Notes were composed 1961–1984 in collaboration with Fernanda Pivano, Italian translator; Jean-Jacques Lebel, Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu, Gérard-Georges Lemaire and Philippe Mikriammos, French translators; as well as Carl Weissner, Heiner Bastien, Bernd Samland, Jürgen Schmidt and Michael Kellner, German translators. Ever-patient confidante, guide, adviser and scholar Fernanda Pivano has borne the burden of pioneer interpretation of American personal and ephemeral references in these texts to her Italian readers, and other translators, for almost a quarter century. Musician-poet Steven Taylor integrated notes from four languages. The author edited and expanded the work through Summer 1984. Poet Philip Whalen, Sensei, aided interpretation of Buddhist terminology.
A.G.
The four poems that follow, dedicated to Neal Cassady in the first years of our friendship, were set among “Earlier Poems: 1947,” appended to Gates of Wrath, a book of rhymed verse. These compositions, college imitations of Marlowe, Marvell and Donne (and Hart Crane), are now relocated among these notes. Subsequent poems of Summer 1948, also imitative in style, are placed with the main body of the collection because they deal with primary visionary experience.
A FURTHER PROPOSAL
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some old pleasures prove.
Men like me have paid in verse
This costly courtesy, or curse;
But I would bargain with my art
(As to the mind, now to the heart),
My symbols, images, and signs
Please me more outside these lines.
For your share and recompense,
You will be taught another sense:
The wisdom of the subtle worm
Will turn most perfect in your form.
Not that your soul need tutored be
By intellectual decree,
But graces that the mind can share
Will make you, as more wise, more fair,
Till all the world’s devoted thought
Find all in you it ever sought,
And even I, of skeptic mind,
A Resurrection of a kind.
This compliment, in my own way,
For what I would receive, I pay;
Thus all the wise have writ thereof,
And all the fair have been their love.
1947
A LOVER’S GARDEN
How vainly lovers marvel, all
To make a body, mind, and soul,
Who, winning one white night of grace,
Will weep and rage a year of days,
Or muse forever on a kiss,
If won by a more sad mistress—
Are all these lovers, then, undone
By him and me, who love alone?
O, have the virtues of the mind
Been all for this one love designed?
As seconds on the clock do move,
Each marks another thought of love;
Thought follows thought, and we devise
Each minute to antithesize,
Till, as the hour chimes its tune,
Dialectic, we commune.
The argument our minds create
We do, abed, substantiate;
Nor we disdain, in our delight,
To flatter the old Stagirite:
For in one speedy moment, we
Endure the whole Eternity,
And in our darkened shapes have found
The greater world that we surround.
In this community, the soul
Doth make its act impersonal,
As, locked in a mechanic bliss,
It shudders into nothingness—
Three characters of each may die
To dramatize that Unity.
Timed, placed, and acting thus, the while,
We sit and sing, and sing and smile.
What life is this? What pleasure mine!
Such as no image can insign:
Nor sweet music, understood,
Soft at night, in solitude
At a window, will enwreathe
Such stillness on my brow: I breathe,
And walk on earth, and act my will,
And cry Peace! Peace! and all is still.
Though here, it seems, I must remain,
My thoughtless world, whereon men strain
Through lives of motion without sense,
Farewell! in this benevolence—
That all men may, as I, arrange
A love as simple, sweet, and strange
As few men know; nor can I tell,
But only imitate farewell.
1947
LOVE LETTER
Let not the sad perplexity
Of absent love unhumor thee:
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and laughter I have spent
To make my play with thee resolve in merriment;
For wisest critics past agree
The truest love is comedy.
Will thou not weary of the tragic argument?
Wouldst thou make love perverse, and then
Preposterous and crabbed, my pen?
Tempt Eros not (he is more wise than I)
To suck the apple of thy sad absurdity.
Love, who is a friend to men,
You’ld make a Devil of again:
Then should I be once more exiled, alas, in thee.
Make peace with me, and in my mind,
With Eros, angel of the mind,
Who loves me, loving thee, and in our bliss
Is loved by all of us and finds his happiness.
Such simple pleasures are designed
To entertain our days, I find,
And so shalt thee, when next we make a night of this.
This spring we’ll be not merely mad,
But absent lovers, therefore sad,
So we’ll be no more happy than we ought—
That simple love of Eros may be strangely taught.
And wit will seldom make me glad
That spring hath not what winter had,
Therefore these nights are darkened shadows of my thought.
Grieve in a garden, then, and in a summer’s twilight,
Think of thy love, for spring is lost to me.
Or as you will, and if the moon be white,
Let all thy soul to music married be,
To magic, nightingales, and immortality;
And, if it pleases thee, why, think on Death;
For Death is strange upon a summer night,
The thought of it may make thee catch thy breath,
And meditation hath itself a great beauty;
Wherefore if thou must weep, now I must mourn with thee.
Easter Sunday, 1947
DAKAR DOLDRUMS
I
Most dear, and dearest at this moment most,
Since this my love for thee is thus more free
Than that I cherished more dear and lost;
Most near, now nearest where I fly from thee:
Thy love most consummated is in absence,
Half for the trust I have for thee in mind,
Half for the pleasures of thee in remembrance—
Thou art most full and fair of all thy kind.
Not half so fair as thee is fate I fear,
Wherefore my sad departure from this season
Wherein for some love of me thou held’st me dear,
While I betray thee for a better reason.
I am a brutish agonist, I know
Lust or its consummation cannot ease
These miseries of mind, this mask like sorrow:
It is myself, not thee, shall make my peace.
Yet, O sweet soul, to have possessed thy love,
The meditations of thy mind for me,
Hath half deceived a thought that ill shall prove.
It was a grace of fate, this scene of comedy
Foretold more tragic acts in my short age.
Yet ’tis no masque of mine, no mere sad play
Spectacular upon an empty stage—
My life is more unreal, another way.
To lie with thee, to touch thee with desire,
Enrage the summer nights with thy mere presence—
Flesh hath such joy, such sweetness, and such fire!
The white ghost fell on me, departing thence.
Henceforth I must perform a winter mood;
Belovèd gestures freeze in bitter ice,
Eyes glare through a pale jail of solitude,
Fear chills my mind: Here endeth all my bliss!
Cursed may be this month of Fall! I fail
My full and fair and near and dear and kind.
I but endure my role, my own seas sail,
Far from the sunny shores within thy mind.
So this departure shadoweth mine end:
Ah! what poor human cometh unto me,
Since now the snowy spectre doth descend,
Henceforth I shall in fear and anger flee.
II
Lord, forgive my passions, they are old,
And restive as the years that I have known.
To what abandonments have I foretold
My bondage? And have mine own love undone!
How mad my youth, my sacramental passage!
Yet I dream these September journeys true:
When five days flowed like sickness in this knowledge,
I vomited out my mockery, all I knew.
III
Five nights upon the deep I suffered presage,
Five dawns familiar seabirds cried me pale:
I care not now, for I have seen an image
In the sea that was no Nightingale.
—My love, and doth still that rare figurine
In thy sad garden sing, now I am gone?
Sweet carols that I made, and caroller serene,
They broke my heart, and sang for thee alone.
Secret to thee the Nightingale was Death;
So all the figures are that I create.
For thee awhile I breathed another breath,
To make my Death thy Beauty imitate.—
More terrible than these are the vast visions
Of the sea, nor comprehensible.
Last night I stared upon the Cuban mountains,
Tragic in the mist, as on my soul,
Star studded in the dark, sea shaded round
And still, a funeral of Emperors,
Wind wound in ruined shrouds and crescent crowned
And tombed in desolation on dead shores.
The place was dread with age: the evening tide,
Eternal wife of death that washed these bones,
Turns back to sea by night, eternal bride:
She clasped my ship and rocked to hear its groans.
I did imagine I had known this sea,
Had been an audience to this before;
The place was prescient, like a great stage in me,
As out of a dream that late I dream no more.
I did imagine I had known this sea;
It raged like a great beast in my passage,
Till I, enragèd creature, anciently
Engendered here, cried out upon mine image:
“How long in absence O thou journeyest,
Ages my soul and ages! Here ever home
In this sea’s endangerments thou sufferest;
And do, and do, and now my will hath done!”
Ah, love, I tell thee true, nor false affix
The solitude I watched by th’iron prow:
While I interpreted I stared me sick
At transformations in the tides below;
For the grim bride rose up, and all surrounding,
Carried me through the star-piercèd air,
Till I cried Stay! and Stay! surrendering
My movèd soul in flight to faster fear.
As I dived then I cried, delving all depthed in foam,
“Now close in weeds thy wave-lipped womb, mistress!”
But she ope’d her watering wounds and drew me down
And drove me dancing through the white-wreathed darkness.
Though I stood still to memorize the deep,
And woke my eyes wild-wide upon the height,
My soul it feareth its descent to keep,
My soul it turneth in its famous flight.
IV
Ha! now I die or no, I fear this tide
Carrieth me still, perishing, past where I stood,
So mild, to gaze whereat I long had died,
Or shall, as well, in future solitude.
What other shores are there I still remember?
I was in a pale land, I looked through a pure vision
In a pallid dawn, with a half-vacant glare.
Alas! what harbour hath the imagination?
O the transparent past hath a white port,
Tinted in the eye; it doth appear
Sometime on dark days, much by night, to sport
Bright shades like dimes of silver shining there,
On red dull sands on green volcanic shores.
I thought these stanzas out this cloudy noon,
Past Cuba now, past Haiti’s stony jaws,
In the last passage to Dakar. The moon
Alone was full as it had been all year,
Orange and strange at dawn. It was my eyes,
Not Africa, did this: they shined so pure
Each island floated by a sweet surprise.
Coins, then, on Cape Verde’s peakèd cones
Sparkle out with pallors various.
It makes me God to pass these mortal towns:
Real people sicken here upon slopes sulphurous.
So in my years I saw my serious cities
Colored with Love and chiming with Nightingales,
Architectural with fantasies,
With fools in schools and geniuses in jails.
When in sweet vivid dreams such rainbows rise,
and spectral children dance among the music,
I watch them still: hot emeralds are their eyes!
My eyes are ice, alas! How white I wake!
V
Twenty days have drifted in the wake
Of this slow agèd ship that carries coal
From Texas to Dakar. I, for the sake
Of little but my causelessness of soul,
Am carried out of my chill hemisphere
To unfamiliar summer on the earth.
I spend my days to meditate a fear;
Each day I give the sea is one of death.
This is the last night of the outward journeying,
The darkness falleth westward unto thee;
And I must end my labors of this evening,
And all the last long night, and all this day:
It doth give peace, thus to torment the soul,
Till it is sundered from its forms and sense,
Till it surrendereth its knowledge whole,
And stares on the world out of a sleepless trance.
So on these stanzas doth a peace descend,
Now I have journeyed through these images
To come upon no image in the end.
So are we consummated in these passages,
Most near and dear and far apart in fate.
As I mean no mere sweet philosophy,
So I, unto a world I must create,
Turn with no promise and no prophecy.
South Atlantic, 1947
Sweet Levinsky
27 LEVINSKY: Leon Levinsky is a character in Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City.
A Poem on America
72 ACIS AND GALATEA … versilov: In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s penultimate novel, A Raw Youth, hero Dolgoruki’s father, Versilov, the ex-revolutionary, wore a hair shirt and mused on Poussin’s painting.
94 NEAL: Neal Cassady, to whom the poem is dedicated.
Neal Cassady (1925–1968) in his first suit, bought second hand in Chinatown, 1946, the day before his return to Denver on Greyhound bus.
98 SAKYAMUNI: Buddha (563–483 B.C.) Sage born to warrior-caste Sakya family; human aspect of Buddha. Poem interprets noted Chinese painting, Sung dynasty.
98 ARHAT: Self-liberated sage who has not taken Bodhisattva’s vows to liberate all sentient beings.
100 CAB CALLOWAY: (b. 1907) Ex-law student, stage-show black jazz singer, slick-haired satin-suited early hipster popular band leader who composed and sang “Minnie the Moocher,” “Are You Hep to the Jive,” “Are You All Reet” and “Hi-De-Ho Man.”
101 VIVA JALISCO: Mexican state mariachi music macho whoop, like Viva Texas!
101 FREER: Gallery of Oriental Art, Mall adjunct to Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution.
105 UXMAL …: Proper names mentioned in the first part of the poem are those of ruined cities. Xbalba, translatable as Morning Star in Region Obscure, or Hope, and pronounced Chivalvá, is the area in Chiapas between the Tabasco border and the Usumacinta River at the edge of the Petén rain forest; the boundary of lower Mexico and Guatemala today is thereabouts. The locale was considered a Purgatory, or Limbo (the legend is vague), in the (Old) Mayan Empire. To the large tree at the crest of what is now called Mount Don Juan, at the foot of which this poem was written, ancient craftsmen came to complete work left unfinished at their death.
