 Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Laura Sheffrin, Director of Events here at the Harris Institute. Thank you for joining us here for our program, Best Minds, How Alan Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Mathis with Aldrin Stephen Wyand. I'd like to say a special thanks to Mechanics Institute trustee Lauren Hamity for recommending to you and his wonderful new book. Also, I'd like to introduce our new interim director, Alfie Rose. She's been taught today, will be followed by a community with you, our audience. And also, after a program, we will have Stephen's book available for you to purchase and please have a look sign. Alan Ginsberg's 1956 poem Howl opens with one of the most resonant phrases in modern poetry. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Mathis. 30 years later, Ginsberg entrusted a former university medical student with materials not shared with anyone else, including psychiatric records that documented how he and his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, struggled with mental illness. That student was Dr. Stephen L. Wyand. Dr. Wyand provides a groundbreaking exploration of the poet and his creative process, especially in relationship to Mathis. Dr. Stephen Wyand is professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he is also the director of global medicine and director of the Center for Global Health. He is the author of two books, When History is a Nightmare, Lies and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing and Bosnian Kipasavina, and Testimony and Catastrophe, narrating the traumas of political violence to very potent themes for today. So please welcome Dr. Stephen Wyand. Thank you all for coming. It's great to be here. I'm going to talk for somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes. I'm going to read a little bit. I'm going to show you some images, and I'm going to take you through some parts of the book. And then I look forward to dialogue. So I try to get close to a mystery, you know, to the mystery of how poetry is made, how Ellen Ginsburg's poetry is made, how poetry is made from really difficult life experiences. And one place you got to start with Ginsburg is you got to start with his 1948 Lake Visions. If you know anything about Ginsburg, you know about this because he always talked about it. And here's what he often said. I heard a very deep earthen-grade voice in the room, which I immediately assumed I didn't think twice was Lake's voice. A very deep earthen-grade voice. I immediately assumed I didn't think twice was Lake's voice. And this comes from an interview that he did in 1965 with a guy named Tom Clark, which is printed in the Paris Review. And all of the biographies written about Ellen, and most of the critical writings written about Ellen, said through this. And it's kind of foundational for everybody's understanding of Ellen. Well, I was at his place a long time ago, 1986. And so it's like 40 years after the visions, but almost 40 years still from now. And I'm going to read you a little bit from the book where I'm talking about that. So when I meet Ellen 40 years later, the visions remain for him a key life event and a major focal point. The visions have been trumpeted by him and others writing about him as the moment when Ellen Pittsburgh first broke through. Given that Ellen's personal breakthrough also became an important literary and cultural breakthrough. The visions have received much attention over the years. They were the focus of one lengthy published interview from 1965, as often quoted, and several other writings. So before we meet, Ellen asks me to first read each of those interviews, especially the one from the Paris Review. Before he will speak with me about the visions, I cannot blame him. I figure he's tired of repeating himself. He also doesn't want me to subject his visions to a reductionistic psychiatric formulation. He doesn't want me to dismiss them as hallucinations, mere symptoms of a mental illness. Like he says, his psychiatrist at the time had done. I must admit, as a medical student first studying psychiatry, I was asking myself such questions. What exactly were these visions? Were they hallucinations? Were they part of some kind of diagnosable psychiatric illness? Was he becoming psychotic like his mother? Even then, I knew very well that diagnostic formulations of the visions might be good enough for psychiatry, but they could never be good enough for literature or religion. Ellen knew this and urged me not to limit myself to diagnostic concerns and to consider the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the visions. So I read the 65 Paris Review interview and everything else I could find both published and in Ellen's archives. When we meet, Ellen takes the time to tell me the story of the visions and to explain how we understood them. And the story he tells me is very similar to the descriptions I read in the interviews. He calls down my blade visions and speaks a very blade's voice of sighting poems, deep in ancient, quote, just like my own voice sounds now, he says, speaking slowly so we can both hear his teeth too. Sitting together in his apartment, I listened carefully to Ellen's explanation of the blade visions as they came to be called by our personal critics. Ellen was unrivaled at telling stories about himself, adding layers of nuance, literariness, and politics that informed and intrigued. At the time he gave the first of the interviews about the visions, the psychedelic era was just taking off. For Ellen, talking about his personal experiences with visions was a deliberate effort to preach to the youth, public government, anyone who would listen about the value of alternative forms of consciousness. The blade visions he spoke of helped turn him into a qualified leader of the counterculture, whereby he recommended that others discover their own visions by any available means, including taking LSD. He was still recommending LSD 20 years later when we speak about the visions, because he sees alternative states of consciousness not just as some bad or so equivalent to madness, but as an essential dimension of life, one in need of nurturing and understanding. I take notice of how most published accounts of the visions are retrospective from many years later, and this seems important. And I think what we need to do is kind of understand contemporaneously how his accounting of these visions evolved. So let's go back in time to 1945, 1946. Yes, Alan comes to Columbia campus as a 16-year-old freshman from Patterson, New Jersey. Raised in a middle-class Jewish family whose dad's a poet and a high school teacher of his mom. Well, she was a teacher too, but had other things going on. So at the time, as luck would have it, he meets these guys, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hal Chase, an unbelievable gathering of folks. I'm Columbia College campus in New York City, and Kerouac in Ginsburg has a plan for the new vision. That's what they call it, the new vision, and they describe it as the need to take in the world as it is without ordered rational preconception, then create an entirely new order in consciousness, very much influenced by Rambo. And it was largely up to Kerouac and Ginsburg to write this new vision into reality from where we sit today. We could say that they certainly delivered. So at the time, this is the summer of 1948, Alan was lonely, directionless, despondent, living by himself in an East Harlem apartment, at least from his theology student friend. He was studying Cezanne for a paper he needed to complete for Professor Meyer Shapiro's art history course so he could graduate. He wrote the Broadway subway down to look