Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are doing
something a little different. Usually when we
look at history, we pick an event, a war, a movement,
a scandal. A big, broad topic. Exactly. But today
we're focusing on a person. And not just any
person. We're looking at a man who you could
argue acts as the connective tissue for the entire
American counterculture of the 20th century.
It is a massive claim, but I think the sources
back it up completely. I mean, if you really
look at the literary and cultural timeline of
America from say 1945 all the way to 1997, there
is one figure who is just. He's present at almost
every single major cultural inflection point.
We are talking about Allen Ginsberg. And I think
for a lot of people, the name Allen Ginsberg
conjures up a very specific, almost a cartoonish
image. Oh, absolutely. You know, the bald head
with the ring of hair, the big bushy beard, the
thick glasses. Maybe he's playing a harmonium
and chanting OM in a park somewhere while people
in tie -dye dance around him. Exactly. The hippie
poet caricature. Yeah. And look, don't get me
wrong. He was that. That part is true. He leaned
into it. He absolutely leaned into it. But that
is just the surface layer. If you stop there,
you miss the actual engine of the man. Because
this is the guy who bridged the gap between the
intellectual literary beats of the 1950s, you
know, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and
the full -blown hippie explosion of the 1960s.
But then, and this is the part that gets me,
he didn't stop there. He kept going right into
the punk era of the 70s and 80s. That's the part
that blows my mind. He was hanging out with The
Clash. He was on stage with The Clash. He's on
one of their records. So our mission today...
Looking at this stack of biographies and letters
and even FBI files is to move past that caricature.
We want to explore the complex, often contradictory
figure who fought for free speech, who explored
Eastern spirituality way before it was cool.
Before the Beatles went to India. Way before.
He investigated the CIA and he wrote arguably
the most influential American poem of the century,
Howl. And we are going to get into the messy
stuff, too. The madness, the drugs, the controversies.
Because, I mean, you can't really understand
the art without understanding the trauma that
fueled it. You really can't. They're completely
intertwined. So let's unpack this. Where does
the story of Allen Ginsberg actually begin? Well,
to understand the man, you have to understand
the child. And to understand the child, you have
to go to New Jersey in the 1920s and 30s. Ginsburg
was born in 1926, grew up in Newark and later
Patterson. And, you know, on the surface, it
looked like a pretty standard Jewish -American
upbringing for the time. But the household dynamic
was, well, anything but standard. It was a house
divided. It's actually a perfect study. In contrast,
on one side, you have his father, Louis Ginsburg.
Right. And Louis was a schoolteacher. He was
a responsible citizen. He paid his taxes. He
was a pillar of the community. And he was also
a published poet, but of a very, very specific
kind. The sources describe him as a traditionalist.
Which feels like an understatement. A huge understatement.
Louis wrote in strict rhyme and meter, you know,
ABAB rhyme schemes. He loved the classics, Longfellow,
Emily Dickinson. He was what Allen later affectionately
called an old -fashioned delicatessen philosopher.
I love that phrase. It's perfect, isn't it? It
just captures this idea of a man who believed
in order. He believed that poetry should be polite.
It should be structured. And above all, it should
be understandable. It shouldn't be confusing
or offensive. So you have this pillar of stability
and tradition on one side of the house and then
on the other side. You have Naomi, Alan's mother.
And Naomi Ginsburg is, without a doubt, the single
most important and most powerful figure in Alan's
life. A force of nature, it sounds like. Absolutely.
She was a Russian immigrant. a fervent Marxist,
and a card -carrying member of the Communist
Party during a time when that was a very radical
thing to be. So she's already politically on
the fringes. Oh, yeah. Radical doesn't even begin
to cover it. But alongside her politics, she
suffered from severe debilitating mental illness.
The diagnoses in the sources vary a bit, but
it aligns pretty clearly with paranoid schizophrenia.
And we're not talking about just, you know, mom
is eccentric or has some quirks. This was dangerous,
terrifying stuff. It was a nightmare for a child
to witness. Her delusions were incredibly vivid
and all -consuming. She believed that the President
of the United States, that Franklin Roosevelt,
had personally implanted listening devices in
their home in Patterson to spy on her communist
meetings. Wow. She thought her mother -in -law,
Louise's mother, was constantly plotting to kill
her. She would see conspiracies everywhere. Wires
in the walls, poison in the food. There's a detail
in one of the biographies that really stuck with
me about her bedtime stories. You know, most
kids get Cinderella or Goldilocks. Not Alan.
