Thunderman’s low psychic growl was gruff, was kindly, but his human interlocutor could feel identity itself unravelling, just from the creature’s dread proximity. Oblivious to its own crushing consequence, this frightful gnostic demiurge continued.

  {You’re most likely wondering where you are. This is World Aleph, Worsley. This is the real world. Your Earth, World Tau, is a control where no one is exempt from laws of probability or physics. I know your life there is hard. That’s why I want to help.}

  Monstrously lovely, Thunderman’s enormous head here nodded at him reassuringly. Wanting to weep, wanting to defecate, he let his flinching gaze stray to the costumed children standing by their hourglass, still regarding him with chill disdain. Catching his glance, Thunderman smiled engagingly, displaying three-inch-long incisors.

  {Ah, yes! The Tomorrow Friends! They got your message, Worsley, the one that you didn’t send when you were five years old. They’re making you a member, Worsley.}

  Everything he’d ever wanted, it destroyed him. Fondly, Thunderman rested one massive paw upon his shoulder, heavy as mahogany, and in those golden eyes were all the marvellous and terrifying things mankind must never, ever have.

  AMERICAN LIGHT – AN APPRECIATION

  BY C. F. BIRD

  While Harmon Belner’s shooting-star arrival in the literary firmament came with the publication of his controversial Harlem Gold in 1959, it would not be until American Light’s thunderous debut, two decades later, that he would accomplish what was thought to be impossible in US literature: a second act.

  Acclaimed as Belner’s masterpiece, American Light can be seen as having retroactively supplied a narrative for his career in poetry; this later work a vindication of the brilliance predicted by so many after Harlem Gold’s phenomenal reception. By establishing iconic start and end points in the Belner story – early promise and its late fulfilment – a less lauded middle period has, of course, also been reappraised. Collections such as Radio is Burning (1961), The Coffee-Ring Mandala (1966), and Norton’s Empire (1970), initially reviewed as underwhelming, stand revealed as necessary stepping stones, developmental stages in American Light’s ultimate gestation. It seems that the radiance of the poem’s title is sufficient for us to detect its bullion gleam in all of Belner’s previous writings.

  And yet, in the comprehensive dazzle of the work’s accomplishment, it would appear that this belated reassessment of the author has become the only focal point of critical attention – what American Light means in terms of Belner and his place in letters, rather than addressing what American Light means. Perhaps intimidated by the poet’s overnight canonisation, commentators have proven reluctant to attempt more than a superficial confirmation of American Light’s monumental stature, without any adequate investigation of the poem’s content, context, or, indeed, its origins.

  This timorous approach does great disservice to its subject, for, as will be demonstrated, Harmon Belner’s magnum opus is a trove of San Franciscan and Beat culture that demands careful unpacking. It is the intention of this essay to provide an annotated excavation of the text, and, in the process, to unearth what Barthes would term its ‘cultural code’, which is to say those aspects of the culture from which any given work emerges, that inevitably will inform said work’s construction.

  In American Light’s instance, this would be the post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco through the 1960s and the 1970s. This is the milieu in which Belner locates his poem, and from which American Light’s painted backdrop is contrived. The persons who comprised that ‘scene’ or movement are the often pseudonymous walk-ons that the poet presses into service as his extras or supporting cast. The poem’s furnishings are those appropriated from the city’s Mission District and its environs during those fraught and fertile years, and it is from that place, those times, that Belner gathers all his colour, incident and character. It might be argued that without a close examination of such backgrounded material, our understanding of this work and what it represents must necessarily remain forever incomplete. Amongst the multitude of celebrants come to praise Caesar, it should be remembered that there is, nevertheless, important spadework waiting to be done.

  We do not, after all, define the Late Cretaceous as the Age of the Tyrannosaurus, recognising that the thing of interest is the whole environment which generated and supported this celebrity top predator. So, too, with art or literary movements, where, unless we would succumb to a ‘Great Man’ theory of history, we must acknowledge that no artist or creation can be properly considered without reference to the complex human systems that engendered both.