122 Written on receiving early “routines” from Burroughs in Tangier, including Dr. Benway in the Operating Room and The Talking Asshole.
W. S. Burroughs, 206 East 7th Street, N.Y.C., Fall 1953, at time assembling “Yage Letters” and visioning Inter-zone Market Naked Lunch. Photo by A.G.
131 MALEST, CORNIFICI, TUO CATULLO: Catullus #38, probably addressed to the erotic “new poet” friend of Catullus, a verse note beginning “I’m ill, Cornificus, your Catullus is ill,” asking for a little friendly word, and ending “Maestius lacrimis Simonideis”—“Sad as the tears of old Simonides.” Ginsberg to Kerouac, on meeting Peter Orlovsky.
Peter Orlovsky by Robert LaVigne, 1954, San Francisco. Author met Orlovsky immediately after viewing this painting, 1403 Gough Street.
Jack Kerouac on Avenue A, Manhattan, 1953, at time of The Subterraneans. Photo by A.G.
132 HUNCKE: Herbert E. Huncke (1915–1996), American prose writer. Friend and early contact for Kerouac, Burroughs and the author in explorations circa 1945 around Times Square, where he hung out at center of the hustling world in early stages of his opiate addictions. He served as connection to midtown’s floating population for Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s interviews with that population segment in his celebrated surveys of human sexuality. Huncke introduced Burroughs and others to the slang, information and ritual of the emergent “hip” or “beat” subculture. See the author’s preface to Huncke’s book of sketches and stories, The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (Cherry Valley, N.Y.: Cherry Valley Editions, 1980): “Huncke’s figure appears variously in Clellon Holmes’s novel Go, there is an excellent early portrait in Kerouac’s first bildungsroman The Town and the City, fugitive glimpses of Huncke as Gotham morphinist appear in William Lee’s Junkie, Burroughs’ dry first classic of prose. He walked on the snowbank docks with shoes full of blood into the middle of Howl, and is glimpsed in short sketches by Herb Gold, Carl Solomon and Irving Rosenthal scattered through subsequent decades. … Kerouac always maintained that he was a great story teller.”
Herbert Huncke, 1983. Photo by A.G.
134 PARADISE ALLEY: A slum courtyard N.Y. Lower East Side, site of Kerouac’s Subterraneans, 1958.
139 ELI ELI LAMMA LAMMA SABACTHANI: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ’s last words from the cross (“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”: Matthew 27:46).
139 MOLOCH: Or Molech, the Canaanite fire god, whose worship was marked by parents burning their children as propitiatory sacrifice. “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21).
144 GARCíA LORCA
Not for one moment, old beautiful Walt Whitman,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies
nor your corduroy shoulders worn down by the moon …
Not for one moment, virile beauty who in mountains of coal, posters and railroads,
dreamed of being a river and sleeping like a river
with whatever comrade would lay on your breast
the little pain of an ignorant leopard.
—Federico García Lorca,
“Oda a Walt Whitman” (adapted by Allen Ginsberg)
Sir Francis Drake Hotel tower, Powell and Sutter Streets, San Francisco, seen from Nob Hill, original motif of Moloch section of Howl, Part II. Photo 1959 by Harry Redl. (See n.p. 139.)
154 WOBBLIES: International Workers of the World, strong on Northwest coast, some Anarchist-Buddhist-Populist tinge, primarily lumber and mining workers, pre-World War I activist precursors to organized American labor unions. For “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night…” see Little Red Song Book.
155 TOM MOONEY: (1882–1942) Labor leader accused of bomb-throwing, 1919 San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade; imprisoned still protesting innocence till pardoned 1939 by Governor Earl Warren; cause célèbre in left-wing populist circles worldwide.
155 SACCO & VANZETTI: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-American anarchists convicted of robbery and murder, executed in Massachusetts, 1927, after international protest. Vanzetti’s last speech to the court: “I found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him. But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people when your name, your laws, institutions and your false god are but a dim rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.” And a letter to his son, April 1927: “If it had not been for this thing I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by accident. … Our words—our lives—our pains: nothing. The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment, belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.”
155 SCOTTSBORO BOYS: Nine black youths arrested 1931 by mob in Paint Rock, Alabama, jailed in Scottsboro, set up and sentenced to death for alleged train rape of two white girls, despite popular belief in their innocence. Their cause focused international attention on Southern U.S. legal injustice and racial discrimination. Supreme Court reversed convictions twice, setting landmark precedents for adequate counsel representation and fair race-balanced juries.
155 SCOTT NEARING: (1883–1983) Sociology professor bounced from Academe for anti-World War I views, Socialist congressional candidate 1919, staunch pro-Soviet historian and autobiographer. In old age, Nearing evolved into “new age” counterculture role model with publication of Living the Good Life (pioneering, building, organic gardening, cooperation and vegetarian living on a self-subsistent Vermont homestead; working plans for a twenty-year project), 1954; and The Maple Sugar Book (account of the art and history of sugaring; practical details for modern sugar-making; remarks on pioneering as a way of living in the twentieth century), 1950; both coau-thored with Helen Nearing (reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1970, 1971).
155 MOTHER BLOOR: Ella Reeve Bloor (1862–1951) Communist leader, writer, traveling union strike organizer and speechmaker.
155 EWIG-WEIBLICHE: (German) Eternal feminine.
155 ISRAEL AMTER: (1881–1954) A leading American Communist, Yiddish part of movement, traveling orator, ran for N.Y. governor 1930s.
157 TOMBS: New York City jailhouse.
158 MANDALA: Map of psychological universe, generally Hindu-Buddhist. See Time Wheel Mandala, p. 590.
158 SNYDER: Gary Snyder (b. 1930) Naturalist-woodsman, poet, early U.S. student of Zen, hitchhiked Northwest with author 1956, as described in poem. Prototype for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums hero.
158 GREEN PARROT THEATER: First Avenue vaudeville movie playhouse, whose marquee was celebrated for Art Nouveau design and extravagant variety of neon colors in tail of its green parrot insignia. At time of poem, the 1930s Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald movie Maytime was rerun. See Maytime song quotes, “Iron Horse.”
158 FRANK H. LITTLE: His dry mummy stood in a glass case in a curio shop on Seattle waterfront, as described.
193 THE ATTIC OF THE PAST AND EVERLASTING MINUTE: Books of lyric poetry by the author’s father, Louis Ginsberg (1896–1976). The Everlasting Minute was published 1937 by Horace Liveright, N.Y. Certain poems were anthologized in various editions of Louis Untermeyer’s standard anthology Modern American and British Poetry.
198 SATORI: (Japanese) Sudden flash of enlightenment, awakening a glimpse of ordinary mind, often result of prolonged Zazen meditation practice. See also opening pages of Kerouac, Satori in Paris (New York: Grove Press, 1966). (There are various kinds of Satori: it is believed that a Zen master can recognize what kind and how profound, long lasting, or life-changing some person’s Satori is.—P.W.)
198 SUTRAS: Buddhist discourses or dialogues, joining teacher and student in transmission of Dharma, or doctrine, over generations.
201 CZARDAS: East European dance, wildly spirited.
202 SHERMAN ADAMS: Assistant to President Eisenhower, who did resign; involved in minor White House scandal for accepting fur coat as gift.
217 FIRST POISONOUS TOMATOES OF AMERICA: Russian immigrants to U.S. at turn of the century had not seen tomatoes; some believed them poisonous.
218 YPSL: Young People’s Socialist League.
221 GRAF ZEPPELIN: Refers to giant hydrogen-inflated German airship Hindenburg, destroyed in flames with 36 deaths while mooring at Lakehurst, N.J., May 6, 1937, arrived on its first transatlantic crossing.
222 PARCAE: The Three Fates: goddess Clotho, spinning thread of life; Lachesis, holding and fixing length; and Atropos, whose shears cut thread’s end.
222 THE GREEN TABLE: German Jooss Ballet’s 1930s classic, wherein warmonger capitalists in black tie and tails pirouette round long green table at diplomatic conference, arranging mobilization, combat, arms profit, refugee fate and division of spoils, with Death figure dancing in foreground throughout eight-scene parable WWI.
222 DEBS: Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) Rail union organizer, founder IWW, “one big union,” Socialist presidential candidate 1900–1920, ran from Atlanta penitentiary during ten-year sentence under so-called Espionage Act for speech denouncing U.S. entry into WWI; received nearly 1 million votes 1920.
Naomi, Allen, and Louis Ginsberg, New York World’s Fair, June 15, 1940.
222 ALTGELD: John P. Altgeld (1847–1902) First Democratic governor of Illinois (1892–1896) since Civil War. Pardoned surviving anarchists of 1886 Haymarket Riots, initiated prison reform, protected laboring women and reformed child labor laws, opposed use of fed troops to suppress RR strikes, incorruptible, rich entering governorship, which he left penniless. See Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Eagle That Is Forgotten”: “Sleep softly … eagle forgotten … under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and clay has its own. / ‘We have buried him now,’ thought his foes, and in secret rejoiced … / Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame— / To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name …”—Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1925).
Hindenberg Explosion. (See n.p. 221.) The Bettmann Archive, Inc.
222 LITTLE BLUE BOOKS: Tiny blue-covered booklets, first mass-market paperbacks in U.S., freethinking content, distributed from immigrant socialist town Girard, southeast Kansas, by E. Haldeman-Julius (1889–1951), whose mission was to educate the masses by offering great literature at cheapest price, including all Shakespeare, much Oscar Wilde, Tom Paine, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, the agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll, and Mark Twain. For publishing The FBI—The Basis of an American Police State, The Alarming Methods of J. Edgar Hoover, by Clifton Bennett, 1948, Haldeman-Julius was hounded by FBI; withdrew The Black International, by Joseph McCabe, 20-pamphlet series exposing relation between Roman Catholic Church and fascist Axis.
224 ZHDANOV: Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) Bolshevik Central Committee Secy, Politburo member, etc., later noted for “anticosmopolitan” chauvinistic pronouncements, 1946, as Stalin’s literary and cultural affairs chief. “Doctors’ Plot” accusations that ten Jewish Kremlin physicians were responsible for the death of Zhdanov and other high military figures signaled a purging of the Party in the year preceding Stalin’s death in 1953.
225 METRAZOL: Used with insulin for shock treatment in common but now abandoned mental therapy experiments.
225 STENKA RAZIN: Russian song, name of folk-heroic Cossack river pirate, tortured and killed in Moscow in 1671.
226 WORKMEN’S CIRCLE: Newark-area Jewish immigrants’ Socialist community service organization.
227 YISBORACH … B’RICH HU: Heart of Kaddish prayer for the dead; for translation see lines 1–2, “Hymmnn” section of Kaddish.
229 BUBA: (Yiddish) Grandmother.
229 SHEMA Y’ISRAEL: (Hebrew) Listen, O Israel!
229 SRUL AVRUM: (Hebrew) Israel Abraham, equivalent to Irwin Allen, names on the author’s birth certificate.
231 CAMP NICHT-GEDEIGET: (Yiddish) Camp “No Worry,” near Monroe, N.Y., summer settlement used by left-wing families, 1930s.
236 MESCALINE: Active psychedelic ingredient in peyote cactus, Southwest Indian religious-vision use. See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
239 LYSERGIC ACID: Synthetic psychoactive chemical with which author first experimented at Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, California, whence poem is dated.
240 GHOST TRAP: A multicolor-stringed wool antenna, to trap stupid ghosts, used during LSD experiments at Stanford Mental Research Institute.
240 ELEPHANT MANDALA: A picture of the universe borrowed by the author from Prof. Frederic Spiegelberg for study during a Lysergic Acid vision and described in section six of the accompanying poem. The mandala and various Ghost Traps—see section five—were brought by Prof. Spiegelberg from a monastery in Sikkim. He writes: “The inscription consists mainly of Mantras, power-words in Sanskirt, which do not carry any mental symbolism, no intellectually expressible meaning, but are supposed to be directly effective as a transforming soul-influence” etc.
247 OLD POET: Martín Adán, pseud. (1908–1985) Refers to his celebrated sonnets in La Rosa de la Espenela, 1939.
247 DISAGUADEROS: Railroad station behind presidential palace in Lima, across from which, in Hotel Comercio, “Old Poet” and “Aether” were written.