at Cezanne's Leicester painting at the Museum of Modern Art. For money, he worked at the Columbia University bookstore. He read Gates, William Blake, St. John Cross, William James, and other visionary literature that he found on the shelves of his friend's apartment. When the visions came, they took him by surprise and immediately became his new reason for living. He told his father and friends and even strangers and bars about them, although the visions were difficult for Alan to describe. In fact, he tried his best at letters, journal entries, and poems. They were inspiring, empowering, but also terrifying. He wanted to tap into the spiritual and aesthetic power of his visions, the mission of central concern for the rest of his life. So he had the first glimmerings of a vision looking at this painting, Momon. The next day, he's reading The Sick Rose, William James' poem, and he has a full-on vision. He writes to his friends, he writes to Kerouac. I can't forget what I have seen, something dreamlike and white. I already asked mostly about us. The unreal has become for me the most real now, to Neil Cassidy. I have had moments of absolute valid literal knowledge. I have seen The Nightingale at last remarkable, but no mention of the voice. He writes poems about the visions. He wants to be able to capture the sense. He wants people to read these poems and have visions of their own. So one of the poems is Two Signets. This is just one or two lines from it, but I'm going to read a little bit more of it here. Two Signets. I dwelled in hell on earth to write this rhyme. I live in stillness now, in living flame. I witness heaven in unholy time. I roam in the renowned city, ham, unknown. The fame I dwell in is not mine. I would not have it. Angels in the air serenade me, serenade my senses in delight. Intelligence of poets, saints, and fair characters, converse with me all night. But all the streets are burning everywhere. The city is burning. These multitudes decline her buildings. Their inferno is the same eye-scale as a stupendous blazing stare. They vanish as I look into the light. He's claiming that I am an eyewitness to the divine, despite this wicked city that I'm living in. I dwell, I see, believe. This was the visions. The thing that happened to him is the more that he kept talking about these to himself, to his friends, to his family, the crazier he seemed, the more confused he seemed. His dad started to worry that he was becoming like his mother, and this was a symptom of mental illness. In his journal he writes, I am ill. I have become spiritually or practically impotent in my madness this last month. I suddenly realized that my head was severed from my body. Alan was living with this character, Herbert Hunky, who some of you may know. He's a writer in the beings world, but also a junkie and trying to support his habit, living with others. And Alan's living with them. And one day they are in their car driving around the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Cop comes up behind them. A car chase ensues. The car turns over. Alan, he'll have his writings with him in the car. They fly all over 963 or whatever it was. They're lucky to be alive. It was a bad crash. It's kind of scandalous. It makes the New York Times. A Columbia student embeds with a junkie gang for material for his novel. This is the story. But it's a serious business. The others get charged with crime. Hunky goes to Rikers with the others. Alan's dad has a player's attorney. The attorney has Jacques Barzane. He's a professor at Columbia. Write a letter saying they should save Alan from such an unfortunate fate then. Restore him to his true potential. And so Alan, the deal is struck. And Alan is going to the New York Times. At the time, he was waiting around for the court to process this. And he and Jack Kerouac make light of the situation with this little ditty that they wrote together. All the doctors think I'm crazy. The truth is really that I'm lazy. I made visions to the guy alone until they put me in the asylum. Funny stuff. But it was serious business. Serious business in part because of Alan's history. This is Naomi at Louis in Better Days. Naomi came as an immigrant. This is Alan's parents. Naomi came as an immigrant child from the Russian pale, landed in a poor East Side in Manhattan, in the state of Fortford Street. Family had a candy store. They were living in a kind of boarding house down there. And she then went to New Jersey, learned to become a teacher. Had her first nervous breakdown when she was around 20. And then things got much worse several years later and she was admitted to Cornell Psychiatric Hospital with psychotic symptoms. And this is a picture of her many years later outside of Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital. What we'll hear about in a moment. This is a remarkable picture. This part of a home movie that they shot. That's Alan's brother Eugene who's visiting Naomi. This is actually a week before she died at the hospital in 1956. Look at how unhappy she is. I want you to flash back to another moment. Well, actually no. Let me do this first. The world knows a lot about Naomi Ginsburg because Alan's cottage, the Dredd Cottage, it's really spoken of as Alan's masterpiece. And cottage is a long poem. It takes 40 hours to read it. It's 36 pages, it's four parts. And Alan wrote it in his flat on Euse Second Street in New York City. That's where he wrote the longest part but other parts were written in Paris and somewhere else. Let me read a little bit of it. As I walked toward the Lower East Side where you walked 50 years ago a little girl from Russia eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street towards what? Towards Newark, towards Candy Store, first homemade sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in the back room on musty brown floor boards, toward education, marriage, nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school and learning to be mad in a dream. What is this like? The poem is like an elegy for Naomi, for her life and for her madness career in great deal. And it really shows how kind of modernity nearly murdered a woman's soul and that of her family. Madness is really presented as a social diagnosis. She went mad because of all, because of fascism and communism and migration and disruption and nuclearism all of these things that still go on today and that drive many people mad. So Kada's really bore witness to a whole world full of crises, trauma and contradiction that it drove this innocent young immigrant woman who was his mother to madness and it said things about madness that had never been said before documenting of course its awful destructive potential but also finding their passion and love and spirit and insight. I think Kada's is maybe the first and certainly one of the most compelling family first-person narratives of serious mental illness and Kada's has also talked several generations how to mourn ambiguous loss, how to mourn losses that are very, very complicated and not straightforward. And it shows open-heartedness towards a mentally ill loved one that in some ways is even more revolutionary than health which shows a different kind of solidarity with madness. And in Kada's Alan declares that Naomi is his muse and he says, oh glorious muse that bore me from the womb gave sunk first mystic life and taught me talk and music from whose pained head I first took vision. I first took vision. So that's the idea of his visions. So he lays that out there in Kada's. So let's talk a little bit more about Naomi again. Well, no actually, let's listen to this video right now. This is from Kada's a very small part of it that Alan read in 1995 at the knitting