A Supermarket in Chennai

A physical trip to the supermarket, a mental trip to the worlds and words of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, and a lot of pondering.

Source: Unsplash

Yesterday I went to the supermarket, after about a year of having not done so. My mom needed to pick up some emergency groceries and surprisingly allowed me to tag along. Social distancing is a lonely pastime, and at first, it was strange to wander along the aisles, peering from beneath my mask at rows upon rows of soap, deodorant, and my personal favourite, peppermint tea. Not until then did my year in solitude truly dawn on me, and the polished fruits and hordes of advertisements reminded me of a poem, by another personal favourite, Allen Ginsberg:

“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”

These lines are taken from the poem A Supermarket in California, which is from the book Howl and Other Poems, published in 1956. Although Ginsberg’s poems tend to be fairly incomprehensible to someone not intimately acquainted with the Beat Generation, A Supermarket in California tends to be an exception. The narrator, presumably Ginsberg, wanders through the streets at night, and overcome with hunger and exhaustion, enters a supermarket, where he is confronted by visions of Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca, poets he is known to have deeply admired.

He follows Whitman around the place, imagining the questions he would ask, the bewilderment he would feel at the opulent consumerism and the fact that shoppers seemed to not mind that they had no idea where their food came from. A hundred years before this imaginary tryst, in 1855, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book that much like Howl and Other Poems, was scandalous for its time. Like Arthur Miller once said,

“The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.”

I do not know if Whitman was ever embarrassed by his work. He was clearly never satisfied with it, and constantly reworked and rewrote bits and pieces, leading to six different published versions of the same book, in addition to different versions of certain poems in his manuscripts, uncovered upon his death. Ginsberg was never really abashed by his work and revelled in disrupting conventions and shocking polite society. He was, however, more popular in his lifetime than Whitman, who at times was unable to find employment due to his association with Leaves of Grass, upon whose front cover he never even printed his name.

Of course, now, Whitman has joined the likes of van Gogh, becoming immensely popular posthumously. Whitman is popularly called the “Father of Free Verse”, even though he was not the one who came up with it, though he was instrumental in popularising the form. And like a lot of great geniuses, he probably didn’t realise the depth of the impact and legacy he would be leaving behind him, brought to light through the following poem, No Labor-Saving Machine, widely regarded as a rare moment of humility for the poet:

“No labor-saving machine,

Nor discovery have I made;

Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found a hospital or library,

Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage, for America,

Nor literary success, nor intellect — nor book for the book-shelf;

Only a few carols, vibrating through the air, I leave,

For comrades and lovers.”

In the last lines of the poem, Whitman says he’s leaving behind his “carols” for like-minded people. It is interesting to wonder what he would have thought of Ginsberg. Perhaps, he would have thought it was fate that while he was born in New York and died in New Jersey, Ginsberg was born in New Jersey and died in New York — a physical embodiment of the themes of the cycle of life and death, of hope and rebirth, that he incorporated in his work.

Or, like the supermarket, he would have perhaps been bewildered at someone writing about having a vision of him shopping for bananas. Though no stranger to strange poems, he might have objected to being called a “lonely old grubber”. And though the aforementioned poem might have convinced you otherwise, Whitman certainly had an interesting social life. He received the likes of Oscar Wilde and Henry David Thoreau and corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was instrumental in giving him the courage to wade through the murky waters of unfair criticism he received on the publication of Leaves of Grass.

It is now 2021, and the world is certainly much different to how it was in the 1850s, or even the 1950s. To be perfectly honest, it does seem to be radically different from even a couple of years in the past. I don’t think it is my imagination that is at fault when I say I can’t even begin to imagine what the 2050s would be like. Will our screen sizes decrease even further, like the length of the poems we now find popular? Will we finally spread colonisation from the confines of the Earth to the outskirts of the solar system? Will the world have unleashed another dashing poet, to shock us all with their unorthodox and outlandish ideas? Are we even capable of being shocked anymore?

However, as I lug the grocery bag, woven of strips of different hues of blue, the bulk of it hitting my knees as I attempt to keep pace with my mom, excited to go home and unpack green apple-flavoured lollipops and write on the crisp pages of a new notebook, it is not questions that encompass the future of the universe that arrest my mind. Rather, my brain wanders to doubts about what my place in whatever the future holds would be.

We are on the cusp of great societal and environmental change, unprecedented in scope, unparalleled in scale, and wholly confusing and contradictory. As someone with a wide array of interests, most of them diverse, and not very interlinked, the future is a scary thing. When you are young, the possibilities are endless, as cliché as that sounds. You really believe you can be anything you want, whether it’s a ballet dancer, a baseball player, or even a space cowboy. As you grow older, the walls close in, and you end up not really having much of a choice.

And while that may seem disheartening, I think that may be the result of us already unconsciously knowing what we want to do, and eliminating other possibilities. After all, let’s be serious, there’s no way lassoing is possible without the confines of gravity. But I digress. Self-contemplation is important, but some things are just instinctive. I’m not too worried for myself. And even if it turns out that I’m not able to narrow it down, I think I’m okay with that. After all, as Walt Whitman once not-so-humbly wrote,

“I am large, I contain multitudes”.