247–254 CHANCAY, PACHACAMAC, NASCA: Pre-Incaic cultures of coastal desert Peru. Myriad relics were found by graverobbers opening the sand of these necropolises.
257 PHILIP WHALEN (1923–2002): San Francisco Renaissance poet and Soto Zen priest, born Northwest 1923, peer among poets Kerouac, Snyder, Welch, McClure, Creeley.
258 ADONOI ECHAD: (Hebrew) “The Lord is one,” end of the “Eli Eli” prayer song.
263–267 Magic Psalm, The Reply and The End record visions experienced after drinking Ayajuasca (Yage or Soga de Muerte, Banisteriopsis caapi), a vine infusion used by Amazon curanderos as spiritual potion, for medicine and sacred vision. See author’s The Yage Letters, w/ William S. Burroughs (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963). The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.
267 YIN: Feminine principle, receptivity or emptiness, in Chinese Taoist apposition to Yang, active masculine form.
273 CLINT MURCHISON: (1895–1969) Dallas billionaire industrialist (banks, rail, steamships, real estate, gas, oil, publishing, office equipment, movie theaters, restaurants, fishing tackle), conservative establishment Democrat.
273 JUDGE YALE MCFATE: His July 1960 decision affirmed constitutional protection for Native American Church use of psychedelic peyote cactus. Weston LaBarre, The Peyote Cult (New York: Shocken paperback, 1977), pp. 224–25: “The legal action most likely to set precedent, however, is the disposition of the case against Mary Attakai, a member of the Navaho Native American Church, under an anti-peyote ordinance of the Navaho Tribe. The local judge in Flagstaff, Arizona, H. L. Russell, disqualified himself, whereupon the Hon. Yale McFate was sent from Phoenix to preside over the case in the Superior Court of Coconino County in Flagstaff. In a notably lucid and well-informed opinion, rendered on 26 July 1960, the Court held that:
‘Peyote is not a narcotic. It is not habit-forming. … There are about 225,000 members of the organized church, known as the Native American Church, which adheres to this practice. … The use of peyote is essential to the existence of the peyote religion. Without it, the practice of the religion would be effectively prevented. … It is significant that many states which formerly outlawed the use of peyote have abolished or amended their laws to permit its use for religious purposes. It is also significant that the Federal Government has in nowise prevented the use of peyote by Indians or others.’
Inasmuch as the statute under which Mary Attakai was convicted of illegal possession is contrary to both the 14th Amendment of the Federal Constitution and Article II Sections 4, 8, 12, and 13 of the Arizona Constitution, the Court found the statute unconstitutional, exonerated the bond, and dismissed the case. Expert opinion has widely admired the decision of Judge McFate.”
273 JOHN FOSTER DULLES: (1888–1959) Eisenhower secretary of state (1953–1959), who escalated cold war with China at 1954 Geneva Conference, where, refusing to shake hands or speak with Chinese foreign minister, he walked past icily, thereby initiating the thirty-year U.S.-China “containment policy.” U.S. refused to sign the French-Indo-Chinese Peace Agreement at Geneva for fear “80% of the populace [of united Vietnam] would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”
273 FORRESTAL: James V. Forrestal (1892–1949) First U.S. secretary of defense; inaugurated first U.S. peacetime draft 1948, early cold war time (never before in U.S. history!) by illegally spending military-budget money for pro-draft propaganda. Next year, in mental decline, obsessed with Zionists and Communist Russian invasion of America, he threw himself out of Bethesda government mental hospital window, May 22, 1949.
275 HARRY SMITH (1923–1991): Celebrated experimental filmmaker, artist, philosopher, hermeticist; editor Ethnic Folkways Records’ The Kiowa Peyote Meeting (FE 4601, 1973) and three-volume, six-disc Anthology of American Folk Music (FA 2951–3, 1952), influential on midcentury world folk-rock renaissance.
275 ATMAN: Notion of individual self, identifiable with permanent self, Brahman.
275 KABBALA: Hebrew Gnostic numerical meditation practice using letters of Pentateuch (Torah). “Natural language letters.”—H. Smith.
277 SPIRO MOUND: Southern Cult (A.D. 1200) Indian mound in Spiro, Oklahoma.
277 PENFIELD’S HOMUNCULUS: Map of brain areas controlling motor and sensory functions. See design p. 70, Fig. III-15, in Wilder Penfield and Jasper Herbert, Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
277 KALI YUGA: Present era is last aeon in Hindu cycle of four ages, an age of iron during which spiritual awareness is at nadir, and cosmic apocalyptic destruction follows.
Combination sensory and motor homunculus (as they appear from above on Rolandic cortex). Penfield’s Homunculus. (See n.p. 277.)
280 ENKIDU: Friend-servant of Gilgamesh, for whose shade’s sake Gilgamesh visited the dusts of Deathworld.
280 LAFCADIO: L. Orlovsky, brother of poet Peter Orlovsky; see “Lazarus” portrait, Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, Book Two, Part One, section 10.
280 CHANGO: Afro-Cuban Oricha, Lord of Drum, phallic creation divinity, somewhat equivalent to Hindu Shiva among polytheistic systems.
280 BARDO THODOL: Experience of gap between death and rebirth; see The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, trans. Francesca Fremantle, commentary by Chögyam Trungpa (Boulder: Shambhala, 1975).
281 KULCHUR: Magazine of new writing, 1961, ed. Leroi Jones et al.
281 IRVING ROSE IN THRALL: Irving Rosenthal (with Paul Carroll), editing 1959 Big Table magazine, published first eighty-page chunk of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, previously censored in Chicago Review.
281 KALPA: Complete Aeonic four-yuga cycle, according to Hindu mythology.
285 CHESSMAN: Caryl Chessman (1921–1960) Executed for murder in California after lengthy court appeals intelligently written by himself, and despite world protest in favor of his life.
285 CHATTERLEY ATTACKED: Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield laid copy of D. H. Lawrence’s long-banned masterpiece, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on President Eisenhower’s desk with certain words underlined as “obscene,” and asked for permission to ban its transport by U.S. mail. “Terrible, we can’t have that,” said Ike in Time magazine (according to author’s memory, 1959).
285 ROCHESTER: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, Milton’s contemporary, whose brilliant gaudy lyrics, published 1950s Paris by Olympia Press, when imported to America were confiscated and burned by Eisenhower U.S. Customs, along with novels by Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, etc.
296 2,000,000 PIECES MAIL: At beginning of cold war, 1945, U.S. Customs and Post Office departments burned as propaganda all second-class mail (books and printed matter) arriving from China, N. Vietnam, and other Communist lands. Two million items a year were incinerated. The practice was ended by President John Kennedy.
287 FABIAN BLDG.: Downtown Church and Market streets, Paterson, New Jersey, movie theater where author in boyhood saw movie phantoms of Jeanette Mac-Donald, Nelson Eddy, Ronald Reagan.
288 ANGELICA BALABANOFF: (1876–1965) Kiev-born aristocrat, first Secretary of Third Communist International 1919, quit disillusioned 1923 with Lenin’s & Trotsky’s use of “unscrupulous calumny” for centralization of power, went her own way, radical, poet. Earlier as Benito Mussolini’s mistress she sheltered and introduced him to Socialist ideology, co-edited Rome socialist daily Avanti; later broke with him, was betrayed and confined, when he formed Italian Fascist Party. See My Life as a Rebel (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938; reprint Indiana University Press, 1978). Author met her briefly at pacifist gathering, Brooklyn, 1945.
289 SS SANTA MARIA: “Cruise ship Santa Maria, with 600 passengers aboard, seized … by armed band of 69 … leader identified as [Portuguese dictator] Salazar foe, Army ex-Capt Galvao … colonial policy manifesto demands creation of Fed Repub of the US of Portugal including overseas territories … Portuguese exiles in GB open drive against Salazar regime” (New York Times, January 24–27, 1961). See also Time, February 10, 1961.
290 DEVAS: Hindu or Buddhist gods, attendant psychological spirits.
290 RAY BREMSER: American poet (b. 1934) See The New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Much praised by Kerouac and Bob Dylan for his celebrated word-syncopation, as in Blowing Mouth (Cherry Valley Editions, 1978).
296 PANYOTIS … YORGIS: Greek youths’ common given names.
296 AHARISTI … NA-TI-THE-MA-FEZ: Bouzouki songs, Athens suburb jukebox, 1961.
296 OPEN THE DOOR RICHARD, I’M CASTING A SPELL ON YOU: American jukebox songs, the latter by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, actually titled “I Put a Spell on You.”
298 YONI: Vagina, counterpart to lingam, in Hindu iconography.
302 HOOGHLY: River Ganges at Calcutta.
302 BIDI: Tiny cheap Indian cigarette.
303 KALI MA: Benares beggar lady with a holy name; see her photograph, Indian Journals (NY: Grove Press, 1996).
303 JAI RAM: “Victory to Ram” (aspect of Vishnu the Preserver).
304 JAI SHANKAR: Shankar or Shiva, patron lord of Benares.
304 BAUL: Mystical sect of wandering, patchwork-clothed Vaishnav singers, some devoted to Krishna, in North Bengal. See Obscure Religious Cults, Sashi Bhusan Das Gupta (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Makhopadhyay, 1959). “The elephant is caught in the spider web, and the ant bursts out laughing.” Influenced Tagore songs.
305 GANGA-MA: Mother Ganges, represented traditionally riding a crocodile.
305 HOLLAND: John P. Holland (1841–1914) Irish born. His invention, the first iron submarine, the Fenian Ram, launched and sank in 1878, was fished up rusty from the Passaic in 1927, and exhibited thereafter in the Paterson Museum. Holland cofounded Electric Boat Co., ancestor General Dynamics Corp.
308 MAIDAN: Area that contains a horse track and polo field in Bankipore, sector of Patna city.
308 PATNA: Capital, Bihar state on right bank of Ganges, 125 miles from Benares.
314 AVALOKITESVERA: The gates to the palaces and some temples of Angkor Wat are made of giant heads of Avalokitesvera (Down-Glancing Lord, Buddha of Mercy) facing in four directions. Principal Bodhisattva of Lotus Sutra pantheon, Chinese Kwan-Yin mercy god, Japanese Lady Kannon, sometimes thousand-armed energetic in compassionate activity.
314 BANYANS: Banyan trees, whose giant roots grow out of ruined walls and temple roofs.
314 SITARAM: Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur, a Vaishnavite guru who told the author in Benares, “Give up desire for children,” and gave other instructions for purity.
316 CHURNING OF THE OCEAN: Bas-reliefs of old Hindu myth “Churning of the Ocean” cover one wall of Angkor Wat (a theme repeated throughout the temple areas).
317 BUDDHA DHARMA SANGHA: Buddham Saranam Gochamee—I take my refuge in the Buddha; Dhammam Saranam Gochamee—I take my refuge in the Dharma; Sangham Saranam Gochamee—I take my refuge in the Sangha. The Three Refuges, which the author interprets as: I take my refuge in my Self, I take my refuge in the nature of my Self, I take my refuge in the company of my fellow Selfs. [Non-Self interpretation.—A.G., 1984.]
317 HARE KRISHNA: This Maha Mantra (Great Prayer) for the Kali Yuga, first recommended to the author by Shivananda, consisting of different names of Vishnu the Preserver, can be sung with ecstatic rock beat.
318 ABHAYA MUDRA: Mudra—Buddhist hand gesture; Abhaya—gesture of calm, stilling stormy waters. Commonly seen on seated Buddhist statuary.
318 LEROI MOI: The American radical poet Leroi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka.
319 LEARY: Dr. Timothy Leary, an early heroic explorer of Psychedelic Consciousness.
319 AP BAC: Early guerilla battle in Vietnam won by Viet Cong, with many unreported losses of life by S. Vietnam Government soldiers and great confusion of leadership.
320 TA-PHROM … TA-KEO … THOMMANOM: Giant ruined Khmer civilization temple areas near Angkor Wat.
320 GARUDA: God of the Hindu pantheon, bird-headed, aide of King Ram in the Ramayana. [Spontaneously self-born enlightenment, Vajrayana Buddhist view—A.G., 1984.]
320 CHAMS: A northern tribe that conquered and burned the wooden Khmer cities that surrounded the temples.
320 TA-PHROM: Huge temple in giant stone-walled enclosure, unreconstructed by archaeologists, its paths cleaned of small overgrowth to show the Baynan jungle encroachment on the tumbling stone architecture.
