But I now also see that his ability to propose much of what others out of fear or repression or bourgeois politeness or discretion fail to ever voice -- and loudly and in public -- must have been utterly magical to him, like his every proposal was a mantra to a higher plane or an opensezame to another world, so long denied to him. To propose to pretty boys and have them say “yes.” He could with words and fame have all the things that beautiful people seemed to always have at their beck and call. But do not be deceived -- I say to myself now and also to the Ginsbergs of the world -- beauty has its own glories, its own perks and yet how many beautiful women I have known have confessed to me (and I imagine others) that beauty has its extreme downsides, that beauty is a trap, a tool of suffering, that physical beauty is a stimulus to both harassment and objectification that leads to you being used by jealous people as a scapegoat to explain all of the failings of the perpetually resentful, those luckily too terrified to become the psychopaths they are.
This mid-1970s after-reading encounter with Ginsberg did point out (not at the time but in hindsight) that he in his ability to wield power and influence and boldly ask for what he wanted -- being an element of both sexual revolutionary and standard sex predator -- was not unlike the boss in a dingy office who can fire his secretary for not going out with him or the rock stars who can have the pick of any litter all because of a guitar solo they replicate on a nightly basis. There is no justice. In this sordid show of might (cloaked in the symbols of liberation or other noble ideals, the conviction of which I never doubted) Ginsberg seemed simultaneously mythic and pathetically small, human, pleading, lonely. And that was part of Ginsberg too. Amazingly bardic (and able to voice and embody entire movements with in/exhalations of barrel chest and belly) and yet just as small-potato pathetically concerned about book sales (as one friend noted, he would come regularly into Eastside Books -- RIP -- in the East Village) as some petty accountant with a pencil behind his ear. He embodied all of that and his poetry tried to capture those human inconsistencies, those national hypocrisies, those crises of faith of the human spirit. He could leap into obvious nitpicking and trivial marginality that mirror the very cliches that 95% of the general public has about poets who are gay, Jewish, and urban. Issues, how language can force change -- what could be more hopeful than that!? -- toward a better world, which could quickly descend into a scenario of a guy, hunched over, victimized by his own cravings and his own need to show that the expression and satisfaction of those cravings could all be declared and noted, while cameras were clicking and buzzing. Yes, a laureate of letters is a kind of CEO. There is a spiritual overlap.
He lived passionately and messily and with full ragged flaws showing. A bulging ego who preached downward that egolessness was the way to go. Committed to political activism and somehow mucking that up with human foibles (what else can a human being do?). He did write his Whitmanesque material -- “Howl,” “Kaddish,” “America,” “Supermarket” -- as he had desired and set out to do and became the living embodiment of a land dealing with its devils, its garbage, its misgivings, its hopes and all of this he seemed to take on gladly, with honor. He was the spokesman (and like Burroughs) was able to avoid ageism. By being ageless and perpetually renewable (not to mention all of the other bongo-beating mumbo jumbo prejudices that straight-laced culture would try to foist upon the Beats -- the New Yorker style persnickety ridicule and satire of all that was Beatnik, for instance), t[he]y became their own best satire.
Ginsberg weathered it all, even recorded a punk single with the Glu-ons, a rousing-moaning rap in the style of his hero Dylan. One of the great samples of 1990s music was his “Let’s all make love in London,” taken from some forgettable film and reused by Dub Syndicate for their “Love 2001” single (there are other examples, of course). So, despite his renewability, he became a kind of corpulent cliché -- his every gesture becoming a pestering parody of the very self he had so lionized and despised -- body and soul as the embodiment and filter of all contradictions, foibles, misgivings, outrages, talents and flaws.
A good poet with some great poems behind him became a star, which is nothing more than an imploding self who has to keeping blowing up a collapsing soul with hot air like a leaky flotation device. Once he begins to believe his hype and immortality, he ends up as someone who is famous for being famous or rich or famous for being rich or becoming rich because you’re famous -- the tautologies are mind-boggling and oxymoronic.
