Ginsberg, India, and the holiness of dirt.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean

Shortly after his arrival for a long-anticipated fourteen-month stay in India, Allen Ginsberg records in his journal a dream in which he imagines himself atop a hill of garbage.

I am climbing about on a pile of refuse when a young married couple spies me & says "Ah, this garbage-haunting is what you represent." I sit cross-legged Buddha style over the wires & refuse & bless it and say "I am here to make the Refuse sanctified" and smile cheerfully at the refuse as if it were a big happy religious redemption. (Journals 8) (1)

The dream brings into focus certain of the tensions in the thirty-six year old poet's life, most importantly what he saw as the tendency of heterosexual normalcy (represented by "a young married couple") to dismiss as "garbage-haunting" the spiritual search that he himself found deeply meaningful. And it captures the urge he felt to sanctify or redeem what society has discarded as ugly, useless and, in some cases, profane.

The aesthetic and the ethic that Ginsberg would develop as a result of his experiences in India were in many ways but an extension, or a deepening, of the system of religious and artistic values that he had already been working eighteen years to articulate. "The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!" Ginsberg had asserted in 1956 in "Footnote to Howl" (Poems 142), the groundbreaking poem in which he celebrated the "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" (Poems 134) who had been driven mad when forced to live in a world governed by Moloch. Likewise, in Kaddish (1959), his haunting requiem for his mother Naomi, Ginsberg invited his reader to contemplate the "ragged long lips between her legs--What, even smell of asshole?" (Poems 227). In attempting to recover the sacrality of the body and its functions, Ginsberg went further, even, than Walt Whitman, who had proclaimed that "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, / The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer" (Song of Myself 524-25).

Ginsberg's Indian Journals (1970) record, thus, not a sudden conversion experience, but a significant stage in his gradual movement from the Judaism of his upbringing to the Buddhism that would guide and preoccupy him until his death in 1997. First exposed to Asian religious texts in his undergraduate courses at Columbia College and further guided in his reading and thinking by his earliest mentor, Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg had drawn upon Hindu-Buddhist poetic form as early as 1955 when writing "Sunflower Sutra." But, as Tony Trigilio notes, until his travels to India in 1962-63, Ginsberg's "Buddhist practice was autodidactic and, as such, was eccentric and erratic" (Trigilio xii; claim repeated on 102). Nonetheless, Trigilio concludes, "Ginsberg's struggle with Buddhism is central to understanding his post-'Kaddish' visionary work; and only through an understanding of his maturation as a Buddhist can we consider the scope of his career in detail" (xi). Trigilio thus reads Ginsberg's later career ultimately as an attempt "to reconceive ... [the] Beat improvisatory aesthetic as a Buddhist one" (2).

The significance of Ginsberg's traveling to India following an eight-week stay in Israel is suggested by the opening passage in the Journals, in which he records his "first dream of India" (which he titles a "Premonition Dream"). "[A]fter weeks of unhappiness" at sea, Ginsberg sees himself arriving in an unidentified Indian city. "I wonder what city I'm in," the Ginsberg-of-the-dream records. But his disorientation is inconsequential: "I'm deliriously happy," he explains; "it's my promised land" (Journals 5). Following this dream of India as his very own "promised land," Ginsberg-the-diarist notes parenthetically, as though to underscore the religio-cultural irony of his situation, that "I'm writing this in the promised land" (emphasis added)--that is, while in Haifa, in modern-day Israel, which remains historically the Promised Land of the Jewish scriptures. (2)

More than marking a shift in a literary/spiritual model from the Book of Jeremiah to the Bhagavad Gita, however, the Indian Journals record an evolving attitude toward death from seeing it as something to be lamented, which Ginsberg seems to have associated with his family's Judaism, to revering it as part of an ongoing process of transformation. Several months into his stay in India, Ginsberg composed a poem memorializing dead family members that concludes, "I / am amazed by the dead population / that must grow to include me / with the rest" (Journals 48). His journals, however, reveal his increasing fascination with the burning ghats in which Hindu corpses are immolated as part of a religious ritual. Initially Ginsberg associates the ghats with holocaust sites like Belsen and Buchenwald (Journals 21, 23), which were presumably brought to Ginsberg's consciousness by his stay in Israel and which represented for him the destructive, inhumane horror of the modern world.