Alan got Marxist parables. Naomi would tell him
these stories about the good king. But in her
version, the good king would ride out from his
castle and he would see the suffering workers,
the sick peasants, and he would use his power
to heal them. It was this strange, intense mix
of political ideology and maternal care all wrapped
up in a fairy tale. So she's teaching him her
politics from the very beginning. Absolutely.
But her illness meant she was also deeply, deeply
paranoid about the outside world. Which would
naturally lead her to draw Alan very close. Incredibly
close. She didn't trust anyone else. She called
Alan her little pet. It created this intense,
almost suffocating bond between them. He wasn't
just her friend. He became her caretaker, her
confidant, her... her anchor to reality as flimsy
as it was. And he saw things no child should
ever have to see. He witnessed her suicide attempts.
The sources are pretty explicit about her slitting
her wrists. He saw her in states of complete
undress, screaming in paranoia at phantoms in
the room. And he was the one, often, who had
to accompany her on the bus to the mental institution,
Greystone Park. That image is just, it's haunting.
A young boy taking his mother to the asylum.
It is. And that trauma right there is the fuel.
If you look at his major works, Howl, and especially
his other epic poem, Kaddish, they are directly
metabolized from this experience. He's taking
this raw, terrifying private pain and turning
it into public art. And you can see why he couldn't
follow in his father's footsteps, poetically.
How could he? Yeah. He didn't hide from the madness.
He didn't try to bury it like his father might
have wanted to. He realized early on that the
polite, rhyming, orderly world of his father
couldn't possibly explain the chaotic, terrifying,
unpredictable world of his mother. So he needed
a new language? Exactly. He needed a language
that was big enough and strong enough and maybe
crazy enough to hold all that madness. So let's
move forward a bit. He survives this childhood
somehow. He's obviously a very smart kid. He
graduates high school and he heads to Columbia
University. And this feels like the moment the
movie really starts. This is the crucible. This
is where all the elements come together. He enters
Colombia in the mid 1940s. And interestingly
enough, his initial plan was to study law. He
wanted to be a lawyer. That is just it's hilarious
considering how much time he spent fighting the
law later in his life. It is. But it came from
a very sincere place. He wanted to be a labor
lawyer. He wanted to defend the working class,
you know, help the little guy. He was trying
to honor his mother's Marxist ideals in a practical
American way. But that plan gets derailed pretty
quickly. Very quickly, it gets derailed the moment
he meets the people who will completely change
his life and, by extension, American literature.
The heavy hitters, the core of the beat generation.
The whole crew. Lucien Carr, who is this sort
of charismatic, rebellious, Rimbaud -esque figure.
William S. Burroughs, the older, mysterious,
sardonic heir to a fortune. And, of course, the
golden boy, the football star. Jack Kerouac.
It's just wild to think of them just hanging
out in dorm rooms at Columbia, smoking cigarettes
and planning a literary revolution. Kerouac had
a nickname for Ginsburg, right? I did. He called
him Carlo Marx. Oh, Marx. Perfect. It was partly
a reference to his Jewish background and his
mother's communism, but it was also because Ginsburg
was the intellectual of the group. He was the
one with the big philosophical ideas. So what
were they bonding over? What was the mission?
They bonded over a shared sense of rejection.
You have to remember the context of the time.
This is post -World War II America. The McCarthy
era is just starting to ramp up. The culture
is obsessed with conformity. The man in the gray
flannel suit. Exactly. The message to young men
was crystal clear. Get a degree, get a corporate
job, buy a house in the suburbs with a white
picket fence, keep your mouth shut, and be normal.
And this group, they were not... interested in
normal. Not at all. They wanted what they called
a new vision. That's the actual phrase they used.
They were rejecting the polite academic poetry
that was popular at the time, which was very
dry, very T .S. Eliot influenced. They wanted
something raw. They're reading Yeats. Rimbaud,
the French symbolists. They wanted art that bled.
But it wasn't just an intellectual exercise for
them. They were living it. They were living chaotically.
And Ginsburg actually got into some serious trouble
at Columbia, didn't he? He was suspended and
then prosecuted. And the story behind it is just,
it's absurd. It's like a bad crime novel that
they would have loved. What happened? Ginsburg
was letting an acquaintance, a guy from the sort
of Times Square underworld they were all fascinated
with, store some goods in his dorm room. Goods.
