I am speaking from this pulpit conscious of history, of my role as poet, of the addresses and essays in public consciousness by my transcendental predecessors in this city, with all the awesome prophecies about these states pronounced by Thoreau and Emerson, and elsewhere the more naked Whitman: prophecies that have now come true.
"--I say of all this tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in the United States, with the result already seen, accumulating and reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle force -infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness-- or else our modern civilization. With all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status equivalent. In its real world, to that of the fabled damned." --Democratic vistas
Because our governors and polis have failed to perceive the obvious I wish to make some political suggestions to this community; I make them as Poet, & claim powers of Prophecy as did the good grey bards before me in this country, because one who looks in his heart and speaks frankly can claim to prophecy. And what is Prophecy? I can not propose right and wrong, or objective future events such as purple balloons on Jupiter in 1984: but I can have the confidence to trust my own fantasy and express my own private thought. All have this gift of prophecy, who dare assume it though?
The present condition of life for American Person is one of deathly public solitude. We've built a technological Tower of Babel around ourselves, and we are literally (as in Gemini) reaching into heaven to escape the planet. Now giant over--population depends on a vast metallic superstructure to feed and transport all the bodies here together. The stupendous machinery surrounding us conditions our "thoughts, feelings and apparent sensory impressions," and reinforces our mental slavery to the material universe we've invested in.
Yet according to Chuang Tzu 2,500 years ago, "The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed--so far, to the end, where nothing can be added...Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed." Yeats appearing in Ireland this century declared:
"This preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem
Must vanish on an instant, did the mind but change its theme."
How can we Americans make our minds change theme? For unless the theme changes--encrustation of the planet with machinery, inorganic metal smog violent outrage & mass murder will take place. We witness these horrors already.
Abruptly then, I will make a first proposal: on one level symbolic, but to be taken as literally as possible, it may shock some and delight others--That everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once; every man, woman, and child American in good health over the age of 14--that, if necessary, we have a mass emotional nervous breakdown in these States once and for all; that we see bankers laughing in their revolving doors with strange staring eyes. May everybody in America turn on, whatever the transient law--because individual soul development (as once declared by a poet in jail in this city) is our law transcending the illusions of the political state. Soul also transcends LSD, may I add, to reassure those like myself who would fear a chemical dictatorship. I propose, then, that everybody including the President and his and our vast hordes of generals, executives, judges and legislators of these States go to nature, find a kindly teacher or Indian peyote chief or guru guide, and assay their consciousness with LSD.
Then, I prophecy, we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceable community.
The LSD I am proposing is literal. I hope it will be understood as not THE solution, but a, typical, & spiritually revolutionary catalyst, where many varieties of spiritual revolution are necessary to transcend specifically the political COLD WAR we are all involved in.
Anger and control of anger is our problem. Already we have enough insight into politics to be aware of one very simple thing: that we can judge all politics and all public speech and ideology by perceiving the measure of anger manifested therein. All present political parties propose violence to resolve our confusions, as in Vietnam. We might look for a third party, specifically named a Peace Party--referring to individual subjective peaceableness (such as we have not seen in our populace or our leaders) as well as consequent public peaceableness; a party founded on psychology not ideology. We obviously need to feed China and India not ignore, manipulate, or threaten to destroy them. The earth is yet to be saved from our aggression, and living organic life like unto our own nature be replaced on its surface which has been overgrown with cancerous inanimate matter, metal and asphalt. And tho many mammal species have been made extinct in this century there are many we can yet save including ourselves.
Driving out of NY or into Boston at night we see the transparent apparitional glitter of buildings walling the horizon, & we know that these are transient specters. In cold daylight we believe in their finality. But it is that half-dreaming insight of normal consciousness that may provide the direction for our imagination to manifest itself in the material world.
What can the young do with themselves faced with this American version of the planet? The most sensitive and among the "best minds" do drop out. They wander over the body of the nation looking into the faces of their elders, they wear long Adamic hair and form Keristan communities in the slums, they pilgrimage to Big Sur and live naked in forests seeking natural vision and meditation, they dwell in the Lower East Side as if it were an hermetic forest. And they assemble thousands together as they have done this year in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, or Thompkins Park in New York to manifest their peaceableness in demonstrations of Fantasy that transcend protest against--or for--the hostilities of Vietnam. Young men and women in speckled clothes, minstrel's garb, jester's robes carrying balloons, signs, 'President Johnson we are praying for you,' gathered chanting Hindu and Buddhist mantras to calm their fellow citizens who are otherwise entrapped in a planetary barroom brawl.
