India Blue

Abstract

Page 23 November–December 2008 India Blue Reinhard Postelmann A Blue Hand: The Beats in India Deborah Baker Penguin http://www.penguin.com 256 pages; cloth, $25.95 With A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, Deborah Baker delivers a meticulous portrait of Allen Ginsberg and his fellow artists commonly referred to as the Beats. Baker proceeds with an academic and affectionate precision that offers the reader a look beyond the curtain of the typical beatnik stereotype—of the cool hipster image and the supposed and inflicted communistic wickedness—that provides a panorama of the soul, of the hearts, and, most of all, of the spiritual impulse that is so much responsible for the cultural and literary output of this particular group of American writers related to and around Ginsberg. Baker’s report of the Beats in India is a document on American literary history changing in time and place. The central figure is Ginsberg—the main locations are NorthAmerica and India. A Blue Hand does not only convince as a group portrait of Ginsberg , Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder & Co., it also reveals the motivation that drew those poets over to India, in order to look for something they didn’t know and in order to find answers to questions they hadn’t asked yet. Similarly to the Italian explorer and colonizer Christopher Columbus, Ginsberg takes off to the mystic East—and (as opposed to Christopher Columbus) truly discovers India, as well as a bunch of intellectuals and poets from India looking for the promising West in return.An extremely relevant moment for Ginsberg’s further spiritual orientation is his Harlem vision: In his uptown apartment, the twentytwo -year-old Columbia student—who was giving his best to graduate in law to eventually become the judicial voice of the huddled masses in Manhattan, while at the same time, his poetry companions are already exercising themselves in lawlessness, drug use, and other alternative lifestyles—hears the voice of God reciting the William Blake poem to him he had just read while masturbating. This event turns the young poet’s world upside down. Desperately, he begins reciting Blake’s poetry over and over hoping to evoke God’s voice again—unfortunately without the desired success. From here on Ginsberg’s religious vision and sexual experience go hand in hand—while Walt Whitman used his sexual experiences to obtain a better understanding of the world, Ginsberg from now on equates sexual experiences with religious experiences. A spiritual quest begins and lasts from now on until his death on April 5, 1997. The title of the book is related to this particular event that took place in Ginsberg’s Harlem sublet on the east side of Manhattan. Having heard the voice of God, he immediately searches the sky for the Maker’s hand—the evidence of God’s physical presence on earth. Ginsberg concludes that not so much God’s hand must have created the sky but much more that the sky itself incarnates God’s hand—the blue hand. Baker’s work benefits from her exhaustive research: Totally stunned by his experience, Ginsberg finds himself walking through Manhattan, and the reader gets to see him witnessing the transformation of a bookstore clerk’s face into something out of Jonathan Swift. The poet is now deeply convinced of being granted access to man’s true nature—an aspect that reminds one too well of the ideas and concepts of another American literary group—the Transcendentalists —among them Ralph Waldo Emerson who considered the universe with all its beings, belongings , and actions to be God itself. Baker’s report of the Beats in India is a document on American literary history changing in time and place. Baker does a great job filling the gaps in between the generally known spots of Ginsberg’s poetic path with plenty of moments, fears, and triggering notions that move Ginsberg, as well as his beatnik friends through their lives—the essence of the Beat Generation’s spirit. Next to the main character’s adventures , the reader also gets to see Gregory Corso raging drunken in Ginsberg’s apartment, heckling his poetry readings and selling fake first-draft manuscripts to the...