Such references, however, disappear from the journals as the ghats lost their horror for Ginsberg. In Benares--the Hindu holy city of the dead (3)--he and Orlovsky rented an apartment on a street leading to one of the busiest ghats, and Ginsberg attempted to record in his journals the complex dramas that played out daily before his eyes: the dignity and deeply felt emotion with which a son ignites his mother's funeral pyre; the extraordinary skill with which the ghat attendants use long poles, much as one would a fireplace poker, to lift wayward limbs back into the fire and keep the disintegrating corpse from falling off its pyre; "the beauty of the crowding bathing nakedness" (Journals 154) of devout Hindus in the Ganges adjoining the ghats; the sheer energy of life in the midst of death. Describing in detail the shifting colors of the flames as they consume a corpse, Ginsberg concluded that it was "like burning away fear--I thought, burning the dross inside me" (Journals 125)--immolating what he earlier termed "my own egotism's death fear" (Journals 48-9). Ginsberg seems to have overcome his fear of, or repugnance for, death while in India.

In addition, the Indian Journals bear witness to an evolving attitude towards human suffering on Ginsberg's part. "If you see anything horrible don't cling to it if you see anything beautiful don't cling to it," Ginsberg records Lama Dudjom Rimpoche N'yingmapa as having taught him (Journals 3): "Watch the wheels within wheels but don't get attached to anything you see. Let it pass into you, but be in-active and not grasping nor rejecting" (Journals 29). Of course, the socialist outrage over human injustice that Ginsberg inherited from his parents did not leave him entirely. For example, in India he pasted into his journal a newspaper story from the Calcutta Statesman, 23 October 1962, titled "The Privileged Class," whose subtitle explained that "Bulk Of Wealth Owned By 1% In India" (Journals 73). But, believing that self-absorption leaves one oblivious to the larger world--that is, that the ego selects from a scene only what pertains directly to its pleasure or what seems a threat to its welfare--Ginsberg set out in a non-judgmental manner to record what he calls "the unnoticed details of the going universe outside the room" in which he and Orlovsky stayed (Journals 42). Being in a "third world" country apparently made it possible for him to gaze with equanimity upon instances of dirt, suffering, and death that plutocratic societies resent as silent indictments of capitalism.

His journals, thus, are replete with descriptions of street scenes that attempt to include every detail--the appearance and actions of every human and animal, the voices, the stains on the pavement--giving everyone and everything equal weight. Crippled beggars are described without pity or revulsion--not dispassionately, by any means, but with a remarkable acceptance of the totality of experience. The photographs that Ginsberg took while in India (some of which he included in the 1996 Grove Press reprinting of Indian Journals) betray the same religious aesthetic. The camera's eye looks without judgment, yet with compassionate acceptance, on a boy whose fingers have been eaten away by leprosy, on a three-legged dog that moves through a crowded street, on a homeless woman sleeping in the street. Ginsberg's Indian Journals and the photographs that he took while in India challenge the reader and/or viewer to consider what is beautiful and what makes a person or scene worth looking at. In effect they sanctify "the refuse as if it were a big happy religious redemption"; Ginsberg's journals and photographs become acts of namaste--that is, of bowing in respectful acknowledgment of another's existence.

Perhaps no poem better illustrates Ginsberg's progressive reconciliation of a William Carlos Williams-inspired aesthetic of "no ideas but in things" with a Buddhist ethic that accepts all life as holy than "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat." Ginsberg composed the poem in his journal while living with Peter Orlovsky in Benares in February 1963 (Journal 176-78), and included it with minor changes in Planet News 1961-1968 (1968). (4) Although the poem is not discussed by Trigilio in his analysis of the evolution of Ginsberg's Buddhist poetics, it exemplifies what he terms Ginsberg's "impulse to resignify material lived experience as a practice of the sacred" (123); the speaker has achieved a "Buddhist mindfulness" that is simultaneously "a matter of poetic lucidity--a mode of clarity that transforms observation into vision" (140). In "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat," human suffering is no longer a maddening source of agony to, or cause of mourning for, the speaker as it is in "Howl" or "Kaddish." Rather the poem, which is characterized by a quiet acceptance of suffering and death as part of the ongoing drama of human existence, offers the reader a vision of the interconnectedness of all things.