322–323 “BLIND … RAIN!”: The entire text of this composition was written in one night half sleeping and waking, as transcription of passages of consciousness in the author’s mind made somnolent by an injection of morphine-atrophine in a hotel room in the town of Siemreap, adjacent to the ruins of Angkor Wat. The passage incorporated in quotation marks was notes taken earlier that day high on ganja (pot) on the roof of the temple of Angkor Thom.
324 LOLEI: A small ruined temple with an active monastery in the same compound, a few miles on the highway out of Siemreap.
325 HUé: S. Vietnamese city on north coast above Saigon, where student protests against suppression of Buddhist radio ceremonies ended in blister-gas riots, reported by telephone to UP office in Saigon, June 1963.
325 RAINY NIGHT AT THE BORDER: “Rainy Night at the Border,” a popular song like “Lili Marlene,” and classic complaint of Oriental soldiers, was banned in the nightclubs of Saigon by Mme. Nhu (wife of Catholic Premier Diem) as being “too pessimistic and demoralizing.”
326 XALOI TEMPLE: Center of Buddhist Association hunger strike, early resistance to Diem government.
326 AFRAID TO PUBLISH: A letter from Jon Edgar Webb of Outsider magazine, apologizing for not publishing a dream of Negroes by the author, for fear of violent white gang reprisals against his office in New Orleans.
327 SUKOTHAI: Very graceful early Thai style of Buddha statues, one hand delicately flowing behind, one hand raised in reassurance, one foot set forward as he steps out into the world of action.
327 LINGAM: Stone phallus universally worshipped in India as basic form of Shiva the Creator.
328 BUDDHA FOOTPRINT: Three fish with one head—a sign of Buddhahood incised in giant stone carving of Buddha footprint found under Bo Tree at Bodh Gaya, mythological Indian site of the Buddha’s realization.
329 RADIOACTIVE DOLPHINS: From a letter from J. Kerouac describing the twentieth-century complaints of his Canuck cousins.
330 10 TINY BUDDHAS: A little fragment of the twelfth-century miniature Stupa carried by the author from broken-down Hindu garden near Bo Tree as a present to poet Gary Snyder in Kyoto.
330 MEA SHEARIM: Orthodox Hasidic section of modern Jerusalem.
331 PEKING’S JEWELRY FEET: See poem “Magic Psalm.”
331 “MAKE ME READY—BUT NOT YET”: A line from W. H. Auden, out of St. Augustine: “O Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.”
333 “… CONVOLUTED …”: See “The Clouds,” part IV, in William Carlos Williams, The Collected Later Poems (New York: New Directions, 1963), p. 128.
345 JULIUS: Julius Orlovsky, brother of the poet Peter Orlovsky, rescued by latter 1958 after twelve years’ residence Central Islip State Hospital, N.Y. See Robert Frank film Me and My Brother, 1966.
353 SWAMI SHIVANANDA: (1887–1962) “Your own heart is the guru.” Spoken to author, Rishikesh, 1962. See dedication, Ginsberg, Indian Journals.
354 BENJAMIN PéRET & RENé CREVEL: Péret—French surrealist poet (1899–1959); Crevel—French dada dandy poet suicide (1900–1935).
355 FAINLIGHT: Harry Fainlight, young British poet active N.Y. underground film literary circles early 1960s. Participated Albert Hall, London, Poetry Incarnation, 1965. Died 1982.
355 ED: Edward Sanders (b. 1939) American poet, classicist, and musician, leader of Fugs rock group, editor Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts.
356 GOLEM: Artificial man created, in one Hebrew legend, by the Kabbalist Rabbi Löw, Prague, end of sixteenth century. Parallel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.
356 BREUGHEL: Pieter Breughel (1520?-1569) His painting Winter Landscape of Prague (including Vltava panorama) is exhibited in that city.
357 KALKI: Final avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu, appearing at close of Kali Yuga (see “Journal Night Thoughts” note) to destroy world and initiate Maha Yuga, the aeon of greatest spiritual virtue, first Yuga of four in Hindu Kalpa cycle.
357 MAITREYA: Future Buddha, aspect of compassion, personification of love, parallel formation to maitri (Sanskrit), friendship.
360 SEBASTIAN SAMPAS: Youthtime poet friend of Jack Kerouac, brother of widow Stella, killed at Anzio beachhead WW II a few weeks after sending Kerouac a recording: “I weep for Adonais, he is dead. … Goodbye, Jack.”
360 OZONE PARK: In Queens, N.Y., where Jack Kerouac lived with his family late 1940s and wrote The Town and the City, his first novel.
The author setting forth from hotel with throne and crown on flatbed truck to Prague Culture-Park for May King election; May 1, 1965. Note formal-dressed students for May Day holiday. Photographer unknown.
360 GURU: Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur. See “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”
361 KRAL MAJALES: May King. Traditional May Day festival, suspended after German occupation prior to WWII. Previous years’ student disturbances persuaded Czech government to restore May King and Queen crowning ceremony in 1965, the occasion of massive public park demonstration by festive Prague populace. Nominated by Polytechnic students, author was elected May King by 100,000 citizens; ministers of culture and education objected. A week later, detained incommunicado, his Prague notebook confiscated, author was deported by plane to London, poem scribed en route.
361 KABIR: (1450?–1518) Illiterate Benares mystic poet-singer, weaver, disciple of Saint Ramanand, comparable to Blake: “If I heard love in exchange for the head in market is being sold,/I shall lose no time in entering the bargain and instantly sever my head, and offer it.” (Sufis, Mystics and Yogis of India, trans. Bankey Behari [Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962], p. 224.) See Kabir poems also translated by Tagore, Bly, Linda Hess.
361 BOUZERANT: (Czech slang) Homosexual.
361 AND I WAS SENT FROM HAVANA: Author was deported from Cuba, February 1965 for private criticism of speech at Havana University in which Fidel Castro denounced homosexuals and ordered purge of theater school. Detained in hotel room, held incommunicado from Casa de las Americas, which hosted the month-long Interamerican Poetry contest he’d been invited to help judge, author was expelled by plane to Prague.
361 JOSEPH K: See Kafka, The Trial.
362 BUNHILL FIELDS: Chief nonconformist burial ground of Old London. Site where Blake’s bones are buried, adjacent to gravestones of Daniel Defoe, John Wesley and Isaac Watts.
362 HAMPSTEAD HEATH: “The great old piece of uncultivated common land and woods whose ancient oaks were protected by Royal Charter in North London, haunt of painter John Constable and poet John Keats, who wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a house which still stands at the heath’s edge in Hampstead.”—Tom Pickard
364 Poem occasioned by a nap at dusk on the site of Druid mysteries, the grassy crest of London’s Primrose Hill, overlooking London’s towery skyline.
367 HARRY: Harry Fainlight (see “Today” note).
369 MONK IN THE 5 SPOT: Thelonious Monk (1918–1982) Genius of spare precise “out” piano harmony and innovator of “bop” rhythm, long denied by drug bureaucracy the necessary police “cabaret card” permit to work in N.Y., returned early 1960s to play many months at Bowery’s Five Spot, jazz club.
371 STUDYING THE SIGNS: 360-degree panorama sketch of Piccadilly Circus composed after midnight conclusion of Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation.
371 BRIGGFLATTS: Late long poem by English master Basil Bunting (1900–1985), who’d suggested to Ezra Pound that Poetry be equated with Condensation, as in Briggflatts verse describing a Northumbrian road cart: “Rut thuds the rim …” See his Collected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1980.
Thru the Vortex West Coast to East (1965–1966)
388 TITLE: See Earl of Rochester’s satire “Upon Nothing”: “Ere time and place were, time and place were not, / When primitive Nothing something strait begot, / Then all proceeded from the great united—What?”
403 PRAJNAPARAMITA SUTRA: Highest Perfect Wisdom Sutra, central to Zen and Tibetan Buddhist practice. It includes the phrase “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” and mantra “Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.”
404 LA ILLAHA EL (LILL) ALLAH HU: “There is no god but God [Allah],” Sufi chant for trance dance as taught by Bay Area Sufi Sam circa 1967.
405 WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: (1860–1925) Congressman, presidential candidate 1908. Later involved in Baby Doe silver mine speculation; leader of populist silver monetary movement: “Thou shalt not crucify Mankind upon a Cross of Gold.” See Vachel Lindsay’s poem “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” (1919):
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American who could sing outdoors …
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that Boy, the Heaven-born Bryan
That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadors rest.
—Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 96.
405 WHO DIDN’T WANT TO BE A MONKEY: John T Scopes disobeyed 1920’s Tennessee law prohibiting high-school teaching of Darwin evolution theory. Defended at trial by Clarence Darrow, he was, interestingly, opposed by Biblical fundamentalist W. J. Bryan, who maintained that God created Adam and Eve in 4004 B.C.
406 AIKEN REPUBLICAN: George D. Aiken (1892–1984) Vermont senator from 1940 through Vietnam War, author, Pioneering with Wildflowers, 1933, other nature books. Interviewed by newsmen on Face the Nation broadcast through Midwest heard by author (through Volkswagen radio) February 20, 1966, on Kansas roads. Senator Aiken pronounced the entire Indochina war involvement “a bad guess” by policymakers who had predicted in 1962 that “8,000 American troops could handle the situation.” Defense Secretary McNamara contended that U.S. was defending South Vietnam from invasion by North Vietnam. “China Lobby” ideologues saw Chinese expansionist plot behind Hanoi and urged nuclear bombing of China.
Senator Aiken argued that the quarter-million South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerrilla army outweighed Hanoi’s troops in confounding the U.S. technologic army then massing toward half-million men. That month, Senator Strom Thurmond backed nuclear arms to win the war.
Later, General Curtis LeMay urged America to “bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” Carpet bombing of north did take place, and Mekong jungle cover was saturated with Agent Orange.
In mid-’70s chaos after American withdrawal, North Vietnam dismantled and bypassed what was left of the same South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G. or Viet Cong) political infrastructure U.S. had rejected 1966. Traditional hostilities were renewed between Vietnam and China at disputed border areas. By then, U.S. was allied with China. Doves & hawks both lost the war, always “a bad guess.”
406 MCNAMARA: Robert S. McNamara (b. 1916) Defense secretary under President LBJ during 1960s Vietnam War, brought managerial sophistication to Pentagon mechanized warfare, though privately doubted its purpose.
406 MANDATE FOR CHANGE: “It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Ho Chi Minh would have been elected Premier.” (p. 337–38) “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader. …” (p. 372) Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
406 STENNIS: John C. Stennis (1901–1995) U.S. senator, Mississippi, Armed Services Committee man and “hawk,” urged nuclear war for Indochina, 1966.
407 AUNT BETTY: Highway billboard advertising bread.
407 RUSK SAYS TOUGHNESS … VIETNAM WAR BRINGS PROSPERITY: Literal headlines, Midwest newspapers February 1966.
407 BEATRICE: Nebraska town, Route 77.
408 HUTCHINSON … EL DORADO: Kansas towns en route between Lincoln, Nebraska, & Wichita.
408 ABILENE: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s hometown, site of his Presidential Library.
408 NATION “ OF THE FABLED DAMNED”: See concluding paragraphs of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas for prophetic warning against America’s hawkish materialism.
410 CLARK: Joseph S. Clark (1901–1990) U.S. senator, Pennsylvania, described Vietnam War at the time as “open-ended”—i.e., could go on forever, including war with China.
410 MORSE: Wayne Morse (1900–1974) U.S. senator, Oregon, outstanding legislative “dove” in active opposition to America’s undeclared war in Vietnam.
411 OR SMOKING CIGARETTES/AND WATCHING CAPTAIN KANGAROO: Pop song of the day referring to children’s TV program.
411 UNITED FRUIT: United Fruit Company’s law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had employed State Secretary Dulles (see “Who Will Take Over the Universe?” note), whose brother, Allen, heading CIA, coordinated the 1954 then-covert overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, elected president of Guatemala. The event is notorious throughout Latin America as a mid-twentieth-century example of “banana republic” repression by North American imperium. By 1980, the U.S.-trained Guatemalan military had reportedly genocided 10 percent of jungle Indian population as part of “pacification” program to “create a favorable business climate.”
Birbhum yogi, likely Khaki Baba. Photographer unknown.
411 OAKLAND ARMY TERMINAL: California students had passed leaflets and picketed this Pacific war transshipment center. Gary Snyder & Zen companions had sat meditating at its gates.
412 MILLIONAIRE PRE SSURE: Refers to a Mr. Love from Wichita, second biggest backer of cold-war-conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society.
