Our new gobal village

Well, here we all are. It seems Marshall McLuhan was right after all. Just a little ahead of his time. #GlobalVillage is brought to you by #Covid-19. The medium is the message, and apparently it is brought to you by Facebook. McLuhan was a bit more than a one-horse town, than that quote. But he coined that phrase in 1964.

Weird, when I was in high school, we were really paying attention to the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, and Mario Savio. We could flash those revolutionary quotes at the drop of a hat. But we were also a politically aware high school class, on the vanguard. We were so badass, we shut down the Marin county draft board, it had never been done before. We were the first high school in the nation to do so, and we were also the first high school to go on strike. 

Drake High School made the cover of Time Magazine and also the 6 o’clock news. We were clocked by the feds—the FBI and the CIA. I remember cutting class to attend those Free Speech rallys at UC Berkeley. Our school president was Jared Rossman, brother to Michael Rossman of the FSM fame, probably helped to motivate us—we had a direct line to Mario Salivo, as it were.

I remember when Marshall McLuhan nattered on about the concept of one big global village, and I thought he was nuts. We can’t even manifest one happy family. I thought he was a stark raving dreamer. Yeah, yeah. He was. But he was also a visionary. Back then, there was no internet, no Facebook, no pandemic disease to unite us all. He predicted the World Wide Web three decades before it was invented. Let that sink in. I’ll wait.

I know Marshall was in Marin during that tumultuous era of social upheaval. That got me Googling. I found a 1999 directory that listed the Marshall McLuhan Center for Communications, in San Anselmo, Ca. TG for the Internet—I was able to find the connection, and not rely solely on a vague memory. After all, as Robin Williams said, if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. No wonder McLuhan was forefront. Here we are interconnected by the World Wide Web. Giants walked among us, even way back then.

In “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” published in 1964, McLuhan said that the communication medium itself—not the messages it carries—should be our primary focus of study. He postulated that “artifacts as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content.” I’m paraphrasing Wikipedia, so here is a direct quote that explains it better. Wiki itself is a perfect example of the global village in action.can access, communication is the message. No more trickle down from the top theory.

“The term global village describes the phenomenon of the world becoming more interconnected as the result of the propagation of media technologies throughout the world. The term was coined by Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan and popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Literary scholar Sue-Im Lee describes how the term global village has come to designate “the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by transnational commerce, migration, and culture.” —Wiki

I vaguely remember something similar from a Richard Brautigan article—remembering the crazy milieu that was Marin during the 1960s and 70s. Marshall McLuhan and his wife were at the epicenter. There were a series of extraordinary community lectures held at Olney Hall, College of Marin. That’s where I met Timothy Leary, Allan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Joseph Campbell, Bucky Fuller, Paolo Soleri, urban experimental architect of Arcosante, who was re-defining the ways in how we lived. Pre-commune days. And that is where I probably met McLuhan too. 

Everybody was hanging out in Marin at that time. It was an heady, if not head-trippy time to be living in. With the somber backdrop of the Vietnam war to kindle our angst, we were redefining our boundaries, our worlds, moving back to the land. Our older siblings were moving to communes and rethinking and redefining the whole shebang that was the 1950s. And we were not going gentle into the 1960s, that’s for sure.

Alan Watts was living on Varda’s ferryboat in Sausalito, Stewart Brand was setting up the Whole Earth store next to Marin Surplus in San Rafael. Ravi Shankar was playing mind-altering sitar right down the street from Drake High School in Fairfax at the Ali Akbar College of Music. We would drop in and tune out as we walked home from school, the odor of incense, and other herbs, pungent in the air. We couldn’t help but be altered by a new consciousness. It truly was a New Age dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

“Stewart Brand drifted into the Zen-tinged New York art scene of Ginsberg, Cage and Rauschenberg and thence into counter-cultural groups like USCO and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. These "New Communalists",… sought an escape from the whole system of confrontational left and right politics and the psychological fragmentation that - as illustrated by Kesey's seminal "One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest." Drawing their energy from cybernetically-informed thinkers including the designer Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome) and ur-media theorist Marshall McLuhan (coiner of the term "global village"), Brand and his peers began to design a possible future for themselves not as workers or managers, but as Fullerian "Comprehensive Designers" - or "an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. …His answer was The Whole Earth Catalogue, a collage of adverts and articles covering everything and anything … that the budding Comprehensive Designer might need. The Catalogue was an instant cult hit, not just among back-to-the-landers setting up experimental communities out in New Mexico, but also with the computer-obsessed inheritors of the Rad Lab tradition, who in research laboratories across the US, but most especially in MIT, Stanford and Xerox PARC, were busy designing cybernetic systems that included everything from the prototype Internet to the first video game, SpaceWar.” —Wiki

This was our world. We may not have had the words to describe what we were living, it took the hindsight of media analysts to puzzle together the fabric of the times that shaped us all, one way or another. 

