Ginsberg in the 60's Interview with Allen Ginsberg By Simon Albury, June 3, 1986 Taken from Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, pages 452-468, edited by David Carter. The following interview is one interview taken from Spontaneous Mind, edited by David Carter and is among many others in a 595 page book. This interview talks about Haight-Ashury, the 1967 human Be-in, Zen Buddhism, the 50's Beat Movement and Kerouac, the City Lights poets - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure (Actually you have to read the book for more on that), the 60's Psychedelic Movement, drugs as a catalyst to higher awareness and it's corollary of emptiness of "love," "peace," free from control, power and aggression, against the Vietnam war and the control-power of warlike government composed of fundamentalism and authoritarianism. This is not outdated at all. There's a lot of relevant information here that pertains to our time era, which really needs to be rediscovered. The entire book is filled with scores of other interviews which are very diverse. - Richard Schwartz This interview was done in Orono, Maine, as research for a Granada Television documentary Sargeant Pepper – It Was Twenty Years Ago Today about the Beatles’ masterpiece and the Summer of Love. The interview took place while Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Robert Creeley were teaching for poet and scholar Carroll Terrell at the University of Maine, Orono. The interviews were conducted in three sessions on June 2 and on Allen’s sixtieth birthday, June 3. The tape from the June 2 interview has not survived.* Simon Albury had known Allen since 1964, when he organized a reading that featured Allen and Peter Orlovsky at Brandeis University. Over the years they remained friends, and Simon helped to organized readings whenever Allen went to London. Albury was among the contacts Allen used to assist him in researching the CIA’s involvement in heroin trafficking. The interview was transcribed by the current editor. – David Carter * Although the tape of the June 2 interview is lost, Albury did transcribe from the interview some of Allen’s quotes on Sargeant Pepper: “There was this element of adolescence opening up and discovering the universe. There was an individual life in the life of Friendship or imagination that was cheerful and uplifted or humane with some rediscovery of humor. “After the apocalypse of Hitler and the apocalypse of the Bomb, there was here (in Sergeant Pepper) an exclamation of joy, the rediscovery of joy and what it is to be alive. They showed an awareness that we make up our own fate, and they have decided to make a cheerful fate. They have decide to be generous to Lovely Rita, or to be generous to Sergeant Pepper himself, turn him from an authority figure to a figure of comic humor, a vaudeville turn. “Remember, this was in the midst of the sixties, it was 1967 when some of the wilder and crazier radicals were saying “Kill The Pigs.” They were saying the opposite about old Sergeant Pepper. In fact the Beatles themselves were dressing up in uniforms, but associating themselves with good old time vaudeville authority rather than sneaky CIA, KGB, MI5, or whatever. It was actually a cheerful look round the world. . for the first teem, I would say, on a mass scale. “They were giving an example around the world that guys can be friends. They had and conveyed, a realization that the world and human consciousness had to change.” Simon Albury: Some people think that the Be-in was largely (Timothy) Leary’s event. Allen Ginsberg: No, not at all. He was our guest. It was an even that he attended, but the organization and the promotion was mostly Gary Snyder and the Haight Ashbury group. If you read Jane Kramer’s book* there is considerable discussion about how much time we would allot to Leary, and whether he should be considered a politician, a spiritual leader, or a poet, and I urge that he be considered a word man, a poet, so given the time accorded to the rest of the poets. There was a long discussion of that in Michael Bowen’s house with Snyder and myself and Ron Thelin and the people who were planning it. SA: Were you living there then? AG: At the time I was visiting for about half a year. I had an apartment in the Haight Ashbury. SA: So the Be-in was an event that was built around acid? AG: No, not altogether. Part of it is acid, part of it is spirituality, part is a ten years or so after the Beat Generation San Francisco Poetic Renaissance, because it was the ground for all that to grow. Because we were sort of the fathers of that scene we were invited to be the masters of ceremony and the speakers to open it and close it. The poets opened it and closed it with a little ceremony, and then in the afternoon Snyder and I did the circumambulation and then it ended with me asking everybody to do kitchen yoga and clean up the park, and then changing Om Sri Maitreya as the sun set. You’ll find some of that in Kramer’s book* and the other in the book by . . . it was the Rolling Stone guy. . Perry! * *Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York Vintage, 1970). *Charles Perry, The Haight Ashbury (1984). AG: Now the Diggers were using Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder and myself and others in sort of the theoreticians and prophets of the situation for the Diggers and Haight Ashbury scene. The Oracle, which was the newspaper, was looking to Alan Watts and Leary and myself and