Even if men were built of stone, they couldn’t live forever.

—Allen Ginsberg

I found this quote in an unpublished journal entry from 1963 when researching this essay on Ginsberg’s overlooked trip to Southeast Asia: beatdom.substack.com/p/…

It inspired the image I made below using a photo I took at Angkor Wat a few years ago. I was asked to give a talk about Ginsberg in Siem Reap during the covid days and managed to visit Angkor Wat when there were no tourists. It was a strange experience and resulted in many great photos.

Ginsberg of course wrote his long poem “Ankor (sic) Wat” but aside from that not a lot is known about his trip because he was at the end of a long journey around the world and seems to have been too tired to take photos, write letters, and produce long journal sketches of his environment. In any case, the essay I wrote is about the only information on his time here. I hoped to turn it into a short book but there simply wasn’t enough, even after a few years of digging.