How the Other Half Looks by Sara Blair

Author:Sara Blair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

FIGURE 5.2. Gordon Parks, New York, New York, push cart fruit vendor at the Fulton fish market, May 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division LC-USW3-028760-D.

FIGURE 5.3. Todd Webb, Suffolk and Hester Street, New York, 1946. Photograph. ©Todd Webb Archive, Portland, Maine, USA.

It is this passage that enables a certain bracing spiritual wonder, on the poet’s part, in the face of “change’s fierce hunger” (9). His movement is mapped from the “here” that is “left with me” (8) to the unfathomable space of death, of a life unapprehended, whose naming becomes a benediction: “There, rest. No more suffering for you” (9). And this going down that is also a going back and a reunion anticipates and makes possible the poet’s descent in part II of “Kaddish” into the most fraught depths of his own experience, the traumatic reality of a family life lived in the dark shadow of breakdown, hallucinations, the “refrain—of the Hospitals” and “remembrance of electrical shocks” (13). At the moment of “Kaddish,” the Lower East Side was clearly being sacralized for a Cold War nation as a unique point of entry into a usable American past. That vision of the ghetto would culminate in a landmark 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life,” an event that reinvented exhibition practice and galvanized city-dwellers as consumers of the neighborhood’s history.26 In advance of that impact, the imagery of the historical ghetto as a portal or gateway to the vanished pasts offered itself as a distinctive resource for Ginsberg’s poetics of prophecy and dissent.

That broader imagery is an important context for the most infamous moment of “Kaddish,” midway through the poem. Here Naomi speaks in her own voice of her vision of God (“a lonely old man with a white beard”) and of the “nice supper” she cooks him—“miltz,” or dairy—as she offers her son “cold undercooked fish,” food “more and more disconsolate” (23, 24). It is, perhaps, the “smells” of these fishy offerings that the poet associates with Naomi’s body, leading him to enter into his most charged and primal memory:

One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up around her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. (24)

Critical readers of the poem have treated this remembrance of contemplated incest as a moment of extraordinary candor, a characteristically radical exposure by Ginsberg of his own extremities of desire.27 But its expression is nonetheless strategic, a poetic device. Notably, the original draft of the poem represents the incest as a fait accompli—“fucked her here,” the line goes, with emphasis on the freighted space of encounter and return.

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