Vale
This is Allen Ginsberg’s last book, particular to his determining intent, his last writings when in hospital aware of his impending death, his last reflections and resolutions—his last mind. When he was told by the doctors that he had at best only a short time to live, he called his old friends to tell them the hard news, comforting, reassuring, as particular to their lives as ever. Despite the intensely demanding fame he’d had to deal with for more than forty years, he’d kept the world both intimate and transcendent. It was a “here and now” that admitted all the literal things of each day’s substance and yet well knew that all such was finally “too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky/at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street…” He was, and remains, the enduring friend, the one who goes with us wherever we are taken, who counsels and consoles, who gets the facts when it seems we will never be told them, who asks “Who’ll council who lives where in the rubble/who’ll sleep in what brokenwalled hut/in the moonlight…” He kept a witness of impeccable kind.
The playful, reductive, teasing verses, which could sometime make this world seem just the bitter foolishness it finally has to, sound here clearly. What is the grandness of death, of a body finally worn out, at last the simple fact of stubbornly reluctant shit and a tediously malfunctioning heart, of “all the accumulations that wear us out,” as he put it, when still a young man? There is no irony, no despair, in delighting as one can in “No more right & wrong/yes it’s gone gone gone/ gone gone away…” No poet more heard, more respected, more knew the intricacies of melody’s patterns. He took such pleasure in the whimsical, insistent way the very rhythms could take hold of attention, bringing each word to its singular place. “Chopping apples into the fruit compote—suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer!” His company insisted upon music and he danced with a consummate grace.
Now we must make our own music, albeit his stays with us forever. William Blake’s great call, “Hear the voice of the bard …,” now changes to “The authors are in eternity,” because ours is a passing world. Yet the heroic voices, the insistent intimacies of their tenacious humanity, hold us in a profound and securing bond. Where else would we think to live? Our friend gave his whole life to keep faith with Whitman’s heartfelt insistence, “Who touches this book touches a man.” So Allen Ginsberg will not leave us even now. “To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky.”
ROBERT CREELEY
JUNE 13, 1998