Compassion and the Sacred

Kandel and Timothy Leary (c)2003 Larry Keenan 

            Compassion and kindness are at the heart of Kandel’s work, even though at times she is conscious of failing to live up to those values and sometimes mixes them with anger, bitterness, cynicism and despair. Nonetheless, compassion was the core of her vision of spirituality as it applies to life around her, which seems to be based on a reinterpretation of Buddhism with Tantric and Taoist elements blended in. It could be argued that the American conception of Buddhism, while sincere, was not the genuine article. It was not like Buddhism as it is practiced in the Orient. This certainly is true, but also it in no way invalidates the spiritual integrity of the Beats, who adapted aspects of classical Buddhism to the American psyche and culture. As the Sixties progressed, Taoism, Zen, Native American spirituality and even radical visions of Christianity began to be added to this religious melting pot, and psychedelics took the concept of direct spiritual experience to a more accessible and controversial dimension. It was within the dynamic of this evolving tradition that Kandel lived and worked. Some of Kandel’s contemporaries, such as poet Gary Snyder, tried to adhere to traditional Zen practices and beliefs. Others, such as Alan Watts, moved from Zen into a visionary approach to the broader focus of Taoism. Visionary philosopher and psychologist Timothy Leary is well known for using hallucinogens to expand spiritual and psychic awareness, but he, too, was profoundly influenced by other aspects of the spiritual amalgamation of the Sixties. Kerouac, when he could see through an alcoholic haze, seemed to combine mystical aspects of Catholicism, Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Zen. Poet Allen Ginsberg was touched by all of these traditions, but his spirituality was much more pragmatically based on empathy for the human condition.

In Kandel’s poetry, compassion is one of the most visible aspects of her personal spiritual framework. It extends to individual people, to her generation and to life itself. She seems to embrace Kerouac’s conception of the word “Beat,” as encompassing hip (some, like Kandel, blew hot, others blew cool), beat (as in beat up, tired and battered) and beatific (Holy! Holy!).

One of her best-known – and best - poems is “First They Slaughtered the Angels,” in which she presents an apocalyptic vision not of the future, but of the present. The vision she presents in the present tense is of the American death machine: an inhuman, sterile and deadly reality that stifles life and often reduces people to robots (or, to borrow from Henry Miller, automatons). If that vision is mixed with LSD, or even cast under the light of sensitive perception, the result might be the framework of Kandel’s poem. It is a poem about the descendants of the angels – beatific – watching the murder of angels with “icy knives” and fleeing into dark recesses to watch and wait. She looks unflinchingly at the anti-life forces in American culture, and sees that the sellout was an “inside job.” We have sold our own souls and, as automatons, mindlessly destroy life. The killers “walk the rubble…with eyes like fire pits.” The descendants of the murdered angels try to placate and make friends with the automatons, but cannot. Of particular brilliance is her allusion to the life force of eros being turned into a force to serve death (one only need to look at the porn sites on the Internet or read Hustler to see the reality of her vision):

the penises of men are become blue steel machineguns,

they ejaculate bullets, they spread death as an orgasm

            It is chilling imagery: orgasm as death. But the imagery extends further into our entire way of life as a symbol of death – not life as it exists on deeper or more innocent planes, or as Kandel sees life, but to the anesthetized shell that has become reality in the lives of many Americans:

we have sold our bodies and hours to the curious

we have paid off our childhood in dishwashers and Miltown

(Miltown is an antidepressant that no longer is widely used)    

…lobotomy for every man

Kandel alludes to Roman soldiers casting lots for the garments of Christ, describing the killers of life around her as “casting the last lots of Armageddon” and participating in “the ritual rape of god.”

Kandel and others like her see the essence of what is happening “with peyote-visioned eyes” and know that the death must end. At this point, however, she abandons Buddhist acceptance of the way things are in the world of human desires, and writes that the spiritual descendants of the angels will “do battle…

and our blood will meet iron

and our breath will meet steel

THEY SHALL MURDER NO MORE ANGELS

not even us

            Indeed, she sometimes candidly admits to the limitations of her ability to live up to her own spirituality. In “Poem for Tyrants,” she acknowledges that

…I am no Christ

blessing my executioners

forgive me, then –

I cannot love you yet

She also can feel anger - seething anger - and cynicism. In “Bus Ride,” she writes of riding a commercial bus and looking at the passing world through tiny greasy squares of glass: “oh god but we are civilized.” She imagines her fellow passengers as pathetic specters of anti-life “jammed haunch to haunch” and “wearing the skins of dead animals,” and at their backyard barbeques wearing corsets and falsies above a “flabby unsatisfied crotch” – another strong image in Kandel’s writing about the link between asexuality and death. She wishes she were a “primal beast” to attack these people and save their bones for winter.

