Gratitude

This Rhetoric assignment was to write a letter to someone in order to thank them for helping us in some manner.

I immediately composed this note of gratitude. It still slams me in the chest and leaves me staggering for breath when I think back to that evening and how many seeds were planted, to be cultivated with experience and travel, and the harvest coming only years afterward...

The synchronicity of composing this at a building which overlooks Grant Park was not lost on me.

~•~
[second draft]


33 E. Congress
Chicago, IL 60605
October 16, 2007

Allen Ginsberg
245 Mount Olivet Avenue
Naropa, Earth


Dear Allen:

Thank you for asking me to join you for dinner. It was one of those uncanny synchronicities, of course, you recognizing me. After a five minute phone conversation the night before, it was damn eerie when you stopped to talk to me after the poetry reading. I only called the radio station where you were being interviewed because I knew the dee-jay, but then suddenly you were on the phone and I just stumbled through my silly question. A real question. "What are you doing before the reading?" I asked, "I'd like to hang out and talk." As if we had know each other for years. We hadn't ever met.

I enjoyed your poetry reading, of course. Best public reading I'd heard then, or even still to this day. Afterward, everyone milling about here and there, I clutched my notebook and hovered around where you were talking to some stiff academic types. Suddenly you stopped in mid-conversation and turned around to face me. "You called me last night," you said, with absolute certainty. I clutched my notebook of poems a little tighter; seventeen years old and talking to Allen-Fucking-Ginsberg!

"Yeah, that's right," I replied, and then without further comment, you asked what I had to show you. The poem I had my notebook open to--with back story ready to tell--didn't thrill you at all. Grimace beneath your long gray-streaked beard and screwing shut your eyes as if to obliterate some Lovecraftian squeamish thing from memory of your sight. Then, instead of a signature, you autographed the page with a quote in your tiny lettering: "No ideas but in things." W. Carlos Williams.

I have to admit, when I saw that, I was crushed. I muttered something to myself and perhaps you saw the sting in my own expression. "Listen," you said, "we're going to get a bite to eat, you can join us if you want." I almost said no.

Can you imagine where I might have headed in the greater scheme of things if I hadn't gone out that night? I wouldn't have the same reflection in my rear view mirror as I traveled on down the road from there, that's for sure. Well, probably. I just wouldn't have done it with the same lessons in my head.

So that was me, then: eating red beans and rice with Allen Ginsberg in Mobile, Alabama. I couldn't believe it, though I was much too cool to ever let on as to how I felt. It was all just so...like old friends hanging out. You had this habit of closing your eyes when someone was speaking to you. It was more than a little disconcerting, but you explained it as being a means to shut out distractions so you could focus completely on what someone was saying to you. Not paying attention to this or that nor thinking of what you were going to say when they stopped talking, but really listening to what was being said. I liked that, having never been much of a person for chit-chat anyway. Not thinking about Back Then, or Maybe Tomorrow, just right Here and Now.

Which was why I leapt right in with the magnitude of my question from the start--

--You who had been on the road with Kerouac and Cassady, on the bus with Kesey and the Pranksters, hanging out with Tim Leary, and Abbie Hoffman, and in Ashrams in India and Communes in Poland...I thought for certain you'd have something to say in response to my Great Question: "What do you think happens to us when we die?"

Without hesitation you snapped your reply, "Absolutely nothing; we turn to carbon and nitrogen and feed the earth."

Second time in one evening my expectations were crushed. I was still dazed from that comment when you managed to slip away from your local guides and snuck out the back of the café. Someone brought a joint and we shared a smoke outside in the alley. Laughing about serious things and being serious about the humor in the world, you pointed out the building where the FBI had offices in Mobile. The very same building where you had been for your radio interview when I called, and--years later--where I would work at that same radio station; WZEW 92.1.

Even if we had never crossed paths again, it wouldn't have made the lessons I learned that night any less profound, but running into you again some years later--you remembered me, again--and we talked briefly. Like running into an old friend. And that's when I learned a little more.

You were not someone to provide answers for others, especially poetic seventeen year old kids just starting out on their own paths. Your quips to me were a way of saying, "Do not follow in the footsteps of the Masters; seek what they sought." And from my hurt responses to such comments, I developed my own Buddhist Truth: "If you have no expectations, you cannot be disappointed."

How much I've learned since then. How far I've come. Coast to coast hitchhiking. Beyond this country's borders in travels on my own. Never satisfied with having learned enough; seen enough. And now, in one of your old haunting grounds, I'm in college in Chicago. At Michigan and Balbo, just across from Grant Park. And I still reflect on my conversations with you.

My ontological spiritual quest: regardless of what we believe or place our faith in or hope or dream or love or fear about what comes after this life, there is at least one fact in nature. When people die they become (something akin to) carbon and nitrogen and are gone. Anything beyond that is our conjecture, our faith, our prayer. What will happen other than that is for each and every one of us to find out at some point. Anyone who tells you different probably wants something from you.

I've often refer to the quote you scrawled in my notebook of poems. I didn't understand it for several years. "No ideas but in things." I think I have learned it now. Ideas should be represented in the manner of what they are. Allusions and metaphors and symbols are fine, but what of the thing which lies beneath the image? Direct experience of something, rather than experience by proxy. And sometimes, I think maybe the there are no things but in ideas. Whatever meaning it, or anything has, the important thing is not in discovering the answer, or even an answer, but in continuing to ask the questions.

Anyway, it's not been fifty years since Howl was published, and even in this day of crass vulgarities spewing forth from prime time network television, your poem is still considered to be too obscene to be read on the radio. I'm not sure if that's funny because of its pathos, or if its pathetic because its so funny. The power of words on paper. But more important to me, personally, are the words we shared together. They are a major reason of why I not only write what I do, but also why I breathe and think and love and continue to believe.

Words are magic. Why else would it be called spelling?

I just wanted to express my gratitude for the magic you brought all of us; left for us.

Your words mean a lot to me.

Thank you, Allen.


your old friend,

~kírk~


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