I like the euphemism. Right. Stolen goods. The
acquaintance was a thief. So when the campus
authorities eventually raided the room and found
all this stolen property, Ginsburg was on the
hook. He was facing serious criminal prosecution.
He was probably going to go to jail. So what
does he do? He's trapped. He plays the card he
has been holding his whole life. Yeah. He pleads
insanity. He used the madness as a strategy.
It was a brilliant, desperate move. He and his
professors basically convinced the authorities
that he wasn't a criminal mastermind. He was
just this mentally unwell, confused kid who fell
in with the wrong crowd. And because of his family
history with Naomi, it was a totally plausible
defense. So instead of prison. Instead of prison,
he spent several months in the Columbia Presbyterian
Psychiatric Institute. Which ironically brings
him right back into the world of his mother.
The world of institutions. It does. And it's
absolutely pivotal because it's in that institution
that he meets a man named Carl Solomon. Carl.
The one and only. And if you have ever read Howl,
you know that name. The entire third section
of the poem is a chant. I'm with you in Rockland,
which was the asylum Solomon was later transferred
to. For Ginsberg, Carl Solomon became the ultimate
symbol of the brilliant, sensitive genius crushed
by the machinery of society. So he comes out
of the institution. He's back in New York. He's
been through the ringer. And then in 1948, something
happens that changes the entire trajectory of
his life forever. He stops being just a rebellious
student and becomes, well. Something of a mystic.
The Blake vision. This is the moment. This is
his origin story as a prophet. Ginsburg is living
in an apartment in East Harlem. He's alone. He's
feeling alienated, probably a bit depressed.
And the sources are very, very specific about
what he was doing at the time. We should probably
just say it. We should. He was pleasuring himself.
Right. He was masturbating while reading the
poetry of William Blake. Specifically, the songs
of innocence and of experience. He was looking
at the poems, ah, Sunflower and the Sick Rose.
It's a very Ginsburg combination, isn't it? The
profane and the sacred just smashed together.
That's his whole ethos in a nutshell. And in
that state of, you know, physical release and
intense intellectual focus, he experiences a
profound auditory hallucination. He hears a voice,
a deep, ancient, gravelly voice reciting the
poems aloud to him. Did he think it was God?
He thought it was the voice of God or maybe the
voice of Blake himself reaching across the centuries
from the grave. But it wasn't just the voice.
He looked out his apartment window at the fire
escape. And he had this sudden, overwhelming
visual realization. He saw the fire escape. He
saw the sky above it. And he understood in a
flash that the fire escape was made by human
hands, but the sky was self -created. It was
a manifestation of cosmic intelligence. That
sounds like a simple observation, but for him
it was everything. It was the interconnectedness
of the universe. That was his phrase. He felt
he was seeing the face of God in the architecture
of the city. He realized that everything was
holy. The sky, the fire escape, his own body,
the book in his hands, it all clicked. Now the
obvious question, given Ginsburg's later reputation,
was he high when this happened? That is the absolute
key point. He insisted for the rest of his life
that he was not. He was stone cold sober. But,
and this is a huge but. He spent the next huge
chunk of his life trying to get back to that
feeling using drugs. He used LSD, peyote, marijuana,
ayahuasca, you name it. He was always trying
to recreate or trigger that cosmic consciousness
again. But the original vision, that was completely
natural. So he has the trauma from his mother,
he has the intellectual training from Colombia,
and now he has the spiritual mandate. He feels
like he's a prophet with a message. And prophets
need a wilderness to go to, or in his case, a
new city. So he goes west. To San Francisco.
And this is the early 1950s, the San Francisco
Renaissance. This is where the beat generation
really stops being a private club and goes public.
He arrives in San Francisco and, believe it or
not, gets a steady 9 -to -5 job. He works in
market research. I cannot picture Allen Ginsberg
in an office, in a suit, analyzing why people
buy a certain brand of toothpaste. He was apparently
quite good at it. He had a knack for understanding
how people thought and what motivated them. But
that was just the day job. By night, he is writing
furiously. He meets Peter Orlovsky in 1954, who
becomes his lifelong partner, and he starts to
organize the local poetry scene, which was vibrant
but kind of fragmented. Which leads to the legendary
night, the one that gets written about in all
books, October 7, 1955, the sixth gallery reading.