  This is especially the case with a phenomenon as fluid as Beat literature, where for a previously controversial view to be accepted as cultural heritage, it must be simplified into one comprehensible agenda; trimmed of its rough edges and its inconvenient trailing threads. In this simplification, much of any subject’s vital substance will be permanently excised and excluded. With Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, we are made justifiably aware of an exclusion of the female from that famous gang and its hard-up beatitude, but that should not obscure the many names redacted from the legendary roster on grounds other than their gender. The intent of this appreciation, therefore, is to re-include all those floor sweepings from the cultural cutting room, and in this way to present Harmon Belner’s most successful work fully contextualised and with the penetrating scrutiny it merits and deserves. Its hope, in short, is to succeed in casting light on light itself.

  American Light

  Born messy over Agua Vista Park the baby day kicked in my window,

  scaring piss-hard dreams away and drenching me in time. American light,

  up and at ’em,1 jostled surly with flushed fishermen on the Embarcadero,

  and slapped blear from powdered cheeks down Castro Street. He ran

  through traffic on James Lick and yelled ‘Tomorrow is relentless’2 as they squinted,

  swerving to avoid him, then set fire to the dead flowers heaped past Masonic.3 It was him

  smashed eggs across the Tenderloin, smooched dirty glass Madonnas in heartbroken churches

  and welcomed the night shift out of prison, clapping backs, warm and congratulatory. He

  bullied ruined men asleep in doorways, was first on the scene discovering dead bodies, dancing

  in awoken fountains, buttering babies, stretching cats, evaporating puddles

  just by looking at them, tempting sea-monkeys and turning overnight loves ugly. Checked

  himself in every shopfront rear-view mirror broken bottle hubcap passing stranger’s eyes, and

  skinny as a teenage burglar slipped in through the transom, climbed

  one at a time the stairs without a sound to make a glory of their dust, then tongued

  my lids to peach translucence, kissed clean of unconsciousness. Whorous, he trailed

  a finger long and bright through the igniting belly hair until I was all set,4 whence I

  retrieved the brain that had been hooked out through my nose5 and throwing

  off the Karloff-bandage bed sheets, in my resurrected flesh, I came forth into him.6

  American light sluiced from the TV; sheened glossy magazines; was always

  generous with boyfriends; stroked their profiles in dust-jacket photographs until

  the gleam attracted moths, flattering, fluttering white wings of onionskin, left

  glyphic corpses by the bedside lamp and nibbled holes in my best patience.7 Arm in

  arm I strolled with him into a Caledonian8 dawn, its bagpipe breeze beyond a doorstep

  coastally eroded by the lapping surf of pretty Micks broken against it.9 We barged out

  upon Nilotic morning to the plaint of thigh-bone car horns all along Van Ness, and turned

  heads in a Hopper diner on 16th, where he fell from the street on to my neck and shoulder, while

  I architectured hash browns into pyramids beneath the ketchup sun. He gestured

  always at the western lands10 beyond Guerrero and Dolores, where the dead

  roamed mute in Celtic twilight11 and on Prosper Street lamented absent shadows, raised black

  pints of porter to O’Siris, long since gone to pieces.12 But just then a

  bouquet of bruised roses bowled past towards studded Folsom, dragged the red half of my needle

  east behind them, and American light posed as a municipal employee, brushing

  sidewalks clean ahead of us before the trail went cold near 12th and Isis.13 Idling on the

  intersection he applied rear indicators stop signs eyes of dime-store skull rings like they

  were a lipstick and we went on, cornering at 10th then over Howard Mission Market unto

  Polk’s fell14 fundament where my fourteenth piece15 was too often found, too often lost.