I never thought I’d be so dependent upon the likes of Facebook to see who’s still alive, who’s died, and who is now fighting the disease. This is our new global village. This medium is our new black plague domesday journal and even Monte Python is in the audience. Bring out your dead!

From a Facebook post, rev. 3/26/23 

The Human Be-In

I was at the Human Be-In with my mother, I was just turned 14, barely into my teens. It was a gloriously sunny, if cold day, and the grass was damp. There were flowers and candles, incense and feathers, cymbals and chimes—and lots of smoke. 

Gary Snyder, in a fringed leather vest, was on stage chanting and reading poetry, Allen Ginsberg was standing behind him with Michael McClure dressed in black. Lenore Kandel. My first Beat poetry reading. (I later met, and read with all of them). It was a gathering of the tribes, and the wild tribe kept growing all afternoon, from a thousand souls to a crowd of 30,000 people converging on the polo fields, and the bands played on.

See the royal maze website that mentions John Cooke

 

Court jester Timothy Leary, all dressed in white, leaped off the stage, tumbled down among the masses, tripping down the main aisle like a pied piper, he spotted my mom, a tall willowy auburn-haired beauty, and bear-hugged her. They knew each other from before. It’s an Irish thing. She was always bringing the Irish poets home like Lew Welsh and Gene Ruggles. He solemnly shook my hand. And smiled beatifically.

Photo by Jim Marshall, from San Francisco Remembered. With thanks to Janet Duncan

As they twirled and hugged, she threw back her head and laughed, her long red mane combusted in the sunlight. I’d never seen her so radiant as in that moment. She was like another person, not depressed. She said, God bless you Timothy Leary, he laughed and drifted onward toward the back of the crowd, creating hives of excitement whenever he stopped. Jerry Garcia was onto a long guitar riff. Bubbles danced in the breeze. Me, awkwardly standing there in soggy rain-soaked pants, taking it all in, never dreaming I’d one day become a writer.

Big Brother and Janis Joplin lived down the road from us in Forest Knolls, Sons of Champlain, Jefferson Starship, Grateful Dead, and Carlos Santana also lived in the San Geronimo Valley so the musicians were all neighbors of sorts. I later met most of them hitching back and forth to high school. My mom took it up a notch, sometimes she took me in tow when she partied with them.

San Francisco, January 1967, was an electrifying year of social deconstruction and reconfiguration. The Gathering of the Tribes where spiritual generation amassed for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields. Guest speakers Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke to some 10,000 very stoned pilgrims who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out en masse.

And yes, there really was a psychedelic poster. I remember it. Someone said that if a poster had the year on it, then it was fake. Whether this one is real, is moot.  The point is, we were there.

'Tween Worlds

You know the Robin Williams line—even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there. Meanwhile Gertrude Stein said: There is no there there. And there you have it as my grannie would say. What Robin should have said: Remembering it is tricky, at best.

SFchronicle_vault Dec. 9, 1987: Robin Williams hangs out with comedian Will Durst (left) after Durst lost a mayoral run. We're thinking that's Vera Carp of "Greater Tuna" on the right. 📷: Chronicle Archive

I follow a couple of Facebook groups and we've posted collective memory threads from multiple perspectives. Some of my recent blog posts are outtakes from those threads. Sometimes the outtakes gel, sometimes. they're merely placeholders of an idea I might revisit later.

We were reminiscing what it was like growing up between times during those turbulent years. Part of the backstory was the anniversary of the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre (which I didn't include). These outtakes are from random fragments that drifted in and out of that series of dialogues.

For some reason, though we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it so, from time to time, I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told Colorado poet, Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

However, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14—a mere 'tweenie at the original 1967 "A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be In" in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal.

Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was also one of the first artists to transform and live inside the Hamms Brewery vats—but that's an '80s story of punk rockers & hippie wars. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often. Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in.

(I'm leaping ahead in my story here. The problem with a run-on memory fragment is that it's a challenge to force it to toe the timeline of congruity. Not an easy thing when the 60s' are invoked.) My mom knew Kush of Cloud House. She got around. She was featured in Whitman McGowan's poem-video, White Folks Was Once Wild Too. That's her dancing around the bonfire.

sfchronicle_vault June 1959: Allen Ginsberg flips through a Jack Kerouac book at a San Francisco bookstore. The Beatniks, as named by Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, had a positive influence on visual arts, performing arts and music. They challenged the values of a conservative city. And they built a foundation for a progressive future. 📷: Joe Rosenthal

I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert "Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played were near neighbors: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave which was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District—LSD ('splains a lot). I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world (living with my Irish Victorian grannie), and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age—and me, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task. 

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School—the only high school (emphasis on the word high) in the nation to shut down a local draft board. 

We were a pretty radicalized group of kids. Our class president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name shoulld ring a bell—as in his older brother, Michael Rossman, a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. When we shut down the San Rafael Draft Board, we made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock news. And gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the kid hitching home from school. How I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

I was living out in rural West Marin and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre. This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the 'tween years—we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.



My related blog post

Ken Kesey

Hitching in Marin during late 60s, early 70s

Note bene: for some reason someone, who posted a comment as "Anonymous" took umbrage to this post and wrote "b.s." Of course I didn't publish it—as they didn't bother to sign their name, nor did they say why they thought it was b.s. It's my past I'm writing about, so how is it b.s.? Maybe he thought it was made up. Who knows? Clearly he was full of b.s. for posting it. And so it goes. I invite comment and dialogue, but not b.s.

The New Zamizdat

OK, I must admit that I'm mesmerized by the new Blogger stats tool—in a shiny packratty sort of way. I am endlessly fascinated that I can now view what pieces are being read—how many readers, and what countries. Positively mind-blowing.

First, writing is a lonely business. Audience is a whole other hemisphere. Then there's the old saw: Who do you write for? Who are your readers? The publish or perish paradigm took off its kid cloves and flexed its knuckles and whistled, "hey kid 'comere!" when blogging was invented. Shades of Marshall McLuhan's Global Village.

I come from the American school of Samizdat or, rather, Tamizdat tradition. No, tamizdat is not a typo—as one well-intending publisher tried to correct one of my posts.

Russian samizdat, from samo- (self) + izdatelstvo (publishing house), from izdat (to publish). Coined facetiously on the model of Gosizdat (State Publishing House). (from AWAD)

Soviet samizdat was a form of illegal self-publishing in a seriously limited edition format, using ten layers of carbon paper plus ten sheets of clean paper—and an upright manual typewriter replete with a print ribbon you had to re-ink by hand. Typing through that many layers of paper was a real bitch. Weak ring finger strength equaled blurred "e"s in final copies. And pity the poor sot who was gifted copy #10—it was a bitch to the tenth power to read.

This is the underground tradition in which Soviet poetry (and secret texts including copies of Bibles) were painstakenly reproduced—and distributed, underground. I met one of Osip Mandelstahm's samizdat publishers in Leningrad, held a fragile copy in my hands—knowing that people risked their lives preserving his poetry. Mandelstahm & Blok's chapbooks still reeked of rancid printer's ink decades later.

Then there was the Leningrad Rock Opera singer Valera (aka Valery / Valeriy) Stupachenko - Валерий Ступаченко (who I did not marry because he loved his dead wife and God more than me—who could compete with that?) Valera treasured his dog-eared carbon-paper Bible. Cherished possessions from a time when religious worship too was illegal.

Sidebar: Ram Dass notes

SIDEBAR: RAM DASS  (draft—need to check facts) 

                 

Spearhead of the psychological growth movement that began in the 1970s, eloquent spiritual leader, counterculture icon, and social activist, Richard Alpert, better known as Ram Dass, began his career as a psychologist to the hip intelligencia. 

In the summer of 1961, drug experimentation led him to the idea of God. Alpert went to Cuerna Vaca with Timothy Leary, where they took magic mushrooms and had an out of body experiences Alpert saw himself as God.  (WHEN???)  He came back to Harvard in the Fall of ’61 to do research on consciousness-expanding drugs. In ’63, both he and Leary were fired from Harvard faculty for experimenting with LSD with undergrads—as LSD was now illegal, criminalized that same year.