But there has been no recognition of this insight on the part of the fathers and teachers (Father Zossima's famous cry) of these young. What's lacking in the great institutions of learning? The specific wisdom discipline that that young propose: search into inner space.
Children drop out of schools because there are no, or very few, Gurus. Those elders concerned with this practical problem might consider that there is an easy practical solution: the establishment within centers of learning of facilities for wisdom search which the ancients proposed as the true function of education in the first place: academies of self-awareness, classes in spiritual teaching, darshan with holymen of disciplined mind-consciousness. One might well, in fact, employ the drop-out beatniks as instructors in this department, and thereby officially recognize and proclaim the social validity of exploration of inner space, Tibetan monks, swamis yogins and yoginis, psychedelic guides, Amerindian peyote chiefs, even a few finished Zen Roshis & many profound poets are already present and available in our cities for such work, tho at present they battle immigration bureaucracies & scholarly heads of departments of Oriental Religion.
What I am proposing as policy, for us elders, for what community we have, is self--examination as Official Politics; an Official Politics of Control of Anger. With state propaganda reversed in that direction, and requests to the government for vast sums of money equal to the outer-space program; & consequent billboards on the highways: "Control Your Anger--Be Aware of Yourself."
There is a change of consciousness among the younger generations, in a direction always latent to Elder America, toward the most complete public frankness possible. As the Gloucester poet Charles Olson formulated it, "Private is public, and public is how we behave." This means revision of standards of public behavior to include indications of private manners heretofore excluded from public consciousness.
Thus, new social standards, more equivalent to private desire--as there is increased sexual illumination, new social codes may be found acceptable to rid ourselves of fear of our own nakedness, rejection of our own bodies.
Likely an enlarged family unit will emerge for many citizens; possibly, as the Zen Buddhist anarchist anthropologist Gary Snyder observed, with matrilineal descent as courtesy to those dakinis whose saddhana or holy path is the sexual liberation and teaching of Dharma to many frightened males (including myself) at once. Children may be held in common, with the orgy an acceptable community sacrament-one that brings all people closer together. Certainly one might seduce the Birch Society to partake in naked orgy, and the police with their wives, together with Leroi Jones the brilliantly angry poet. America's political need is orgies in the parks, on Boston Common & in the Public Gardens, with naked Bacchantes in our national forests.
I am not proposing idealistic fancies, I am acknowledging what is already happening among the young in fact and fantasy, and proposing official blessing for these breakthroughs of community spirit. Among the young we find a new breed of White Indians in California communing with illuminated desert redskins; we find our teenagers dancing Nigerian Yoruba dances & entering trance states to the electric vibration of the Beatles who have borrowed shamanism form Afric sources. We find communal religious use of ganja, the hemp sacred to Mahadev (Great Lord) Shiva. There's now heard the spread of mantra chanting in private and such public manifestations as peace marches, and soon we will have Mantra Rock over the airwaves. All the available traditions of U.S. Indian vision-quest, peyote ritual, dancing, Oriental pranayama, east Indian ear music are becoming available to the U.S. unconscious through the spiritual search of the young. Simultaneously there is a new Diaspora of Tibetan Lamaist initiates; texts such as the Book of the Dead and the I Ching have found fair-cheeked and dark-browed Kansas devotees. And rumor from the West Coast this season brings the legendary Hevajra Tantra--a document central to Vajrayana Buddhism's Lightningbolt Illumination--into public light as a source book for the tantric community rules. LSD structured by ancient disciplines for meditation and community regulation.
Ideas I have dwelled on are mixed: there is some prescription for public utopia thru education in inner space. There is more prescription here for the individual: as always, the old command to free ourselves from social conditioning, laws and traditional mores.
And discover the Guru in your own hearts. --And set forthe within the New Wilderness of machine America to explore open spaces of consciousness in Self and fellow Selves. If there be the necessary revolution in America it will come that way. It's up to us older hairs who still have relation with some of the joy of youth to encourage this revolutionary individual search.
But how can peaceful psychological politics succeed when $50 billion a year is spent to busy participation in armed conflict? "Vietnam War Brings Prosperity"--headline Lincoln Nebraska Star, February 1966. Certainly the awareness itself of this condition will help some of us: as did Ike's warning against the military-industrial complex running the mind of the nation.