  Transfixed I was on that defile, in mid-stride friezed, a side-seen pharaoh in intaglio stood

  sighting up the twelve hours of his seamy night at Foster’s Cafeteria,16 Restau hot for rant,17

  where once were zoo-browed gods at table: sunflower-headed Ra with slender consort,18 or

  dandy McCool all Finn-de-siècle,19 shaven yet forever troubled by his Beard,20 quite

  estimable if not for his would-BeBehan crew and wolf-eyed bride.21 And there amongst them,

  sparkling in spilled cola on Formica was American light,22 hung on every word, on every

  scribbled napkin, also upstairs at the Wentley leaning southerly in on LaVigne to flood his

  canvas,23 and across the street at Hotel Young on Fern while sol yearned pale through fog24 or else

  went down on the burned-rubber angel,25 who cracked wise, who flipped his monkey wrench, who

  finally ran out of road and pranks and heartbeats, boarded an ethereal train and left

  his lovely body by the trackside like forgotten luggage.26 Here, then, was death’s country, great

  stone heads in chiselled afterlife looming in reminiscence from rooms over half the shabby delis,

  gilt sarcophagi in all the bookstores, our illustrious cadavers, jewel-boned skeletons hung

  decoratively from the conversation and American light was their marrow. Shrugging reverie, I let

  him lead me, Market Street my aisle and ghosts the fabric of my wedding dress dragged after me,

  past gradually encroaching bums and rubbled movie houses where American light poured once from

  big silver faces on to smaller ones upturned,27 the hypnogogic drift of nations at the edge of

  sleep, and we processioned up to Kearney when St Patrick’s clock was striking ten.

  Should this horology fail to convince, assume I fucked a boy with every other

  stanza break.28 So, wiping-zipping-looking up on Kearney Street I saw the ugly inn of holidays

  wherein were hearts and feathers weighed, where towered American light unrepentant in the

  dock while Shig and Larry gnawed their thumbnails and the sun himself away in Mexico, in

  telepathic jungle, waited his foregone conclusion.29 Saw across the street on Washington pure koan

  Zen Nam Yuen, name where a restaurant wasn’t, Snyder’s one-hand-clap a finger snap as he chopped

  sticks, stuck chops with vanished Jack30 who typed a highway fading ribbon grey that

  ran to Florida and bottle-mom and nonsense about Vietnam, then the black jackal man.31 Saw,

  up on Jackson, Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory concealing fists in punchlines, Lenny Bruce with

  hungry eyes like blackened spoons, outside the hungry i, and such are the breath-taken

  show bills of eternity.32 Blue flame was in the holy lantern skulls hanging in

  backstreets right across the city and American light gushing from quizzical sockets, spilling

  poetry on hangovers, on love affairs, on tantrums, whiskey scribes bemoaning lost

  papyri,33 ‘Love Me Tender’ on a somewhere jukebox that hymned Memphis and the valley of the

  king. Saw, too, the ectoplasm of deceased hotel rooms on Columbus, Paradise kicking his

  shoes off, sleeping in a marinade of cars, of crockery, hep Negro script and Chinese

  lullaby.34 Crowned corpses shuffling after me, I trod a block just past the subway’s

  underworld mouth to Montgomery where I went up into a San Franciscan Book of Gone.

  I hauled all nine perspiring bodies of my soul35 through Sutter Bush Pine California Clay,

  beneath the tomb of interred Transamerica,36 and kept my dwindling khaibit37 to the left. Hawk with a

  human head, alert for capon, the heart’s spirit moved past Jackson,38 soaring on the

  torch-song updraft of a disappeared Black Cat, got trick-or-treated out of business 1963, still

  filled by spectres and conjectures, by fine drinkers, problem writers, Steinbeck in mid-

  werewolf-shift to Faulkner.39 Here, queer fountainhead, Stonewall not yet a course of

  brick, where Sarria padded out her falsie empire in a drizzle of dull Eisenhower, and

  kohl-eyed queens nursed vipers at pretended bosoms.40 O’er the way in onion-layers of purple

  history were carven profiles conga-lining midst the dust of decades: Garry Goodrow’s tragic

  grin and brothers smothering and blackbirds singing from their low-wage cage.41 Not far, up on the

  incline’s right, was drama by committee where fair McAllure had his barb busted for a bogus

  blow job, real ones in a dozen titty bars along the street,42 and first-night Fenians fawning on that

  eighth part of the self that is my name.43 With ab in mouth, with double at my heels and shadow

  trampled now below them,44 I climbed into apple-blue noon45 and, at Broadway, smacked by awe,

  kneeled speechless to behold 1010 Montgomery in where the undefeated sun46 squeezed an

  American light out from hypodermic saints madhouses cocksuckers, squeezed Moloch

  from the Francis Drake,47 squeezed from our blood-striped rag a starry howl, the ibis-word of Thoth,

  then, sacred with profanity, birthed in this hepcat land his language of the birds.48

  And with that wind of syntax at my back swelling my shirt-front sails, did I lean my

  trireme to port on Broadway, bound for Orient and its curled dragon rooftops in cascade down

  Powell and Stockton.49 Put in to the far shore of Columbus by its bubbling ferlinghetto of

  downtrodden paragraphs,50 where once in intermittent diamond rain I stood amongst a pantheon, with

  giant Bunford blocking out posterity;51 meanwhile American light, blind drunk and promiscuous,

  licked every other sainted face till they shone with his spittled phosphors. Here admirers sometimes,

  tetra-shoaled, to tug the sleeve or zipper if in luck in vogue in stock,52 but through its

  front pane now was only my reflection interesting, new, in an attention-grabbing

  jacket, who presided over the display’s headstone octavos, half transparent, a Beat essence in

  symbolic superimposition on that lexical necropolis.53 Self-edited from

  picture-window, I next loitered brief down alley through to Grant, pulp-dusted seam of gumshoe

  dream and there in my all-seeing private eye was Hammett-dashing, lighting cigarettes I don’t

  smoke behind upturned collars that I wasn’t wearing, and hot on some heartless mummy’s gilded

  case through the sand-blasted sockets of a city where the bigshots were all

  animals from the neck up, and everyone got taken for a ride by noir dogs in the end.54 Last-

  glancing down the backtrack crack, with Gee almighty rolling thunder at the Hibbing

  kid who sang for homesick subterraneans,55 I bore the jar that held my rumbling

  guts on to Vesuvio, that I might hazard pyroclastic flow and out-eat the devourer of the dead.56

  Ripe to a margin of solidity, tomato schists wore mozzarella pearls without compare and I

  wound pasta bandage-wraps about my fork to whip-quick flick cream beads of topaz on my

  constellated chin, then hot bread that bled butter, coffee custards, crystal wine

  astringent in the coated throat.57 Tables that echoed still North Beach Italian anarchists, fuse-eyed,

  denouncing Mussolini; Kerouac, boozed and confused, missing his dinner

  date with Henry Miller; Dylan Thomas in wet-run rehearsal for a Chelsea checkout and phantoms

  diaphanous of burly girlesque belles from down the block swelling Lenoir’s silk stocking

  flock.58 I, with a clavicle of alphabet, unlocked the mealtime mausolea and released their

  flavorous memories, American light winking lustful from my cutlery and dribbling down the

  goblet’s bulbous flank, shining approval on the sand-dance crypt-script in this

  notebook, on this golden Parker stylus when the mortal bill is squared. Replete, I came

  forth from that aromatic tomb by afternoon, prohibited names chiselled on its

  threshold there, with foremost this coast’s coarse Gregorian corsair and such of less

  note as Shameless O’Sullivan, bards barred eternal with their appellations O’Zymandias dust

  scuffed by my exit.59 Once, the solar centre of his naked, starving generation sat and wrote here in the

  twilight of his heterosexuality, waiting on girls who showed too late to bait him from queer

  fate with soulmate Saint Peter the Great60 and heaven’s gate swung open on bohemian Pentecost, and

  tongue fired with its sparks I cut back through to Grant, was down on Sutter Street before I knew.

  Past its meridian, the Beaten soul’s winged disc commenced descent, the movement of a

  movement into afterlife, hearts quivering in their balance against Maat-black vulture truth; shied by

  time’s random ape of judgement.61 Over Sutter, back in the before, stood a White House

  department store whereat the Driving Force gypped his off-road fiancée with a Woolworth’s five-

  and-dime engagement ring, caught later naked basking in the risen Sun or triangled to his most