Snyder as the sort of wise elders to have a conference afterwards, and they published this complete conversation that took place on Watts’s houseboat. The whole notion of the Be-in was a Snyderesque meditation: be-in rather than a sit-in, to merely be there, like “be here now.” I think it was a psychedelic thing, but with the input of the imagination of the poets and Zen mediation. Suzuki Roshi was the first great teaching Zen master in America who established a meditation hall, although there had been others since the world Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago. D.T. Suzuki was also there as well others. He was there when I first came in ’58 and worked in rapport with Joanne Kyger and many of the people that Chogyam Trungpa now teaches and Gary Snyder and Diane DiPrima were old members of the Zen Center. SA: To what extent was the San Francisco thing really about acid more than anything else? AG: It was a public surfacing of acid in the set and setting* of the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation and literary movement and poetic imagination that emerged from 1955 on in San Francisco with City Lights and with the ecology movement. And that was spearheaded by Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, the ecological notion, the notion of a Be-in to begin with, the notion of an art newspaper featuring poetry and featuring the On The Road generation philosophers and poets. And the Be-in itself was planned and coordinated by artists and poets: Ron Thelin was the business men who didn’t want to be a commercial businessman, the Diggers who emerged around that time, the Hells angels brought in by Ken Kesey and his troupe,* who had been some of the promoters of acid, after all, but Kesey the novelist and his Merry Pranksters was again poetic imagination.* * ”Set-and-Setting” was the title of a presentation given by Timothy Leary at a 1962 American Psychological Association conference. * The San Francisco Mime Troupe – a radical play group that had been cited for performing in Golden Gate Park, Bill Graham organized a benefit to pay for their defense. See Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock and Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild, by Joel Selvin (New York: Plume Books, 1995) and Peter Coyote’s (once a member of the Troupe) Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 1998). * See Tome Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) The formulators of the actual people on the stage were a committee of Thelin, myself, Snyder, Michael Bowen, and Allen Cohen of the Oracle who is also a poet. We were the ones who decided who would have a place to speak and how long they would speak and who invited Suzuki Roshi to sit on the platform and join us. And he did, which Snyder thought was quite a historical event because it’s very rare for the Zen people to come out into large crowds, for they generally were withdrawn into their meditation hall and taught in small groups. So the set and the setting was determined by the poets, the catalyst was acid, the ground was established by the San Francisco Renaissance and the whole Beat movement of ’58 and Beatitude magazine and City Lights and all the poetry activity. The first activities by Bill Graham featured the poets in the mind-food benefit as among the major attraction that opened and closed and gave dignity to the whole benefit in a kind of spiritual direction. What I’m pointing out is that the imaginative and spiritual direction of ’67 in San Francisco was a great deal the creation of the poets. And one of the great culture heroes was Antonin Artaud of the supremacy of the imagination. The levitation of the Pentagon was a further extension of Gary Snyder’s conception of the Be-in and an outgrowth of our circumambulation of the Meadow. SA: The Merry Pranksters and Kesey, what was positive about them? AG: Well, first of all they didn’t reject the American flag but instead washed it and took it back form the neoconservatives and right wingers and war hawks who were wrapping themselves in the flag, so Kesey painted the flag on his sneakers and had a little flag in his teeth filling. Actually his Merry Pranksters were Korean War veterans, Ken Babbs among them, who were sort of like big macho Americanists. And it was an Americanist movement to regain the old American tradition of Prankster, Voyager, Explorer, Davy Crockett, individual enterprise can-do, but can-do in a peaceful rather than in a warlike way. Family-oriented, Kesey coming from a big family and the gatherings being at La Honda at his family home, so it was an extended family notion. There was also the idea of humour and art being the basis for political gatherings and the Acid Tests. * Humour and daring and adventureness rather than paranoia and fear, cutting through paranoia, and we’re going right into the paranoia and seeing its emptiness. On a political level in ’64 Neal Cassady, who was the hero of the earlier Beat thing, drove Kesey’s bus cross-country during the Goldwater-Johnson presidential campaign with a slogan painted on the bus, “A vote for Goldwater is a vote for fun.” * and went thought Texas and all through the South with that slogan, exploding the whole serious hawk and war issues. It was Kesey also who had turned the Hells’ Angels onto acid and warded off their attack on the 1965 peace march that Jerry Rubin, Snyder, myself, and others participated in, * as distinct from the heavy political people whose