until this week it was,” Ginsberg said, laughing. He reached into his jacket pocket for a Pall Mall. “In New York, I met this really groovy swami named Satchidananda. At a party Christmas Eve, I think it was. And I was complaining about smoking too much, and like he said that giving up smoking could be interpreted as a valid form of yoga. Like it involves all the yogic disciplines—control of temper, concentration, devotion, the happy concurrence of body and mind. So like I vowed then and there to stop, and I was doing all right till I hit San Francisco.” Ginsberg shrugged, looking ashamed of himself.

  Lavinia handed Ginsberg a plateful of steaming rice, and he stayed in the kitchen for a while, eating and gossiping. Then, with Maretta in tow, he wandered down the hall, following the sounds of voices, bells, and cymbals, and the sharp mingled smells of incense and tobacco, to a small, square room that was dimly lit by a set of fat black dripping candles. The room, which was Bowen’s meditation room, was hung with the batik bedspreads that served in psychedelic circles as everything from wallpaper to evening gowns. Thin mattresses had been laid out, side by side, around the walls, and in the middle of the room, on a worn Oriental rug, there was a low, scrolled wooden table holding a candelabra, a saucer of burning incense, a tiny bronze Buddha, and a scattering of flowers. The remains of a light fixture on the ceiling were draped with bells, god’s-eyes, and long strands of crystal beads, which dipped down almost to the floor and swung, tinkling, whenever anybody touched them. One of Bowen’s paintings, an LSD vision of eyes, hearts, broad squiggly lines, and strange Coptic-looking configurations, was tacked to one of the bedspreads, next to an aquatint of Mary and Jesus at an angel party of some sort, and across the room, taking up most of a wall, was a large and extremely rare Tibetan tanka, or silk-scroll painting, of the Maitreya. (Snyder had discovered the scroll in Kyoto, Ginsberg had paid for it, and they had entrusted it to Bowen to be used as an altarpiece, probably for an “indigenous American ashram” in the Haight-Ashbury.)

  About eighteen people, in their be-in costumes, were snuggled in companionable heaps on the mattresses. Some of them were talking or chanting quietly to themselves. The others were staring amiably into space. They were all in the process of sharing a peace pipe when Ginsberg and Maretta, tripping over a pile of people on the threshold, stumbled in. Maretta headed for a dark corner, where she staked out a few feet of mattress, curled up into a ball of culottes and fringe, and almost instantly fell asleep. Ginsberg located Snyder on a mattress behind the candelabra and sat down next to him. Snyder was wearing clothes—a pair of green corduroy jeans and a green blouse blocked with big mauve leaves and flowers—and waving a gallon jug of California Bordeaux around. Just as Ginsberg reached for the jug, a light went on, and two television men, dragging kliegs and cables, began maneuvering toward him. They said that Bowen had invited them. Ginsberg groaned.

  “I don’t know why, but this whole day strikes me as absolutely sane and right and beautiful,” one of the men said cheerfully, holding a light meter up to Ginsberg’s nose. “Mike must have put something in my tea last night.”

  “What’s so insane about a little peace and harmony?” Ginsberg asked him, inching over on the mattress to make room for Maretta, who had been awakened by the light. Maretta nodded sleepily.

  “It was beautiful, man,” she said.<
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  “Like thousands of people would like to come to the park on a day like today,” Ginsberg went on. “So they can relate to each other as—as dharma beings. All sorts of people. Poets, children, even Hell’s Angels. People are lonesome. I’m lonesome. It’s strange to be in a body. So what I’m doing—what we’re all doing—on a day like today is saying, ‘Touch me, talk to me.’ ”

  “People are groovy,” Snyder said.

  “Zap!” Ginsberg said, and snapped his fingers. “You know how Reagan said, ‘Once you’ve seen one redwood tree you’ve seen them all.’ ”

  “That’s an incredible mentality to us,” Snyder broke in.

  “Actually, I used to be in love with Reagan in the thirties—I used to see all of his movies,” Ginsberg said, smiling ingenuously. “So Ronald Reagan and I are one. Ronald Reagan, you and I are one!”

  Bowen came running into the room with a telephone in his hand and called to Ginsberg that he had Santa Barbara on the line. “In Santa Barbara, they meditated with us for six whole hours while we were at the be-in,” Bowen shouted as he leaped over a mattress, dropped down on his hands and knees, and began tossing pillows aside to find an extension socket in the wall.

  “You mean to say you have a phone in your meditation room?” Ginsberg said, and he burst out laughing.

  “Electric Tibet, baby,” Bowen said, flipping Ginsberg the phone. “Say something, will you, Allen?”

  “Hello. What’s your name?” Ginsberg said, sticking a finger in his free ear. “Bright? Hey, that’s a groovy name.” Ginsberg turned to Snyder. “His name is Bright. That’s nice.” And then back to Santa Barbara. “We’re just saying that Ronald Reagan should prove his good faith by turning on.”