factory shortly before, a couple years before he died. Damn right, you're a shock. I'm sorry about that. This is from part two of Kada's a little bit. Lost and grazed down the ward. Never be shocked for her electricity following the 40 insulin in metrosol that made her fat. So that a few years later she came home again. We'd much advanced and planned. I waited for that day. My mother again took cooking, played the piano, sing at mandolin, long stew and stonk a rod and the communist line on the war with Finland. The Louisian debt suspected to be poisoned by mysterious capitalism. I walked down the long front wall and looked at the furniture. She never remembered it all. Some amnesia examined the doilies and the dining room set was sold, the mahogany table, 20 years of love, gone to the junk man. We still had the piano and the book of folk and the mandolin on the end of some stream dusty. She went to the bedroom to lay down in bed and ate or nap high. I went in with her, not leave her by herself, lay in bed next to her, chase pole, dusky, late afternoon, Louis in front room at desk waiting, perhaps boiling chicken for supper. Don't be afraid of me because I'm just coming back home from the mental hospital. I'm your mother. Poor love was a fear. I lay there, said, I love you Naomi, stiff next to her arm. I would have cried. Was this the comfortless lone union? Nervous. And she got up soon. Was she ever satisfied? And by herself sat on the new couch by the front windows, uneasy, cheek, leaning on her hand, narrowing eye. At what fate that day, picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an old suspicion, thoughts old, worn vagina, absent sidelanse of eye, some evil debt written in a wall unpaid and the aged breasts of Newark come near. May have heard radio gossip through the wires in her head, controlled by three big sticks left in her back by gangsters in Amnesia through the hospital, cause pain between her shoulders into her head. Roosevelt should know her case, she told me, afraid to kill her now that the government knew their names, traced back to Hitler, wanted to leave Louis's house forever. One night, sudden attack. Her noise in the bathroom, like croaking up her soul. Convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth. Diarrhea water exploding from her behind. On all fours in the toilet, urine running between her legs. Left, retching on the tile floor, smeared with her black feces. Unfainted and 40 varicose, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling police, yelling for her girlfriend Rose to help. Once locked herself in with razor and iodine, could hear her cough and tears at the sink. Lou broke through the glass, green painted door. We pulled her out to the bedroom. Then quiet for months that winter. Walks alone, nearby on Broadway, red daily worker, broke her arm, fell on I.C. Street. Began to scheme escape from cosmic financial murder plots. Now lost and grazed. Okay, on April 24, 1947, a people, 51 year old, Naomi Ginsburg, entered the examining room at Bellevue Hospital in Lower Manhattan. She was teetering on her feet, almost falling over. I think that Allen had called the ambulance that brought her to Bellevue. Sometimes sitting there, she kind of jerked her head about an imaginary axis drawn perpendicular to the floor. And other times, she flew her head under her chest and let it hang there. And she hung her head because she said, I can't keep trying to hold on to a happy thought. When asked about her husband, she said, that's where my trouble started. Everyone knows my life. It's a case in history. My husband killed his brother and child. My husband is a well-known poet. I left him before years ago. I got tired. We separated. His mother organized a game to get something in America for the Jews. They went wild with the killing. She had visions of God. She said, all of a sudden, a vision came to me when I first became sick. It said, have patience. Who comes to the needy. And I was so happy I tried to get him again. But she also felt like near life's end. I can endure this suffering. I feel as though I'm dead, but I'm not dead. These things were very remarkable for me to find because I really wanted to discover Naomi. I wanted to know, can we get a sense of who this woman was? She's one of tens of thousands of people who were disappeared into the state psychiatric hospitals with no hope of ever getting out. And we knew her as an icon of madness in Alan's cottage. But could he ever hear her voice directly? So you can then allow to hear her voice here. Naomi joins a Pilgrim State psychiatric hospital from Belleville. That's a picture of Pilgrim State Hospital, which is on Long Island, about 100 miles from New York City. At the time, it was the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. 13,000 patients. 13,000 patients. One fifth of the world's, of the United States, psychiatric inpatients were in New York State. And so massively, occasionally Alan and his brother would come to visit. And Naomi says to the nurses, I feel sorry that they come and see this site. And another time she goes up to the nurses. She says, there's no hope for me. I want to die. And she gives a piece of paper requesting that they let him euthanize her. She writes letters to Alan. And this is from one of the letters and it's kind of an epigraphic book. For the love of Jesus, I do not know how I got this sickness. It's up to you to find out if you're loving Mother and Naomi in the way you kind of did this. If you think about it. Here's what one of the letters actually looks like. Dear Alan and your team, please come to see me in a hurry. One son call up another son. Tell Eleanor that's her sister to come see me. I'm still alive and walking around. So, so desperate, so sad. This is from Naomi's psychiatric record at Pilgrim State. This is the chief of service, Dr. Henry Brill, saying that the electroconvulsive therapy hadn't worked. She was still agitated. She was still depressed. And so they recommended three frontal lobotomy. 1947. Alan had just gotten home from Dakar where he was doing a merchant meridian thing. Comes home, finds this letter. Wise letter go to him. At that time Alan is the legal guardian for Naomi. Alan has been the caregiver for Naomi all these years as a child. He lived with her, the parents divorced at some point and Alan was very, very, very close to her. And so it was all on Alan. So I'll read the letter. Please be advised that your mother, Mrs. Naomi Ginsburg, was seen in consultation with the assistant director and it was decided that her mental condition is serious enough to warrant a prefrontal lobotomy. If you are interested in more details in regard to this type of operation and its possible complications, you can discuss this problem with the doctor in charge of the case of your mother on the next visiting day. In the meantime, we are enclosing a permit for the operation in which you can sign and return to us if you so desire. Very true leaders. Harry J. Worthing. And Alan didn't know what to do. But he goes to the hospital and he talks to the doctor and the doctor says to him, your mother is going to die if you don't do this operation. Her head is going to literally explode. So you need to do this. And so he did what anybody would rather do. He signed it. Made a decision along. Didn't talk to anybody. Did it. Alan came home that day and wrote in his journal, Alan, Don't Die. A month or so later, lobotomy is performed. Lobotomy makes wide sweeping incisions that cut the way that the prefrontal cortex makes connections with other brain areas. At the time, it's touted as the miracle operation of psychiatry like a open heart surgery. It's going to cure schizophrenia. It's going to empty the mental hospitals. It's going to return these people, most of them are women. There's a real gendered aspect to this. But it's going to return them to their families. They'll be docile. They'll take and do things around the house. Well, that's not what happened with niomy. In any case, I also want to mention that I was rummaging around his archives in the spring of 1987 and I found this letter. And it shocked me. Because at the time, there was no public knowledge that Alan had signed for lobotomy. And if you think about all the things we know about Alan, it just wouldn't have made any sense. And so, that put me in a very difficult position of having to decide should I show Alan the letter. And I did. In his apartment one day. And I was very stressed out about it. But I showed it to him. And he said, that's a very extreme thing. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he said, because I had to do the signing for it. And he was unclear about when it was. And we established when it was. He insisted that it was in the 1950s. And I said it was from 1948. And he said, oh, there must be some relation between that and my psychotic experience. And he used the word psychotic experience to describe it. He's talking about his visions. So, this is something that I explore more in the book. But I want you to think about Alan's strangled mind at the time in 1948. When he's doing the signing. He was very much under the sway of Rambo. And Rambo writes, as I came down to the passable rivers, I felt no more the parchment's guiding hands. There was a kind of, like, welcoming, other crisis. Because crisis is going to separate them from bourgeois and more class mentality. And bring them close to the real. Bring them close to the truth. And so, in a way, for Alan, this became the crisis that would do that. This is the mentality that preceded the visions. So, I'm going to go part before we get on to the next one. So, as I came to understand, the visions happens some six months after him signing the lobotomy consent, which I think is kind of a big deal. Why did the visions come six months after lobotomy and just before graduation? It's impossible to know for certain, but we do know his life circumstances of what William James, the Variety's Religious Experience, described about candidates for conversion experiences. James wrote, to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections, and opposite affections should overpoweringly break over us. At that point in his life, when he had visions, Alan was facing multiple crises. His severely ill mother remained privileged, but had found no solid work or career. He was single, gay, closeted, apart from his friends. He hadn't managed to fulfill the dream he had for himself as a writer that suddenly, with the visions, everything changed. They were a sexual experience of a spiritual visitation. They thrilled and frightened Alan. He passed in the delight of having made contact with the eternal. He was also terrified by the fact that so few people around him seemed to be oblivious or so many people around him seemed to be oblivious to an eternal presence. Few people knew what he now knew. The visions which opened the doors to both heaven and hell, excited and frightened him like nothing else. They enabled him to put poetry at the center of his life. He wrote many poems and he thought he was going to be a hero, but then he found that the poets' poems were still clouded by the lack of concrete sensual realism. He wasn't reaching the heights that he wanted to reach. He didn't really talk about the visions directly in relationship to his mother, but it doesn't seem a far stretch to think about how having visions presented him as a poet and as a son a way to reimagine his relationship with his seriously mentally ill and now the bottom ice mother, who for years had had her own visions of God. Decades later somebody wrote about Alan. Alan was looking for the truths his mother had gotten lost with him. As a child he was exposed to all these visions. Her paranoid delusions, her voices, nudity, unpredictability, suicidality. She tried to win Alan to her side. They were very attached. She talked her down when she was getting too agitated. He kind of lived within her delusional system and she did have a lot of passion for politics, for religion, for philosophy and he connected with her on all those things. In 1986 Alan showed me a draft footnote he had just written for a Hebrew translation and it said her suffering affected me so driving me out of my skull, out of my mind a vernacular phrase for disturb so that I looked for a permanent answer or response workplace or expression in poetry or look for a permanent vision through and in poetry. And another way that I said in the book is that Alan was kind of like schooling himself on the best visionary artists and saints that you could find, St. John of the Cross, William Blake, the likes of them. His mother was defeated by her vision. She ended up in the hospital. She ended up being lobotomized which he felt incredibly guilty about. Alan instead was going to be their master. He was learning from other masters. He could handle his visions and harness their power. Naomi and her madness would be redeemed. But Alan ends up at the New York State Psychiatric Institute up on 168th Street in Upper Manhattan. A very different place than the Pilgrim State Psychiatric Institute though it's part of the same New York State mental health system. But it's kind of the jewel in the crown and there's a collaboration with Columbia University. So it's really an elite research and training hospital. And it's where I went to medical school and where I was training to be a psychiatrist when all of this came down. So what happened when Alan went to PI? Alan gave me access to his psychiatric records so I read it and studied it and we have those and one chapter of the book goes into a great detail. And I think it's just remarkable because here we have this brilliant guy at a critical moment in his development as a young man and as a poet and we have the process notes from his psychotherapy in the time when they really took good notes and named me another artist for whom we have such material. I can't think of one. But this is a jump back in time. We have to look through the lens of 1940s psychiatry and psychoanalysis so they saw things differently. So here's the warshack. The patients are brilliant but autistic, schizophrenic probably of the catatonic type who has religious ecstasies and occasional agitated periods in which he can be destructive. He feels alternatively crushed by the world and commanded the world because unconscious seems to be extremely conscious. What's that? So he gets admitted to the fifth floor for so-called genius war where a lot of intelligent and artistic people are admitted who are struggling with psychosis and they do psychotherapy with them. The director of that work, the director of research in the hospital is a psychiatrist named Dr. Paul Hope. At the time, he and another doctor had derived a new diagnosis in psychiatry that they call pseudo-neurotic type schizophrenia. This diagnosis is not used anymore but what it essentially referred to is people who at their core were psychotic but were kind of defended by three kinds of systems of neurosis, anxiety and sexuality and just kind of like holding on and some of them, the thought was are going to spiral and become openly psychotic and others keep it together. They thought Allen was one who was going to be full-on schizophrenic within a few years not unlike his mother. But this was a serious condition and Dr. Hope was actually doing psychosurgery on such patients which means lobotomy and in fact they