412 TELEPHONE VOICES: When Peter Orlovsky and author came to read poetry, Philosophy Department hosts at Wichita’s Kansas State University received many crank phone complaints.
413 AGING WHITE HAIRED GENERAL: Lewis B. Hershey (1893–1977) Selective Service director since Truman appointment 1948, time of first U.S. peacetime draft.
413 REPUBLICAN RIVER: Runs from Kansas City to Junction City.
414 OLD HEROES OF LOVE: Neal Cassady, born in Independence, Mo.
414 MCCLURE: Michael McClure, American Romantic bard and playwright (b. 1932), Marysville, Kansas. See The New American Poetry, Donald M. Allen, ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1960), for McClure’s part as key biological philosopher-poet in 1950s “San Francisco Renaissance” and subsequent “generational” culture.
414 OLD MAN’S STILL ALIVE: Ex-President Harry S. Truman.
414 SHAMBU BHARTI BABA: A Naga (naked) saddhu the author often met at Benares’s Manikarnika Ghat cremation ground. See photographs, Indian Journals.
414 KHAKI BAB A: North Bengali (Birbhum area) 19th-century saint who, dressed in khaki loincloth, is pictured sometimes sitting surrounded by dog friends and protectors. (See photograph on page 786.)
414 DEHORAHAVA BABA: A yogi author met at Ganges River across from Benares, 1963.
414 SATYANANDA: Calcutta swami encountered by author 1962, had twin-thumbed hands, and said, “Be a sweet poet of the Lord.”
414 KALI PADA GUHA ROY: Tantric acharya or guru visited by author in Benares, 1963.
414 SHIVANANDA: Swami, teacher to Satchitananda, visited by author, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, Rishikesh, 1962: “Your own heart is your Guru.”
415 SRIMATA KRISHNAJI: Contemporary Brindaban lady saint, translator of poet Kabir, advised author thus.
415 BRINDABAN: Holy town near Delhi where Krishna spent childhood in play as cow herder.
415 CHAITANYA: 16th-century North Bengali saint, founder of Hare Krishna Mahamantra lineage, pictured dancing, singing.
415 DURGA-MA: Mother Durga, aspect of Shiva’s consort Parvati emphasized in Bengali Hindu mythology, 10-armed goddess of war fields, who consumes evil through violence.
415 TATHAGATA: (Sanskrit) Buddha characterized as “He who has passed through,” or “that which passed.” (“Thus come,” and also “Thus gone”: “Thus come [One].”)
415 DEVAS: Indian gods, seen as aspects of human or divine being.
415 MANTRA: Sacred verbal spell or prayer composed of elemental sound “seed” syllables, used in meditative concentration practice. Literally, “mind protection” speech.
416 “KENNEDY URGES CONG GET CHAIR” …: February 14, 1966, news headlined Senator Robert Kennedy’s proposal that U.S. offer Viet Cong share of power in South Vietnam. This was major break with administration war policy.
416 CONTINUED FROM PAGE ONE: In February 14, 1966, Wichita Eagle.
416 BONG SON: 100 Viet Cong soldiers were killed close to Bong Son and were reported struck by many bullets before falling.
417 LA DRANG: Vietnamese battlefield mentioned in news reports third week February 1966.
417 BURNS: Tiny Kansas town near Wichita.
418 KELLOGG: Main drag in Wichita.
418 HOTEL EATON: On Douglas Street, near local Vortex Gallery patronized by Charles Plymell and Kansas artists.
418 CARRY NATION: “(b. Garrard Co., 1846; d. Leavenworth, Kans., 1911), temperance agitator. An ignorant, unbalanced, and contentious woman of vast energies, afflicted with an hereditary paranoia, she was subjected to early hardships that fused all her great physical and emotional powers into a flaming enmity toward liquor and its corrupt purveyors. From her first saloon-smashing ventures at Medicine Lodge, Kans., she carried her campaign to Wichita (1900), where her distinctive weapon, the hatchet, was first used, and then on to many of the principal American cities. Arrested thirty times for ‘disturbing the peace,’ she paid fines from sales of souvenir hatchets, lecture tours, and stage appearances. Her autobiography was published, 1904.”—Concise Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), p. 721.
419 NIGGERTOWN: Area of Wichita between Hydraulic and 17th streets.
421 CHARLIE PLYMELL: American poet, filmmaker and pioneer editor, accompanied author in Kansas-Nebraska travel.
421 THE JEWEL-BOX REVIEW: Transvestite club show, Kansas City.
421 SEX FACTORIES: Kinsey Institute, University of Indiana, Bloomington, gave birth to this jump-cut phrase.
421 BURCHFIELD: Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) American painter, best known for portraits of particular solitary gabled Victorian houses in bare U.S. regional landscapes.
421 WALKER EVANS: (1903–1975) Classic American photographer whose record of Boston houses, poets’ faces, Cuban visages, Southern agrarian scenes (for Farm Security Administration Project, 1930s), billboards, junkyards, main streets, subway riders, Chicago corners and train glimpses helped define a second generation of American photography, and influenced younger eyes, including Robert Frank’s.
423 KENNEY … MORPHY: Friends of William S. Burroughs in 1930s St. Louis.
423 W.S.B.: William Seward Burroughs
425 FRENCH TRUTH, DUTCH CIVILITY: “French Truth, Dutch prowess, British Policy,/Hibernian Learning, Scotch civility,/Spaniards Dispatch, Danes wit,/are mainly seen in thee.”—Earl of Rochester, “On Nothing”
425 CRANE: See Hart Crane’s address to Whitman, The Bridge, end of Cape Hatteras section.
429 CANNASTRA: William Cannastra, ex-Harvard Law suicide-accident-dead (1950) friend of N.Y. painters and poets, including W. H. Auden and Jack Kerouac. See “In Memoriam,” September 1950.
432 MADAME GRADY: Panna Grady, patron of letters, friend of poets Charles Olson, John Wieners and William Burroughs, once lived at Dakota Apartments, Central Park West, N.Y., and held literary salon there.
Zigzag Back Thru These States
(1966–1967)
442 EDWARD CARPENTER: Contemporary, disciple of Whitman, British educator-poet. See “Turin-Paris Express” from his poem book Towards Democracy, 1902, a rare example of successful Whitmanic line.
442 HOMER: Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s late sizable black dog, subject of several popular poems.
443 MULADHARA SPHINCTER: Refers to anal chakra (one of seven bodily centers of spirit energy in Orient yoga practice).
443 SAHASRARAPADMA: Seventh chakra, “thousand-petal lotus” at skulltop.
443 GAVIN ARTHUR: (d. 1972) Bay area astrologer, grandson of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur, had slept with Carpenter, who’d slept with Whitman, according to written testament entrusted to author. See text, Gay Sunshine Interviews, ed. Winston Leyland, vol. 1, San Francisco, 1978, pp. 126–28.
444 MR. CUMMINGS & MR. VINAL: E. E. Cummings wrote much-anthologized poem mocking lesser poet Harold Vinal: “Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal.”
444 SEBSI: Moroccan clay pipe for kif.
446 NA-MU SA-MAN-DA … SO-MO-KO: “Dharani of Removing Disasters,” repeated thrice in temple usage. See D. T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1960).
447 WALTER LIPPMANN: (1889–1974) Aging political columnist/philosopher wrote thus in newspapers the week of “Iron Horse” ride.
447 SAM LEWIS: “Sufi Sam”—world traveler, founder of Sufi sect in San Francisco, friend of Gavin Arthur.
447 DR. LOURIA: Leon Louria, Naomi’s boyfriend, “Dr. Isaac” of “Kaddish,” had served as consulting physician for National Maritime Union until purged as left-winger in Senator Joe McCarthy era, early 1950s.
447 FREEHOLD NEW JERSEY: Geyshe Wangyal, first Gelugpa sect Tibetan Buddhist teacher in America, founded his monastery at Freehold in 1950s.
450 GEORGE E. TURNER: Ephemeral Texas journalist (b. 1925) whose acid comments author read on train newspaper.
451 YEVTUSHENKO: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the then-popular Russian poet, had written an open letter to novelist John Steinbeck questioning his support for U.S. military occupation of South Vietnam.
455 THE WOMAN IN THE RED DRESS: The woman who “informed” on “Public Enemy No. 1,” John Dillinger, leading FBI to the Biograph movie house where he was cornered and shot.
455 PURVIS: FBI agent who organized Dillinger’s fatal ambush.
455 HENRY CROWN: (1896–1990) Chicago business hustler, made early fortune buying municipally owned rock waste and selling it back to Chicago for road construction; later major stockholder and 1959–1966 chairman executive committee, director, of then-number-one military-industrial-complex corporation, General Dynamics.
457 FULBRIGHT: Senator James William Fulbright (1905–1995) Head of Senate Foreign Relations Committee 1959–1974, made eloquent public attack on President Johnson’s expansion of the Vietnam War.
458 SHERI MARTINELLI: American painter and miniaturist, formerly N.Y. fashion model, friend-companion to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., in mid-’50s. An acquaintance of Charlie Parker, she served somewhat as Pound’s connection to the new cultural life in U.S. postwar underground. A tiny book of her portraits, with prefatory note by Pound, was published by Editions Scheiwiller, Milan, 1956.
458 YAJALóN VALLEY: Isolated mountain valley town, Chiapas.
458 XOCHIMILCO: Ancient floating gardens, Mexico City, where Kerouac, Orlovsky and the author met a party of Mexican ballet boys in a sightseeing boat. See Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, Book Two, Part One, section 20.
458 FIJIJIAPAN: town close to Guadalajara, Mexico, notable for its candy.
459 KEDERNATH & BADRINATH & GANGOTRI: Northwest India Hindu pilgrimage sites on the way to Kailash, Shiva’s sacred Tibetan border mountain abode, source of Ganges.
459 MANASAROVAR: Iced lake on Kailash.
450 KARMA: Hindu-Buddhist concept of inevitable interconnection of cause and effect. Karma may be “white” and “black,” wholesome and unwholesome, meritorious or unmeritorious, or neutral, in mixed degrees, according to the activities of Mind, Speech, and Body that initiate karmic momentum and payback. “Black” karma example: As ignorant greed motivates agribusiness to aggressive exploitation of soil, so soil may collapse under assault of chemical poisons, finally become barren, eroded, no longer nourishing its bewildered and inconsiderable stewards. Further example: As American populace is indifferent to military sufferings its government wreaks on distant nations, Indochina to Central America, so will that public heartlessness progressively discourage private trust and adhesiveness between government and populace. On individual scale, a father, careless of his children, may not have faithful helpers on his deathbed.
Such karmic patterns may be altered and their energy made wholesome through meditative mindfulness, conscious awareness, the practice of appreciation, which burns up karma on the spot. Traditionally, attentive appreciation of an enlightened teacher who has transcended his/her own karma may inspire the student/seeker/citizen to work from “black” through “white” situations toward holistic primordial experience, or unconditioned states of mind and activity, exchanging self for others, liberated from karma as may be Mahatma Gandhi or certain Buddhist folk or Native American elders.
461 SRI RAMA NA MAHARSHI: 20th-century South Indian ascetic saint, instructed meditation practice, “Who Am I?” Quotations are from his book Maha Yoga.
464 MANNAHATTA:
Starting from fish-shaped Paumanok where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother,
After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city … (“Starting from Paumanok”)
“Thus Walt Whitman, born in Long Island, paraphrases the old Indian name for New York City. ‘Mannahatta! How fit a name for America’s great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires glistening in the sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!’” (Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980] p. 107.)
Sri Ramana Maharshi. Photographer unknown. (See n.p. 461.)
465 FRANK O HARA: (1926–1966) Gay central figure in N.Y. literary art life 1950s till his death; MOMA exhibitions department curator, inspired a whole generation of N.Y. “Personism” poets; died struck by beach buggy, dark midnight accident Fire Island. See “The Day Lady Died,” in his Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1972).
465 KLINE: Franz Kline (1910–1962) American abstract expressionist pioneer painter, on whose work Frank O’Hara wrote monograph, died of heart attack.
466 EDWIN DENBY: (1903–1983) China-born, influential dance critic, poet, friend of younger writers of “New York School,” 1960s–1980s; frequented N.Y.C. Ballet and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. (Collected Poems published by Full Court Press, New York, 1975.)
475 KUAN YIN: Chinese name, Avelokitesvera, compassionate aspect of Buddha. See “Angkor Wat.”
475 SHIVA: Lord energy of creation and destruction, symbolized in Hindu shrines by Shiva lingam or phallus, generally a standing rounded oblong rock covered with flowers and incense.
