17 Dec '62
Long walk this morn to Manikarnika ghat—sat inside red stone porch with Saddhus & smoked ganja pipe & inquired about guru of good looking saddhu from Nimtallah—reminiscent red haired Naga saddhu knew him. Cow laid its head on my lap to be scratched. American tourists floating by in rowboats.
Dream: I meet Buddy Isenberg & Burroughs—turns out Isenberg is a nice girl—we sit at cafe table & talk, I apologize for writing so late. Nice dinky soft mannish looking girl. My demeanor is excessively self assured, is demeanor. Strange I should dream twice of girls in one day. “At my age” I said to Peter.
This morning while my back was turned from the table I heard a great thump—turned around to see a monkey jump on the table loaded with oranges & bananas, snatch one banana & leap out to the balcony, disappearing thru the lavatory window—next sitting on high branch of adjoining tree peeling the banana & staring at me thru the big leaves.
Incense in the room tonite, bought straw mats to cover half the slate-black tile floor.
What Vanity? What possible divine
blessing on all this Politics.
What invocation beyond Millions
of Votes for 1960 Hopes
What rat Curse or Dove vow slipt from my hands
to help this multitude
Smirking at the ballot box, deceived,
sensible, rich, full of onions,
voting for W. C. Williams with one
Foot in the grave and an eye
in a daisy out the window
18 Dec '62—
Sitting on rock at Harischandra Ghat—down below a sand slope at the water's edge blackened with ashes, a high pile of firewood ablaze and a man's head bent back blackened nose & mouth unburnt, black fuzzy hair, the rest of the chest belly outlined along down thighs at top of the pyre, feet sticking out the other end—now turned toes down—cry of geese & rabble of white longnecked good goose swan boids pecking in the water's edge a few feet from fire.
Nearby scows filled with sand from the other side of the river, laborers carrying baskets of grey sand up the brick stairway from the river—“Oh—the head's going to fall off—” The pile darkening, white ash floating up—a few watchers squatted on bricks facing the pyre—Pole man comes & tucks a foot into fire—then circles around & pushes length of pole against the black head (lain back with open black throat & adam's apple silhouetted against the small flames against the green river) til the body's balanced on the center of the collapsing charred logs. Donkeys led along the sand path, children running with kites, a black baby with no pants & pigtails, balancing a stick of bamboo—A saddhu in orange robes sitting up on a stone porch on the embankment under turrets of an old small castle—rather Venetian the scene—Rectangular-sailed boats going down stream—the air above the pyre curling in the heat, like a transparent water veil between my eyes & the greenfields & trees along the horizon on the other side of the Ganges—and the embankments, red temples spires, toy mosques, trees and squat white shrines walling in the bend of the river upstream to the long red train bridge at Raj Ghat an inch high.
18 Dec and a torn burlap bag to cover the squat pantsdropd lavatory window that opens on the staircase of the house, so ascending passersby can see the diarrheic mud bubble down from the asshole of P. Orlovsky & Company, Inc.