The poem unfolds like a cinematic Rube Goldberg operation. The eye of the speaker (whose position on a balcony overlooking the street scene below is not established until line 7) is first taken by the "tottering" movement of Kali Ma, a blind street person who is "feeling her way" to the curb where she needs to urinate. (5) Her blindness prevents her from recognizing that there is an abandoned broom lying where she habitually performs her bodily functions. The broom, however, allows for the poem's segue from Kali Ma to the broom's owners, "the Stone Cutters who last night were shaking the street with Boom! of Stone blocks unloaded from truck" (2), and who presumably did not realize that they were leaving it behind as they completed their work in the night-darkened street. Mention of the Stone Cutters leads the reader's gaze from Kali Ma squatting over the broom to "the blindman in his gray rags" who, when the delivery truck arrived and the Stone Cutters began unloading their stones, had been forced to leave the bed that he makes every night in the middle of the street, and before whom there daily pass "cows donkeys dogs camels elephants marriage processions drummers tourists lepers and bathing devotees" (5). Thus, in only six lines Ginsberg has led his reader from the seemingly casual contemplation of a single, apparently isolated figure to a riotous parade of human and animal life.

The speaker's next chain of figures begins as he watches a leper, previously obscured by the stationary bicycle past which Kali Ma lurches, "emerge dragging his buttocks on the gray rainy ground by the glove-bandaged stumps of hands" (8). The leper laboriously drags himself to a municipal water pump, pausing each movement of the way to push before him the tin can that he seeks to fill. He stops to converse with "a turban'd workman" who questions why he uses this water pump when "free rice" is available at the pump near an outdoor altar place in the opposite direction (16-17). As the leper pauses to discuss the matter with the workman, the speaker recognizes that the leper and his can rest just short of "a puddle" formed by Kali Ma's urine, which causes the reader-viewer's gaze to return to the blind woman (19-20). Done urinating, Kali Ma--"her hands in the air" (20)--attempts to find her way back to the pile of rags that is her bed and which, in her absence, a free-roaming cow has begun to chew (21).

Kali Ma quietly disappears from the poem as the speaker-observer's gaze shifts to the dozing "comb-&-hair-oil-booth keeper" who is startled awake by a dog's barking and rushes to chase "her" away with a stick (22). (It is not clear if the pronoun refers to the salivating cow or to the urinating Kali Ma.) The dog's barking was instigated by the appearance of

   ... a madman with dirty wild black hair who rag round his midriff &
      water
   pot in hand

   Stopped in midstreet turned round & gazed up at the balconies,
      windows,
   shops and city stagery filled with glum activity

   Shrugged & said Jai Shankar! [Victory to Shiva!] to the imaginary
      audience
   of Me's,

   While a white robed Baul Singer carrying his one stringed dried
      pumpkin
   Guitar

   Sat down near the cigarette stand and surveyed his new scene, just
      arrived
   in the Holy City of Benares. (23-27)

By offering a chain of seemingly insignificant causal circumstances, the poem in effect provides a vision of how everything in the world is interconnected in ways that cannot be anticipated. The poem seems to move forward visually in cinematographic fashion: the reader is asked to look from the speaker's vantage point on his balcony above the street through the camera's eye, as it were, as it pans from Kali Ma, to the disabled leper, and finally to the black haired madman and the white robed Baul Singer. Temporally, however, the poem's actions move constantly backwards in an attempt to explain those actions' causes: to the arrival the night before of the Stone Cutters who would leave behind the broom with which Kali Ma comes in contact, and who disrupted the routine of the blindman who sleeps "in the middle of the road"; and to the disruptive appearance on the scene of the madman who sets to barking the dog that awakens "the comb-&-hair-oil-booth keeper" who chases away either the scavenging cow or Kali Ma herself. Past and present combine in a moment of extraordinary lucidity in which the reader is implicitly invited to share.