475 OUROBOROS: Great cosmic snake, tail in mouth completing Einsteinian circle.
475 PARVATI: Shiva’s consort.
475 YOD: Hebrew abbreviation, divine unutterable name.
475 COYOTE: Amerindian trickster-hero god.
475 RAMAKRISHNA: Ecstatic Hindu saint (1836–1886), founder of Vedanta order, entered all religious practices. See The Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (Madras, India: Shri Ramakrishna Math, 1957).
475 BODHIDHARMA: Twenty-eighth Zen patriarch after Sakyamuni in orthodox transmission line, brought Buddism from India to Canton in the West 520 A.D., thus first Chinese patriarch of “Wall-gazing” Chan (Zen) practice; died aged 150 years.
Hui-K’o (486–593) cut off his arm and gave it to Bodhidharma, token of sincerity: “I have no peace of mind … Please pacify it.”
“Bring your mind here.”
“I can’t find it.”
“There, I have pacified your mind.”
481 BOUFFANT ROOTS: Upswept hairstyle, with undyed roots growing visible.
482 DAKINI: Buddhist sky goddess, conveyor of insight.
488 VISITACIONE: Ancient bardic visiting round in Wales.
488 LLANTHONY VALLEY: Pastoral vale, Welsh Black Mountains.
490 CAPEL-Y-FFN: Ancient ruined chapel at green bottom of Llanthony Valley. Eric Gill, type-font designer and craftsman, dwelt there 1920s with arts commune.
490 LORD HEREFORD S KNOB: Mountain walling north side Llanthony Valley.
490 (LSD): First draft main body of poem was written in fifth hour LSD-inspired afternoon.
491 EXORCISM: Gary Snyder’s 1967 Bay Area broadside, A Curse Against the Men in Pentagon, Washington, helped initiate flower-power era mass peace-protest “Levitation” of Pentagon, the demystification of its authority. See Norman Mailer’s extensive account in Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1971 reprint).
491 DIAPHANOID: From title of science fiction movie the author saw 1967 at S. Gemignano while traveling from Florence to Milan.
491 WESTMORELAND: General William C. Westmoreland (b. 1914) “Hawk” commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam 1964–1968, who, not realizing that the majority of Vietnamese didn’t welcome American/Catholic domination of South Vietnam as part of China-containment policy, urged escalation of war, all-out victory by any means, including nuclear.
491 USURY: Allusion to Ezra Pound’s monetarist theory: that banks’ usurous (fast buck high interest) abuse of credit as a commodity, for speculative moneymaking rather than productive ends, cankers the entire economic system of the West. See the Cantos of Ezra Pound, “Canto XLV” (New York: New Directions, 1970): “With Usura the line grows thick.”
491 MCDONNELL DOUGLAS TO GENERAL DYNAMICS: These corporations were chief military contractees to Pentagon, 1967.
491 APOKATASTASIS: Event wherein ignorant or “satanic” energy is transformed instantaneously to divine wisdom light, as might be at end of Kali Yuga.
491 RAKSA: Tibetan mantra to purify site for a ceremony, from Hevajra Tantra. Raksa is an energy daemon.
491 PEKING: At time of composition, diplomatic nonrecognition of existence of People’s Republic of China was an obsession central to U.S. anti-red cold war monolithic “containment policy” strong-armed politically by “China Lobby,” including then ex-Vice-President Richard Nixon.
492 RUSK: Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909–1994) President Johnson’s hawkish diplomatic executive for Vietnam War.
493 NORRIS: Frank Norris (1876–1902) Novelist, author of naturalist novel The Pit, drama of frenzied Chicago grain market.
493 OBSERVERS’ BALCONY: “Street theater action” initiated 1968 by Abbie Hoffman at New York Stock Exchange, throwing a bag of dollars on the exchange floor as war protest. Thenceforth balcony was walled with glass.
Elegies for Neal Cassady
(1968)
496 SHABDA: (Sanskrit) Sound or vibration, a path of yoga.
496 GREAT YEAR: 24,000-year cycle of the sun, which rises for 2,000 years each through 12 zodiacal constellations, as it wobbles almost imperceptibly on its sidereal axis; presently entering Age of Aquarius.
497 HEJIRA: Mohammed’s flight from Mecca, A.D. 622; Kesey’s bus trip, A.D. 1964, Neal Cassady at driver’s wheel.
497 LOWELL: Massachusetts Merrimack River redbrick mill town where Jack Kerouac was raised, site of many novels.
Ecologues of These States
(1969–1971)
519 ALLEYWAY LILA: Lila (Sanskrit), “play,” as in Krishna’s play on earth, “Krishna Lila.”
525 BEULAH: Blake term for mythic realm of subconscious, source of dream-poetic inspiration.
526 JOHNSON BUTTE: High mountain plateau overlooking Lake Wallula at confluence of Snake and Columbia rivers. Horse Heaven Hills top the vast butte.
526 SAKAJAWEA: Indian lady guide for Lewis and Clark expedition through Northwest native territory hitherto unknown by white men.
526 THALASSA: (Greek) Sea.
527 SIRHAN: Sirhan J. Sirhan, young Palestine-born assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, Los Angeles 1968. His comments on conviction, and description of his visage, were taken from Associated Press reports.
527 52% PEOPLE: Refers to 1968 Gallup poll.
527 SDS: Radical activist Students for a Democratic Society, whose early 1960s “Port Huron Declaration” proposed patriotic reform of institutionalized race prejudice and abusive imperial exploitation of nature and human labor. SDS rose as an alternative to the relatively passive “establishment” National Students Association, which had absorbed much natural student energy but was revealed during mid-1960s Senate investigation to have been funded by the CIA as a front for covert propaganda activity and an illegal domestic training ground for agents. SDS was later infiltrated and sabotaged covertly by the FBI, whose “cointel” (counterintelligence) policy was blueprinted to create leadership dissension and split white student youth from alliance with black activist groups. SDS fragmented in early 1970s, having helped spearhead early civil rights struggle in South and later extreme student opposition to U.S. military invasion of Indochina.
528 MIRA BAI: 14th-century Indian poetess, ecstatic Krishna worshiper. Her sacred devotional songs are still sung in villages and cities of India.
530 DRUM H.: Arizona poet Drummond Hadley (student of Charles Olson, friend of Gary Snyder), from whom author first heard Padmasambhava mantra.
530 TARTHANG TULKU: N’yingma-pa lineage Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Berkeley friend of Gary Snyder, taught the millennial Padmasambhava mantra quoted: “Body, Speech, Mind, Lotus-Flower-Power Diamond-Teacher, Hum.”
530 SAGUARO … OCOTILLO … CHOLLA … PALO VERDE: Varieties of cacti.
539 MEMORY GARDENS: Cemetery near Albany Airport glimpsed on way to Jack Kerouac’s funeral in Lowell, Mass. Poem was written on that trip.
540 HAL: Hal Chase, Denver-bred contemporary and friend of Cassady and Kerouac, later boat and lute builder in Bolinas, California, 1960s.
541 JOHN HOLMES: John Clellon Holmes (1926–1988) Author of first published (1952) Beat romance, Go (New York: New American Library, 1980).
543 LSD: Formula for lysergide written on the john wall differs from that given in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary (1981): C20H25 N3O.
546 FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH: Allusion to date of explosion in town house West 11th Street, New York. While parents were on vacation, it was used as safe-house bomb factory by “Weathermen.”
546 HAMPTON, KING, GOLD: Fred Hampton, Chicago Black Panther murdered in bed by police with FBI collaboration, 1968. Martin Luther King, assassinated in Memphis, April 5, 1968. Theodore Gold, killed in Weathermen blast (see note above).
546 SONG-MY: Vietnamese village blasted and burned by U.S. forces “to save it from the Viet Cong.”
546 TU-DO: Main Saigon hotel-café street during U.S. occupation.
550 MAHANIRVANA & HEVAJRA TANTRAS: Buddhist Vajrayana texts used by advanced meditation practitioners.
552 JOHN SINCLAIR: Poet, pioneer Detroit publisher, jazz critic, leader of Ann Arbor “White Panthers.” Arrested 1969 for giving two marijuana joints to police spies in his Artists Workshop interracial poet-musicians’ enterprise, he was sentenced to 9½–10 years jail, and liberated by state legislation the weekend after John Lennon-Yoko Ono’s “Free John Sinclair” concert, Ann Arbor, 1972. This libertarian protest provoked unsuccessful Nixon administration deportation proceedings against Lennon.
553 QUECHUA: The Quechua Indian city Macchu Picchu is located in Huilca Bamba valley.
553 DMT: Dimethyltryptamine, a short-lived “high,” psychedelic drug related to traditional Peruvian intoxicant Huilca. The chemical was later described by an early experimenter, Dr. Oscar Janiger, as “most powerful of all hallucinogenic agents.” DMT use has not yet been experimentally discerned in a cultural climate (1970s–1980s) discouraging to this area of scientific investigation.
555 GOODMAN, CHANEY, SCHWERNER: N.Y. Jewish boys and a Southern black were murdered together while traveling in Mississippi, 1964, to aid black civil rights campaign.
558 WEATHERMEN: Underground radical extreme confrontation-protest antiwar SDS splinter group engineered pot-convict scientist Dr. Timothy Leary’s over-the-wall departure from half-ounce grass-bust twenty-year sentence to California prison.
558 EAST HILL: Highest point Otsego County, N.Y., 2,400 feet near Cherry Valley town (pop. 300).
561 PRANAYAM: Yogic conscious breath attention practice.
561 NITYANANDA: Swami, guru to Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, from whom author received meditation instruction at time of writing.
562 SAMSARA: World of illusory suffering, or existence seen as condition of suffering.
562 ASANAS: Yogic postures.
562 KUNDALINI: Energy wakened by yogic practice. See The Serpent Power, by Arthur Avalon (New York: Dover, 1974), celebrated early exposition-translation by Westerner.
565 MILAREPA: “Cotton-clad” Himalayan yogi poet, early father of Kagyu lineage, Tibetan Buddhist hero, author The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, trans. Garma C. C. Chang, 2 vols. (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962).
Bixby Canyon to Jessore Road
(1971)
569 MUDRAS: Sacramental or yogic hand gestures, bodily or psychologic attitudes.
570 BEEDLE: Beetle, or beadle: church official who bears the mace. See Blake, Songs of Innocence, “Holy Thursday”: “Grey headed beadles walked before / with wands as white as snow / …”
579 JESSORE ROAD: At time of author’s visit, millions of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan communal strife crowded starving in floods on this main road between Bangladesh and Calcutta.
582 SUNIL POET: Calcutta poet Sunil Ganguly (Ganghopadhyay), with whom author traveled Jessore Road, in company with American Buddhist student and poet John Giorno.
Sad Dust Glories
(1972–1974)
597 OM MANI PADMI HUM: (Sanskrit) “Hail jewel in the lotus,” Tibetan mantra for compassion practice, each syllable penetrating its equivalent among the six worlds pictured in Time Wheel Mandala: Heaven Realm, Human Realm, Hungry Ghost Realm, Hell Realm, Animal Realm, Angry Warrior Realm, transitory delusive states of consciousness, all revolving on the axle of vanity, greed and ignorance. The poem explores the cycle thrice. See illustration to poem.
597 CORD MEYER: CIA officer responsible for covert subsidization of international intellectuals’ opinion-making organizations and periodicals, 1950s–60s Committee for Cultural Freedom, Encounter magazine, etc.
599 DHARMAKAYA: Buddhist term—kaya: realm, world or body; dharma: truth, law or nature. World of absolute, in the sense of totally accommodating open space, nondiscriminating ultimate reality, equivalent to the nonconceptualizing awareness of ordinary mind.
600 RINPOCHE CHöGYAM TRUNGPA TULKU: (1939–1987) Rinpoche, honorific title for lamas: “precious jewel”; Tulku, one of succession of teachers “reincarnated” or trained in specific lineage teachings. Chögyam Trungpa, the author’s Vajracharya, or Mantrayana-style meditation practice master, born in Tibet, abbot of Surmang Monastery, is presently director of Vajradhatu Buddhist Centers and Naropa Institute. See his Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973, and First Thought, Best Thought (108 poems), with introduction by Allen Ginsberg, 1984, both Shambhala Press, Boulder.
600 TANTRAS: Buddhist texts for Mantrayana practice mode.
600 HAGGADAHS: Hebrew liturgy, Passover Seder service.
600 ZOHAR: Kabbalist-gnostic theosophical work expounding Pentateuch mysteries.
600 KOANS: Extrarationalistic riddles for nonconceptual mindfulness and “nonlinear” awareness used in Zen meditation practice with a committed teacher’s guidance.