Unlike Leary, Richard Alpert, with a Ph.D. in Motivational Psychology (WHEN??), managed to keep his academic standing and taught at Stanford University, where he was also Director of Psychedelic Review.

San Francisco, 1967: an electrifying year of social deconstruction and reconfiguration. In January, there was a Gathering of the Tribes where spiritual generation amassed for a Human Be-In. At the Polo Fields, guest speakers Ram Dass and Leary spoke to some 10,000 very stoned pilgrims who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out en masse. I was there.

Alpert, Timothy Leary and the Diggers hang out with the Hell’s Angels in the Haight. Alpert lectured on LSD in San Francisco and UCLA on “Psychedelics Drugs and the Law” Kesey’s Acid Tests in Santa Cruz).

After the breakup of the Summer of Love, and the Haight, the hippies and anarchist Diggers moved onto the land with a circuit of communes in Northern California, Nevada, and New Mexico. Alpert settled in??? Marin Santa Cruz? XXX 

After experimenting with mind -expanding drugs, Richard Alpert turned to meditation to seek drug-free enlightenment. In mid-1967, Alpert’s friend, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg returned from India and told him about meditation. Alpert went 1st class in a Land Rover to India. In Kathmandu he met 27 year-old Californian from Manhattan Beach? Bagawan Dass, who’d been studying in India for years. High on peach melbas? they connected on several levels of spiritual life, kundalini... 

Bagawan Dass toured with Richard Alpert. They went to the Himalayas where Alpert met his future guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and became a disciple. Alpert experienced shaktipat (spiritual awakening), and spent 3 months doing seva (volunteer work) at an ashram while learning and practicing various lines of yoga. Alpert was given the name, Baba Ram Dass which means “Servant of God.” When Ram Dass returned to the United States (an expired visa), he lived in upstate New York (with LEARY??), where he began lecturing informally about his experiences.... garnering a wide following.

Those recollections evolved in the groundbreaking book, Be Here Now, which became something of a bible in New Age circles. Be Here Now which chronicles group meditation process in the New Mexico desert…xxx

“Richard Alpert used to talk about the orange basketball,” remarked Stewart Brand some years after the Haight scene had collapsed. “Psychologists had raised some ducklings with a basketball and they imprinted on it as if it were their mother. Wherever the basketball rolled, they’d follow it. That’s what the movement was to us. That was our basketball. Wherever it rolls, we’ll follow.”  p281 Rolling Stone editor Charles Perry, “The Haight Ashbury: A History” (84)

Ram Dass’ guru died in 1973; Dass formed the HANUMAN FOUNDATION in 1974 to “further the spiritual awakening in our society.”(Hanuman is the Hindu monkey god of XXX) One aim was to promote development of a broad base for meditation in the West. They began with a list of facilities and helpful quotations which evolved into a best selling, popular book, Journey of Awakening, the proceeds of which helped to support the foundation.

Ram Dass’ continued rise in fame was partly in response to the latent yearnings of the “Me Generation” in pursuit of spiritual connection, of greater consciousness and equanimity, what Tibetan Lama Trungpa Rinpoche dubbed as spiritual materialists.

“In the sixties, when we first encountered Eastern ideas of enlightenment, we expected to be personally enlightened in a matter of a month, a year, or a decade at most. …but now in the mid-eighties we have come to appreciate the fine print in the Eastern texts… We have learned patience and humility and an understanding that we practice dharma without attachment to the goal”  —Grist preface.

Ram Dass attempts to share with us “the unspeakable” to “know what is not knowable. … For ultimately we will transcend knowing.” from Grist, a pioneer who forged new psychological territory in the West by bringing from the East,  translations of teachings of eastern mysticism of the westerner.

Ram Dass drifted into the Death and Dying Project late ’70s and co-wrote a book with Stephen Levine, “Grist for the Mill” documenting one-on-one work with death & dying and the spiritual path. The project created innovative hotlines for the terminally ill, as well as centers, the 1st in Santa Cruz? Groundbreaking videos of the project were filmed in Berkeley.