had studies comparing psychosurgery versus psychotherapy if you can believe that. So Allen was in the group of patients who was considered for lobotomy I got to meet one of the psychiatrists, actually was one of my teachers at the time but was a resident back then and he told me that he and the other residents would try to protect the patients from being selected for lobotomy and that they had their eyes on Allen to try to protect him. Allen was in heart therapy through this painting looking out over Hudson River, Palisades, and George Washington Bridge. This is what the progress notes look like and many pages of these but you can see there he says when he thought of a new vision of reality the whole world had an intelligence running through it so there he is talking about his visions with this therapist. It's kind of remarkable. I became a psychiatrist and a therapist so I could understand these notes and analyze them appropriately and in the book I go through that in great detail but not for professionals, for anybody who wants to understand how therapy works and how it might work in this case so I'm going to share with you just a few vignettes from the therapy and I'm going to test you a little bit I'm going to test you and see how you would respond so what if your patient comes in and says I'm the greatest poet of my age I think so too well as you can say now at the time he was not a published poet he he was clearly brilliant but people weren't sure what to think about him so what should you say then? good luck see how you feel over here here's some paper what is this anyways I think it's what we would call grandiosity a lot of people who struggle with psychosis who are having psychotic breaks are very grandiose and their grandiosity is out of control so one of the things that I do with such people is try to help them reign in their grandiosity a little bit on the other hand he could have been right but what are the doctors supposed to do if they can so as luck would have it the therapist is writing down as those talking with the down and someone knocks on the door and he has to walk out the door to talk to someone and Alan he said that was to see what the judge was writing and he sees I'm the greatest blood on my age and he goes that sounds pretty paranoid when you have it there doesn't it and it was kind of like the best thing that therapist ever did completely by accident because it was a good interpretation of Alan's grandiacities getting Alan to kind of step outside of that and take a look at that and see is this really how it is and how is this attitude serving you well here's another moment about the visions the therapist writes again when it was suggested that the unusual intensity of experience maybe a state in which his usual intellectualising defences were not operative Alan was disappointed that he needs to be considered special in prophetic states but the therapist didn't believe him that he saw a god Alan like threw a fit but the therapist they were tough they weren't going to fall for that they were like okay great so what are you going to do with that you want to be an artist you're going to have to find a way to communicate that better than you have so far so it's on you I'm not going to get into the issue I'm seeing god or not alright here's another thing he struggled a lot with what is madness what is mental illness obviously struggling with how to think about his mother too he made it clear at the start that he looked upon mental illness as a definite entity that for him everyone in the world is sane or insane and he's having a little trouble placing himself at the scheme he described his visions stating clearly that these are the experiences which previous therapists have labeled mad so am I mad what's madness is my mother mad what's mental illness he's trying to ask these questions but he's approaching it from a fairly rigid and dichotomous point of view which isn't serving him too well he talks a lot about his mother Alan then said his mother often exposed herself at age 10 he remembered feeling tempted to look he felt this was a seduction and that she demanded husbandry responses from him there's a lot of stuff like this even an imagined he had an appendectomy when he was young he imagined that the appendectomy the surgeon's decision gave him a vagina so he had this sense of kind of disturbance in body image which he related to his interest in men now at the time it's important to say that homosexuality was viewed as only a symptom of mental illness and that's the lines through which they looked at his homosexuality his preference for men and but some chink in the armor I guess you might say at one point there's an interesting exchange where Alan says to his second therapist I guess I want to be the queen of many you know she's calling him on his kind of flamboyance and outrageous his risk taking his testing of limits with his father and she's like does being homosexual mean you have to take extreme social risks you have and so remarkably this woman who I think might have been lesbian actually I never slept with her she meets asked to meet with his dad his dad says Alan's homosexualism he calls it is so degrading and I feel like it's my fault I feel like I did something wrong and she says no he has a mental illness this is a symptom of an illness and just like any family member needs to tolerate the illnesses of a family member you need to tolerate this okay not exactly like setting him free to follow his dream you know but actually in a way bucking the orthodoxy of the day and helping Alan create a space with his father there's father that allowed him to leave the hospital and come home and you know allowed him to work something out for a couple of years Alan was extremely grateful for that and to this day well when we spoke was really appreciative of what this woman did and the day after she did that Louie Alan's dad complained to the chief of the hospital and got her fired from the case because he couldn't stand that but he did stick by it so Alan is at the end called pseudo neurotic type as Alan says to me they certified I was not mad more of a real neurotic to a pseudo psychotic and Alan liked it Alan loved his diagnosis and I explained it to him because I liked the idea that everybody lives near psychosis and that I live near psychosis that's true that's how I think of myself so we keep going a little bit that's all right what was Alan writing at the time? at the time in the hospital he was obsessed with the idea of the shrouded stranger and he wrote three or four notebooks with shrouded stranger poems this was going to be like the big breakthrough work Kerouac and he also were Kerouac was working on this too it became Dr. Sacks Kerouac's novel and this is a drawing in Alan's notebook of this character, the shrouded stranger and the different kinds of literary origins of it Paul Sacks Dr. Jekyll that kind of thing but the shrouded stranger is a kind of bourbon boogeyman a scary creature we'll come lay down in the dark with me to belly and knee to knee we'll look into my hooded eye we'll lay down under my darkened thigh into a child along the railroad tracks this therapist thought that this was the best poem he had written at the time but in any patient you thought interpreted it as this is an image of your psychotic and seductive mother of us at the same time terrifying but also deeply appealing to you as a child Alan gets released a week later he goes to hear William Carlos Williams read at the Puget High Museum Williams is from Paterson, New Jersey of course famous poet, pediatrician New Jersey and Alan asked if they could meet they eventually meet some other day and Williams says show me your