AT ABOUT 7 THIS MORNING
At about 7 a m. this morning I woke to put out the rubbish and went back to bed for an orgy of Allen Ginsburg, reading “Howl” for the first time since my university days – after all, what did I know then and what bewilderment a thing like that caused – I mean, how can you expose the tender mind of a 16-year-old to such power? Weren’t Shakespeare and the Bible bad enough?
Ginsburg, wandering, stoned, between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, assembling this terrible Golem of a poem – what right did he have to dump this thing on the good citizens of the 20th Century (as it then was) and then to have 70 years of readers claim falsely that they had actually read it, and us knowing that that could not possibly be true or there would have been a lot more frontal lobotomy cases staring blankly at the walls in mental institutions in the lands where The Eengleesh, she is spoke.
I never read the critics. Never never never never – and while others did so I wondered the paths of Table Mountain, mostly in solitude, discovering Truth on every bend, fresh wet foliage after rain in the winter and khaki-coloured fynbos in summer heat through clouds of bees and butterflies greeting every passerby in accordance with the unspoken Mountain Code. We are the blessed, the fortunate, the free - disconnected, temporarily, from the City below, untrammelled from it’s woes and anxieties, up here where thoughts are clear and people are kind.
Ginsburg, bloody Ginsburg, you came as a shock this morning – and before breakfast, and all – and now what is an old man supposed to do with the rest of his day? Sit on his stoep, watch the birds, and wait for his pulse to settle?
Harry Friedland
Hearts and Drums
2023 06 16
No comments:
Post a Comment