Assorted birthday ramblings...

In a little while, Di and I are heading to south county to listen to some sweet jazz a la Miles Davis in 1950. We will connect with a few friends, get some good eats and red wine and take in the ultra cool weather on this my 58th birthday. It has been a gentle and rest-filled day and I've been thinking about a few assorting thoughts:

+ First, it seems that one of the reasons I have become so captured by the Beat poets of late - and their on-going influence in the music I love - has something to do with the chaos of the contemporary world. More and more I find the ugly and shrill politics of this era not only offensive and mean-spirited, but soul destroying, too. And when I look at the historic alternatives to the status quo, only the counter-cultural spirituality of Jesus and the Beats make sense to me. In the time that remains, I want to be a living part of that alternative to the greed and hatred that embodies joy within the sorrow, peace within the violence, grace within the judgments and faith within the despair.


+ Second, although Allen Ginsberg has been gone for 13 years, his testimony lives on in my heart in ways I would never have imagined. And while sorting through the sludge of some of his poetry is daunting, there are precious nuggets of wisdom and blessing amidst the mire. What's more, both HOWL and KADDISH have only ripened. Like the opening line in his Wikipedia listing says:

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation, an anarchic group of young men and women who combined poetry, song, sex, wine and illicit drugs with passionate political ideas that championed personal freedoms... he celebrates his fellow "angelheaded hipsters" and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...

As Timothy Leary says in one of the best documentaries of Ginsberg, this was a man committed to the "politics of ecstasy." To be sure, there were times of stupidity and selfishness in his life, but that is probably true of us all. And when Ginsberg passed, he was still a tender, gentle and compassionate Bodhisattva who made the world a better place for having lived. We could do a whole lot worse...

+ And third, life is too freakin' short for anything but the politics of ecstasy - and I mean that personally, spiritually, professionally and publically. I know this will sound like a broken record, but as America's two wars wind on into even greater tragedy and complexity and the Gulf of Mexico bleeds like an open sore upon the earth, the creative soul of both the Beat poets' laments and celebrations ring true for me.

ps: bummer update - at the very last minute Di got sick - so she's sleeping and feeling like shit while I watch old mysteries and soak up the cool breezes. Like Peter Green said: oh well...
(painting by Jaclyn Stiles @ http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2008/01/28_thisweekphotos.asp)