Instead, however, she cringes:

I sit in shame, guarding my own poor bones from such as you

Kandel’s anger arises again in “Poem for Perverts,” but is less overt and more cynical. This poem clamps its teeth tight on her feelings of outrage and disgust, and instead lets nonstop imagery of human bleakness speak for itself.

Love, he (the ‘Fat Man’) whispers, Love is my whip.

            Kandel creates scene after scene of dominance, bondage, discipline and torture by the Fat Man and ice-cold Lady Olga, and then writes:

behold the fantasy of man gone civilized!

No naked brute could dream these delicate deceits.

            She also acknowledges the power that bondage holds over people who cannot love or celebrate themselves:

There is no way out, each door a further entrance to

indignities and epicurean conceits, of anguish impossible to

dream on, the carnivorous bloom of flowering neurosis gone to

synthetic seed.

There are no exits in Bondageland, there is no way back!

                               Exquisite! breathed the Fat Man

                               He adjusted his pallid bulk delicately

                               and mounted the blue-eyed corpse

In this poem, Kandel sees spiritual death both as the cause and the end result of bondage. She does not share the contemporary view that it is nothing more than a healthy way to act out and liberate one’s self from dark fantasies, but instead sees it as undiluted ugliness in the service of death that continually digs the grave deeper.

While Kandel can be angry, cynical and unforgiving in the face of the death spirit, the dominant impression of her work is of gentle and loving compassion for people who have been ensnared by it, or who resist it quietly or overtly. With sadness but no sentimentality, she recognizes the power of the dominant society to destroy life and bring pain, despair and destruction into the lives of people.

Perhaps her sense of compassion is seen most clearly in “Telephone from a Madhouse,” a heartbreaking and extraordinary poem about a woman who is confined to a mental hospital and feels all alone with overwhelming feelings of desperation and hopelessness, and caught within a labyrinth (both internally and externally) from which there seems to be no escape. The poem begins with a phone call from the madhouse to the poet, “the voice from a million miles away, from a treeless plain, from, a gray wet dank abyss”. Kandel uses counterpoint to show both the desperation of the patient, contrasted with her own health, vigor and sense of life. The poet “carelessly” says hello while drinking black coffee from “a pretty rice bowl.” “Are you there? Are you really there? Sometimes I can’t believe you exist…,” the patient implores in “soft and desperate tears” over the phone. “Yes, I (the poet) murmur, yes, yes, yes…I’m here I REALLY EXIST”. The poet grips the floor with “my bare brown toes, …snaps my voice like a lion whip…(rubs her) muscled thigh…(and sees with) analytic eyes”.

The poet visits her friend in the “sterile madhouse,” and Kandel develops a unique technique to paint the picture of what transpires. The main narrative is told in a poem on the left side of the page, but a second poem arises in a column on the right that sets tone through images of an old woman shuffling up and down the hospital corridor, visitors peering in doors, “enema yellow” paint, angry screams of patients, piteous voices calling for help and, finally, an announcement that visiting hours are over. At first I resisted this technique of side-by-side poems, in the mistaken feeling that it was an artificial structure. It is hard to remember why I felt this way almost 40 years ago, but it probably had to do with my aversion to the school of “concrete poetry,” which was based on imposing artificial structural forms that had no organic relevance to the poem itself. The result was a pointless shape, technique with no purpose. But my first impression of Kandel’s poem was wrong. The technique of dual poems was wholly organic to her purpose, and the counterpoint of imagery began to feel right. I still have one reservation about this technique, though. It works when the poem is read from a book; the reader’s eyes simply go back and forth, taking in both poems in pieces, reading two poems at once. But I have no idea how Kandel would give an oral reading of this poem, and I regard poetry as an oral art form: poetry is meant to be read aloud to people. It is meant to be performed. In this light, perhaps it would have been better if Kandel had developed a poem within a poem to paint the same picture. While I applaud Kandel’s willingness to experiment and discover different forms (she also did this through two “prose poems” in Word Alchemy), I think she missed the mark from the perspective of oral performance.

Nonetheless, “Telephone from a Madhouse” is one of my very favorite poems by Kandel, and the full development of her sense of compassion is accomplished with brilliance and clarity. Kandel provides no easy answers, no bromides. The mood is nearly unrelieved desperation and despair, of “soiled bedclothes,” “feral eyes,” “I can’t go on,” “I can’t live anymore,” “man-eating flowers,” “nurse with glaring eyes,” “I don’t think i'll ever get well(,) I’m afraid” and

the world is

disintegrating and

i don’t have

anything to hold

on to

…nobody will ever

love me     she sighs

i am afraid     I am

afraid of everything….