600 DHARMAKAYA … NIRMANAKAYA … SAMBHOGAKAYA: “body of truth” (absolute Buddha nature), “body of creation” (earthly or grounded Buddha form) and “body of bliss” (visionary communicative aspect of Buddha as speech).
600 PADMASAMBHAVA: Founder Tibetan Buddhist Nyingma or “old sect,” A.D. 747 author of Tibetan Book of the Dead.
600 DR. SAMEDI: Traditional Vodun presence in Haitian graveyard, dressed as described.
600 BHAKTIVEDANTA SWAMI: Founder of U.S. Hare Krishna movement, spiritual friend of author; died 1977.
600 FILES ON NY POLICE AND C.I.A. PEDDLING HEROIN: See section “Narcotics Agents Peddling Drugs,” including “Brief bibliography of news reports showing that narcotics agents, federal, state and local, the bulk of each group, are themselves involved in dope trafficking,” pp. 63–70, and “CIA Involvement with Opium Traffic at Its Source,” pp. 71–97, Allen Verbatim, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). See also Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
601 JOE BOZZO & HARRY HAINES: Respectively, reputed 1930s mob boss, Paterson N.J., and publisher of Paterson Evening News.
601 MOUNI: (Sanskrit) Wise man, sage, sometimes vowed to silence.
601 TOM VEITCH: American poet (b. 1941) See his Death Collage, (Berkeley: Big Sky, 1976), with afterword by Allen Ginsberg.
601 IBM 135–35: During U.S. invasion of Vietnam, world’s largest computer located at Nakon Thanom Airbase, Thailand, directed “electronic battlefield” Indochina bombing.
601 IGLOO WHITE: U.S. project to destroy supply trucks and people moving down Laotian Ho-Chi-Minh jungle trail, 1967 on. Sensors, implanted on ground or suspended from trees by air drop, sent electronic messages to aircraft overhead, for relay to central computer control station. Then flying gunships equipped with low light-level TV systems and infrared detectors were directed to strike area.
601 DRAGON-TOOTH: Plastic pellet bombs which devastated football-field-sized areas.
601 FUEL-AIR BOMB: Scattered a powder gas which exploded after penetrating underground caves and shelters used by Viet Cong.
601 BODHISATTVAS: Who take Four Vows: (1) Sentient Beings are numberless, I vow to liberate all; (2) Obstacles are countless, I vow to uncover all; (3) Gates of Dharma are innumerable, I vow to enter all; (4) Buddha path is endless, I vow to follow through.
601 BHUMI: (Sanskrit) World, realm, among graduated stages of awareness. For Ten Bhumis, see Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, trans. H. V Guenther (Boulder: Shambhala Press, 1971).
601 RUNG: (Hebrew mystic term) Realm or state of attainment.
601 OM AH HU?: Trikaya mantra of body, speech and mind.
601 A LA LA HO: Salutation mantra.
601 SOPHIA: Gnostic wisdom goddess.
601 SOHAM: Pranayama breath mantra, “I am.”
601 TA RA MA: Mother Tara, Hindu-Buddhist compassion aspect goddess; also, a female Buddha.
601 OM PHAT SVAHA: Mantra of offering to affective spirits. See D. L. Snellgrove, Hevajra Tantra (New York: Oxford, 1959). (For traditional use, consult lineage teacher.)
602 MARPA … GAMPOPA: Kagyu order, early Tibetan lineage teachers. Marpa the translator (1012–1096), farmer-yogi; Milarepa (1052–1135), yogi-poet; Gampopa (1079–1153), consolidator of teachings, author guidebook, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation.
602 TRUNGPAYE: Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a current bearer of Kagyu teachings.
602 NAMASTAJI: Intimate Indian salutation.
602 BRAHMA: Formless aspect of Hindu trinity with Vishnu, Preserver, and Shiva, Changer.
602 SURYA: Vedic sun god, much like Occidental Apollo.
602 INDRA: Chief Vedic god, rain-lightning-thunder.
602 BOM BOM! SHIVAYE!: Mantra of offering cried out, often at cremation grounds, by cannabis-smoking saddhus to grace a chilam (clay ganja pipe) before inhaling.
602 RAM NAM SATYAHEY: “Ram’s name is the truth,” traditional chant of Hindus bearing corpse litter to Ganges cremation ground.
602 GANIPATTI: Or Ganesha, four-armed, elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles, god of wisdom, prudence and learning, son of Shiva and Parvati, whose vehicle is a rat.
602 OM SARASWATI HRIH SOWHA: Traditional mantric invocation to goddess of music, learning and poetry.
602 ARDINARISHVARA: Hermaphrodite-bodied Hindu divinity.
602 RADHA: Krishna’s consort.
602 HAREKRISHNA: Krishna, seventh of nine avatars of Vishnu, lord of preservation. Hare may be shakti of Krishna, consort, or spiritual-bliss potency of supreme person of universe.
603 WHO: Reply to request from Who’s Who for self-characterization.
604 HALF MILLION COMMUNISTS ASSASSINATED: Indonesian slaughter accompanying 1965–1966 overthrow of President Sukarno, political coup influenced by U.S. business intelligence.
604 SLAUGHTER … MEXICO CITY: Refers to 1968 machine-gun massacre of 1,000 student protesters at Tlatelolco Square, a clean-up of political dissidents preparatory to Olympic festivals. See also “Birdbrain.”
610 NAROPA’S SIX DOCTRINES: Psychic Heat, Illusory Body, Dream State, Clear Light, After Death State, and Consciousness Transference; see Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, W. Y. Evans-Wentz (Oxford, 1967).
610 KITKITDIZZE: Wintun Indian name for tarweed, bear clover or mountain misery, dark green shrub varying 3–15 inches in height, tarry touch and smell, belonging to rose family. Typical ground cover, western slope Sierra ponderosa pine forest. Poet Gary Snyder’s Sierra household is named Kitkitdizze, after this common plant, Chamaebatia foliolosa.
616 AH: Calligraphy by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, 1978. Symbol of Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu order; one syllable summary of Prajnaparamita Sutra; mantra for purification of speech, and appreciation of space; related to Samatha meditation practice, mindfulness of outbreath; a vocalization of the outbreath.
617 SANGHA: (Sanskrit) Community of Buddhist practitioners.
618 BO TREE: The ancient pipal, Ficus religiosa, or sacred fig tree, in Bodh Gaya, India, under which Buddha meditated till enlightened.
620 SKANDAS: (Sanskrit) The five “heaps” of experience or psychosomatic aggregates of individual personality, namely: form, reaction-sensation, feeling-ideation, cumulative habit pattern, and apparent consciousness, which compound the transitory energies of ego.
620 SUNYATA: Emptiness, nonmind, or awareness devoid of egocentric projection.
622 SNAKE COCK AND PIG EAT EACH OTHER’S TAILS: Symbols of anger, vanity and ignorance at center axle of Time Wheel Mandala. See illustration, p. 588.
622 CALLER OF THE GREAT CALL: According to Barbelo-Ophitic myth of Garden of Eden, the snake (as caller of the Great Call) was Sophia’s messenger to waken awareness in Adam and Eve. Sabaot, archon of their aeon, was but seven-aeon-times-removed reflection of Sophia’s first thought. See Hans Jonas, Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). Refer also to “Plutonian Ode,” note to verse 16, Sabaot.
622 STERN GANG IRGUN: Terrorist groups under British mandate, fought for Zionist cause.
622 AL FATAH BLACK SEPTEMBER: Terrorist groups after Israeli sovereignty, fought for Palestinian cause.
623 MEYER LANSKY: U.S. organized-crime chief reported to’ve supplied guns to Zionist terrorist/freedom fighters. Retired to Israel for years, was deported back to U.S. after public scandal, 1972, and arrested for income tax evasion.
623 MY FATHER HAD A COFFEE SHOP IN JERUSALEM: See poem “Write It Down, Allen Said,” in Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs, Peter Orlovsky (San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Poet Series #37, 1978), pp. 118–20.
623 COMMENTARY: American highbrow crypto-Zionist right-wing ideological journal edited by ambitious early prose critic of Kerouac’s poetic prose, later hawkish proponent of military hard-line hardware equated as alternative discipline for supposed loose 1960s national morals including public acknowledgment of gaiety.
623 PALESTINE REVIEW: Pro-Palestinian journal.
624 SHEMA YISROEL ADONOI ELUHENU: End of Hebrew chant: “Rejoice, O Israel, the Lord is one, the Lord is God.”
624 LA ILAH …: Sufi chant: “There is no god but Allah.”
624 HU: Sufi mantric out-breath.
624 SHALOM! SHANTIH! SALAAM!: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic for “Peace!”
627 KENJI MYAZAWA: 20th-century Japanese poet, trans. Gary Snyder among others.
628 SHOBO-AN: Japanese Soto temple reconstructed by San Francisco Zen Center in California Sierras adjacent to Kitkitdizze “Ring of Bone” Zen Practice Center.
628 ACORN PEOPLE: Sierra Indian diet staple was acorn mush.
Ego Confessions
(1974–1977)
631 GYALWA KARMAPA: 16th lama head of Milarepa lineage, Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism.
631 WEATHERMEN GOT NO MOSCOW GOLD: Timothy Leary, held incommunicado for years, early 1970’s, by Feds, refused to testify falsely that Weathermen were directed by Moscow finance. FBI heads were later convicted of illegal wiretapping since no evidence that antiwar protesters were agents of foreign powers could be found.
631 VAJRASATTVA: Central image of Nyingma old-school Tibetan meditation practice, blue-bodied, with diamond-lightning bolt (vajra) form held in right hand at breast, bell (ghanta) of empty (open) space held at left hip. Dharmakaya Buddha.
631 OVERTHREW THE CIA WITH A SILENT THOUGHT: Refers to 1970 Georgetown dinner bet between author and then CIA chief Richard Helms: whether or not Central Intelligence Agency had working relationship with opium traffickers at “secret” CIA base, Long Cheng, Laos. Author offered his vajra, if misinformed, and requested CIA Director Helms to practice meditation an hour a day for life if his denial proved incorrect. The wager was accepted, a bet either party might profit from by losing. Note also:
The New York Times
3 rue Scribe
75 Paris 9e
Apr. 11 1978
Dear Allen,
I fear I owe you an apology. I have been reading a succession of pieces about CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia and I remember when you first suggested I look into this I thought you were full of beans. Indeed you were right and I acknowledge the fact plus sending my best personal wishes.
C. L. Sulzberger
636 GENERAL MOTORS … STANDARD OF CALIFORNIA: The dozen corporations name-dropped herein are top twelve capital powers whose $133 billion sales represented a tenth the total gross national product one yearly trillion $. Traditionally, an oil corporation representative fills post of U.S. Secy of State and auto corporation representative fills Secretary of Defense post. This gossip’s source was conversation with Daniel Ellsberg & Gary Snyder, November 26, 1974, re: Douglas F. Dowd’s The Twisted Dream, Capitalist Development in the United States Since 1776, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Winthrop, 1977).
637 FOUR YEARS AG O: Poem is sequel to “Guru Om,” October 4–6, 1970.
637 STONY BURNS: “After being arrested twice on pornography charges, then convicted for inciting riot, Stony Burns, art director and founder of Iconoclast and Dallas Notes [underground newspapers], was sentenced in Dallas to ten years and one day in prison for the possession of less than one tenth of an ounce of marijuana. The extra day in the sentence prevented eligibility for parole. Within a year, public protest freed editor Burns.”—Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press, PEN American Center report, ed. Geoffrey Rips, foreword by Allen Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981); see pp. 102, 107–8. The poem was written when Stony Burns was first jailed, 1974.
642 (MAYAGUEZ CRISIS): After U.S. withdrawal from Indochina war, the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez, presumed to be spy ship, was taken by Cambodians near their coast in 1975. The ship was recaptured by U.S. with giant force, some loss of life, large headlines. The incident was argued at the time to symbolize U.S. resolve to “be perceived” still as “number one” in world might.
643 BIG TIME SYNDICATE TAMPA: Sam Giancana and John Roselli, associated with Tampa mob chief, engaged by CIA to assassinate Cuban Premier Castro in “turf war,” early ’60s. Both were murdered or “rubbed out” prior to scheduled testimony before Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by late Senator Frank Church, 1965, re CIA assassination attempts against Castro. Roselli was found in barrel in ocean; Giancana was shot in his kitchen.