In the early ’80s, Ram Dass traveled extensively, visiting monks and religious centers around the world. “The eighties are the sixties twenty years later.” Wavy Gravy once quipped to Ram Dass. During the ’80s & ’90s, Dass lent his name and energies to a series of charities and volunteer projects, and was also the most sought after speaker for new age conferences, workshops, the lecture circuit and events where he was “known for ability to convey mystical ideas with lucidity, humor and grace.”  (Don Lattin, 5/26/97, SF Chronicle).

After his stroke in February of ’97, those closest to him said the loss of language was the most frustrating aspect. If you listen with patience, the old message still gets through; he communicates with what he calls the “eloquence with silence.”

Journal entry, Allen Ginsburg Memorial, Passover Eve., Buddha’s Birthday.

4/20 Allen Ginsburg Memorial, Temple Emanuel, Arguello St. SF. Passover Eve., Buddha’s Birthday. In the courtyard, poets greet us in white robes. Oranges and gardenias float in the fountain. We enter the temple like wedding guests.

Said the rabbi, “‘Others criticized, ‘How could you honor such a person as Ginsburg in a holy temple?’”

Said the rabbi, “A temple is not sacred until sacred people gather in it. Welcome.”

A tribe of poets gather here today, some 3000 strong: an Ecstasy of Poets. The energy is like at COBRA founder Bert Scheerbeek’s funeral in Amsterdam, last June, I stood between his disciples Jan Volkers, Hugo Claus and Willem van Toorn. Breaking from tradition and metered verse, Bert’s post W.W.II vision begat Allen’s voice, which in turn, begat our own poetic voices. I never again thought I’d experience the chaotic force of poets united in one mind. Surely this is Godhead. Yes, we who work at living… and what is the work? To ease the work of living…

So many long-lost friends I haven’t seen in ages, I thought them dead: Steve Petty, Stephen Kessler, the Joannes: Kyger & Hotchkiss, the Jacks: Micheline, Hirshman and Foley, Noni Howard, bald as an egg. A trick of vision:

I imagined the dead joined us. Embodied poetics. Was that really Boschka Layton in the wings, with her face adroop with Bells’ Palsy, dead these 22 years, (Donald Sutherland’s sister). And was it Cliff McEntire serving us platters of sea bass at poets dinners in the Haight? John Logan. Brother Antoninus? (William Everson in his fringed buckskin jacket and boots).

And Robert Duncan in black, like a Zen master Bending the Bow? Kerouac, Cassidy, Brautigan? One-eyed Creeley? I swear I saw Lew Welsh’s face in the crowd. Ring of Bone. Paul Mariah smoking, swigging from his flask and giggling. And the ones I once wished dead, the ex-flames: John Oliver Simon. And a current flame: where is Neil? Oh, to have arms big enough to embrace this room! People five-deep in the aisles: I give Neil’s seat to Terry Ehret. Good to see her.

Nancy Peters said City Lights was inundated with letters, tributes, calls from all over the world. Larry Ferlinghetti said “I’ll always remember Ginsburg’s voice singing Blake.” And read “Allen Ginsburg Dying.” Mark Linenthal who brought Howl into the classroom, said, “He, more than any other writer, changed what a writer could, or should be…”

Ginsburg, our uncle, our poetic ancestor, gave us the right to write from the heart. Kyger, who went to India with Allen, read from his journal: “Widen the area of consciousness until it becomes so wide, it encompasses its own death… widen consciousness…keep it simple…behind writing is the practice of meditation.” Kyger holds up her hand, says “It’s 1977: Allen makes a literary map of Bolinas: ‘I hear the waves of Bolinas reef saying, boxcar, boxcar, boxcar…’” We chuckle.

Pantherlike Ann Waldman notes: “The weight and desire that human attachment brings…Allen flossing his teeth… making chicken soup…” Did someone say he resembled Dostoyevski in death? “All ashes, all ashes again…”

Bob Hass said, “Allen showed us the importance of breath in prosody or free verse—how they breathed their very breath. ‘The point wasn’t to suffer, the point was to get it.’” We murmur in appreciation. Michael McClure, ever in black, “I met Allen in ’54 at a party in SF for W.H. Auden. We were both wallflowers. Allen set benchmarks of political consciousness and speaking out.”