ground was that this is the last conflict with black-shirted fascists and we should attack them with chains instead of having a flower power march as a demonstration as theater. So he had a good idea of public theatre. * See Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. (New York: Grove Press, 1985). * Barry Goldwater, an ultraconservative Republican and Arizona senator, was the Republican candidate against incumbent President Johnson. He took a harsh stance against the Soviet Union and opposed any arms-control negotiations. Many feared his extreme anticommunist stance might cause a war with the Soviet Union. * Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin, heading the Vietnam Day Committee, planned a series of marches from Berkeley to Oakland protesting the draft and the Vietnam War. Ginsberg and Gary Snyder participated in the first October march changing mantras to calm the protesters. The police and Hell’s Angels seemed inevitable. Ginsberg offered advice in the form of a handbill titled “How to make a March Spectacle” (see Deliberate Prose, New York: Harper Collins, 2000). SA: Was flower power all about theatre? AG: Oh, yeah. About ’67, sticking the flower into the barrel of the Pentagon gun during the levitation, * and flower power actually meant the power of green, growth, and ecology. It was planet news, so to speak, for an ecological statement. It didn’t mean idiot sentimentality, it meant the basic power of matriarchy, the feminine, Mother Earth, vulnerability, and the vulnerability of the earth itself, and also the long-lasting strength. And a lot of the influence, brought in to some extent by Snyder and the anthropological poets, was American Indian, the headbands and ponytails of the Indians. Then there was also the added influence of oriental thought, both Japanese and Indian, Buddhist and Hindu. The Hindu iconography was very powerful in the Oracle, like the Be-in issue had a giant poster of a Saivite sadhu smoking grass so it was a confluence of grass, psychedelics, and Eastern Indian and American Indian peyote ceremony that was influential on the style of dress and demeanor and earth thinking. * The Pentagon Levitation. On October 26, 1967, tens of thousands joined in a march on the Pentagon. Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, of the avant-garde rock group the Fugs, and many protesters performed the Pentagon exorcism for which Ginsberg provided the text titled “No Taxation Without Representation.” The event is described in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night: History as a Novel. The Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968). SA: Where do the East Indian traditions fit in to what was happening in 1967? AG: First of all, on a very basic level, you have the notion from Plato, “when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake” *: if you remember around the middle of the 1960’s, Charlie Mingus and Ornette Coleman began experimenting with monochordal music and began listening to Indian music. It was also about the same time that the Hare Krishna movement settled in the Lower East Side where I was working with them for a while and then settled with Prabhupad (A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami) in San Francisco right after the Be-in in Haight Ashbury. Prabhupad was living there for some time, right off Haight Ashbury on Frederick street, I think. Then there was the singing in the street of the Hare Krishna people, the part of the street action or the notion of the street: street-fighting man or street smarts or street people. There had been that early in ’64. * Annotated Howl erroneously attributes this quotation to Pythagoras. Nineteen sixty-two, ’63, ’64, there had been a trip that Gary, Peter, Joanne Kyger, and I took to India which got to be sort of a catalyst for a whole migration across. Especially when the media picked up on it and Esquire had a big cover story. There was a fake Allen Ginsberg with a beard. I don’t know if you remember that? Esquire Throws a Party.” They had this cover where this guy in an Indian cloth looking like me is with a pretty girl model saying, “Oh, Mr. Ginsberg, how mice of you to come all the way from India to join our party.” That was on the cover and apparently a lot of people read about India that way. So that was also the beginning of the transcontinental hegira to India where people were trying to get free or legal hash and grass. So it was partly a psychedelic and partly a spiritual search. And then a lot of that was in the poetry form the late fifties on, Snyder’s and my own. Also the notion of loose, light clothes that allowed sexual freedom to the genitals, of paisley and cashmere, like cashmere shawls. The organic flower-power paisley design had sperm symbolism in it, combining erotic, spiritual, and ecological. A whole new style of long loose shirts and pajama pants came out of that. That was partly the work of Mrs. Pupul Jayakar who was the head of the Home Industries in India, with whom Snyder and I stayed, and we advised her to try and open up shops to sell the Gandhi Khadi cloth* in the West, which she did. So the Indian handcraft industries began seeing an opportunity to transfer both music and dress and styles and statues commercially to the West. That begins around 1964. * Homespun coarse cotton cloth made in India. SA: But what particular quality did the Indian influence lend to the summer of ’67 besides the dress? AG: In regard to the use