Page 6-Sunday, March 19, 1978-The Michigan Daily The Michigan Daily----Sunday, P ginsberg (Continued from Page 3) negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.. ." And it remains a dominant force behind Ginsberg's most recent verse: "Punk Rock you're my big cry- baby/ I'll tell my deaf mother on you. Fall on the floor and eat your grandmother's diapers/ Drums. Whatta lot of noise you fart/ a revolution." "Wiat do you think of punk rock?" Ginsberg throws the question out to the audience at the poetry workshop, and the response is predictable. "We don't like it," volunteers one jean clad frizzy-haired fellow while other heads nod in accord. "I've been listening to a lot of it lately," retorts Ginsberg. "I like the energy, another generation taking up the ball; it reminds me of when I was young." He pauses. "It reminds me of when I was middle-aged and it reminds me of when I'm old too. "I think there's a frank philosophical message coming through-hopelessness. I think it's a very useful thing to hear said in public. After telling a generation to work within the system . . . ending the war, getting everybody to sort of shut up, the punk rockers are saying 'well, man, I'm willing to perish with the system-no future for you, no future for me.' That's what Johnny Rotten is saying, isn't it? Everybody else wants to cover over the social- political scene with a lot of optimistic bullshit. But the essential problems remain on stage, unsolved, unresolved. Take the energy thing,... In the early seventies Ginsberg once confessed to an interviewer that he was probably "too much disper- sed in energy and activity, If the war were over, I think that I would withdraw from the world and do a lot of monastic things." Monastic? Though the war has been over for several years, it hardly seems possible. During the war years Ginsberg had a favorite theory about CIA involvement in drug traf- ficking-the CIA profited from the Vietnamese black market trade and in exchange propped up the Saigon government; the resultant corruption of U.S. cities gave our government reason for law and order crackdowns. Now all possibility of a 'CIA-Saigon' connection has dried up, but Ginsberg's enthusiasm is not easily squelched. FBI subversion of the radical left and the 'oil company-U.S. government-nuclear conspiracy' now top the list of the poet's causes. With the force of his peculiar brand of logic, Gin- sberg pushes a twenty minute monologue from the subject of Blake's energy to the energetics of punk rock to the energy of energy. Energy. . . Blake, Gin- sberg informs us, called it an "eternal delight." Gin- sberg labels it a "heavy metal horror scene." "The system, the oil companies and the energy companies, in this case, Mobil, Gulf, Exxon-the seven sisters-have never really confronted the problem. I have a new poem that gives you the infor- mation. 'Who Runs America' is the title. The Secretary of State has traditionally been somebody connected with the oil companies, therefore foreign policy is oil policy. And these very few people who run the scene are just goofing. You don't need to be a technological genius to know that plutonium being scattered on the earth irrevocably commits us to 250,000 years of high-technology culture, whether we like it or not. Hitler promised his civilization would last a thousand years. We're promising that ours will last 250,000 years, that we'll take care of these con- crete barrels of poisonous shit for the next quarter million years. "Energy which would be an 'eternal delight' probably would be large-scale tree crop agriculture, a renewable source of energy which would not only be clean but also exquisite, friendly and beautiful. But sure, with 250,000 years of atomic poison, it is hopeless, 'no future for you, no future for me., America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? It occurs to me that IJam America Inam talking to myself again. W HEN Ginsberg published "Indian Journals" at the end of the sixties, enlivened by Bud- dhist meditation and his mantra chant "Om," one critic wrote disappointedly, "For me this second stage in the Ginsberg saga has been even more caJArMtpus 1ha ,he % lpwl'itge TJ eirst had th w genuineness94f pfgr Apd 4fspair about it-it was home grown and home felIf-6ut the second has been clouded by great expectations ... nirvana in the pad, nightly forever. There is terror for me in the miscon- ception of what inner fantasy-life can make of the stony world; and Ginsberg is one of the breeders of that terror." Eight years later Ginsberg is still chanting Om (during his visit he "sat" with a local Buddhist group for an hour one evening, and he also led his poetry reading audience in a silent five minute long meditation). - But it is hard to see how that one critic could have been more mistaken in his fears that Ginsberg, the chanting buddha, would sap the powers of Ginsberg, the apocalyptic American prophet. For the buddha nourishes and the poet-prophet derives purpose. Seated with Ginsberg in a natural foods restaurant for a lunchtime interview, I have the chance to ob- Ginsberg's success in fitting buddha into the marked- ly American urban-violence scene as neatly as television. The chant "Om Ah Hum" captures both the vulnerability and the humorous posture of our- selves as victims of inner city destruction. "Generally, people are overwhelmed by anxiety," says Ginsberg. "Chanting dissipates anxiety.1' The mediator "follows the outbreath, letting his thoughts dissov.