This sense of the underlying connectedness of all things is reinforced poetically by the absence of end-stopped punctuation in the poem. "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat" is 27 lines long yet possesses only one period, and that only at the very end of the poem. All of the other lines are suspended by commas or em-dashes, the enjambment of the lines combining with Ginsberg's compressed syntax ("Maximum information, minimum number of syllables" ["Cosmopolitan Greetings," 955]) to create a discourse in which seemingly individual actions and identities are collapsed into the shared welter of life. Thus, no one action begins and concludes independently of another. Rather, as in a Rube Goldberg device, each leads incongruously yet inescapably to the next. Similarly, as noted above, the ambiguity of the pronoun "her" in line 23 leaves the reader uncertain whether the "comb-&-hair-oil-booth keeper" is using a stick to force the cow or Kali Ma to vacate the space in front of his booth. Ginsberg's deliberately ambiguous pronoun collapses the animal and the person into a single identity, blurring the border between the human and the animal worlds. Kali Ma's puddle of urine, like the cow's dropping to the ground the wet mass of Kali Ma's rags that it has spent five minutes trying unsuccessfully to digest (21), is undesirable to the booth keeper's business but--like "the Snail's slime track" left by the disabled leper (14)--is suggestive of the Bakhtinian open body whose fluids flow freely, blurring the boundary between the Self and the World. From a businessman's point of view, both the cow and the blind woman are a nuisance; but from the speaker-observer's, each is an essential part of a scene of Bakhtinian grotesquerie in which people are open, not closed, to life. (6)

For Ginsberg it is exactly this weltering confusion of values that makes the world holy. The Amer-European reader is most likely taken aback by the concluding phrase of the poem which summarizes the scene as "the Holy City of Benares" (27). The typical Western observer who has been raised to associate the divine with order, and evil with chaos (Yahweh brings form out of the waters, and light out of darkness, in Gen. 1.1-10)--or who has been influenced by the emphasis on cleanness and uncleanness in the Mosaic holiness code and its equivalent in Islam--would no doubt judge a scene "profane" in which a blind woman urinates publicly, a leper drags himself along the street by the stumps that remain of his hands, a madman in a ragged loincloth sets a local dog to barking, and "cows donkeys dogs camels elephants" mingle indiscriminately with "marriage processions drummers tourists lepers and bathing devotees" (5). Conversely, physiologically, Ginsberg's concluding line allows the reader a momentary experience of ecstasy: even as the long meandering lines of the poem are brought to a conclusion with an endstop, the open vowel sounds of "Holy City" and weak final syllable of "Benares" forestall sonal closure, eliciting from the reader a gasp--of exhaustion, of wonder, or (the poet may hope) of both. The poem in effect forces the reader to consider not only what makes this particular scene "holy," but where the holy is to be found in the world in general. Every night the "blindman in his gray rags" shakes under his blanket "telling his beads or sex" (4): is he praying or masturbating? Maybe the two actions are not so dissimilar, the poem suggests, in that both actions are attempts to find release from misery.

Paradoxically, in a poem that opens with Kali Ma blindly "tottering" (1), the seemingly unstable world of Dasaswamedh Ghat proves surprisingly stable. Kali Ma's routine of urinating at the curb, like the disabled leper's progress to the water pump and the cow's scavenging, is repeated daily, vesting the action with almost ritualistic significance. The reader senses that the scene has been repeated innumerable times over the centuries--if not with these exact personages, then with other representatives of their condition. The most vulnerable and perilously mortal members of the city's community participate in a drama that, while deeply grounded in the immediate experience of the senses, transcends the quotidian to become a primal drama of bodily survival and, paradoxically, spiritual transcendence. The leper's struggle to obtain water, Kali Ma's to evacuate her waste and the cow's search for sustenance are elemental actions invested with the hope of release into nirvana because the actors perform them without complaint in the Holy City of Benares.

Ultimately, the purpose of the poem is to invite the reader to "look" anew at the sacred beauty that inheres in the most humble of circumstances. The poem's closing movement juxtaposes two perspectives: that of the madman who "gazed up at the balconies, windows, shops and city stagery filled with glum activity / Shrugged and said Jai Shankar! [Victory to Shiva!] to the imaginary audience of Me's" (24-25); and that of "a white robed Baul Singer," newly arrived in "the Holy City of Benares," who sits down "near the cigarette stand and surveyed his new scene" (26-27). The madman calls the destructive power of Shiva down upon the bourgeoisie who literally look down on this world from the safe distance and emotional remove of their windows and balconies, and who do not participate in the drama played out in the street below. Significantly, the speaker includes himself in this group, whose actions are controlled by their egos ("Me's"): however much his attention is engaged by the festive bustle along the ghat, he apparently does not descend to join the crowd but holds himself somewhat aloof.