of kif, grass, ganja? The religious background and heritage: the sacred us of soma* and the divine herbs, and grass is one of them. It influenced the whole set The approach towards psychedelics which Leary had already adapted in The Tibetan Book of the Dead style – we had The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide by 1960- changed. India had a big influence in music when Ravi Shankar and Ali Akhar Khan became notable in the West and began influencing Western jazz. In fact, there was like this fusion for a while so that if entered into the Beatles’ music even. Of course in terms of poetics I brought up Dylan’s influence, which is more powerful, because that was the text everybody was listening to from ’65 on. And that’s in a lineage from Kerouac, according to Dylan. * In Hindu mythology and ancient Indian cult worship, soma is a powerful elixir of the gods. See Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality by Robert Gordon Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson On Soma: And Daniel H.H. Ingalls’ Response (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1971) Other Indian influences were the notion of polytheism rather than the fixed Christian monotheism of the West, the entry of animism and polytheism and different American Indian as well as East Indian religious notions along with vegetarianism and the growth of Indian restaurants in the United States and the switch of diet from the heavy meat-eating Texas war diet of aggressive meat filled with adrenaline of frightened animals. You have a change of music, change of diet, change of clothing style, change of religion, a change of recreational drugs, all influenced by East India and American Indian: all that relating to a notion of the world is one consciousness: one world, fresh planet. And the phrase “fresh planet,” introduced around that time, was Gary Snyder’s. I think it evolved from “fresh planet” to “planet news” to “planet waves.” There was the practice of meditation in many forms, whether the mantra chanting which related to the music or mantra chanting which related to mediation, or actually sitting meditation practice which was then beginning to get very powerful in San Francisco as indicated by Suzuki Roshi’s presence and the respect accorded him in his presence on the Be-in scene, and that’s something that had been cultivated for a long time from Kerouac on through Snyder: Dharma Bums. In 1967 the notion of mantra and meditation had arrived in London so that, around the time I left, the Beatles had encountered Maharishi (Mahesh Yogi) in ’67 and whole notion of rock and roll as a spiritual message, as a mental trip, as a singers, bards, and minstrels, which, translated in modern terms, would be the minstrel show or the variety show or vaudeville or Sargeant Pepper Making use of the vaudeville tradition for hermetic messages or psychological messages. And just at that time or just before that time the Birch Society and the neoconservatives in the West and the old Stalinist Marxists in Eastern Europe began attacking rock and roll and reacting against it as a youth movement which was anti-state, antiauthoritarian, anti-heavy metal science, and pro-ecology. SA: How important were marijuana and acid to what happened in 1967? Really, are they the key to understanding what happened? AG: I think they’re a key in that they were a catalyst to a change of consciousness, a deconditioning from the old authoritarian work consciousness cultivated by the Vietnam militarization, a deconditioning from the authority of the government and all apparent realty, catalyzing a reconsideration of what was real and what was unreal, what was illusory and what was hallucination and what was eternal and what was perennial: nature versus hyperindustrialized civilization. The same struggle that William Blake had from the very beginning when he said, “remove those dark satanic mills” or when he referred to “dark satanic mills” as “the dark satanic mills of the mind” as well as the industrial mills that were blackening the English landscape. So Blake was a key reference there, even in the use of drugs. But what’s important is the imaginative set and setting in the taking of the drugs, considering the drugs as a deconditioning agent as William Burroughs would call it, or as a glimpse of Eden or a glimpse of the natural state of mind before the authority of Jehovah and the governments intervened, was the setting: the use of drugs for spiritual search. And the use of drugs for imaginative expansion and the use of drugs for reconsideration of the authority of the state. But those thoughts, those considerations, were first proposed by the poets, from Blake through Rimbaud and Artaud up through the San Francisco poets who introduced the notions of sacred use of drugs and sacred spiritual search and return to nature and deindustrialization and appropriate technology and modern city as Moloch. So, to the extent that the psychedelic trip depends on the set and setting, I would say that the drugs were the catalysts but the actual setting and ground was the poetic and spiritual imagination of the artists of the state. And drugs, particularly marijuana, played a very important role in this way: that since the government with its authority announced that marijuana drives you mad and since by the early sixties a huge percent of the population had gotten high on marijuana they saw that the government cover story was not real but was a hallucination