A Certain Kind of Wizard (edited by Romy Ashby and photographer Ira Landgarten and published by Lithic Press) is available directly from them (https://www.lithicpress.com/index.php/our-catalog/143-a-certain-kind-of-wizard), or, alternatively, from the Golda Foundation ( https://goldafoundation.org/about/a-certain-kind-of-wizard/)
I was thrilled to receive my copy of A Certain Kind of Wizard directly from Tate Swindell, a diligent poet, archivist, photographer, and editor who recently co-edited the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books (2019) with Raymond Foye.
A Certain Kind of Wizard is an ingenious work that vividly expresses the unconditional love and reverence that many confidantes, close companions, and fellow artists had for such a perspicacious, consummate artist streetwise enough to scrape by wherever the sole of his foot trod. A great deal of deserved affection, admiration, unpretentious appreciation, and esteem has been invested in this book with the sole purpose of breathing new life into precious writings by Ira Cohen scattered in different magazines, reviews, journals, anthologies, and books that have long been out of print.
Without a doubt, Ira Cohen is a rara avis: he was a mesmerizing performer, a poet, a hipster, a publisher, a photographer, a raconteur, a filmmaker, a collage artist, a magazine editor, a scholar of hermetism and cabbala, an actor, a magician, a jazz aficionado, a drug connoisseur, a spiritual seeker, a mystical freethinker, and more. In fact, Cohen spent more time globetrotting than any other pioneers of the Beat Generation or the counterculture movement with the exception of course of Allen Ginsberg who, according to David S. Wills, visited 65 countries. His wanderings were extensive and he endeavored to establish lasting relationships both with the local laymen and literati as he did in Kathmandu “where it was not difficult to believe that, as long as we remained, we would stay young forever writing poems…”
Cohen roamed the streets of Tangier around the same time as Allen Ginsberg, and he got there on board the same Yugoslavian freighter that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky traveled on. Gregory Corso joined the clan later. In Tangier, he met William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, and others in the Moroccan expat community. Thus, Cohen is a significant figure in the history of literature, cultural studies, music, and arts, and his adventures and pilgrimages in all the four corners of the globe, not to mention his rich life experiences, transcend any pigeonholing.
A Certain Kind of Wizard is undeniably an inexhaustible minefield that harbors the best of literary and artistic treasures from the vaults of Ira Cohen. It is a timely book for the simple reason that Ira Cohen has always been understudied, not only by strictly conforming academics, but also amongst those who specialize in what came to be known as countercultural literature and movements. Strangely enough and for no clear reasons, one does not come across Ira Cohen or his works when one peruses counterculture reading lists despite the fact that he was deeply immersed in the scene around the same time as the Beats. One does not find him on lists that otherwise include the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Neal Cassady, Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, and Abbie Hoffman.
A Certain Kind of Wizard is a project in self-discovery, or rather a review of a riveting lifetime through different literary lenses. The self here is that of Ira Cohen, but it also indirectly connects with and includes many of us—aficionados of free-spirited writers and artists—for the otherness of other people is an extension of the otherness of our egos. As a native of Morocco, I am intrigued by Cohen’s sense of rapprochement (not that he had any ancient rivals or serious feuds to fix), by his sense of engagement with different cultures and peoples, and by his readiness to embrace their incongruities, oddities, and eccentricities without any prejudgments. Through Cohen’s vivid depictions and memories, Moroccans can reconcile with their subjectivities, practices, and aspects of their culture that they strive scrupulously to eradicate under the guise of modernity or censorship that they unconsciously impose on themselves. Cohen’s writings are lavishly suffused with an expert witness’s witticisms on the aspects and practices of Moroccan culture that have long been undermined or shunned by the natives due to a rampant sense of shame and disgrace.
The book evokes Cohen’s travels in North Africa, more specifically Tangier and Marrakesh, with a great deal of admiration and appreciation, enthralling us to wish nostalgically for the revival of cherished customs and traditions undermined by the introduction of cheap mechanically industrialized forms of entertainment. Here in this excerpt Cohen describes daily life in the famous square of Djemaa El Fna:
Once in Marrakech I remember a gold-turbaned storyteller sitting on a faded rug from which the beauties of the hammam looked out. He flips sheets of colored papers—Noah’s ark loaded with golden lions, ibis, jeweled serpents, pink stallions, swords cleaving heads in two, blood dripping red all over onto the ground. Eggs materialize in thin air. Everyone has eyes. An Arab midget does a trance dance to ouds, drums and flutes: whirls, stumbles drunkenly and falls down. A crowd begins to gather around the storyteller as the sun sinks below the horizon and the red city of Marrakech is glowing like an ember. The white-humped Atlas holds up the sky like a great carnival tent and all around there is the bustle of people at twilight on their way home through a sea of Ganaouas, monkeys, pickpockets, sailing corpses, scattered teeth, 738 bicycles threading the eye of a needle, coming out on the other side, which is Marrakech .
When it comes to the controversial issue of drugs and the demonization to which they have been subjected through concerted campaigns to justify their prohibition, Cohen is an unrivaled expert. Long before the legalization of drugs and approval of their use for recreation and medical purposes, Cohen considered drugs a means for enhancing one’s consciousness and altering one’s perception of reality to connect with the divine. He quotes the greatest Sufi poet Jalal al Din Rumi, who said in one of his poems, “Let us not take opium tonight!” to solidify his claim that “there’s a certain attraction in the most subtle forms of the religious expression on the mystical side which is connected with smoking; in order to elevate spiritual consciousness.” When he was in Tangier Cohen ate majoun, a traditional cannabis-infused confection, and smoked a great deal of Hashish, which is similar to the charas smoked by Indians. In his view, majoun is for the Sufis a symbol of mystical knowledge that reveals the essential harmony of the universe. He even wrote a Hashish cookbook with his then-girlfriend Rosalind. Cohen is more knowledgeable about the local concoctions of herbal drugs than many of his peers and he seems to know where the best quality is to be sought in Morocco: “Getting together the perfect majoon in Morocco would take you on a tour of the whole country to find the best of each ingredient—Taroudant for the gold bug, the mountain caves of Xauen for 75-year-old honey, the magic shops of Marrakech for jduq jmel (small black seeds probably containing scopolamine), the Sahara for its specially strong gouza, or nutmeg.”
Cohen is looking for the connecting thread between all the civilizations by referring to the organic elements in every culture, elements that foster consecration, a distinctive feature of the human species, instead of desecration, which he believes is the ultimate endeavor of all the Western civilizations. Through grass, Cohen made his way to the spiritual realms of Hinduism, Islam, the Zohar, Cabbala, and mysticism, which he finds much more “interesting than [those of] the everyday orthodox believers […] Religion without marijuana is like sex without love.” Such a turn in Cohen’s life represents an outlet towards ecological awareness and more communal survival that defies restricted forms of living in a mainstream capitalist society.
Drugs were not the only temptation that drew Ira Cohen to Eastern cultures. He was interested in the Sufi spiritual traditions of the East in general, which represented for him an alternative to the orthodox puritan belief systems rampant in the West. In Morocco, he was profoundly immersed in research about different mystical Zawiyas constituting the spiritual fabric of the country, mainly Jilala, Derkawa, Aissaoua, and Gnaoua. What intrigued him more was the permeating spiritual energy and the therapeutic potential of these Sufi mystical brotherhoods. The Jilala, Cohen proclaims, “are particularly useful in curing cases of epilepsy and hysteria, controlling the spirits or demons in possession of the subject through their music and the ritualized gestures of the dance. But mainly the dances are dances of exaltation.” To celebrate his friend Brion Gysin’s return from Paris sometime around 1965, he invited Jilala, as he did one with the Gnaoua, to perform “their trance rituals for small groups of friends, which included on occasion the surrealist poet Édouard Roditi, who told stories of his encounters with Federico Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane, Susan Sontag who arrived from New York to visit Paul and Jane Bowles, Alfred Chester who dropped in early one day when Targuisti was skinning a sheep before a night of trance music.” Later, he even put a record of Jilala music with the help of Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles.
What blew Cohen’s mind is the fact that there seems to be an intricate connection between grass and the possibility of expanding one’s consciousness for an ultimate connection with the divine. Cohen affirms, “these people are all smokers. If you would really trace that tradition, the esoteric tradition and alchemical side of literature, I think you will find a very special line and brotherhood of smokers that goes all through history, a kind of Dervish order unbroken to this day.” On the other hand, Ganaoua, which refers to the sub-Saharan music played originally by slaves brought to Morocco in camel bags, has also been at the center of Cohen’s interest in Sufi brotherhood for its exorcistic capacities. It inspired him sometime between 1963-64 to release a magazine by the same name which published selections from Nova Express, Brion Gysin’s Rites of Pan, Harold Norse’s great erotic poems, and work by Michael McClure and Irving Rosenthal.
Again, Cohen was ahead of his time in recognizing the importance of these forms of spiritual music and helped to bring them to a larger international audience, starting with his fellow artist Angus MacLise, the first drummer of the Velvet Underground. About that memorable experience of his musical crusades, Cohen reminisces:
Now as I write these words, the music of the Jilala and the Gnaoua as well as the music of Joujouka have become well known all over Europe and America, and it is not unusual to find groups of these Moroccan musicians in all the music capitals of the world. Thirty years later, I find myself reading poetry and performing in New York City at The Cooler with Hassan Hakmoun playing gimbri and showing him a rare copy of Gnaoua with the English translation of a song about how the Gnaoua were brought to Morocco from the Sahara as children by the Larobia in camel bags and how they were anointed in the name of the Prophet with jasmine and orange blossoms. When I sent copies of Gnaoua to Allen Ginsberg, who had also contributed to the issue while he was in India, he sent one to Bob Dylan and you can see on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home; his copy of the magazine sitting on the center of the mantelpiece.
I wrote the virtuoso of Gnaoua music, Hassan Hakmoun, sending him the previous excerpt, asking him about his past collaborations with Cohen. Hakmoun responded with a great deal of love, gratitude, and cherishment:
I just got a chance to look at this beautiful article you sent. It was a family to me. We have done so many shows together when he read his poem might perform with me, my band and we have done so much especially late 80s and early 90s, and we have done different performances together. He’s a great, great brother. Thank you for sharing. God bless you.
In India, Cohen had the same spiritual pursuits, which he believed were central to his attempts to understand the human condition and its expression through artistic creativity. He elaborates: “the Shaivites of India—the followers of Shiva—were the most interesting to me. I have even a Shaivite name because I went with the Ananda Akhara, which is a Naga order; through many Kumbh Mela celebrations, […] I spent some time with the Nagas without becoming formally a Naga. I was living myself as a complicated, multi-layered, contemporary head.” Yet, Cohen was not someone who sought to become a sadhu: “I wasn’t so interested in walking around naked covered in ashes for the rest of my life, standing on one leg for 24 years.” He was more fascinated by the “spiritual inspiration” which he contends to be rudimentary for the artistic expression. Cohen asserts: “a poem without any underpinnings of spiritual inspiration or awareness is not a poem at all to me, nor is any work of art. It’s a fundamental prerequisite, even for electronic music.”
I could endlessly digress talking about Ira Cohen as indeed his life, as Nina Zivancevic contends, resembles “ a well-kept, illuminated manuscript that consists of many internally and externally sparkling events, mythical voyages, and legendary encounters that afford him the real and poetic privilege of calling each and every important artistic and literary figure of the second half of the 20th century by his or her first name.” He is “the real thing” as the Japanese humbly told him upon his visit to their country. He is the psychedelic photographer whose work, most notably his experimental project called the “Mylar Chamber Images,” has been used extensively in various artistic productions and venues. Some of the friends whose pictures were turned into psychedelic visual experimentations included Jimi Hendrix, Jack Smith, William S. Burroughs, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. He is made of a multitude of peoples and cultures that unceasingly inform his creative work and conception of the human condition. Ira Cohen is indeed a certain kind of wizard.