The newly arrived Baul Singer, conversely, "surveyed his new scene" from ground level, fully intending to participate in it. In his notes to the poem, Ginsberg glosses "Baul" as "mystical sect of wandering, patchwork-clothed Vaishvan singers, some devoted to Krishna, in North Bengal," and notes their influence on the songs of Rabindranath Tagore (Poems 779), with whose work Ginsberg acquainted himself while in Bengal. (Indeed, according to Deborah Baker, upon first hearing of Ginsberg and the Beats, Sunil Gangapadhyay and the members of the Krittibas circle thought of them as Bauls, "those troubadours of the Bengal countryside who rebelled against the conventions that marked class and religious differences" [160].) The singer, thus, is as much a stand-in for the peregrinating, vision-seeking Ginsberg as the somewhat aloof observer in line 7 who seems to be included by the madman in his denunciation of "the city stagery filled with glum activity."

This dual doppelganger for the poet suggests, finally, the dual function of the poem as well as the complex nature of Ginsberg's experience in India. On the one hand, the madman's devotion to Shiva the Destroyer is at odds with the Baul Singer's devotion to Vishnu the Preserver, suggesting the two men's differing attitudes towards the scene: the one implicitly denounces the "city stagery" of those who are sheltered by their middle class comfort and complacency, while the other prepares to engage lyrically with "his new scene." But, on the other hand, in Hindu cosmology the actions of Shiva the Destroyer are necessary before new life can be created, as the actions of the one god actually complement those of the other. The speaker may remain aloof as an actor within the poem, but the poet is fully engaged by life's tragicomedies. In "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat," the self is relieved of an absolutist point of view.

Ginsberg's description of a scene of dirt, confusion and instability is, thus, also a celebration of the eternal religious: the poet, who is different than the poem's speaker, sits atop the pile of what others may dismiss as "refuse" and blesses it "as if it were a big happy religious redemption." It is not Shiva's fire that rains down on the scene, but the "Rain" that is mentioned in the poem's title and that is present in the text proper only as "the gray rainy ground" across which the disabled leper drags himself (8). That the poem does not focus in greater detail upon the physical fact of the rain, despite its prominence in the poem's title, suggests that Ginsberg is more interested in rain as an image of spiritual cleansing and renewal than in the effect of a meteorological event on the material world. "Materialist lived experience," to repeat Trigilio's claim for Ginsberg's Buddhist poetics, has been resignified "as a practice of the sacred" (Trigilio 123).

The Indian Journals are important as a record of Ginsberg's complex spiritual quest. Ginsberg spent much of his time in India looking for a guru. He sat talking with sadhus, sought out methods of meditation, and experimented with a variety of local substances, particularly ganja. But as he records in his dedication, ultimately his experience in India taught him to "stop going around looking for Gurus" and instead to follow his own heart (Journal 3). Clearly, the torment that infuses "Howl" and "Kaddish" does not disappear entirely from his poetry, but as Trigilio points out, the breathing techniques that Ginsberg developed while in India and through his exchanges with Gary Snyder during these months abroad allowed him to fuse "song" and "concentration" in an "appropriation of mantra speech" (86): rather than a protest against injustice in the world, his poetry became increasingly a means of trying to make something happen.

At the time, even if disappointed not to have found the guru that he was searching for, Ginsberg understood fully that in India he had absorbed more than he could possibly express. "But how ever recreate India?" Ginsberg wondered in his journal two months before his departure (Journals 193). It was the unparalleled nakedness of India, the lack of capitalist subterfuge that he witnessed in so many street scenes--in effect, the holiness of dirt--that allowed him to experience what he terms "heartfelt the minute of now" (Journals 172). It's "very satisfying," Ginsberg records, "the click of the instant" (Journals 171), employing a phrase that suggests the snapping of a camera shutter. Yet for all the street scenes that he records in his journal, he worries that there are "thousands of scenes like this in India I haven't writ, but saw" (Journals 8). India offered a richness of experience that transformed him into an Emersonian eyeball: "I / am / traveller / eyes" (Journals 24), he notes.