publicly spread by the government, and that the actual experience was different from the government’s story and therefore people began thinking, “Well, if the government’s story on drugs is inaccurate and inflated, than what’s their story on money?” So the notion of free money and the diggers came up. “But what’s their notion of the war in Vietnam?” That could be an equally large misconception of the world: “What’s their story on the military? What’s the government’s story on almost everything in the government? What is government authority?” And that’s what led to the levitation of the Pentagon notion a demystification of the authority of the t Government, catalyzed by the direct sensory experience, not the ideological experience but the direct sensory experience of a state of mind that was slightly more sensitized and perceptive with marijuana and amplification of sensory input, let us say, compared to the government notion of hallucinatory distortion psychosis and frothing dogs mad in Algeria. So it played a large part in the direct experiential demystification of the authority of the state on some of the most sacred subjects home, family, dope, dope fiends. So fiends, unafraid of the terminology and taking it with a sense of humour. In fact, they talked about themselves as freaks, like a reversal of values. However, all that still depends on the whole generation reinterpreting history. As Charles Olson announced at the Berkeley Poetry Conference*, history is over: this is a post-historical period, a field open to reinterpretation, no longer closed down by the old dog-eat-dog military imperial policy, which is an echo of Einstein’s original statement that the absolute nature of the bomb would have to make man reconsider his values and his consciousness and his whole frame of mind. * At this contemporary poetry conference in July 1965, many of the most important young poets of the time attended, including Creeley, Olson, Duncan, Wieners, and Snyder. So it’s the set and setting that determines the direction of the psychedelic trip. And in fact the hippie era is criticized now by hindsight for having an idealistic set and setting which set the whole generation on the wrong run to an idealistic nature movement: instead of taking over the reigns of power, it renounced power: turning on, tuning in, and dropping out rather than turning on, tuning in, and dropping in. So the hippie movement is criticized for an inadequate historical grasp of the power of bureaucracy and military and state, an inadequate grasp of its rootedness, and an inadequate grasp of that rootedness in the family. SA: Some people feel that the hippie movement lost its momentum. At the of 1967 there was a ceremonial death of the hippie. AG: That was because that media had taken over the hippie movement and distorted it into a Frankenstein as they had done ten years earlier with the Beat movement, turned the poets into the television image of Dobie Gillis* , who was some kind of humbling, likable fool who couldn’t get his life straight and was like the family black sheep, and that was the image spread on television and in radio soap opera series. So Thelin and the Diggers, who had ideas of a more free society, said the only way to do that is to have the hippies bury the hippie movement so that the media could not exploit it any longer. * The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was a television sitcom featuring the cliché beat character, played by Bob Denver. SA: How was the media exploiting it? AG: By exaggerating the sensationalist aspect, pushing for illegalizing LSD, and taking fake stories like the Sergeant Jeffrey McDonald’s family was murdered by a band of hippies marching around the room saying “kill the pigs” when McDonald himself had murdered his family: by playing up the horror stories and creating another setting which was one of hallucination, horror, and violence: by later using the Manson Family* as symbolic of the hippie psychedelic movement rather than the more grounded audio engineers who were creating a new music. Also simply sensationalizing the hippie movement, like there was a Life magazine cover that showed somebody in the throes of some awful swirling photo montage hallucination that had no relation to the microscopic clarity of possible trip but emphasized instead madness and murder. * See Ed Sander’s The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (New York: Avon, 1972) SA: But there was some madness and murder which . . . AG: yes, there was, but very little compared to what was going on in Vietnam, for one thing. Very much a reflection of some of the social stress, like Manson himself was not exactly a left-wind hippie, he was anti-Negro. He thought there was going to be a massacre of Negroes if necessary. It was like an inversion of that. And the media grabbed onto that and Altamont* as a way of burying the hippie movement, I think. The government certainly did. But it was more like hyping the more garish and the least spiritual aspects and de-emphasizing the artistic and spiritual accomplishments. * Often called ‘the end of the sixties,” the December 1969 free music festival held on the heels of Woodstock at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco went bad when the Hell’s Angels, hired by the Rolling Stones as concert security, turned on the crowd. In an altercation, one man who approached the stage with a gun was killed and many others were brutalized. The Rolling Stones