Meeting Ginsberg

I did, in fact, meet Alan Ginsberg, once: In 1968 I was 14 years old, a burgeoning hippie blues harp player. That sainted summer, my father took me to Kyoto for two months to visit his older brother, my uncle Cid Corman. Cid edited, translated and wrote poetry, and knew the Beats, though I think he was not really one of them. A lot of folks passed through Kyoto in their travels, and those who were interested in contemporary poetry made a point of visiting with Cid.

It was a long, hot and isolated summer for me. The grownups were absolutely uninterested in me, and I was given pocket money and pushed out the door. I spent my time visiting the temples, of which there are dozens, and generally walking the city. No big adventures, and it was a gorgeous place to be marooned, but still I felt lonely and, honestly, angry and abandoned. Cid, my father, and the visitors all seemed to me preoccupied with doing Great Things or alternatively, sucking up to people who they believed were doing Great Things. Lots of posturing, earnest discussion and dispensation of putative wisdom, a heirarchy of greatness prevailed, and it felt competitive and artificial to me.

Cid lived in a suburb? district? in a small traditional house, tiny yard, with other similar houses close by. The summer was hot and muggy, punctuated by huge downpours that left the air steamy. Cid's wife, my aunt Shizumi, gave us dinner most nights, breakfast every morning, and it was at breakfast that Ginsberg turned up.

I had some sense of who he was, and that it was rather extraordinary to be meeting him, but he was in fact a sweetheart, a nice normal guy. He and I talked a bit, and he was kind and, amazing to me, interested in what I had to say. Kinda rumpled, hair aloft. As I remember it, he was very excited about meditation. In discussing why monks are traditionally celibate, he said "You know how your balls hurt after you come?" (At 14, I couldn't say that I did.) He said "That's why they're celibate: it's a distraction from the meditation." You learn something new every day.