If you could build a time machine and go back
to one single literary event in American history,
this is the one you choose. The Sixth Gallery
was basically a converted auto repair shop. It
wasn't some fancy auditorium. Ginsburg organized
a reading with a bunch of his new poet friends,
Gary Snyder, Philip Whelan, Michael McClure.
And Kerouac was there, too. Kerouac was there,
but he wasn't on the bill to read. He was the
hype man. The master of ceremonies. The sources
have this great image of him going around with
a hat, collecting spare change from the audience
to buy these big gallon jugs of cheap red wine.
So the atmosphere is loose. Very loose. The room
is packed. It's smoky. Everyone is getting drunk
on this cheap wine and just buzzing with anticipation
for something new. And then Ginsburg steps up
to the makeshift stage. He steps up. He's nervous
at first. Then he takes a few big gulps of wine.
He's drunk. He's passionate. And he just unleashes.
How? I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Just
hearing that line. It's an assault. It's aggressive.
It's breathless. This is not the polite, metered
poetry of his father. Kerouac described him reading
with his arms outstretched, swaying, almost screaming
the lines. It was a rhythmic, physical, incantatory
performance. It was like a sermon. Let's break
down how for a second, because it's not just
a chaotic rant, which is how some people see
it. It has a very clear structure and it has
a villain. It does. It absolutely does. The poem
is divided into three main parts. The first part
is this long Whitman -esque catalog of the best
minds, his friends, the junkies, the travelers,
the artists, the outcasts, and all the ways that
society has destroyed them. And then you get
to part two. And part two introduces the monster
responsible for all that destruction. Moloch.
Moloch. Where does that name come from? In the
Bible, in the Old Testament, Moloch is an ancient
Canaanite god that was associated with child
sacrifice. People would literally burn their
children as offerings to appease this god. But
in Howell, Moloch isn't some ancient stone statue.
Moloch is modern American society. Moloch whose
mind is pure machinery. Moloch whose blood is
running money. Moloch whose fingers are ten armies.
Yes. Moloch is capitalism. Moloch is the military
industrial complex. Moloch is the crushing pressure
to conform, to be a cog in the machine. It's
the soulless robotic force that eats individuality
for breakfast. And there's a great backstory
in the sources on where she got the actual visual
for Moloch. It wasn't just an abstract idea.
No, it came from a vision. He was in San Francisco,
high on peyote this time, and he was looking
at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, a big, imposing
building. And under the influence of the drug,
he saw the facade of the building transform.
He saw the windows turn into the empty eyes of
a skull. He saw the whole building as a giant,
devouring monster eating the city. That hallucination
became the face of Moloch. It's incredible how
he takes these deeply personal, often drug -induced
visions and turns them into these powerful metaphors
for social commentary. That's his genius. But
the authorities in 1956 did not see social commentary.
They saw filth. They saw obscenity, plain and
simple. The poem was published as a book by City
Lights Books, which was run by the poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti. The police seized the books. They
arrested Ferlinghetti and the bookstore clerk.
They charged the book with being obscene, specifically
because of the graphic depictions of sexuality.
We have to remember the context. This is the
mid -1950s. Exactly. Sodomy laws are in full
effect in every state. Being gay is not just
frowned upon. It's effectively illegal. It's
classified as a mental illness. And here is Allen
Ginsberg writing these incredibly explicit lines
about cocksuckers and men getting fucked in the
ass by saintly motorcyclists and celebrating
it. He wasn't using euphemisms. He was shouting
it from the rooftops. The trial must have been
an absolute circus. It was a pivotal moment for
the First Amendment in America. And the judge
presiding over the case was a man named Clayton
W. Horn. And get this. He was a Sunday school
teacher. Oh, no. Right. Everyone in the literary
world assumed he would look at this filth and
throw the book at them. Literally. They thought
City Lights was going to be shut down. But he
didn't do that. He did the opposite. He actually
listened. He listened to the literary experts
and critics who came to testify that the poem
had artistic merit, that it was a serious work
of literature, not just pornography. And he delivered
this landmark ruling that is still the gold standard
for obscenity cases today. He ruled that if a
work has even the slightest redeeming social
importance, it cannot be legally considered obscene.
I have the quote from the judge here. He said.
Would there be any freedom of press or speech
if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid, innocuous
euphemisms? I mean, what a line. It was a complete
and sort of slam dunk for free speech. And the
great irony, of course, is that the trial made
Ginsberg an international celebrity. Before the
trial, he was a locally known San Francisco poet.