poems, let me see what you got he looks at the poems he says no, not good you shouldn't be writing in kind of traditional writing verses let me see your notebooks books in his journal good, good, take this do some work with this and he tells Alan what to do Alan then writes this to Karolak and as a kind of instruction for what they're going to do all you got to do is look over your notebooks that's where I got these poems lay down on a couch and think of anything that comes into your head especially the miseries the miseries or night thoughts when you can't sleep an hour before sleeping only get up and write it down then arrange in lines of two, three, four words each don't bother about sentences in lines of two, three, four each will have a huge collective anthology of American kids and mental useries and so this is what they do so he goes into his journals and he comes up with these poems and those are most of the poems that you know now it's an empty mirror he goes in another direction too, he starts what he calls the stranger project this would be a good project for St. Francis I would say Alan goes around the streets goes on the subway looks for people who are obviously struggling a lot of homeless and drafts portraits of them and this is a description of a woman thin, bony, elite passively mad, anciency or nobility, intelligence beyond ideas completely beat shifting nervously in her seat continually agitated by her unknown mystery so he's more attracted to like a kind of urban ethnography of people on the street people living lives of madness than he is of the mythical character of a shrouded stranger and he's drawing in his journal and he's drawing this figure that he calls like a person who is half skull and half alive half dead, half alive man who knows who sees death or is half deaf man who knows death who knows he will die he knows he will die and I'm like what does it mean to live a kind of double sided existence very warm death for half of life and think about it, Alan who led a double sided existence is whole life with his mother being on the brink of psychosis I mean in psychosis and on the brink of death, suicidality he went, you know, he would spend weekends riding the bus to Greystone psychiatric hospital or other hospitals to visit her and he was exposed to this whole world and as a young man coming on the scene in New York City he was attracted to all people like people like junkies, people who were strung out people who had mental health issues people like Carl Solomon who was a friend who we met at New York State Psychiatrists who was a writer from the Bronx but also struggled with mental illness so he was interested in all these people and what was happening with them he wrote a poem that had this line many have sold on riding Albert on the path many have sold on to the jail and prison and asylum and then one day blocks from here really in North Beach, 1955 August 22nd, 1955 Alan is sitting down and doing what Williams told him to do flip through your journal look for the things you wrote in your journal see what you can do with them and he saw this line I saw the best mind angel headed hipsters down and that day he took that line and he broke it into two and he wrote I saw the best minds of my generation generation destroyed by madness and then he put it back together into one line and I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness and that of course became the first line howl and that opened up the pluckings he had been intending to write a poem but then in a marathon writing session he wrote howl and this is a wonderful statement I think this first line because what is he saying he's saying I saw he's saying I'm a witness I'm a witness to madness I'm a witness to this thing called madness whatever that is and but madness is it good is it not good it's the best minds but is it the best minds meaning they're liberated they see things the others don't see or is madness a consequence of being destroyed somehow what society has done to them let's just say it's multi-positional and ambivalent I would say it's much more liberating than not liberating but it's a hard line to figure out I think it embraces these things in these many different positions and probably some others you can come up with but it really demanded a response it demanded that Alan a whole story of his generation of a generation of young people that thought they were brilliant but were told that they were losers and thought that they were even when being crushed seeing things about society that others didn't appreciate and so he wrote that poem and you know the poem maybe we'll listen to one of the two lines of the book who poverty and tatters and hollow eyes and high smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats swiveling across the tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to heaven under the L and so mohammed and angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake like tragedy among the scholars of war who were expelled from okay hallucinating Arkansas and Blake like tragedy among the scholars of war that's him having his visions at Columbia who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism that's his mom so I want you just to think for a minute how far Alan came from 1948 having the visions to 1955 writing column just seven years just seven years but think of all the things that he managed to pull together in those years one is that I think he learned to not take so many risks not aesthetically he was taking a lot of risks aesthetically but risks in his personal life risks by hanging out with criminals and things like that risks with his own flirting with suicidality so he learned how to be safer what else did he learn he learned how not to be so possessive of his visions he learned to kind of stand back from them he learned not to say I saw God like I possessed God he learned to be more in the position of a witness to see the struggle of people who think they saw God or have other some experience of madness and he grew to embrace this whole construct this wonderful construct of madness as a kind of like the gun ambivalence, multi-positional thing that embraced everything from deviance to serious mental illness to ecstasy to sexual freedom to artistic expression and so on and so forth and so for Alan they were all lumped together as madness and it was an essential property of life he also learned how to restrain his grandiosity and he really learned how to work done as an artist and and he learned how to work on a deal with his dad about his homosexuality that will allow him to have a place to live and to do his writing well so those were major major achievements I think that therapy the therapy had and treatment he had I guess deserves some some small amount of credit for helping him to do that as flawed as it was and it was very fun from today's perspective so the last time I saw Alan he asked me if I had gotten his mother's records and at the time I hadn't and I was actually terrified of those records so I got him after he died and I found something remarkable that I'm sure he wouldn't want to know but I didn't I wasn't able to tell him because I didn't know at the time that there was a record there about Naomi from Naomi's first hospitalization that Naomi had been sexually molested when she was five, six, nine years old living on Orchard Street and think about that it makes you think really differently about her diagnosis and her treatment and I think it would have been done differently for her then back then but certainly would be if that were the case today when we take trauma on trauma in children sexual trauma very seriously and we have systems of trauma in foreign care well they