A final observation might be made about the influence of Ginsberg's India sojourn upon his religious vision and his poetics. Clearly, Ginsberg never renounced the inheritance he received from Emerson, Whitman and Carlos Williams. That inheritance, however, seems to have been reinforced, and their influence redirected, by Ginsberg's exposure to the South Asian sacramentalization of the gaze. According to Diana Eck, the Hindu custom of darsan grows from a belief that when one looks upon an image of the divine, one is seeing and being seen by the deity (3). "When Hindus stand on tiptoe and crane their necks to see, through the crowd, the image of Lord Krsna, they wish not only to 'see,' but to be seen. The gaze of the huge eyes of the image meets that of the worshiper, and that exchange of vision lies at the heart of Hindu worship" (7). Consequently, gods are represented with particularly prominent eyes in Hindu religious art--as, by extension, are humans in Indian cinema. In his "Apu Trilogy," for example, film maker Satyajit Ray repeatedly frames his characters as they look at, or are looked at by, another person, giving them the dignity of religious icons. The characters silently implore each other, and by extension the viewing audience, for relief from want by looking directly at each other.

According to Susan Sontag, conversely, Western aesthetics betray a reluctance to look directly upon a person in pain. In Regarding the Pain of Others she notes that, during World War II, American photojournalists showed their respect for fallen American servicemen by carefully photographing their bodies from an angle that obscured the face, thus respecting the grief and guaranteeing the privacy of surviving family members. She compares these photographs with those made for the American news media of people starving in Biafra in the 1960s, of the Tutsi victims in the genocide that took place in 1994 in Rwanda, and of children and adults whose limbs were hacked off by rebel terrorists in Sierre Leone--photographs in which the subject is oftentimes allowed to look directly into the camera. "[T]he more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying" in the popular media, Sontag observes (70).

   These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is
   outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this
   is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of
   those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish
   belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or
   backward--that is, poor--parts of the world. (71)

In Western cultures, she concludes, "whenever people feel safe [...] they will be indifferent" (100). Humans are able to look directly on the pain of others--to take a "full frontal view"--only to the extent that we are incapable of identifying with the sufferer because he is either completely alien to us, is dying under circumstances in which we cannot imagine ever finding ourselves, or has been discovered in conditions so extreme that the viewer feels there is nothing he or she can do to relieve such suffering and, thus, can look upon the scene with impassivity.

Like his photographs, Ginsberg's "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat" invites participation in the suffering of others, and may be read in the context of darsan. In his dream, Ginsberg "smile[d] cheerfully at the refuse as if it were a big happy religious redemption." Rather than turning his gaze from the distressed, he blessed it. Significantly, Ginsberg's syntax does not make clear who or what is being redeemed: the refuse by Ginsberg's smile, or Ginsberg himself by having discovered what he had been searching for? In the Hindu practice of darsan the gaze is powered by both participants. Redemption can be found in the streets, and one is made holy by being able to "see" the sacred as it gazes upon one from a trash heap.

It is doubly challenging, Ginsberg recognizes, for someone raised in an Amero-European mind set to communicate the reality of India to someone who has not experienced the culture him- or herself. Ginsberg's description of a street festival that he and Peter witnessed suggests how powerful a hold India took on Ginsberg's imagination.

Elora--Glory, I mean they got great dancing Shivas balanced with ten arms doing cosmic dances of creation 20 feet tall, & fantastic skully Kalis invoking nightmare murders in another yuga, thousands of statues dancing all over huge temple built like Mt. Kailash the Himalayan abode of Shiva--And Ganesha with fat belly & elephant head & snakehead belt & trunk in a bowlful of sweets riding on his Vehicle a mouse--How can Da Vinci beat an elephant on a mouse? (Journals 65)

Leonardo's representations of the Mona Lisa, of John the Baptist or of the Last Supper--the standards by which the excellence of traditional Western images are judged--pale in comparison with a culture's ability to unite such contradictory elements as an elephant riding astride a mouse in the popular depiction of the god Ganesh and his vehicle. The sacred cannot be set apart in a museum or church with a halo to confirm its nature. Rather, the holy is to be found in a riotous street scene, in "the click of the instant," in which the goddess Kali, traditionally represented with black skin and with a string of skulls around her neck and/or waist, is addressed as "Beautiful Mother."

Has the incommensurability topos ever been so dramatically expressed, or the gulf between American and South Asian ideas of Holy Beauty been so movingly articulated? In its acceptance of dirt and its celebration of a seemingly defiled universe, "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat" enacts the revolt of the sudras (untouchable) poet against middle class order and cleanliness.

References

Baker, Deborah. 2008. A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. New York: Penguin.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Eck, Diana L. 1982. Banaras: City of Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

--. 1996. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Second ed., revised and enlarged. New York: Columbia University Press.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean. "'Sweet boy, Gimme Yr Ass': Allen Ginsberg and the Open Male Body of the Beat Revolution." CEA Critic 61, 3-4 (Spring/Summer 1999): 83-98.

