Allen Ginsberg is a person dear to me in reality and important as an idea. About once a week, I'm in a situation that makes me ask myself, 'What would Allen have done?' The most recent time this happened, I was having supper with Francis Russell at his house, when a neighbor, who is a Pentecostal Episcopalian and be- liever in healing, dropped by. Her name was Harriet and she had just come from a three-hour trip to a hospital visiting and praying with a thirty-five-year-old woman dying of cancer. She herself was about forty-two and ninety pounds overweight.
She was very upset by her brief afternoon with the dying woman and kept on assuring herself that God had heard them. Probably, her distress was increased because she knew Francis was annoyed by her conviction. 'That woman will never get better; she's going to die,' he insisted. But that didn't deter her. She told us that she goes to her church meetings four times a week -- in a town half an hour from where she lives. Then, to make light of her religious activities, she added with a laugh that she was a forty-year-old Jesus freak. She went on, confiding to me that she had been healed of bad gums, and that now she was going to ask for help losing weight. I thought that was a good idea, not so different from going to Weight Watchers. She described how she got into Pentecostal religion -- about the bad trips she had had before she believed. 'I was asleep for a whole year.' I liked her.
In my head I heard Allen. He wouldn't be afraid he'd catch Harriet's depression. Or be embarrassed by the rawness of her unhappiness. He wouldn't let her dismiss herself. Somehow, he'd lead her out of that notion toward some self-respect. Perhaps by saying he was a sort of Jesus freak himself -- he'd just spent three months meditating ten hours a day and was building a temple with his own hands. Could she top that?
Too, Allen is so interested in people's spirituality that he would have asked Harriet a million questions; but he'd come at it in such a way that she wouldn't end up explaining herself. He would offer a prayer for her dying friend. Tell Harriet about the healers he's met all over the world. How he'd actually found one Five blocks from Flagg Street. And if Francis happened to ask Allen, as he asked me, do you believe in all that stuff, Allen would reply with a softness. She's a good woman, outgoing, needing the world.
When it was time for me to go back to Cambridge, I shook Harriet's hand. I knew for sure Allen would have embraced her, blessed her with an Indian chant. But I was too shy to hug her, though I thought of it. I felt it wouldn't work for me, there at least, in Francis's living room; but being polite and saying, 'See you in the Square,' was more distant than I felt.
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