Love emanates constantly but is seldom met with openness. Each of us, our own dam to the river of humanity. Writers take the everyday commodity of sound-as-language and wrestle with ways to open the dam. In my life, Lawrence Ferlinghetti became in language what Puccini was earlier, in music: a delta, impregnating branch after branch of new systems of expression. I was given a box of books by another maritime beacon, David Noon, in his initial attempts to downsize. The box was full to the brim. In it were a few copies of books by Lawrence. I had never heard of him until David’s final lecture covering the love and openness possible in the history of music. David stood, under spotlight in dramatic pose, bedecked in Star Trek uniform and Dada sneakers; he closed the lecture with I Am Waiting.
There was no life-as-narrative moment here, and I do not wish to infuse it with any awe whatsoever; the words simply hit. They represented reality, and a stance of cynic and pessimist converted into oracle, tour guide, maestro di amore. When the books hit my hand, my already intense life at the beginning of my twenties in New York City, was catapulted into a spasmodic froth. Over the next period of time, I met with words daily and revealed to myself their potency and cunning. All the while I managed to collect an edition of every book he wrote, numbering somewhere around forty. Words and music clashed together in a new marriage that was yet unknown to me. The shear vitality of his voice, true to the grand line of Italian lyricism, maintained the guttural necessity of romanticism without the navel-gazing. His openness and acceptance of the world that was truly America, post-WWII, is the story of us all. And today, on the day he has left us here, to continue in our collective baited waiting for a rebirth of wonder, I am struck mostly by his courage. He continued ever forward in an unstraight line, meandering to and fro, following his version of beauty. Along the way he was praised and lambasted, and generally speaking, not well-read by critics. Mostly, he’s known for his ‘role’ in aiding Allen Ginsberg with support in the publication of Howl; but this is but a few-month period of his life, and really represents only business-as-usual for his beliefs and actions. Our time is one fixated on the current trend. A time obsessed with digital technology, and gripped with a sordid requirement to bring out the worst in others, standing behind our choice of glowing blue orbs. The simple act of public speaking has been raised to that of gladiator sport; the victor only wins if the unrealized blind-spots of the loser are catalyzed into a 140-charactercharacter-assassination. (That is not a typo).
In this decade and the decades that preceded it – seven of them to be exact – Lawrence somehow mustered the courage to believe that a song, volleyed into the darkness, sung in good faith, would indeed bring about love and wisdom, joy and exaltation. I read him all at once, and this was a struggle as I was forced to deal with a superficial ‘veneer theory’ that seems to govern a large percentage of his work. However, as I grew, I began to dust off this coarse shell and hear his words for what they ultimately are: love songs. After years of political dissidence and years of love songs, years of grimaces and laughter, he found himself in the most negative version of the land that had shaped him. A land transfixed with social media; a land governed by Donald Trump; that ‘so great monoculture’ that he had feared. Still, his final word came back to love; and for me, this is the most courageous act of all.