After the trial, he was on the front page of
newspapers. The government's attempt to censor
him backfired spectacularly. So now he's famous.
He's the king of the beats. But Ginsberg has
this deep -seated restlessness. He doesn't just
stay in San Francisco and enjoy the film. He
goes to Paris. He lives in the famous Beat Hotel
with Burroughs and Gregory Corso. But then the
real spiritual shift happens in the early 1960s.
He goes to India. This is the next major chapter.
This is where we see the transition from the
angry young poet screaming about Moloch to the
spiritual guru who starts chanting Aum. What
drove him to India? Was he just tired of the
West? It was a kind of desperation in a way.
He was famous, but he was deeply unhappy. He
was still chasing that Blake vision. He felt
spiritually hollow. He felt like the anger of
Howell had sort of burned him out. So he and
Peter Orlovsky decided to travel to India in
1962, and they ended up staying for nearly two
years. And they weren't doing the luxury tourist
thing, staying in nice hotels? Not at all. They
were living on pennies a day. They stayed in
the slums of Calcutta and Varanasi. They spent
most of their time at the burning ghats on the
Ganges, just watching bodies being cremated day
in and day out, contemplating mortality. They
hung out with the sadhus, the wandering holy
men who covered themselves in ash and renounced
the material world. Ginsburg was looking for
a teacher. He was looking for a method. And this
is where he really connects deeply with Buddhism
and Hinduism. He had been interested in it since
the 50s. Kerouac was a huge influence there with
his book, The Dharma Bums. But in India, Ginsburg
didn't just read about it. He practiced it. He
learned meditation. He learned to chant mantras.
He bought a harmonium that... boxy accordion
-like instrument you always see him with in pictures
from that era. What did the chanting actually
do for him? Was it just a performance, a new
kind of poetry? No, for him it was physiological.
It was a technology. He realized that the long,
sustained breath required for chanting literally
calmed his nervous system. It stabilized his
mind. It was a way, he said, to get high without
having to rely on drugs, which were becoming
unpredictable for him. And when he came back
to America in the mid -60s, he brought that practice
with him. He became the hippie bridge. This is
a crucial role he played. In the mid -60s, you
have the explosion of the hippie counterculture.
You have all these kids dropping out, taking
acid, looking for spiritual meaning, but without
any roadmap. Ginsberg looked at them and saw
they were brilliant, but also unstable. And he
thought, I can help them. I can give them a tool.
I can give them a practice. So he starts chanting
everywhere. Everywhere. He becomes the single
biggest promoter of the Hare Krishna movement
in the West. He befriended Swami Prabhupada,
the founder of the Hare Krishnas in New York's
Lower East Side. He used his fame to help them
get a temple, to get a record deal. He made them
legitimate in the eyes of the counterculture.
There's the famous story of the mantra rock dance
in 1967. Oh, the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
A legendary lineup. You have the Grateful Dead.
You have Yanis Joplin with Big Brother and the
Holding Company. You have Moby Grape. And then
right in the middle of this psychedelic rock
show, you have Allen Ginsberg and the Hare Krishnas
in their robes leading thousands of hippies in
chanting Hare Krishna. It's an incredible image.
He made it cool. to be spiritual in that way.
He validated Eastern religion for a whole generation
of rock and roll kids who would have never picked
up a Bhagavad Gita otherwise. But he didn't just
stay in the ashram. He took that spirituality
and he weaponized it politically. Weaponized
is an interesting word, but I think it's accurate.
He used chanting as a form of nonviolent protest.
As a political tool. The 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. Chicago, 1968. The whole
world is watching. You have the Vietnam War protests
raging. The police are rioting. They're beating
protesters in the streets with billy clubs. There's
tear gas everywhere. It is a war zone. And what
does Allen Ginsberg do? He doesn't throw rocks
back at the cops. He walks right into the middle
of Lincoln Park, sits down on the grass, pulls
out his harmonium, and just starts chanting,
Oom, for hours. What did he think that was going
to accomplish? Did he think it would stop the
tear gas? He believed in the physics of sound.
He genuinely believed that if he could create
a steady, peaceful vibration, the sound of OM,
it would literally lower the temperature of the
violence. It would give the panicked protesters
a center of gravity so they wouldn't freak out
and get violent themselves. It was an act of
sonic peacemaking. It's such a unique approach
to activism, not fighting fire with fire, but
fighting fire with breath. But don't let the
gentle chanting fruit you. When it came to hard
-nosed politics, Ginsburg was sharp as a tack.