This morning down to the burning ghats & sat with same group of sadhus in their eyrie in the sandy basement porch of a pilgrim's rest house—fire with a pot of boiling lentils, embers from the burning ghat down below at 10 AM—a trident and bamboo lance & brass water-pot begging stoup scattered around, one friendly Sadhu named “Shambhu Bharti Baba” with whom I've sat and smoked before—today seeing my difficulty handling the red clay pipe he made & accompanied me smoking a cigarette mixed with ganja—I also partook of two pipes tho I coughed & the cold snot bubbled out my nostril from the strain-wheeze—brought some bananas & green seed fruits to distribute, gifts—and camera so made photos—the Naga Sadhu (S b b) wanted his very confusingly, as he don't talk but makes finger gestures—he got to his feet, stripped off his g-string & pulled down his cock under between his legs—one yogic ball bumping out—like cunt—for a photo—I took a dozen, all the group smoking round the pot & ashes—one standing of the Naga sadhu with his pots & brass tridents etc. then high put on my shoes & walked back along the ghats home, & slept in dark closed room a half an hour—read Mayakovsky
elegy to Lenin—“and
child-like,
wept the grey-bearded old”
and Brooklyn Bridge poem—I didn't remember it was so lovely —“in the grisly mirage of evening
… the naked soul
of a building
will show
in a window's translucent light”
Jodrell Bank's deposit of heavenly radio waves
Shot some M, last nite, up on mattress reading The Statesman (Calcutta), Time, Mayakovsky, writing postcards, washing socks handkerchiefs undershirt, Peters cock, necking with him,
While below the balcony under the streetlight one milk shop clattered pails
in the darkness, the Desasumedh Ghat beggars kept thin fingers moving under dried burlap, counting beads Jai Ram Jai Citaram, & the woman on the opposite corner with long wild hair crouched against a bidi shop steps rocking back & forth—I gave her 25 NP when I went out before dawn to buy milk & cigarettes—
now the square begins working—I feel like An American in Paris in 1920—The naiveté of neighborhoods awakening, radios turned on too loud to the Hindi news in the milk shop,
First lights turned on across the street, in the Cigarette and fried noodle peppers stall at the gate of the market,
three rickshaws circling to take off up street and look for cold dark business
Householders wrapped in shawls carrying brass waterpots trudging into the Ganges steps, passing & observing the beggar man in the mid-street shrouded in his own burlap shawl—he'd moved all night praying—
and carrying flowers to adorn the Lingams in the temples overlooking the starlit, planet-lit river—
arguments between Ram & Cita in Hindi voices tinnily rickochetting all the way up to my balcony from the radio—
Walkers coughing & trudging river street in Paterson too at this hour—
Him crouched under street lite on the corner counting a basketful of small potatos
Such a basket as I bought last night to contain my bananas & oranges, from white glued paperbags written in ledger sheets Hindi another day in a dark office—
Martial music to accompany the morning's broadcast, and the sound of a claxon with a throat inflammation in the background—
Peter lying dressed up in pants on mattress picking his red mustache, with long hollywood Christlike hair & Christ's small beard stubble—
I found out Octavio Paz is in Delhi the Ambassador of Mexico, arranging train rides for his tennis team—a headache—
Blake's photo on the wall, waiting waiting waiting—with his life mask eyes closed—thinking—or receiving radio messages from the cosmos source—
The rickshaw wallahs had slept all night crouched covered with their shawls on the red leather slope plastic of lowered rickshaws—
at night their bells rang in tune back & forth, speeding down the hill to Godolia from Chowk, up & down answering alarm clock tingalings in the dead streets—an iceman's tingaling, a knife sharpener's charged bellsound—
A huge black tree looming over my window obliterating half the square, all nite lights shining thru its leaves from milk shop where a vat of white cow buffalo lact bubbles over a charcoal trench.
Coughs answering back & forth across the square, and the splash of the streetcorner waterpipe faucet, clearing the throat near dawn—
a big white cow with horns had walked slowly up the street alone, looking for something to do—cows all last night in repulsive play, chasing each other in the traffic to lick the red asshole pads they drop streams of urine thru on the puddled street—black bulls horning the girls in front of Sardau's Hindu Hotel, separated by silver giant wire trees, knobby with ceramic eyes—
Wet charcoal & first white smoke impregnating the air to the tops of the trees—the monkeys asleep—the weasles aware— few rare ants—cigarette ashes cleaned from the trays in paper bag on the porch with banana & orange peels (the cows' lot) waiting the sweeper
Morning not yet come, Dec 19, 1962 must be 4 or 5 AM in Benares, writing & fingering my cock & remembering Shostakovitche's dead March as the radio bounces & crashes across India with brass violins—
The smell of frying meat cakes and potatos, Jai Citaram in a toneless voice, & gentle gossip near the rickshaws, the clanging of a temple bell at worship time early a few blocks away.
A lady already arrived with small baskets of parsley & radishes sits in the road where it turns down to the river steps, coughs & spits on the ground & bides in the gloom as the first blue light breaks open clouds in the East sky over the river, seen from balcony thru trees and a few balconied chickenwired houses leaning over the steps.
~~Allen Ginsberg's notes from India in Mind -ed- Pankaj Mishra
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