weren't there then but it also makes you think differently about the trans-generational transmission of trauma that was passed on to Alan it makes you think differently about Kavish it makes you think differently about that in the story of Kavish is the story of violence against women not just madness of a person and so I think it makes it even a fuller picture the other major gap there is that that I'm going to add that what's remarkable is that the lobotomy is barely mentioned and never ever is it mentioned that Alan signed consent for his mother's lobotomy so how is it possible how is it possible that he goes for treatment that this elite psychiatric hospital it's part of the same system the health system that lobotomizes his mother but it's never mentioned that Alan did a lot with these experiences and found a way to artistically work on and created the great art that we know that had liberated and uplifted many but there was a lot that didn't happen a lot of healing that didn't happen for him and that I was laughing at him for the rest of his life but he was very unhappy about that I got a chance to experience firsthand but in the end to learn from Alan is to accept that the bombs as holy as the seraphim the madmen is holy as you my soul are holy to walk with Alan is to believe that madness within us and around us is sacred and should be handled with care and reverence thank you we got into it we're so happy to do it thank you Steven so such deep inside this family relationship with his mother and also just to understand more about his deep vulnerabilities and also his greatness and boldness and where he came from and where he went in his life and all that he's given is incredible poetry and work and relationships so we want to open up for questions from you if you have a question raise your hand now I'll come over with a microphone so I'm curious about the languages you because I know my grandparents came from Russia and didn't speak any English and it had a really profound effect on my grandmother who was subsequently incredibly isolated deteriorated as a result so my question is really about Naomi was her first language English or Russian and was as an immigrant maybe the isolation was conducive or was a cause of a breakdown that's a great question her first language was Russian and she learns to speak English as a kid and I don't think had any problems speaking English I don't know I work I do a lot of work with immigrants and refugees and I think that your right isolation can be a big problem and some people are vulnerable to that I guess this is pure speculation but I think that we always think about the interaction between brain and environment and including social environment and family environment and wider societal environment and I think there's all that going on for Naomi I can't help but think that there's brain based vulnerability in her some biogenic disposition towards psychosis and in fact there's several other people in the family in the extended family that have had such issues I can't talk to her but I think that the issue of the sexual assault that she suffered was huge and when I first saw that I was speechless because I think that more so than isolation per se but in a way that breeds its own kind of isolation because of course that would never be talked about and she had to live with those memories and when you see the kinds of delusions she had you can also see that she's working over some of those issues there's kind of the imprint of sexual trauma in some of that you know in another day and age maybe she would have gotten some kind of trauma informed therapy and not gone down the road she went I like to think that we are in that other day and age in part because of Alan because Alan the fundamental message of Kaddish and how humanized matters have sympathy for these people they're like us we're like them and talk with them and work with them and support them Alan was a great inspiration to R.D. Lang and the anti-psychiatrist and Alan was an anti-psychiatry but I think that anti-psychiatrists were a great inspiration to the experience and the consumer movements and peer movements and all of that so I think that in a way Alan opened those doors with this so in a way Naomi did so there's something satisfying about it if you think about it that way but there's nothing satisfying about the fate of Naomi who died alone in a concrete room in Pilgrim State Hospital Question here Yes, Doctor I was wanted to ask you about the use of the word madness in the subtitle because you probably could have used the phrase mental illness or mentally ill or psychotic experience right? Could you say something about why you decided or chose to have the word madness in the subtitle? Because I think that I think it's a value I think it means something it means something different than mental illness madness simply unreason is a big circle that contains within it all of those kinds of things I said before ecstasy sexual freedom deviance it also includes mental illness it is not a a lack of actualization it has bad things and bad consequences but I think this is the construct this is how Alan saw the world this is this is the construct behind the poems of Kaddish and Howell and some other poems and I think this is what spoke to the world I think that it was a kind of lever that helped open things up in the culture and said to people well, you know this kind of like tightly wound cultural space that we had close to World War II and Eisenhower's America there's more to it and some of the folks that were excluding and some of the thoughts and feelings that were excluding are really shouldn't be it should be cherished and blah blah blah and I think that I think that that's what Alan latched on to Alan was he was into both personal and social liberation spiritual liberation and I think madness captures that in a way that mental illness never would but we should never forget that there is mental illness mental illness is real and Alan was not taking the position of what's his name no, the other anti psychiatrist from from New York State Thomas Sauss the myth of mental illness he was not taking that position Alan wasn't I think like Blake and other great artists Alan saw at the same time the liberatory and the decoratory potential of madness and he saw both the injurious and the therapeutic potential of psychiatry and he was trying to keep those all in one ball questions? I was curious about how was it that you developed a connection with Alan Ginsberg so that he trusted you when he met up for reference that's a good question so I reached out to Alan when I was a third year medical student I had read his poetry since junior high school I was deep into it I was into Dylan and all of that and Alan was almost as cool as Dylan was I wanted to I wanted to become a psychiatrist I was going to become a psychiatrist and I was thinking about things like how Alan published from a literary and psychiatric perspective and I had questions I couldn't answer and then I realized he was an indication of the very place where I was studying psychiatry so I wrote him a letter I signed to his publisher and three days later I came home and there was a message on my answering machine from him saying hi Steve and starting to tell me the stories he's calling me tomorrow and I skipped class and I called him and I spoke with a band name Bob Rosenclaw who was an important person I'll come back to him in a second and he's like hands upon an Alan Alan I introduced myself to Alan and Alan's like are you writing a book about me and I said yes and he's like good meet me tomorrow at the museum and you know what I said this is in the book mom was not open tomorrow because