The Elegiac Modernist

'A novel is the only place where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.'

—Paul Auster

“Governments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line.”

Uncredited Photographer Beat Poets Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Jack Hirschman, Michael McClure and Bob Kaufman, Caffe Trieste, San Francisco 1975

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives, all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown— and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen, —We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg, "Sunflower Sutra," 1955

--

my head felt stabbed

by a crown of thorns but I joked and rode the subway

and ducked into school johns and masturbated

and secretly wrote

                                     of teenage hell

because I was “different”

the first and last of my kind

smothering acute sensations

in swimming pools and locker rooms

addict of lips and genitals

mad for buttocks

                                that Whitman and Lorca

and Catullus and Marlowe

                                          and Michelangelo

and Socrates admired

and I wrote: Friends,

if you wish to survive

I would not recommend

Love

-- Harold Norse, "I Would Not Recommend Love" 1973

--

I ran down the street and into the house smelled of oregano and shook Mickey Monaco, said C'mon, Balaban's got a breadloaf climbing over old Gruber's fence, he thinks the mad dogs is doves.

But Mickey grew up in the bed till he was too old and besides Balaban was crazy, he sucked his tongue and got left back twice.

So I ran to Joey Bellino's house but his mother's black stocking said Joey was out early shoe shining. And besides a, that Balaban he's a crazy a kid, he suck a the tongue and Joey says he get lefback three times.

So I banged on Bitsy Beller's window yelled he was near the top, the mad dogs waiting down below he thinks is doves.

But when Bitsy stood up he turned into a stiff cue stick. And didn't want nothing to do with nobody cracked upstairs. And Dickie Miller became a semipro. And Howie Fish a doctor. So I ran down the street full of hope

by myself because I was on fire. But I got there too late for Balaban. Two of them had a stretch of skin between their teeth fighting over it,

and the foam of their mouths and Balaban's blood spattered in such a way, the most the greatest picture looked me straight in the eye, made me sit in the gutter and cry,

and when I got up vow to be Balaban from that day on

-- Jack Hirschman, "Balaban" 1969

--

for Jack Kerouac 

IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,

     I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement

                 of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold

           light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing

                     and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,

             black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh

                 seen in the clear bright light. It is not night

                and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.

            And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls

                                       in the light

                           of the room. I sit or stand

                 wanting the huge reality of touch and love.

            In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream

          of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting

             only the purity of clean colors and new shapes

                                     and feelings.

                 I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY

                   I have ten years left to worship my youth

                      Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow

  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I

                                                                                            feel the swell of

smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars

                                                                                                     the brown shadows

on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to

                                                                                                                       dull plane

from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.

      The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the

                                                                                                                            clear grain.

I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.

              The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.

                               I am real as you are real whom I speak to.

                   I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up

                    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash

                            to my eyes. No change to the room.

                       Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.

                     The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.

                       An agony to be so in pain without release

                             when love is a word or kiss.

-- Michael McClure, "The Chamber" 1961

--

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night, Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time, Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes. And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game, And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me, And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn. No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters, Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains. Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey. And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights. And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.       Still, they remain unfinished. And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet; The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity. 

(via How to Get Into Susan Sontag: An Introductory Guide)

Charles Lloyd, Gabor Szabo, Ron Carter & Tony Williams in a photo session for Lloyd´s second album Of Course, Of Course, released on the Columbia label in November, 1965.

Kirsten Malone,

Photograph of Dexter Gordon at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1964,

Gelatin silver print from original,

saxophonist Dexter Gordon Paris, 1988

Mark Seliger