Indoctrination or Ecstasy?

Allen Ginsberg, Luigi Mangione, and Suppressed Libidinal Drives

Today, I wanted to write more about the dead. I wanted to write about my dear, difficult friend Michael Brownstein, who played such a crucial role in my life, introducing me to ayahuasca and to the Mayan calendar as well as Mesoamerican prophecies through the work of Jose Arguelles. (I was dismissed, mocked, exiled for writing about these indigenous forecasts, yet isn’t it obvious, now, that we have entered a time of transformation and destruction; perhaps, also, recreation?). But I find my thoughts traversing many paths at once.

Yesterday I mentioned four friends who passed recently. They were all, I realize, connected through New York countercultural circles and, particularly, the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997), who we all knew and loved. A natural social connector, Ginsberg was the nexus of a huge global scene of poets, artists, and activists. I’ve been thinking about Ginsberg quite a lot lately, in conjunction with the consciousness-takeover happening now, along with the political takeover.