I knew because I was a student remember he said don't worry I'll cut a cent of course your Alan gets the book and so the point is that who is his personal secretary for 20 years said that Alan had incredible ability to read people he could read people instantly and he could make judgments about whether this is a good person and trustworthy or not and he said Alan had a good feeling about you and he said he was right and I think if I had been like the person I am now he probably would have told me to piss off you know I think because I was a student and I was open minded and I was clearly interested in literature and not just going to do a psychiatric number on him he thought this was good and I was a student in Columbia and he cared about Columbia so and the fact is I wanted things that he wanted him to what if he wanted just to be clear he didn't want to sleep with me that was never a thing and we were connecting on a different level he wanted to know what had happened to his mother he wanted to know what was going on with her did she really need to know about me should I have signed up what happens to me in the psychiatric institute Alan had told so many kind of myths about his life that he couldn't find his way back at that point and he wanted someone to help him to look at the records and tell the truth in the story not in a way that his achievements as an artist which I think are amazing but complicates things such as the vision so back to the vision the truth is that Alan didn't report hearing the voice of William Blake until 17 years after the actual Blake visions well not exactly 17 there were some things here I know here in 1958 he wrote a poem that he said and dream of Blake's voice talking something like that so maybe at least 10 or 12 years after so what's going on there Alan was lying Alan was doing the work of an artist and the visions were material you know and the visions weren't just a thing that happened one day the visions were subject to artistic reworking and Alan struggled with how do I represent his experience in a way that could be understandable and one thing that helped him was seeing Fra Angelico's enunciation which gave him a model gave him an artistic model for what a vision would be this is the voice of Aaron coming down like Madonna like Angel Gabriel so and you know when he told the story of himself to the world he never really mentioned the lobotomy I mean it's there but he also says well mother what have I left out mother what have I forgotten well maybe what you left out was the conception of lobotomy she never knew I think this tortured him this tortured him he lived with that all of his life so these were the kinds of things that were on his mind he was trying to find some peace he did great artwork as I said it inspired lots of people but he himself was never healed from this painful for him and for those around him yes question here so I mean clearly many people experience madness or mental illness does not create great art but Alan Ginsberg did and just stepping back have you ever thought about how much of the great art we appreciate is created by those experiencing madness or mental illness have you given your professional background I mean sure that's something I've thought about and a lot of people have thought about that I mean I don't think that this is like I would never say that all art has to be created there's so many different kinds of art and paths to art but I think for sure in the case of Alan he worked with all of this life experience I would never say even that something like Kaddish is a documentary in the way that it is there's no obligation in Alan's art for it to be completely honest and truthful to life and Alan made modifications to make the art better even in things like Kaddish when I point those things out in the book but I think for lots of people yes but I want to make the point one that Alan didn't turn to art to make himself feel better it's not like he was sad and he wrote poems to uplift himself the opposite I mean Alan curled himself into a lot of pain in a way went to the mad house in order to have the steps that Naomi walked and to own that experience own the visions he took a lot of risks and so this was not like art to heal your wounds this was art that wounded and I think there are a lot of artists who do that I don't know I'm a big music fan I just read Warren Zane's book about Nebraska Bruce Fruzzi where he's which is kind of Bruce's revisiting of childhood trauma I think there's a lot of trauma in the beats there's a lot of trauma in burrows in caroac in others we don't know as well in Diane DePrema and so you know I think it's something worth thinking about but then I also don't think that there's any simple formula for transforming trauma into art but I think that there's great value in doing a close close study like what I did for other artists see if you can trace those paths in a way that makes sense then the related question to that is that someone is asking for is if he had gotten proper treatment would we have the art what if he had gotten trauma in form care what if he took Simbalto um my answer to that is I think not because it would have messed with the brew the brew that he was so immersed in he was working with but on the other hand the trauma the therapy that he got I think saved his life helped him stabilize his life in a way that he could get an artistic work done so it's kind of gray area yes great new one last quick question answer because we want to have time for you to well there's a film biography of Ginsburg and in it he says his last letter from his mother she said to him the key is in the window the key is in the sunlight in the window and that is poetry and I'm wondering whether you think she had the gift of poetry too or if you want to control your eyes well yes I think that she did have a way with words and you can see that in some of the letters you can also see that in a short story she wrote I found a short story amongst her papers at the Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital which is kind of remarkable and but I think that persons who are struggling with psychosis and with trauma there's often a kind of policy to their words to some of their words if you spend time with people with serious mental illness they some of their language can be very poetic and evocative and in the next sentences it's really mundane and and so I mean one of the things we've done in therapy with patients is to poetry therapy poetry therapy with people with psychosis and help them to be able to express themselves and I think there's great value in that and I think Alan would say Alan would be all for that that kind of thing and I think Alan was inspired by his mother's words and I think he was tortured by the fact that he had lobotomized her because he took that away she was much worse after the lobotomy than she was before and and the last letter is not the last letter I found that out and I talked about that in the book he made a swap that letter was a previous letter that had been sent to his brother Eugene but Alan loved it for that image that he is in the sunlight in the window and there's a lot of the image of the sunlight that recurs a lot in Alan's work and in denunciation and things like that so Alan liked that so he said that that was the last letter so that's an example where he took poetic license but it's okay thank you thank you very much thank you for this very powerful conversation about Alan Ginsburg sharing some light on Alan Ginsburg's work and his life and also he's such such a literary giant in America and around the world so thank you so much for your book 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