The Convalescence Notebook, Part III, March 27, 2005

Published in the Uncategorized

Although I thought when I finished “The True Story of My Convalescence” that I finally understood what was going on, the whole story turned on its head within days.

When Michael’s reading spoke about the need to appease my father’s karma, I naturally assumed it was my dad. Over two days I spent a lot of time trying to ease my father’s transition in any way I could. But there really didn’t seem to be a lot of energy there. It felt pretty complete.

The next day I got an e-mail—Allen Ginsberg was under attack again! Would I write something? I decided to write something later, but I kept thinking about it all day and decided I should just sit down and write while it’s fresh.

That got me to thinking a lot about Allen—mostly that he had shown me more kindness than anyone I can think of—real, honest kindness. Kindnesses. Luckily, I made a point of telling him this repeatedly—before every goodbye the last five or six years he was alive. Although I never used the word “kindness” then—just that I loved him and how much I’d learned from him and how excited I was to have the chance to work with him and know him. And at one point on my front porch I just suddenly started weeping spontaneously, I missed him so much. I can’t remember crying for Allen like that ever before.

Then when I woke up this morning I was thinking about Allen and crying again. And I suddenly flashed back to our last phone conversation.

A couple of months before he died, I called Allen’s office number a little after 2:30 a.m., his time, expecting to leave a message, but instead he answered the phone, sounding chipper and wide awake, like he was happy the phone had rung. “What are you doing up? I was expecting your answering machine.” “Oh, well, just puttering around.”

I was calling him to ask him to be part of a James Joyce Festival I was putting together in Boulder, and he said sure, just remind him a couple of days before the event so he could prepare. But most of our conversation concerned something that had just happened to me–something causing me a lot of distress that I could have done something about–and he was giving me advice, like he always did. He told me that if someone said something about me that wasn’t true, I had to speak up. People will assume my silence means that I’ve done something wrong. History is made up of its voices. My history, if anyone’s did, deserves to be heard! But we both knew I wouldn’t do anything about it.

Anyway, before we hung up I gave him my usual litany–that I loved him and I enumerated specifically all of the things I’d learned from him. But he stopped me short this time and shouted, “Yeah, well, I wish you’d learned some of my gregariousness!”

So I’m sitting in bed, crying for Allen, and remembering his last words to me and suddenly I connect this with something else.

I have a friend who read my earlier story and said, “Isn’t it interesting? Your journey perfectly describes what’s known as an ego death in transpersonal psychology. See, you’re in a white space right, hearing and seeing fluttering beings around you. What does that sound like to you? Okay, so you’re in that state and something enters or is released by your tailbone and travels up your spine and punctures the egg. Right? Okay, so you stand up, and then you precisely go through all the stages of physical death and birth—I mean, part of you is falling to the earth and becoming unconscious—it’s dying, right?—and a part of you is learning how to stand up. And it’s hard at first, but that’s the voice that guided you through the hospital because, Randy, I know you, and what you said and the way you acted was not you, or not the old you. Anyway, so then you go through the bardo—the inferno, right? You even spend some time in a literal tomb, and you get a series of questions before you can cross from outside the heaven into the heaven itself, right? And from that point you see everything balanced—there’s the good nurse on the right side of the bed, and there’s the horrible nurse on the left, right? Like those cartoon angels and devils on people’s shoulders. And then you struggle out of the underworld and you’re a different person, right? And you’re kind of disembodied, you haven’t figured out how to use the equipment yet. It seems pretty clear to me.”

So, now I’m thinking, well, I guess I’ve got my fathers confused. There’s my physical father but I have a spiritual father too. And he’s under attack, and what he needs is someone with a little … gregariousness.  So I wrote an essay: “In Defense of Allen Ginsberg, American Poet.”