segment of the concert was filmed and released as Gimme Shelter. SA: Looking at it today, what remains from 1967 and that spirit? AG: There is a permanent change in civilized consciousness so that it includes the notion of one world, fresh planet, the awareness of the fragility of the planet as an ecological unity, the absorption of psychedelic styles in dress and music into the body politic, the sexual liberation movement, all of those slight, affirmative, permanent alterations in all lifestyles. I think also a permanent change in awareness remember, the notion of Armageddon apocalypse before the sixties was considered eccentric, whereas now as a possibility it’s a universal awareness. In Einstein’s time in the forties it was only glimpsed by geniuses who knew the implications of the bomb, or geniuses who knew the implications of acid, or geniuses who knew the implication of the union of Eastern and Western consciousness. So, as Jack Kerouac said back in 1960, walking on water wasn’t built in a day. I think there was a glimpse of possibility of survival of the planet, partly through spirit, partly through imagination and poetry, partly through psychedelic insight. Then to substantiate that glimpse and actually rework the material world wou8ld be a matter of decades and ages because the Industrial Revoluti8on itself is 200 years old, and it would take another 200 years to readjust and refine and return to basic values, meaning compassion towards sentient beings, respect for earth as the American Indians had it, realization of the fact that we could pollute the earth. If not destroy it in one flash, we could pollute it slowly as Gregory Bateson pointed out at the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress* when he pointed to the greenhouse effect being a slow poisoning of the atmosphere. * The dialectics of Liberation Congress was a London conference organized by radical psychologists R.D. Laing. The summer 1967 conference was the occasion where Gregory Bateson first introduced the greenhouse effect. Among the many notable speakers were Paul Goodman and Stokeley Carmichael. Ginsberg spoke on the theme “Consciousness and Practical Action.” All that is left as an overwash, as well as an improvement in perception of lyric poetry so that for generations now people actually read lyrics and songs and examine them for what the symbolism is. In that sense there has been an improvement of literate culture, again co-opted or exploited so that by 1969 or 1970 MGM was taken over by right-wing politicians – Mike Curb among them – who banned all psychedelic music and anybody who anything to do with drugs in an attempt to roll back or squash the intuitions of the youth movement and their statements. SA: Some people might feel looking at America today and Reagan that things have been pretty well squashed. AG: Yes, they have. I would say the military is going to get bigger. So, it’s a king of paradox that nobody really believes in the military anymore in the way they used to except maybe like right-wing, really neoconservatives fundamentalists who still want us to salute the flag and return to the old discredited and chauvinist nationalism and even imperialism of big stick, which by 1940 had become démodé. And even more miraculous, the old Baptist, money-grubbing preachers that had been satirized by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry - and one would have thought permanently wiped off the psychological map as an elemental force in the nation – have come back redoubled on television with network power. So that’s kind of a paradox, that, for fear of the chaos and the unknown and the new scientism and the apocalypse, there is a Bible Belt fundamentalist religious revival, sort of the last straw to which people can cling to, to stay in the old nineteenth-century order, rather than entering the space of the present and future. (Examining the film treatment:) I think there’s too much drugs and not enough culture in here. SA: And you think the drugs need to be reduced? AG: Well, I don’t think that’s the whole story. It’s the change of culture that’s important. The drugs were a catalyst, but they weren’t the change of culture itself. The change of cultur3e was the change of ideology and a change of basic awareness of the planet. To some extent flower power and grass power are identical but the other half of the equation is flower power as well as cannabis power. In fact, the reason that cannabis was so interesting was the it was a natural flower, and the reason why mushroom peyote was interested was that it might be considered an extension of diet, rather that drug taking, it’s imply eating a different food. SA; So there should be more in the film about the set and the setting. AG: Yes, if you’re going to deal with it in terms of the trip, then you have to consider the set and the setting of the trip as determining the trip’s nature. So far into this on page six, you wouldn’t even know that was a Vietnam War going on in America and that there’d already been vast mobilizations and that the Be-in was basically a peace Be-in, that’s the meaning of Be-in: that the aggression of the sits-ns-or to the extent that the sit-ins represented a maternal force against a material force – this was spiritual force and breath against a material force Be-in rather than sit-in. SA: So the Be-in was in –part directed or provoked by . . . AG: Toward meditation and appreciation. It was a reaction to the speeding hypotropic