He was an investigator. And this brings us to
his obsession with the CIA. This is one of my
favorite parts of the whole Ginsburg saga, because
it shows how he was so often ahead of the curve.
In the 1970s, he became completely convinced
that the CIA was deeply involved in heroin trafficking
in the Golden Triangle. That's Southeast Asia,
Laos, Burma, Thailand. Which at the time must
have sounded like a completely bonkers conspiracy
theory. It sounds totally nuts. The government
is secretly selling drugs to fund its secret
wars. Yeah. People just dismissed him. They said,
oh, that's just Alan. You know, he's high. He's
paranoid. But Ginsburg did the homework. He spent
10 years collecting newspaper clippings. He talked
to sources. He compiled this massive file. He
claimed the CIA was using the drug trade to pay
its proxy armies in Laos and Vietnam. He even
confronted the head of the CIA about it. Yes.
This is amazing. He met Richard Helms, the former
CIA director, at some public event. And Ginsburg,
being Ginsburg, just walked right up to him and
confronted him. He bet him $10 that he was right
about the heroin trafficking. Helms, of course,
denied it and called him ridiculous. But Ginsburg
was right. He was 100 % right. In 1972, a historian
named Alfred McCoy published a massive, meticulously
researched book called The Politics of Heroin
in Southeast Asia. And it laid out all the proof.
The CIA was absolutely complicit. And the New
York Times actually had to apologize to him.
The editor at the time, C .L. Sulzberger, wrote
Ginsburg a personal note that essentially said,
you were right and we were wrong to dismiss you
as a crank. It was total vindication for him.
So he's fighting the American government. But
he wasn't exactly a darling of the authoritarian
leftists either. This is what makes him so interesting
and so hard to pin down politically. He wasn't
a partisan hack. He was an equal opportunity
agitator. He was a socialist, yes. But he had
zero patience for authoritarianism, even if it
came from his own side. The Cuba story is a classic
example of this. In 1965, he gets invited to
Havana to be a judge for a literary prize. He's
excited to see the great Cuban revolution up
close. But he gets there, and he immediately
sees that Fidel Castro's regime is persecuting
gay people, sending them to labor camps. And
Ginsburg just cannot keep his mouth shut. What
did he do? He started publicly protesting the
treatment of homosexuals. He complained about
the lack of marijuana. And according to some
reports, he allegedly called Che Guevara cute
and said he wanted to sleep with him. I can't
imagine the Cuban authorities appreciated that
very much. They did not. A few days later, they
knocked on his hotel room door, told him he was
a bad influence, and deported him. They put him
on the next plane out, which happened to be going
to Prague, Czechoslovakia. So out of the revolutionary
frying pan and into the Soviet fire? Exactly.
He lands in Prague, which is under a very repressive
Soviet control. And the students there, who are
living under this gray, conformist regime, they
see Ginsburg as this icon of freedom. They embrace
him. At their annual Mahalis festival, they elect
him the King of May. It's this huge, joyous,
spontaneous celebration of freedom and poetry.
And you can be sure the secret police are watching
all of this. There's ATB. They are tracking his
every move. They raid his apartment. They steal
his personal journals. They read them and declare
them lewd and degenerate. And within a week of
being crowned King of May, he is expelled from
Czechoslovakia, too. So he was too gay for the
communists and too communist for the Americans?
He was a man without a country, in a way. He
lived in his own sovereign state of radical openness.
And speaking of that radical openness, we have
to address the most controversial and for many
people, the most disturbing aspect of his life.
We can't do a deep dive and just skip the things
that make people profoundly uncomfortable. No,
you can't. And you're referring to his involvement
with NMBL. Yes. The North American Man Boy Love
Association. The sources are very clear on this.
Allen Ginsberg was a member. He was. And this
is where we have to be very precise about just
reporting the facts from the sources. Ginsberg
joined the group. And he publicly defended it.
How on earth did he justify that? What was his
rationale? He framed it primarily as a free speech
issue and as an issue of non -judgment. He viewed
it as just another frontier of sexual liberation.
He is on the record as saying, this is a direct
quote from him, I'm a member of NBLA because
I love boys too, everybody does, who has a little
humanity. That statement. It's incredibly disturbing
to hear today. It is. It's shocking. And it wasn't
just a passive membership for him. He wrote poems
about it. He called them pederast rhapsodies,
where he graphically described his attractions
and fantasies. And this put him at war with other
parts of the counterculture that had once been
his allies, specifically the feminist movement.
