Allen Ginsberg's Speech

The amazing thing was that everybody was able to get up and dance after sitting frozen, not knowing quite what to do. When ancient rhythms are flowing through everybody's body, then certainly everybody desires to dance and sing rather than be frozen. But such is the nature of our conditioning in this which is called the Kali Yuga according to Hindu theology, Hindu religion, Hindu belief, Hindu metaphysics, Hindu cosmography … probably corresponding to what in our Western tradition we know as the Gnostic tradition through Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and William Blake. This is an Orient version of what may be the same tradition, suppressed in the West when the CIA took over religion in 313 A.D. [laughter and applause] when Constantine, Caesar, made a deal with the church to suppress all alien thoughts and heresy and to formulate a square version of heaven and hell.

The Kali Yuga concept is one that you can now in a sense interpret ecologically. If you have been following the scientifical pronouncements of doom possibility coming over television, radio and slick magazine lately, as well as from the underground press, you'll notice that there's increasing attention to the fact that our own fecal materials, the waste products of our robots, have now so polluted Lake Erie that it's now a great lake of green-blue slime, biologically dead, that our atmosphere, the planetary atmosphere, is increasingly polluted with carbon wastes, and that we are so sunk in our attachment to automobile exhaust fumes, to sulfur wastes from great steel factories producing metals that can be sent flying to explode on the other side of the planet with the collaboration of the science faculties of such universities as this, [applause and laughter] that we find ourselves increasingly sunk into what is called the materialistic habit like the junkie stuck on his junk, people hooked on matter and on their own identity in matter, taking their own identity from their faces, noses, bodies and immediate physical city complex around them, not realizing another sweeter, deeper but wilder or "transcendental" identity than the identity of the one-dimensional man that Marcuse has talked about. So what we are proposing here is a modern-minded view, or some indications of a modern Western, i.e. Gnostic-Marcuse view of Kali Yuga as applying to our own situation.

As it stands, I read in the paper today, the prognosis (according to U Thant in today's paper, according to the head of the U.N.) is that mankind has almost ten years to reverse the political, social, moral, emotional course of the planet and alter our technology, alter our consciousness radically enough to preserve human existence on the planet. [applause] This is not only official U.N. pronouncement, but it's also the pronouncement of most of the ecologists, biologists and ecosystemic students of the planet who are presently considering the ecological disruption that we have caused through our greed and destructiveness.

The Oriental analysis has it, however, that we have a good deal more time. The Kali Yuga or the age of heavy metal entanglement, Iron Age, lasts 432,000 years, and we are only 5,000 years into it. So there is 427,000 years to go. In a conversation with Swami Bhaktivedanta today I was enquiring more about the details of the theology which I found in a book called the Bhagavat Purana. He explained that according to Hindu analysis we are 5,000 years into the descent from a lighter age, the Age of Brass, the disappearance of Lord Krishna, the Preserver, or the Supreme Form of the Preserver aspect of the universe, of ourselves or of Vishnu. The disappearance of Krishna historically is 5,000 years ago. We are 5,000 years into the Age of Iron, and we have 10,000 years in which to chant Hare Krishna, which is to say repeating the Name of the aspect of preservation, hope, that particular vibration of dancing joy, transcending our cosmo-political worries. We have 10,000 years for that play, before there is a total descent into one-foot-tall monsters who will eat each other up for meat because all the vegetables have disappeared because the DDT has completely cleared out any biological life form except mammals who go around eating each other at that point.

I have known Swami Bhaktivedanta for about three years, since he settled in the Lower East Side New York, which is my territory or my neighborhood. It seemed to me like a stroke of great intelligence of him to come, not as an uptown swami [laughter], but as a real down home street swami [laughter] and make it on the street in the Lower East Side and also opening a branch on Frederick Street in San Francisco, right in the center of Haight Ashbury neighborhood. The people who were tripping in Haight Ashbury several years ago, coming down, wanting some more permanent eternal reassurance, formula, ritual, magic, hope, feel, or truth, zeroed in on the Frederick Street rug laden, perfumed, incensed ashram where chanting would be heard at dawn, as they were coming down off a trip all night. A great many people who were hung on acid or other varieties of chemical psychedelics found it much more stable to practice a prolonged ritual, or sadhana, following the instructions of Swami Bhaktivedanta which are old classical Indian style instructions for rituals, daily living, diet, sexuality, book-consciousness, apparel, hand gestures, a very complicated, ritualized yoga, a very ancient one also.

I thought Swami Bhaktivedanta made a great move in coming to the Lower East Side and to Haight Ashbury and then, naturally because people dig chanting, centers formed in other parts of the United States so that there are small street level houses or store front centers in Vancouver, in L.A., in Montreal, up in Buffalo, down in-there are some Buffalo chanters here-"Chant," incidentally, comes from the word "enchant," by the way, which means to make a magical spell about oneself. There's a Santa Fe center also. In other words, the importation of a very strange Oriental form, almost a hard-shelled Baptist Oriental form in the sense of its traditionality and its fundamentalism, its reliance on ancient texts and interpretation of ancient texts by a long tradition of teachers … it's strange that so far out and ritualized an Indian form should take root in the United States a little more naturally than the more protestant Vedanta Society or the extremely rigorous Zen groups that have taken root. I think partly it's due to the magnanimity or generosity by the old age charm, wisdom, cheerfulness of Swami Bhaktivedanta, his openness of heart, his willingness to come down onto the street and his sense of his own divinity and the divinity of others around him that it's been possible for the bhakti-yoga cult of India to be planted very firmly here in America so that now there are communes or ashrams functioning on the basis of the Krishna rituals, which are in some respects a model for all those anarchists and political people who are interested in establishing indigenous American communes. The regulations on food, on sexual relations, which generally cause much confusion in mutually held pads, the regulations on sleep and thinking process are an interesting model to study for those who are interested in forming affinity groups or large family communes.

I will have my turn at language tomorrow because I am giving a poetry reading at the student union. So, I will cut myself off now and be brief and leave the rest of the evening to Swami Bhaktivedanta who will give a language explanation or whatever he wants to say, of the cultural or metaphysical or religious roots. So the rest of this evening Swami Bhaktivedanta will explain his Divine Self and then we will continue chanting. [applause]