Ginsberg, Allen. 2006. Collected Poems 1947-1997. New York: Harper and Row.

--. 1996. Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings (1970). Reprinted, New York: Grove.

Miles, Barry. 1989. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Morgan, Bill. 1995. The Works of Allen Ginsberg 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.

--. 2006. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Viking.

Parry, Jonathan P. 1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schumacher, Michael. 1992. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

Trigilio, Tony. 2007. Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Whitman, Walt. 1959. "Song of Myself. In Collected Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by James E. Miller, Jr. (25-68). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

(1) Quotations from the Indian Journals are identified parenthetically as Journals, and those from the Collected Poems as Poems. Because Ginsberg's long breath lines are rarely numbered as verse lines, as is traditionally done when lyric poetry is discussed, I cite Ginsberg's poems only by page number. The exception is "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat," which I analyze in detail, making line number references necessary.

(2) The facts of Ginsberg's journey are summarized in Miles (298-322), Schumacher (368-96), Morgan (I Celebrate Myself 344-73), and Baker (passim). Ginsberg's stay in India was particularly important in terms of his relationship with Peter Orlovsky. Although Ginsberg would remain Orlovsky's provider, their relationship seems to have ceased being sexual in India, and for the remainder of Ginsberg's life, Orlovsky would assert his independence of Ginsberg in ways that oftentimes seemed designed to humiliate the older man (Morgan, passim). Following India, however, Ginsberg seemed less conflicted about his sexuality. In India he seems to have reached a greater acceptance of himself.

(3) For the history of Benares as the Hindu Jerusalem or Mecca, see Eck, Banaras. A historian of religion, Eck is strongest when assessing the religio-cultural significance of the city, and offers in passing a good deal of information about Dasaswamedh Ghat (which she transliterates as Dashashvamedha Ghat). For a sociological analysis of the customs surrounding the care of the dying and the disposal of the remains of the dead in Benares, see Parry. He is particularly astute in deducing from the facts of the cremation industries the belief systems that draw pious Hindus to the city. The name of city appears in scholarship on South Asia more often as "Banaras," but I respect Ginsberg's choice of an alternative transliteration and use "Benares" in my essay.

(4) I cite the poem as it appears in Collected Poems 1947-1997, 303-4. According to Ginsberg's bibliographer, Bill Morgan, the poem was originally titled simply "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh"; the word "Ghat" was not added until 1971 (Works item F30). Compare items A15 and A19, with items F30 and A48.

(5) The dramatic impact that Kali Ma had upon Ginsberg and Orlovsky during their months in Benares has been documented by Deborah Baker. Her summary is informed by her interviews with Orlovsky:

At Dasaswamedh Ghat, he [Orlovsky] discovered a leper woman wearing a burlap sack tied with a string, crusted with dirt. When he helped her change into a newly bought sari, he discovered deep, maggot-infested wounds on her buttock and hip. "I was so surprised I dident know what to do for a second--then I hide tailed it to a doctor." He [Orlovsky] disinfected her wounds, looking into her eyes as he fed her. Upon their return from Delhi some weeks later, he stumbled upon her body and veered away in surprise. "I dident think she would go so soon. What fooled me was her calm eyes, living so peasefulley above her hip woe--." (Baker 199)

While in the army, Orlovsky had been a medical attendant and, thus, was experienced at cleaning wounds. And in Calcutta, as Baker reports, "Peter had worked alongside the nuns at Mother Teresa's ashram for the dying" (Baker 199), so was not unfamiliar with the suffering of the poor and abandoned. The extremity of Kali Ma's condition, thus, is suggested by his rush to consult professional medical expertise.

(6) Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin demonstrates how grotesque bodily realism challenged the hierarchical construction of sexuality in medieval popular culture. Compare the "new bodily canon," which Bakhtin notes came to dominate the High Renaissance and was further refined in the neoclassical style. It "presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade. The opaque surface and the body's 'valleys' acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world" (320).

The "open body," in contrast, allows its fluids to flow freely into the world. "Describe: The Rain on Dasaswamedh Ghat" is, in Bakhtinian terms, ultimately a festive poem and might be analyzed as a South Asian version of a scene by Breughel. For another aspect of Ginsberg's Rabelaisian poetic, see Frontain.