Poetry, Catastrophe, Joy

Some thoughts on being alive now

Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Michael Brownstein, back in the day!

I thought I would write my newsletter in a free associative style this morning while listening to the calming “Nouvelle suites” of Jean-Phillipe Rameau. We will see what wants to emerge.

Last night, I went to the poet Anne Waldman’s 80th birthday party at the Bowery Poetry Project. The night before, I saw Outrider, a new film about her directed by an old friend, Alystyre Julien. The film was a lovely compendium of moments from Anne’s long and productive life, offering glimpses of her friendships with Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and many others. It was a joy to bathe in her rich, oracular world for a few hours.

My recently deceased friend Michael Brownstein — he was a frequent, wonderfully irascible commentator on my newsletter before dying in a car crash upstate last fall — made a few cameo appearances in the film. He and Anne were romantic partners back in the 1970s. They went to India together to take their Tibetan Buddhist vows. They drank ayahuasca together in the Amazon for their first time (if I remember correctly).

I was delighted to catch some glimpses of Michael and Anne together — they were so young, so charming. Back around 1998, Michael introduced me to ayahuasca, telling me about it and finding me my first shaman to sit with. Later, I published his poetry book, World on Fire, a potent, prophetic apocalyptic screed.

Michael also introduced me to the Mayan prophecies via the work of Jose Arguelles. This was the inspiration for my second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Michael was a major influence on my life, in other words.

I am — shockingly — fifty-eight years old now, and my life has many Proustian layers and cross-hatchings to it. I am actually loving this age which feels like a ripening, a time when I have shaken off almost all the negative baggage from my childhood that caused me so many wretched problems, and feel very happy to be myself. Being myself — containing everything I have seen and experienced up to this point — feels like an extraordinary luxury and a lucky break, for as long as it goes on.

I am still physically well. I love going to the gym. My mind remains sharp. I have beautiful connections with many friends and a few magical women. Almost my main problem is that there is so much I want to do — I feel like my creative tendrils want to reach out in so many different directions, and the problem is finding time for all of it. I swarm with creative and artistic ambitions. It is almost overwhelming!

I wrote a few screenplays I couldn’t get produced. I am hoping, soon enough, I can create, at least, an animated version of them using AI. I know many people hate AI. I think it can be a fantastic tool for creativity if you already possess a strong vision.

And then there is a weighty sense of responsibility — a very somber and sad feeling that has me, at many moments each day, close to tears or sobs.

Why did I always feel — from as far back as I can remember — that I was somehow responsible for the care, the collective happiness, of the whole, in some bizarre way that makes no sense? I never felt I was meant to dedicate my life to maximizing my own personal success. I always felt surprised, even affronted, to realize how many creative people operate like that. I have friends with such a myopic, narcissistic focus on their own projects that I can barely speak to them anymore. This is such a common pattern — I find it so odious.

I always found it impossible to be “political” about my career or my life. This was professionally costly. But I also can’t care about this too much — I get bored easily. In the past, I think I was often misjudged because people thought I was trying to make a political career move and failing at it or overreaching, when I was just expressing what I felt needed to be said at that juncture.

So far, I have — sadly — failed at my mission to get enough wealthy and powerful people to see the world the way I see it, so we could put together an “A Team” to change it. Because I am a kind of quintessential outsider — a college drop-out with no academic or institutional affiliation — I find it hard to get people to take my ideas or messages seriously. I’ve also found the hard way that there is a massive difference between access and influence: Somebody very famous or influential may enjoy having you around at parties or festivals, but that doesn’t mean they want to invest in your projects or splash into the public with you, bearing the torch of some radical plan you have concocted to “save” reality.

I would love to be the Peter Thiel or Elon Musk of deepening consciousness and evolving the collective power of the human heart. There is absolutely nothing of interest to be found on Mars, but an infinite gradient of possibility to be discovered within our psycho-cosmos. We don’t need to use AI to build super-potent surveillance systems with killer drones and hyper-advanced weapons of paranoid annihilation, as Thiel and Alex Karp are doing with Palantir. We need to use AI to enhance our understanding of self and other so we can attain universal peace based on our devotion to being, our empathy, care, and interdependence with each other — not to mention trees, flowers, animals, fungi, phytoplankton, insects.

And so, here we were… just drifting along in our little boats of curious individual-Self-being-presence, trying to do our thing, until suddenly we found ourselves confronting a catastrophic world-ending crisis, with no idea what to do about it.

All of a sudden, we find ourselves, once again, facing literal Nazis — Seig-Heiling Nazis! — with massive amounts of wealth and incredible technological power at their fingerprints, yet they are still not satisfied.