Yes. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin in particular
went after him hard. She argued that this wasn't
about liberation or free speech. She saw it as
predatory and abusive. She accused Ginsburg of
using his intellectual status and his fame to
justify the abuse of children. And what was Ginsburg's
response to that? He didn't back down an inch.
he accused workin of projecting her own trauma
onto him he refused to feel shame about any of
his desires it was a massive ugly and very public
conflict But it's important to include this because
it shows the absolute extreme edge of his philosophy.
He believed in candor at all costs. He believed
in revealing every single thought, no matter
how caboo or repulsive it was, to the rest of
society. He didn't want to hide any part of himself.
Nothing. He wanted the world to see the madness
and the darkness right alongside the spiritual
light. It was all part of the same human package
for him. Let's pivot back to his poetry for a
minute, because while he's causing all these
international incidents and controversies, he
is also constantly refining his craft. He had
some really specific techniques he used. He was
a serious technician. He wasn't just splattering
feelings on a page. He talked a lot about the
eyeball kick. The eyeball kick. Explain that.
He got this idea from looking at the paintings
of the post -impressionist artist Paul Cezanne.
He noticed that Cezanne would put two contracting
patches of color right next to each other on
the canvas, like a bright red right next to a
bright green. And when your eye hits that border
between the two colors, it sort of spasms, it
vibrates, it creates a little jolt in your perception.
And he wanted to do that with words. Exactly.
He wanted to jam two completely opposite images
or ideas together in a single phrase to make
the reader's mind jump. The most famous example,
of course, is the phrase hydrogen jukebox from
Howl. Hydrogen and jukebox, two words that have
no business being together. None at all. Hydrogen
brings up the H -bomb, science destruction, Cold
War terror. Jukebox brings up teenagers' diners,
rock and roll, fun, pop culture. You smash them
together, hydrogen jukebox, and you create a
brand new third image in the reader's mind that
is both terrifying and electric. That jolt, that's
the kick. And he also believed in what he called
spontaneous prose. First thought, best thought.
This was originally a Kerouac idea, but Ginsberg
adopted it and made it his own. The idea is that
the mind is inherently holy. So if a thought
or an image comes into your head as you're writing,
it's true and pure. If you stop to edit it or
censor it, you are lying. You're getting in the
way of the divine flow. But did he actually practice
that? Did he never revise his poems? The truth
is he did revise his poems. The manuscripts for
Howell show a lot of revision. But the goal,
the aesthetic he was aiming for, was to capture
the raw, unfiltered flow of consciousness. We
talked a lot about Howell, but many literary
critics actually say his greatest single work
is Kaddish. I would agree with that. I think
Kaddish is his masterpiece. And it brings us
full circle right back to the beginning of our
story. Back to his mother, Naomi. Naomi died
in 1956 while she was still institutionalized.
She died in the mental hospital. And because
of the circumstances, there was no minion. the
required quorum of 10 Jewish men, to say the
traditional Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,
at her funeral. Ginsburg was devastated by that
failure. He was. He carried that guilt with him.
He felt he had failed her in her death as he
had so often failed to save her in her life.
So a few years later, he wrote his own Kaddish.
And it is a long, brutal, absolutely heartbreaking
poem. It is essentially a biography of her madness.
He doesn't sugarcoat any of it. Not at all. It
is unflinching. He describes the scars on her
belly from the lobotomy. He describes her vomit.
He describes her paranoia. He describes her nudity.
It is incredibly raw and graphic. But through
all that grotesquery, there's this immense, overwhelming
love. He's trying to give her back her dignity
by bearing witness to her suffering in a way
no one else would. There is a specific detail
in the poem, a letter she wrote to him from the
hospital. This is the emotional core of the entire
poem. Two days before she died, in a rare moment
of lucidity, she wrote him a letter from the
hospital. It said, The key is in the window.
The key is in the sunlight in the window. I have
the key. Get married, Alan. Don't take drugs.
The key is in the sunlight. That image, the key
in the sunlight, haunts the poem. It represents
this fleeting moment of peace and clarity she
was always looking for, but could never quite
grasp because of her illness. And in a way, you
could say Ginsburg spent his whole life looking
for that key, too. As we move into the later
years of his life, the 70s, 80s, 90s, Ginsburg
achieves this really weird status. He becomes
the grandfather of the counterculture. He refused
to become irrelevant. A lot of the 60s icons
either burned out, faded away, or became these
sad self -parodies. Ginsberg just kept adapting.