643 LET LUCKY LUCIANO OUT OF JAIL …: The international organized crime chief was released from federal prison by wartime Office of Strategic Services to supplant influence of Communist partisan anti-Hitler underground in Sicily with Mafia political infrastructure. According to American authorities, Luciano later became Mediterranean narcotics overlord. See “I’m Glad the CIA Is Immoral,” Thomas W. Braden, Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, p. 14.
644 CHILE’S RED DEMOCRACY …: Salvador Allende (1908–1973), first democratically elected Marxist-socialist head of state in the western hemisphere, was deposed by U.S.-trained generals’ junta, 1973. Subsequent Senate investigation revealed that CIA funds were used to organize destabilizing truck transport strikes, to penetrate Santiago’s daily newspaper Mercurio, and to arrange “housewife demonstrations” against the new Allende government. Well-dressed family ladies walked in the streets, and banged on pots and pans, conveying an impression of normal people spontaneously protesting Allende government’s socialist austerities. The night after the U.S.-backed generals’ assault on presidential palace and assassination of Allende, the author remembers watching the TV screen with his father while news commentator Victor Riesel energetically congratulated American viewers: “The CIA was not involved!”
644 NKVD: People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—Soviet secret police.
644 OGPU: 1930s Russian secret police.
644 DIA: U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
644 KGB: Soviet Committee of State Security, equivalent to U.S. FBI, but worse.
645 LIDS: Lid, a quantity of marijuana, equivalent to an ounce, originally a Prince Albert tobacco can full.
649 YOU GOT TO SUFFER: First stanza refers to Buddhist doctrine of three “marks” or characteristics of existence: (1) suffering, (2) change, (3) Anatma (no permanent selfhood). Stanzas 1–3 refer to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhist philosophy: (1) Existence contains suffering; (2) Suffering is caused by ignorance; (3) Ignorance can be changed by practice of detachment, wisdom and compassion (4) and by following an eightfold path as paraphrased in song lines 13–20: (1) right views, (2) right aspiration, (3) right speech, (4) right activity, (5) right labor, (6) right energy, (7) right mindfulness, (8) right meditation. There follows brief instruction for sitting and review of six sense fields.
652 WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS FOOD …: After Snyder/Whalen adaptation of Zen thanks offering for food.
656 ACID TIDE: Nitrous waste pollution of Jersey-Manhattan waters. A 1966 Los Angeles Free Press Robert Cobb cartoon showed ocean of LSD washing away a pillared fortress-island of Law, God, Self, Good, Evil, etc., seen somewhat as Urizenic Blakean abstractions.
664 AUNT ROSE: See “To Aunt Rose,” Paris, 1958.
664 NAROPA: Naropa Institute, contemplative college founded 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa; named for Kagyu lineage second patriarch, once rector of eighth-century Buddhist Nalanda International University. Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, codirected by author and Anne Waldman, was founded same year.
673 ETERNAL RUNE CUT IN STONE: Rune (Old Norse), character of Old Teutonic or Scandinavian alphabets; magical cipher.
685 EIDOLON: Platonic Image. See Whitman’s poem “Eidolons.”
691 MABUHAY GARDENS TO CBGB ’ S: Punk rock/new wave youth clubs, on San Francisco’s North Beach and New York’s Bowery.
699 RICHARD HELMS: See “Ego Confession” note.
704 QUE DISPIERTE: Adapted Summer 1978-Spring 1981 by Sidney Goldfarb and Allen Ginsberg from Waldeen’s trans. of Let The Railsplitter Awake and Other Poems, by Pablo Neruda (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1950).
707 ELLSBERG: Daniel Ellsberg (b. 1931) Author, revealer of the “Pentagon Papers,” now-public “secret” Defense Department analysis of built-in futility of U.S. Vietnam War adventure, had also helped design nuclear-strategy practical mechanics, including the failsafe system. The author and scholar Ellsberg were arrested together in Colorado during anti-nuclear peace protest at Rockwell Corporation’s Rocky Flats plutonium-bomb-trigger factory.
708 GOLDEN COURTHOUSE: See Kerouac’s verse “I wanna go to Golden,” i.e., Golden, Colorado, Jefferson county seat, where Rocky Flats anti-nuclear-weapons-manufacture demonstrators were tried.
710 WHITMAN: Walt Whitman.
710 DOCTOR SEABORG: Glenn Seaborg, “Discoverer of Plutonium.”
710 SEA BEYOND URANUS: Pluto, past planets Uranus and Neptune.
710 AVENGING FURIES: Pluto was father to Eumenides, the Furies who return to avenge mindless damage done in passion, aggression, ignorance, etc. Pluto was also Lord of Wealth.
710 DEMETER: Pluto’s mother-in-law, the Earth fertility goddess whose daughter Persephone was stolen for marriage by underworld lord Pluto (Greek: Hades [Aides], brother to Zeus and Poseidon) and kept in his caverns a half year at a time, released to her mother each spring. Demeter gave wheat to man at Eleusis, site of her temple, one place in ancient world where Hades also was acknowledged with ceremonies indicated above.
Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and friends of Rocky Flats Truth Force, meditating on R.R. Tracks outside Rockwell Corporation Nuclear Facility’s Plutonium bomb trigger factory, Colorado, halting trainload of waste fissile materials on the day Plutonium Ode was completed, July 14, 1978. Photo by Steve Groer, Rocky Mountain News.
710 ASPHODEL: W. C. Williams wrote of asphodel, “that greeny flower,” as the blossom of Hades.
710 FISH … RAM … BULL … TWINS … CRAB … LION: Ages of Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo—2,000 years each age.
710 GREAT YEAR: Platonic, or Babylonian, or Sidereal “Great Year”—24,000 years—half life of Plutonium radioactivity. This fact, pointed out to me by Gregory Corso, inspired this poem. Cf. W. B. Yeats, A Vision.
710 ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-SEVEN THOUSAND: The 24,000-year span of the Great Year—167,000 cycles—4 billion years, supposed age of Earth.
710 BLACK … DISILLUSION: Six senses, including mind.
710 SABAOT … IALDABAOTH: Archons of successive aeons born of Sophia’s thought, according to Ophitic and Barbelo-Gnostic myths.
710 SKY OVER SILENT MILLS AT HANFORD … MASON: Plutonium factories, whose location by state and whose function in bomb-making are here described. Plants in Pantex, Texas, and Burlington, Iowa, managed by Mason & Hanger-Silas Mason Co., Inc., assemble the finished components of the nuclear weapons.
711 TWO HUNDRED FORTY MILLENNIA: 240,000 years the supposed time till Plutonium becomes physically inert.
711 TEN POUNDS: Ten pounds of Plutonium scattered throughout the earth is calculated sufficient to kill 4 billion people.
711 SIX WORLDS: Six worlds of Gods, Warrior Demons, Humans, Hungry Ghosts, Animals, and Hell Beings held together in the delusion of time by pride, anger and ignorance: a Buddhist concept. See notes to “Thoughts Sitting Breathing,” p. 796.
711 DIVINE WIND: Kamikaze, typhoon, wind of Gods.
711 THREE HUNDRED TO NS: 300 tons of Plutonium, estimate circa 1978 of the amount produced for American bombs.
711 I SING YOUR FORM: “The Reactor hath hid himself thro envy. I behold him. But you cannot behold him till he be revealed in his System.”—Blake, Jerusalem, Chap. II, Plate 43, lines 9–10.
712 HONEY … WATER: Traditional libation to Hades poured at Temple of Eleusis, and by Odysseus at the Necromanteion at Acheron.
712 DIAMOND TRUTH: Reference to Buddhist doctrine of Sunyataa, i.e., existence as simultaneously void and solid, empty and real, all-penetrating egoless (empty void) nature symbolized by adamantine Vajra or Diamond Sceptre.
712 FIVE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR: Estimated world military budget; 116 billion, U.S. share, October 1978.
713 TAKE THIS INHALATION … THOUGHT-WORLDS: Four characteristics of Buddha-nature activity: to pacify, enrich, magnetize & destroy.
713 GONE OUT … AH!: Americanese approximation and paraphrase of Sanskrit Prajnaparamita (Highest Perfect Wisdom) Mantra: Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.
717 DUDJOM LINEAGE: Dudjom Rinpoche, contemporary head of Nyingma “old school” Tibetan teachings founded by Padmasambhava.
717 BEDROCK MORTAR …: Cottage built by author and friends in California Sierra woods adjoining Kitkitdizze, at site of original Indian inhabitants’ mortar holes. See “Sad Dust Glories” note.
718 DON’T GROW OLD: See poems on the death of Louis Ginsberg, January 12-July 11, 1976.
724 LINDY HOP: Peculiar quick dance step popular late 1920s.
725 BODHICITTA: Seed of enlightenment stuff, enlightened essence of Buddha mind, or awakening aspect of mind.
727 HARRISBURG HYDROGEN BUBBLE: In Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear accident, March 28, 1979, unit #2’s reactor core was badly damaged. A pressure relief valve in the main cooling system had jammed while the reactor was operating at full power. Thousands of gallons of water unexpectedly drained from the core. At this pass, operators mistakenly turned off pumps designed to flood the reactor in such emergency. Consequent overheating resulted in damage to the reactor, and release of radiation.
728 MOAPA: Original nomadic inhabitants of Nevada.
728 ROBERT MAHEU: (b. 1917) Secretary to Howard Hughes, ex-FBI, introduced Sam Giancana and John Roselli (business acquaintances of Tampa syndicate boss Santos Trafficante, co-worker with Jack Ruby, and pre-Castro vice/narcotic lord of Havana territory) to CIA official Sheffield Edwards, to arrange assassination of Cuban premier Castro. Personages of Watergate plumbers team were associated with the much-reported yet little-researched anti-Castro Cuban Mafia circle of secret operations. See “Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox” note.
(Sheffield Edwards was also CIA Chief of Security, which office oversaw early 1950s drug experiment programs, psychedelic and otherwise.)
728 MT. CHARLESTON: Sacred mountain among Moapa tribes in traditional migratory cycle.
728 ENGLEBERT: Mr. Humperdinck, popular cabaret entertainer.
728 PLATONIC YEAR: See “Plutonian Ode” note.
728 UNDER THE ASTRONOMICAL FLAGP OLE: Harold Ickes, interior secretary under FDR, commissioned various solar system designs, including the Great Year pattern of earth’s wobble on its sidereal axis, to be set in bronze on Hoover Dam’s plaza, marking the monumental size of the project, equal in scope to the Egyptian pyramids.
728 BUGSY SIEGEL: Original organized crime/vice chief of Las Vegas, assassinated by shots through window of Beverly Hills living room, 1947.
734 STAMMHEIM: Isolation prison where “terrorist” Baader-Meinhof gang members (originally armed by police double agents) were subject to continuous interrogation under 24-hour glare lighting.
735 “GUESTS” DO THE WORK: Gastarbeiter, “guest workers” of post-WWII West Germany: Turks, Italians, Slavs imported for heavy labor or menial work.
741 ORYOKI: Traditional style of formal three-bowl mindful silent eating practice in Zendoo (meditation hall).
745 MAYAKOVSKY CRIED, THEN DIE! MY VERSE: “Let glory/disconsolate widow frail/trudge after genius/in funeral anthems/Die, my verse,/die, like the rank and file/as our unknown, unnumbered, fell/in storming heaven.”—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At the Top of My Voice,” 1930, in Mayakovsky and His Poetry, trans. Herbert Marshall (London: Pilot Press, 1943). Frank O’Hara first called author’s attention to this poem.
746 XOCHOPILI: Formerly referred to as “God of Flowers” in tourist guidebooks. Vegetable forms incised on his celebrated statue in Mexico City’s Archaeological Museum have been identified by Harvard Botanical Museum director Richard E. Schultes as peyote, morning glory, amanita mushroom, tobacco, etc. Evidence of Xochopili culture was obliterated during Spanish conquest.
746 RAN GERMANY ON AMPHETAMINES: Among other books, Inside the Third Reich, memoirs of Albert Speer (New York: Macmillan, 1970), gives evidence on Hitler’s rug-chewing speed addiction.
750 MAGLIC CASTLE: Castle of “mist” or “fog” (maglic) at heart of original kingdom of Serbia.
750 IVAR RIVER BANK: (12th-century “Ras”) In Ivar River Valley, “Valley of the Kings.” “Where the valley narrows to form a dramatic gorge … stand the remains of the Magli’c fortress perched like an eagle’s nest upon a separate spur of the mountains” (Fodor’s Yugoslavia, 1972, p. 277).
* Notes for “Angkor Wat” from Fulcrum Press edition (London, 1968).