Diane diPrima said: “The excellence of every art is its intensity… How will you measure Allen’s passing… how will you measure the dark?” Gary Snyder remembered Allen visiting in Berkeley, with Rexroth “drinking our graduate schooling down the tubes… Howl held the power of the voice, of the breath… Allen broke that open for all of us.” Gary’s long, rangy voice filled the temple, “It’s Buddha’s birthday. Allen chose to die during the month of cherry blossoms blooming.”

April is poetry month, not T.S. Elliot’s cruellest month… Gary sings from Magpie’s Song: “Here in the mind brother, turquoise blue…” I hum along. It’s Passover Eve. Fill the temple with the sacredness of poets. A kaddish beyond words. Shalom. You spoke of simultaneous thought, Allen: First mind, best mind. Full moon! And Earth Day! Timothy Leary takes to the skies in his silver ship! Bon Voyage Timothy Leary. Say Hello to Allen!

At intermission Herman Berlandt said Neil wasn’t here, but I knew he was, I could feel him. There: standing on the pillar steps. I yelled Neil! several times. He searched, but couldn’t see me. Across the sea of faces, I watched him, as if stranger (who is this man?), before I wormed my way across the courtyard to his side, reclaiming my destiny. Whoever he is, we are linked. There is magic afoot. I touched his arm and he burst into smile.

So many people to talk to: Joanne Kyger asks about the lump in my breast… resuming a conversation we’d had 2 1/2 years earlier. I hug David Bromige, Steve Tills, Ann Erickson, Gary Glazner, Duncan McNaughton—the old Sonoma gang. Last time I saw Whitman McGowan, his face was painted blue. (Light-years before Gibson in “Braveheart”). I choke, suddenly remembering my dead mother’s hands in front of the bonfire in Whitman’s videopoem. An aftergift for the survivors.

The scent of gardenias and 3000 fresh orange rind simultaneously releasing essential oils: the juicy tang of communion. Noni Howard and I nip Hennessy's by the fountain, she was captivated by a man with knee-length dreadlocks, a felt pelt, and here she was bald as an egg, painting on eyebrows and lashes longer than he’s been growing dreadlocks. I don’t think Neil fully caught the irony of the situation. Poets really are wonderfully weird. I hold my breath.

He looks a bit bewildered, but seems to be taking it all in stride. Good. Another test passed. This is where my prospective men have failed the test unless they happen to be crazy as poets too. It’s as if poetry makes us unfit: unable to fit in with the rest of humanity. He walks me to my truck, we lean on the brick wall gazing into the park. Talks of his father, again. And the spaces between worlds. The universe puts me on alert. Something big is about to happen. And he is central to it. Something inexorable closing in.

Jack and Adele Foley, Herman, Neil and I went to the Mission District for dinner at an Indian restaurant. All over the city, poets were feasting and fucking in honor of Allen Ginsburg. Over chapatis, Jack tells us about a long, spontaneous interview he just did with Allen for KPFA. A pregnant woman joins us and announces she’s a single mother looking for a husband. No one makes her an offer. Neil mumbles into his plate: “It’s easier to give birth to a child than to give birth to a husband,” as if he were struggling with the concept himself.

Over dinner, I marvel at how Neil and Jack’s bodies are cast from the same mold: short, barrel-chested, foreshortened arms, diminutive starfish hands. Fir Bolgs? Neil’s a handsome man, most pleasing to look at. Jack’s stringy hair and glasses hide his face, but his eyes and brows are similar. Jack tells us stories of his father, an Irish vaudeville actor blarneying his way out of a ticket from an Irish cop. A lesson on how to grease the spoon.

Neil spoonfeeds me the last of the mango chutney. Walks me to my truck “Like an Old world gentleman.” “In which case,” I say, “I’ll take your arm (and a leg too, if I can).” I give him some Irish books, for, though he’s a descendant of Irish kings, he doesn’t know his own cultural heritage, the Ulster stories of Cú Chullain, Conchobar and Deirdre. The Táin. Fionn McCumhail.

He said, “My flabber is gasted. This merits a kiss…” Our first beneath the orange glow of sodium lamps. He loves to tease me. I like who I am around him: shy, gawky, a child, a sophisticated woman. He pulls me to him, I lay my head on his shoulder. This is becoming habit-forming. I’m still torn by the daisy petal routine: he loves me, he loves me not…

David Bromige, Paul Mariah, Allen Ginsberg, photo

This was from the Helen Luster memorial at the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa