Manic Mensch.

Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (HarperCollins, 512 pp., $30)

FOR half a century, Allen Ginsberg was at the vanguard of what could be called the Religious Far Left, combining Buddhism, radical politics, and psychedelic aesthetics. In the late 1940s, Ginsberg, a shy, nerdy Columbia undergraduate, hooked up with the dashing Jack Kerouac and his wild circle of literati, later to be baptized "the Beat writers." Kerouac, who introduced Ginsberg to Buddhism, put the disaffected youth of the '50s "on the road" and paved the way for the next generation of dissenters-the Hippies.

Once again, Ginsberg was there. Along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, he was at the spiritual center of the antiwar movement in the '60s and '70s, theatrically chanting Om at all the major demonstrations (he believed the mantra's vibrations would reduce violence). He also collaborated with Timothy Leary on LSD experiments and traveled to the jungles of South America to experience the ritual use of peyote.

Until his death in 1997, Ginsberg was integrally involved in the spread of Ameri can Buddhism, founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disem bodied Po etics at the Naropa Institute, the only accredited Buddhist university in the U.S. "He was like a bac chic/bard ic/Bud dhaic/Jud aic Gandhi," writes Ed ward Sanders in a forew0rd to this volume of Ginsberg's previously un collected essays. The black-and-white cover photo of Gins berg standing on a New York rooftop in 1953, a dreamy cityscape behind him, evokes both an era and the essence of the man. The Jewish "homosexual virgin" from Pat er son, N.J., wearing a white shirt and thick glasses, meets your eyes with a sad penetrating stare. He appears innocent and vulnerable, but also determined to express what he sees through those thick lenses.

Ginsberg lived a fascinating life, and these essays are like his intimate lost letters. Editor Bill Morgan has collected a diverse set of materials from a wide array of sources, including underground magazines, obscure avant-garde arts journals, and Ginsberg's copious drawers of unpublished material. He divides them by topic: Politics and Prophecies, Drug Culture, Mindfulness and Spirituality, Censorship and Sex Laws, Auto biographical Fragments, Literary Tech nique and the Beat Generation, and Writers.

Despite Morgan's efforts at coherent organization, Ginsberg's prose manifests the same free-associative process-the same manic flight of ideas-found in his poetry. This makes DeliberateProse riveting in places and difficult reading in others. Gins berg's rants against the repressive Ameri can "police state" have an undeniably paranoid tone that clearly goes over the line of rationality. He believed that there was a conspiracy to delimit man's consciousness, even comparing the plight of those using "mind expanding" drugs to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. In his "Independence Day Manifesto," he writes: "Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete."

It would be difficult for me, as a professor of psychiatry, to miss the strong hints of mental illness in these essays. Mental illness is part of Ginsberg's life story. His famous poem "Kaddish" is a conflicted memorial to his mother, whose psychotic episodes terrorized young Ginsberg. She died in an asylum, and Ginsberg himself spent eight months in a psychiatric institute. Read ing "Kaddish" or "Howl" with the eyeglasses of a mental-health professional, one suspects they represent the world's best-articulated manic experience.

In Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison presents impressive evidence that the majority of successful poets suffer from mental illness, especially manic-depressive disorder. Why do crazy people make the best poets? In their suffering, they touch a deep core of human experience that most of us gloss over, primarily because we can. Poets in their mania are flooded with a melange of images and associations that would never occur to the rest of us. Thus Ginsberg manages to be both crazy and deeply wise.

Of course, just because he was paranoid doesn't mean they weren't out to get him. Ginsberg's satiric description of his own declassified intelligence files, "What Six Nice People Found in the Government Drawers," serves to remind us that we once turned the power of the state against our own intelligentsia:

Customs has a note, from February 1970, that they caught me with pictures of "nude women in suggestive poses" in my suitcase. That was a copy of a Canadian underground newspaper in which I had some poetry . . . They [the FBI] wrote "Allen Ginsberg admits to using narcotics, having homosexual experiences and homosexual love affairs . . . He describes his background as Jewish, left wing, atheist, Russian" . . . In 1965 I had written a very brief letter in Jewish Currents . . . So there was a three page [FBI] document saying that Jewish Currents, formerly known as Jewish Life, is a communist front . . .

Ginsberg's dated, even demented radicalism might easily obscure his more subtle and profound psychological insight that everyday culture powerfully conditions our perceptions. This mental operating system, like Microsoft's monopolistic Windows, can homogenize our cognition and rob us of the ability to see the world as it is, with our true selves, in the present moment. Ginsberg is perpetually in search of this transcendent reality, and he is at his best when he shares his ecstatic sense of the esthetic, as in this previously unpublished description of beauty, where once again art, religion, and politics merge:

We've all seen beauty face to face, one time or other-and said "oh my god, of course, so that's what it's all about, no wonder I was born and had all those secret weird feelings!" May be it was a moment of instantaneous perfect stillness in some cowpatch in the Catskills when the trees suddenly came alive like a Van Gogh painting . . . At that moment you either kill your soul and go out and make money or you pick up on the fact for good that there's something alive behind the universe, that nobody, but nobody, has had the guts to meet . . . let's blow up America-a false America's been getting in the way of realization of beauty-let's all get high on the soul.

A gem of surprising contemporary significance is Ginsberg's 1966 plea to Congress for the decriminalization of drugs. His testimony poignantly articulates why the war on drugs is unwinnable: It is a holy war on both sides. Ginsberg discusses the role drugs played in his most intimate religious experiences and in opening creative depths within himself he otherwise would never have plumbed. He also reveals that the second part of his most famous poem, "Howl," was written under the influence of peyote and LSD. Here, in what must have been a remarkable scene, he describes to Congress one of his drug experiences:

Most of the day I spent in the backyard watching the cherry tree in bloom, and writing down my observations of the blue sky as seen through changed eyes-that day the openness of the sky seemed oddly like it was- a giant place in which I was on a planet. So this is an area of consciousness that psychedelic drugs bring to awareness . . . like the graceful appearance of the divine presence, as if a god suddenly made himself in my old weekly New York universe.

There are millions of middle-aged Americans, with good jobs and fat retirement accounts, who will tell you (out of earshot of the kids) that drugs enhance their creativity and their sense of the numinous. As long as a large number of Americans use hallucinogens to achieve an experience of the sacred, the war on drugs can only be won if America actually becomes the police state Ginsberg imagined it to be. In his crazy way he is pleading for the most American of values, the right to find God in your own way.

The last and longest section, "Writers," is largely composed of tributes to his friends. David Adox, writing in the New York Times, called them "insipid thank-you notes." At least he wrote thank-you notes. If nothing else, Ginsberg was by all accounts a mensch.

Ultimately we must be grateful to Bill Morgan for collecting these essays, most of which would have drifted into obscurity. More than political diatribes, they are a window into a slice of American social and literary history, the creative process, and the soul of a beautiful man.