It is always interesting the hear how a composer works, and how they envision the feelings that a piece of art from a different medium express. Here we have Philip Glass writing a work that shares the title of Allen Ginsberg’s Wichita Sutra Vortex:
Take a listen to the work and hear the beautiful harmonies, the fresh urgency of the piece, and then read Ginsberg’s poem:
Allen Ginsberg
from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966)
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas but not afraid to speak my lonesomeness in a car, because not only my lonesomeness it's Ours, all over America, O tender fellows-- & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy in the moon 100 years ago or in the middle of Kansas now. It's not the vast plains mute our mouths that fill at midnite with ecstatic language when our trembling bodies hold each other breast to breast on a matress-- Not the empty sky that hides the feeling from our faces nor our skirts and trousers that conceal the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin, white smooth abdomen down to the hair between our legs, It's not a God that bore us that forbid our Being, like a sunny rose all red with naked joy between our eyes & bellies, yes All we do is for this frightened thing we call Love, want and lack-- fear that we aren't the one whose body could be beloved of all the brides of Kansas City, kissed all over by every boy of Wichita-- O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me-- On the bridge over the Republican River almost in tears to know how to speak the right language-- on the frosty broad road uphill between highway embankments I search for the language that is also yours-- almost all our language has been taxed by war. Radio antennae high tension wires ranging from Junction City across the plains-- highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow lanes curving past Abilene to Denver filled with old heroes of love-- to Wichita where McClure's mind burst into animal beauty drunk, getting laid in a car in a neon misted street 15 years ago-- to Independence where the old man's still alive who loosed the bomb that's slaved all human consciousness and made the body universe a place of fear-- Now, speeding along the empty plain, no giant demon machine visible on the horizon but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky's edge I claim my birthright! reborn forever as long as Man in Kansas or other universe--Joy reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods! A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear, imaging the throng of Selves that make this nation one body of Prophecy languaged by Declaration as Happiness! I call all Powers of imagination to my side in this auto to make Prophecy, all Lords of human kingdoms to come Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands give up your desire Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru William Blake the invisible father of English visions Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes half closed who only cries for his mother Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise merciful Chango judging our bodies Durga-Ma covered with blood destroyer of battlefield illusions million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable Allah the Compassionate One Jahweh Righteous One all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis & holymen I chant to-- Come to my lone presence into this Vortex named Kansas, I lift my voice aloud, make Mantra of American language now, I here declare the end of the War! Ancient days' Illusion! and pronounce words beginning my own millennium. Let the States tremble, let the Nation weep, let Congress legislate it own delight let the President execute his own desire-- this Act done by my own voice, nameless Mystery-- published to my own senses, blissfully received by my own form approved with pleasure by my sensations manifestation of my very thought accomplished in my own imagination all realms within my consciousness fulfilled 60 miles from Wichita near El Dorado, The Golden One, in chill earthly mist houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward in every direction one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord-- Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower where Florence is set on a hill, stop for tea & gas
The poem is starkly anti-war, pleading, preaching to everything, everywhere to stop the (Vietnam) war. The Nation has a wonderful analysis/reflection of the work:
“Wichita Vortex Sutra” originated as a kind of proto-podcast that Ginsberg intoned into an Uher tape recorder while traveling across the American heartland in the winter of 1966. In the early verses Ginsberg makes his way south into Kansas from Nebraska, juxtaposing images of the Great Plains landscape with fragmented media reports about the distant war in Vietnam. Reciting the bloodless newspeak that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the current Iraq War (vague phrases like “tactical bombing” and “limited objectives”), Ginsberg eventually grows impatient, dismissing official military body counts as “the latest quotation in the human meat market.”
As Ginsberg continues his southward journey to Wichita, his poem notes the stunted attention span of the mass media, mixing the empty language of war (“Rusk Says Toughness Essential For Peace”; “Vietnam War Brings Prosperity”) with the noises of advertising and entertainment (“the honkytonk tinkle/of a city piano/to calm the nerves of taxpaying housewives of a Sunday morn”). Television images, which reduce everything to a shorthand of analogy and synecdoche, gloss over the human suffering (“electric dots on Television–/fuzzy decibels registering/the mammal voiced howl/from the outskirts of Saigon to console model picture tubes”).
The poet attempts to use the warmth and sensuality of the human body to make the distant violence urgent and real (“flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s/ripped open by metal explosion/…on the other side of the planet”), but he concedes that his very medium–language–has already been “taxed by war”:
The war is language, language abused for Advertisement, language used like magic for power on the planet: Black Magic language, formulas for reality– Communism is a 9 letter word used by inferior magicians with the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
Just as “terrorism” (another nine-letter word) has become an incantation that aims to blur all manner of failures and lies by “inferior magicians” within the Bush Administration, the word “Communism” was central to the alchemical formula for Johnson-era spin and manipulation–a drab reminder that language could obscure truth as readily as express it.
In Philip Glass’s piece he mimics not only the structure of the work, by beginning the piece with the simple chorale texture, much like Ginsberg begins and end the poem with the simple reflections of being in the US, in a car. But the piece grows in emotional intensity, building to reflect Ginsberg’s poetic crescendo into his shout out to the entire world, “I here declare the end of the War!”