As a side note: there are specific methods for combatting the mental dictatorship over "thoughts feeling and apparent sensory impressions" imposed on us by military industrial control of language and imagery in public media. W.S. Burroughs has provided a whole armamentarium of counter--brainwash techniques: cut-up of newspapers and ads, collage of political and entertainment news to reveal the secret intention of the Senders, observation of TV imagery with sound off and simultaneous apperception of noises on the radio or street. These methods are effective in jolting the soft machine of the brain out of its conditioned hypnosis.
Cutting out, or dropping out, of the culture will not lead to a chaos of individuality: what it will mean, for the young, is training in meditation and art (and perhaps neolitic lore), and responsibility of a new order, to the community of the heart, not to our heart-less society wherein we have read the headline in the Omaha World Herald: "Rusk Says Toughness Essential for Peace."
The "oversoul" to be discovered is a pragmatic reality. We can all tell signs of an illuminated man in business or the church--one who is open-hearted non-judging, empathetic, compassionate to the rejected and condemned. The tolerant one, the Observer, the Aware. And we see that these souls do influence action.
Finally, detachment comes naturally: we all know the war is camp, hate is camp, murder is camp, even love is camp, the universe is a grand camp according to Chuang Tzu and the Prajnaparamita Sutra. This detachment is salvation. We have an international youth society of solitary children--stilyagi, provo, beat, mufada, nadaista, energumeno, mod and rocker--all aghast at the space age horror world they are born to, & not habituated to--and now questioning the nature of the universe itself as is proper in the space age.
There are many contradictions here, especially between proposed communal sex orgy and a contemplative choiceless awareness (as the sage Krishnamurti articulated it this fall in New York). Whitman noticed that too: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself." A dialogue between these contradictions is a good healthy way of life, one correcting the other. Indulgence in sexuality and sensational ecstasy may well lead to contemplative awareness of desire and cessation of desire.
"I know although when
looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the
door unlatched,
The sooner love is gone."
What satisfaction is now possible for the young? Only the satisfaction of their Desire--love, the body, and orgy: the satisfaction of a peaceful natural community where they can circulate and explore Persons, cities, and the nature of the planet--the satisfaction of encouraged self-awareness, and the satiety and cessation of desire, anger, grasping & craving.
Respect for the old? Yea, when the old are tranquil and not nervous, & respect the sport of the young. Holymen do inspire respect. One conservative Vaishnavite Swami Bhaktivedanta moved into the Lower East Side this year and immediately dozens of young LSD freak-outs flocked to sing the Harekrishna Mahamantra with him--chant for the preservation of the planet.
But a nation of olders convinced that spiritual search is immaturity, and that national war and metallic communication is maturity, cannot ask for respect from the young. For the present conduct of the elders in America is a reflection of lack of Self-respect.
I am in effect setting up moral codes and standards which include drugs, orgy, music and primitive magic as worship rituals--educational tools which are supposedly contrary to our cultural mores; and I am proposing these standards to you respectable ministers, once and for all, that you endorse publically the private desire and knowledge of mankind in America, so to inspire the young.
It may appear from this address that I find myself increasingly alienated form the feeling-tone, ideology & conduct of the supposed majority of my fellow citizens: thus the title Public Solitude. But I do not feel myself alienated from all our inmost private desire, which the prophet Walt Whitman articulated in his second preface to his life work 90 years ago, passionately expressive of our hearts in Space-age America:
"Something more may be added--for, while I am about it, I would make a full confession. I also sent out "Leaves of Grass" to arouse and set flowing in man's and women's hearts, young and old, endless streams of living, pulsating love and friendship, directly from them to myself, now and ever. To this terrible, irrepressible yearning (surely more or less down underneath in most human souls)--this never-satisfied appetite for sympathy, and this boundless offering of sympathy--this universal democratic comradeship--this old, eternal, yet ever-new interchange of adhesiveness, so fitly emblematic of America--I have given in that book, undisguisedly, declaredly, the openest expression. Besides, important as they are in my purpose as emotional experience for humanity, the special meaning of the "Calamus" cluster of "Leaves of Grass" (and more or less running through the book, and cropping out in "Drum-Taps") mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west,--it is by this, I say, and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future (I cannot too often repeat,) are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal'd into a living union."
--Allen Ginsberg
Nov. 11, 1966
Public Solitude: Address delivered at Arlington Street Church, Boston, November 12, 1966 on occasion of Unitarian-Universalist Laymen's League Center for Research and Development --First Convocation