-with the breath and flow out with it." Meditation thus serves as Ginsberg's counterbalance to the punk rock ethic: "Punk rock-it reminds me of something Abbie Hoffman once said-all he was doing was shouting theater to a crowded fire. . . But meditation-I always started with whatever hysteria, whatever turbulence is going on. I sit down with it. I watch it become winds. "Consciousness gets clogged up in anxiety. My in- terest in poetry is opening it up where you have a free space, where you have a chance to solve those political problems, where you have a chance at eter- nity-that is, not doing anything." At times now, he seems no more than a relic, his monologues fueled by the energy of a man growing older, obsessed by his range of interests, too fond of his own time-worn ideas. Still he relishes the present above all else, displaying a patience with students, interviewers and audiences, and a calm delight in the absurdity of age-wrinkles, balding and the waning of his own desires. The old smalldog trembling in Aprilsunlight on winter-brown grass. Snow gone, so Youth is gone, though this sunlight shines on naked bodies West one more spring. A redwing whistles, flying over the pine trees. NE LAST GLIMPSE OF Ginsberg. It is Friday morning, the day after one of the worst blizzards in local memory. The world is white, the streets are hopelessly clogged and the poet is snowbound. The phone rings in the home of a Daily reporter: It is Ginsberg, who has heard that the re- porter is working on a storay about the FBI's dirty tricks campaign against radicals in the late sixties and early seventies, and he would like a look at some FBI documents the reporter has collected. Not too much later Ginsberg appeared at the paper's offices, and there he remained for several ____________________________________ hours, held by realms of obscure counterintelligence datarcollected on student radicals, some forged let- ters, written to subvert and confuse the left's political serve him shifting between the two states, not once, operations. but several times. "$3.50 for this," he declares I tried to approach him a couple of times, but aggressively, pointing to a bowl of rice and though always friendly and polite, it was clear that vegetables, "is no improvement culturally at all from his interest in our interview, in Allen Ginsberg or his a slophouse." A few minutes later he shyly pulls out a poetry, had waned completely. "I'm thinking of put- joint and asks, "is it cool in here?" When the answer ting a book together of excerpts from these documen- is negative, he puts it away without so much as a ts," he said to me in one rare communicative instan- whisper. ce. But otherwise, like a child with a new toy, he had Slowly but surely he barrages his listeners with the eyes for no one but my silent friend and his hundreds doomsday messages-punk rock, energy crisis, the of FBI photocopies. FBI, hopelessness. Then the flip side-a love poem, a "In the punk universe nobody trusts anybody," chanted nursery rhyme, a five minute meditative Ginsberg had said the day previous. "The agent him- silence. self becomes the camp figure. You try for some sort I want to carve a clear-cut formula out of his talk, of boy scout reform-let's be good people-and you unearth his source of evangelical zeal. What results find yourself sucking the cock of an FBI agent. A does he expect, what good can he possibly bring about whole generation has grown up to distrust boy scout in this dim world through gimmicks like mass reforms. The artistic show of punk rock-bondage, meditation? He shrugs. "They've got the experience Leathers, chains-is a consequence of the mental of five minutes of actual silence. You plant a little bondage of a whole generation, of secret police seed; you can't plant trees. At least for five minutes collecting dirty pictures and mailing forged people weren't doing anything awful." documents." * * , * But not until I watched him shuffling through the I looked up at the crowd of kids on the stoop-a boy piles of papers, making copies, displaying his own stepped up, put his arms around my neck memos, did I grasp the urgency with which he had tender/y I thought for a moment, squeezed harder, his pressed his earlier remarks. He was a man with a umbrella handle against my skull, mission eager to share information with a like- and his friends took my arm, a young brown companion minded student. Still standing, unrecognized in the tripped his foot against my ankles large office, he at times seemed to be no more than a. as ! went down shouting Om Ah Hum to gangs of lovers on wanderer, stumbled in blindly to avoid the bad the stoop watching * weather. slowly apgreciating, why this is a raid, these strangers mean After he had returned to peer at the papers for the strange business third time and finally left, my friend commented, with what-my pockets, bald head, broken-healed-bone leg, "He had these FBI documents with hir, with all my softshoes, my heart- these famous names in them but he didn't even know Have they knives? Om-Ah Hum-Have they sharp metal what they really meant." wood to shove in eve ear ass? Om Ah Hum ... Ginsberg the poet, Ginsberg the energy obsessed. Grisbefg tfhe buddhst, ;thehold.mapi and the little pboy. 1'OEMSIKE. KK EPECEp