Ginsberg lors d'une séance d'enregistrement dans les années 50 à Berkeley.Archives Allen Ginsberg / Fantasy Records

 

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     Or thru Elanor or the Workmen’s Circle, where she worked, ad-dressing

envelopes, she made out—went shopping for Campbell’s tomato soup—saved

money Louis mailed her—

      Later she found a boyfriend, and he was a doctor—Dr. Isaac worked for

National Maritime Union—now Italian bald and pudgy old doll—who was

himself an orphan—but they kicked him out—Old cruelties—

 

      Sloppier, sat around on bed or chair, in corset dreaming to herself—‘I’m

hot— I’m getting fat—I used to have such a beautiful figure before I went to the

hospital—You should have seen me in Woodbine—’ This in a furnished room

around the NMU hall, 1943.

     Looking at naked baby pictures in the magazine—baby powder

advertisements, strained lamb carrots—‘I will think nothing but beautiful

thoughts.’

     Revolving her head round and round on her neck at window light in

summertime, in hypnotize, in doven-dream recall—

     ‘I touch his cheek, I touch his cheek, he touches my lips with his hand, I think

beautiful thoughts, the baby has a beautiful hand.’—

     Or a No-shake of her body, disgust—some thought of Buchenwald—some

insulin passes thru her head—a grimace nerve shudder at Involuntary (as shudder

when I piss)—bad chemical in her cortex—‘No don’t think of that. He’s a rat.’

      Naomi: ‘And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a

squash, a vegetable.’ I come downtown from Columbia and agree. She reads the

Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day.

     ‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed

up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken

farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.

 

       ‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables,

bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.

     ‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the

matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?

     ‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so

long, and he likes lentil soup.’

 

       Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with

tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with

leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea

sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to

please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft

naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

 

     One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to

herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round

her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions,

appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick

zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was

cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know

the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She

needs a lover.

 

     Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador,

v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.

     And Louis reestablishing himself in Paterson grimy apartment in negro

district—living in dark rooms—but found himself a girl he later married, falling

in love again—tho sere & shy—hurt with 20 years Naomi’s mad idealism.

 

     Once I came home, after longtime in N.Y., he’s lonely—sitting in the

bedroom, he at desk chair turned round to face me—weeps, tears in red eyes

under his glasses—

     That we’d left him—Gene gone strangely into army—she out on her own in

N.Y., almost childish in her furnished room. So Louis walked downtown to

postoffice to get mail, taught in highschool—stayed at poetry desk, forlorn—ate

grief at Bickford’s all these years—are gone.

 

Eugene got out of the Army, came home changed and lone—cut off his nose in

jewish operation—for years stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee to get

laid—Went to NYU, serious there, to finish Law.—

 

        And Gene lived with her, ate naked fishcakes, cheap, while she got crazier—

He got thin, or felt helpless, Naomi striking 1920 poses at the moon, half-naked

in the next bed.    

     bit his nails and studied—was the weird nurse-son—Next year he moved to a

room near Columbia – though she wanted to live with her children – 

 

     ‘Listen to your mother’s plea, I beg you’—Louis still sending her checks—I

was in bughouse that year 8 months—my own visions unmentioned in this here

 Lament—

     But then went half mad—Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the

sink—afraid of Dr. Isaac now, suspecting that he was in on the Newark plot—

went up to Bronx to live near Elanor’s Rheumatic Heart—

 

       And Uncle Max never got up before noon, tho Naomi at 6 A.M. was listening

to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill,

     for in the empty lot downstairs, an old man creeps with his bag stuffing

packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat.

     Max’s sister Edie works—17 years bookkeeper at Gimbels—lived downstairs

in apartment house, divorced—so Edie took in Naomi on Rochambeau Ave—

     Woodlawn Cemetery across the street, vast dale of graves where Poe once—

Last stop on Bronx subway—lots of communists in that area.    

Who enrolled for painting classes at night in Bronx Adult High School—walked

alone under Van Cortlandt Elevated line to class—paints Naomiisms—

 

     Humans sitting on the grass in some Camp No-Worry summers yore—saints

 

with droopy faces and long-ill-fitting pants, from hospital—

 

      Brides in front of Lower East Side with short grooms—lost El trains running

over the Babylonian apartment rooftops in the Bronx—

       Sad paintings—but she expressed herself. Her mandolin gone, all strings

broke in her head, she tried. Toward Beauty? or some old life Message?

     But started kicking Elanor, and Elanor had heart trouble—came upstairs and

asked her about Spydom for hours,—Elanor frazzled. Max away at office,

accounting for cigar stores till at night.

 

      ‘I am a great woman—am truly a beautiful soul—and because of that they

(Hitler, Grandma, Hearst, the Capitalists, Franco, Daily News, the ’20s,

Mussolini, the living dead) want to shut me up—Buba’s the head of a spider

network—’

    

     Kicking the girls, Edie & Elanor—Woke Edie at midnite to tell her she was a

spy  and Elanor a rat. Edie worked all day and couldn’t take it—She was

organizing the union.—And Elanor began dying, upstairs in bed.

     The relatives call me up, she’s getting worse—I was the only one left—Went

on the subway with Eugene to see her, ate stale fish—

     ‘My sister whispers in the radio—Louis must be in the apartment—his mother

tells him what to say—LIARS!—I cooked for my two children—I played the

mandolin—’

 

      Last night the nightingale woke me / Last night when all was still / it sang in

the golden moonlight / from on the wintry hill. She did.

     I pushed her against the door and shouted ‘DON’T KICK ELANOR!’—she

stared at me—Contempt—die—disbelief her sons are so naive, so dumb—

‘Elanor is the worst spy! She’s taking orders!’

 

     ‘—No wires in the room!’—I’m yelling at her—last ditch, Eugene listening on

the bed—what can he do to escape that fatal Mama—‘You’ve been away from

Louis years already—Grandma’s too old to walk—’

 

     We’re all alive at once then—even me & Gene & Naomi in one mythological

Cousinesque room—screaming at each other in the Forever—I in Columbia

jacket, she half undressed.

     I banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the gamut of

Hallucinations—for real—her own universe—no road that goes elsewhere—to  

my own—No America, not even a world—   

 

     That you go as all men, as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, all the same—to the      

last doom—Thunder, Spirits, lightning!                                                 

 

      I’ve seen your grave! O strange Naomi! My own—cracked grave! Shema

Y’Israel—I am Svul Avrum—you—in death?

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City Light Bookshop

San Francisco, 1981

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Richard Brautigan : La courbe des choses oubliées / The cuve of forgotten things (27/09/2024)

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Richard Murphy : High Island (16/11/2024)