Kandel offers this woman what she can offer: a small gray pigeon feather she found on the hospital steps, descriptions of a beautiful day outside the hospital, of sunlight and flowers, of a party and tea cakes for lunch. She offers hope – in the form of reality – that life and beauty truly do exist outside of the hospital walls. “Pigeons are real.” Kandel tries honestly to touch this woman, to offer shelter and comfort, but in the end the poet kisses her tears that feel like “January sleet” on her lips, and leaves. It is a poem that can break one’s heart.

The prose poem, “Morning Song,” paints a picture of another kind of compassion: a bitter compassion for the bleakness of resignation. In today’s terminology, this prose work might also be called “microfiction.”  The story is about a man and wife awakening in the morning. On some level, the man “remembered realized and regretted the passage of his life, visualizing it as some peculiar bird flapping away.” Eyes shut, he feels the “pressure of his wife,” and senses the smells of stale armpits, talcum powder, movie theaters, shoe sweat, popcorn, toast and bacon. He remembers other women he has known: a mountain-sized woman who inspired him “to dive in and excavate darkest Africa”; and a “girl half-elf…she so soft and small…(who) made streetlights into stars.” The man feels ashamed. He reaches out and “his wife rose to him like bread dough.” He awakened, feeling the familiarity of his wife’s body, “and they performed an act of fornication.” Then the man went to work, feeling “a faint disturbing sense of loss.”

Junk Angels

            Kandel’s sense of compassion, in all of its variations, extends to her own generation and the combination of hip, worn out and beatific that defines the Beats. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her poems of despair and anger, but also of empathy, for junkies and other drug users. Other Beat writers were not silent on this subject, but none approaches it with Kandel’s candor and openness. Kandel sees the power of drugs to destroy lives and hope, and to create the sense of the desperation of a hunted animal. While she mourns the causes and effects of hard drug use, she does not condemn the people, whom she most often approaches with empathy and compassion that sometimes is laced with anger, and often with the sense of holy penance and penitence.

In “Blues for Sister Sally,” we feel her compassion for this:

moon-faced baby with cocaine arms

…novice of the junkie angel

lay sister of mankind penitent

…she bears the stigma (holy holy) of the raving christ

Sexuality, for Kandel, is one of her ways of seeking spiritual transcendence. But, for Sister Sally, junk is her lover and Kandel creates imagery of junk in sexual terms: “my sister makes it with a hunk of glass…who fornicates with strangers…who masturbates with needles….” Anyone who has ever used junk knows the feeling of a rush almost like intense sexual pleasure, but hard drug use also kills genuine passion and cuts off the user from this aspect of life.

Kandel demands answers and receives none, and weeps for Sister Sally who:

…walks with open veins

leaving her blood in the sewers of your cities

            She paints the junkie as “not quite dead”, “afraid of the dark” and “pumping her arms full of life”. In the end, she laughs cynically at a junkie god who “has sold salvation for a week’s supply”.

            In “Junk/Angel,” Kandel gives birth to a “junkie angel” in the form of ichorous which, in Greek mythology and English usage, carries the dual meaning of an ethereal fluid flowing through the veins of the gods, and also as a watery discharge from a festering sore. The junk angel comes to Earth on wings of a bat, with bones shining through his skin, the odor of corruption and a “glaring faceless face”. He caresses the shadows of “some ecstatic acolyte” with his bony fingers, and “he never speaks and always understands (and) he answers no one”, and then flies away to a place behind the sun.

“Naked I Have Known You” is one of Kandel’s most powerful poems. The poem begins by watching a lover’s face “open in the wet heat of love”, and on a very encompassing and perhaps even bone-chilling level, knowing him all the way through. There is an ominous quality to her knowing, of stripping her lover naked and exposing his essence. She has known him as “the skeleton exquisite” moving furtively through the streets, known him as “witch-animal scurrying to covens underground…rat brother….” Watching his furtiveness, Kandel screams: “FLY THEN GODDAMN YOU!”

Kandel writes that she has known him in the nakedness of “junkie doorway god-love,” in the image of his head smashed through mirror glass shattering into uncontrollable fragmented dimensions, and in the sun-like warmth of a junk rush that also threatens to devour him in flame:

the most noticeable thing when falling into the sun is

the exquisite sensation of warmth

But the sun also immolates those who would fall into it.