When punk rock happened in the late 70s, he didn't
look at it and say, oh, that's just noise. It's
not like the 60s. He said, this is the energy.
This is the new beat. He hung out with The Clash.
He collaborated with them. He's on the track
Ghetto Defendant on their classic album Combat
Rock. You can hear him in the background reciting
his poetry. He toured with Bob Dylan on the legendary
Rolling Thunder review. He recorded a track with
Paul McCartney. He just stayed curious. That
is the defining trait of his later years. He
never stopped being curious. He was always looking
for the next new vision. He was teaching at Brooklyn
College. He became a distinguished professor,
but he was still showing up at punk rock clubs
in the East Village. But eventually the body
fails. In 1997, he gets the diagnosis. Liver
cancer. It was terminal. And the doctors believed
it was a complication from hepatitis C, which
he had likely contracted decades and decades
earlier. It was on the drug use. Possibly from
a dirty needle during his heroin experimentation
phase in the 40s or 50s, or maybe from unsterilized
medical equipment somewhere along his travels
in the 60s. It's impossible to know for sure.
But the result was the same. The doctors gave
him a few months to live. And the way he handled
his own death, it feels like his final performance
piece, his final poem. It was. It was a masterclass
in his own philosophy. He didn't withdraw. He
didn't go to a private hospital room and hide
from the world. He went home to his loft in the
East Village. And he got on the phone. The goodbye
calls. He went through his address book, and
he called everyone. He called his old lovers,
his fellow poets, his students, his friends,
his enemies. He called them to say, I'm dying,
and I love you, and goodbye. Can you imagine
picking up the phone and hearing that? Allen
Ginsberg on the other end. The sources say the
calls were this incredible mix of sorrow and
joy. He was crying. They were crying. But he
was also laughing and telling stories. He was
wrapping up the show. He was practicing the non
-attachment to life that he'd learned from his
Buddhist teachers. And he kept writing. Until
the very end. His last poem, which was titled
Things I'll Not Do, Nostalgias, was written just
days before he died in April of 1997. It's just
a simple list of all the places he won't get
to visit now, the books he won't read, the lovers
he won't meet. It's this beautiful, sad, accepting
farewell to the physical world. And then he was
gone. But the ripple effect, you could argue,
is still moving. So let's try to synthesize all
this. We've covered a lot of ground here. The
boy from Patterson, New Jersey, the Mad Mother,
the Columbia Rebellion, the vision of William
Blake. the obscenity trial, the chanting, the
protests, the controversies. When you look at
the whole arc, what is the key takeaway? What's
the thing that holds it all together? I think
the key to understanding Allen Ginsberg is that
he treated his entire life as a laboratory experiment.
And the subject of that experiment was radical
openness. What do you mean by that exactly? I
mean, he decided early on, probably because of
the secrets and shame surrounding his mother's
illness, that secrets are poison, that shame
is the enemy of the soul. So he lived his life
as a completely open book. He hid nothing. He
didn't hide his homosexuality when it was illegal
and dangerous to be openly gay. He didn't hide
his drug use when it was taboo. He didn't hide
his mental health struggles. He didn't hide his
most controversial and too many repulsive desires.
It's the complete opposite of how most of us
live, especially now. We curate everything. We
have our Instagram face, our LinkedIn face. We
hide all the messy parts. Ginsburg put the messy
parts on the front page. He made it his life's
work. He forced America to look at the things
it wanted to ignore. He forced us to look at
the madness and ask if maybe, just maybe, the
so -called mad ones were the only ones telling
the truth. It brings me right back to that line
from his mother Naomi's final letter. The key
is in the sunlight at the window. Ginsburg spent
70 years trying to find that key through poetry,
through sex, through drugs, through chanting,
through political protest. And maybe he found
it. Or maybe he realized that the search itself,
the act of looking, the act of living openly
and honestly without shame, was the key all along.
So here's a final question for you listening
right now. In our age of hidden selves and carefully
crafted online personas, could any of us survive
the kind of radical openness that Alan Gessberg
practiced? Or was that so -called madness the
only thing that actually kept him sane in a crazy
world? It's a question worth meditating on. That
is it for this deep dive on Allen Ginsberg. Thanks
for listening, and we'll see you next time.