Other Visions

            Seeking and translating vision lies at the heart of Kandel’s poetry. Almost all of her poems could be accurately described as visionary, and the visions induced or expanded by the use of hallucinogens play a large role in her art. While some poems overtly talk of peyote and possibly LSD, others simply give the feeling that hallucinogens played an important role in giving her a clarity of vision that evolved into a poem. Other visions appeared to result from spiritual dimensions, and still others from the sometimes hallucinogenic quality of ordinary life. In the Year 2003, it is difficult to talk of the role that peyote, LSD, “magic mushrooms” and other vision-inducing substances played during the 1960’s. Today, after 30 years of being pounded by the alleged evils of all forms of drug use, it is hard for someone who did not live through that era to understand the liberating, spiritual and

 enlightening qualities that many people – including myself – sought and sometimes believed they had found through these substances. It is hard for many people today to know that these drugs represented a quest for expansion of self, personal vision and spirituality beyond the realm of what was culturally permissible – and even culturally possible – for someone who came of age at that time in America. They were seen as a voyage of discovery into uncharted realms of the psyche and consciousness. They also were seen as an aspect of a fundamental right to seek ecstasy in all forms, independently of social or legal constraints, with only one’s own conscience and consciousness as a roadmap. For many, they were seen as sacred. As such, there is no contradiction between using hallucinogens and Kandel’s overall sense of radiant life.

In “Peyote Walk,” Kandel’s vision is “that the barriers of time are arbitrary; that nothing is still”, that all is “part of the flow…MOTION….” This sense of constant motion, that the river of life is never the same from one moment to the next, is an important aspect of Taoism and Zen. Kandel came to this visualization through peyote, it would appear from her poem. The poem also creates sexual imagery of pricks and cunts of cosmic proportions engaged in a “wilderness” of each other’s bodies, with:

orgasmic infinity

one (!) second long

…huge pelvises shuddering

while worlds burn

            Through peyote, she thus has discovered some of the insights of Tantra, and visions of Kali, an aspect of the Hindu deity symbolizing both rebirth and destruction. Indeed, in “Small Prayer for Falling Angels,” Kandel calls upon Kali “for enlightenment and not oblivion”.

            “Age of Consent” describes why she felt she had to push beyond the limits of the known and into the realm of the visionary and prophetic.

I cannot be satisfied until I speak with the angels

I require to behold the eye of god

to cast my own being into the cosmos as bait for miracles…

“I demand the access of enlightenment…

“the presence of unendurable light…

“(as) the child of man demands his exit

from the safe warm womb

            Sometimes Kandel’s visions yield terror, despair and confusion. But they also can yield beauty and gentleness. In “Rose/Vision,” the visionary Kandel unfolds with elegance and subtlety:

Permit me the concept of the rose

the perfumed labyrinth

that leads one petal at a time

into oblivion’s heart

There are visions within the silence of the rose

…and I not only see but am all possibilities

of time and space and change

            Life itself can appear hallucinogenic. Kandel’s five-part poem, “Circus,” appears to have arisen from the hallucinogenic qualities of a circus itself, but perhaps (if not probably) aided by vision-inducing substances. On some level, she wrote, all dreams are true: a circus is a dream, and a circus is true. Her poem spills like an electrified waterfall over the sights and sounds of the circus, resting only briefly on each dream-like appearance of circus people and acts: the clowns, the “beautiful naked girls” riding horses bareback, the horses themselves like “figures of the dance” weaving enchantment

that melts, dissolves, and burns

till all that’s left transforms itself

into one glittering and dawn wet rose

that the ringmaster

accepts in trembling hands

            What she sees in the circus is the wonder of life itself – life kaleidoscopic, life as a dance, life as acrobats, clowns, and wild soaring on a flying trapeze. In the section entitled “Freak Show and Finale,” Kandel implores:

EXPOSE YOURSELF!

ACCEPT THE CREATURE
AND BEGIN THE DANCE

            One of the sections of “Circus,” “Love in the Middle of the Air,” is the most captivating portrait of trust in love that I have ever read. Kandel’s vision is of the almost unimaginable trust required on the trapeze to fling one’s self into the air and know that your partner will catch you.

CATCH ME!

     I love you, I trust you

     I love you…

CATCH ME!

     Here I come, flying without wings

     …WITHOUT A

     SAFETY NET…

In Summary

            Lenore Kandel was one of the guiding lights of  Twentieth Century American poetry to those who have discovered her and treasured her gifts during her nearly 40 years of artistic near-silence. She clearly ranks among the highest echelon of contemporary poets. Her work has not been surpassed in vision, daring, courage, scope, understanding, intelligence or artistic excellence. Perhaps no other poet has captured the essence of her era as well, even though several have been granted much more fame and many more accolades. To my knowledge, no poet has ever written as evocatively about sexuality, eros and ecstasy, and she stands utterly alone in this regard. She has accomplished her own goal of stepping outside of the ego in order to “share the grace of the universe,” and she has indeed “worked alchemy within the language.”

We have been impoverished by her creative near-silence, and those of us who have been fortunate enough to know her published work have been enriched beyond measure.