militarization of the war and the aggression of the ware. Actually the progression of the Beatles from “All You Need Is Love” to actually getting into some kind of direct spiritual involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a paradigm of the whole era. SA But was it not only a minority that was involved in meditation? AG: Yeah, it was a minority. I don’t think you could ever get the mass of mankind involved, not for a couple of hundred years, but it was the active artistic minority, the antennae of the race: the poets who were the legislators of the world, the artists who determined the rhythms of dance and talk and singing and recreation, the painters who retrained the eye, the psychiatrists who retrained some of the mind, the scientists who realized nuclear winter. After all, the reaction to the sixties is not really a reaction to taking drugs, it’s also a reaction against women’s liberation, it’s a reaction in America against black power, the reaction on the part of the born-again against sexual revolution, a reaction against liberation of language and pictures in print, and a move towards censorship. So, in a sense, it’s not merely the stamping out of drug excesses, it’s also an after the drugs and would survive the drugs, including an attempt to override the peace movement with giant military budgets and overriding the SALT Treaty: break the SALT Treaty and you go back to nuclear competition. So it’s not that the change was only drugs and that only drugs are being stamped out, but it’s the whole culture they’re trying to roll back. In Eastern Europe, you’ll find that the Stalinists and heavy-handed Marxists also disapproved of the rock’n’roll art and saw the generational conflict as youth rebelling against Stalinism and the Stalinist bureaucracy. After all, 1968 was also the Carta* in Czechoslovakia and Hungary where Eastern European intellectuals asked for more freedom and protested against the arrests of writers, artists, and politicians who were libertarians. The year after 1967 was the year the Russian tanks rolled into Prague to stamp out a whole new wave of liberty. The tanks weren’t rolling into Prague to stop drugs, although LSD had been a catalyst even in Prague with Doctor Rubichek’s experiments on a very small scale. The counterrevolution that began in 1968 with the state trying to re-impose its authority on the Whitmanic, Thoreauvian individual didn’t involve drugs in Eastern Europe, and it doesn’t involve only drugs in the Western world. Margaret Thatcher didn’t campaign against drugs, she campaigned against libertinism, welfare state, communal socialism, and old mining traditions. Reagan came in on trying to re-impose a Baptist God. The spiritual attack in the United States was a secular humanism, and the reaction was an attack on modern reevaluation of nationalism, having seen the effects of nationalism on Russia and Germany and on American nationalist imperialism in Latin America: there was the Alliance for Progress with Kennedy. There’s been a rollback. In fact, the American government and Cold War theory has been that you have to have tyrannies to fight Communists, so that an approval of tyranny is part of the package deal of rollback. * When I spoke with Josef Jarab to confirm the spelling of this word, he informed me that there is no such word in Czech. He opined that Allen was likely conflating the Charter movement begun by Vaclav Havel in 1977 with the 1968 Czech uprising. It does seem likely that Allen is referring here to the entire spirit of the 1968 Czech resistance to Russian domination. – DC If you’re talking about what survives of the sixties then it’s not merely a few scattered institutions, in which I would include things like Naropa, which is actually the first accredited Buddhist college in the Western world, or the great spread of meditation forms, or holistic health forms, even unto jogging, as a byproduct of that ethos. You’d also have to account for basic changes in attitude which have been adopted by the majority: not only the renunciation of the Vietnam War or the cutting off of money by congress at the end of it, and not merely the military but Watergate, the final demystification of the administration. Beyond these, the more prominent substrate of changes, like women’s liberation, sexual liberation, black liberation, liberation form censorship, notions of cooperative control of industry. Solidarity – Solidarnosc – in Poland and whatever equivalents there are in the United States. So some permanent changes have now been built in so subtly that they are unnoticeable as byproducts of the expansion of mind and the liberation of movement of the sixties. So it’s the whole cultural change. That still leaves unaccounted the scale and weight of the counter-reaction, which sees the sixties ethos as the enemy of Cold War, the enemy of nuclear power, the enemy of military solution, and sees gay liberation as Hitler did, as a weakening of the will to power of the nation: “a softening of the moral fiber of the nation,” is their own words. Since we’re not going to have a nuclear war – I think common sense of humanity will go that far – that means in the long run there’s going to have to be a slow adjustment to the insights of the sixties, of 1967, particularly the Be-in, of fresh planet, a vulnerable planet, alterations of human behavior patterns in order to survive biologically, notions of appropriate technology such as Shumacher and E.P. Thompson have proposed.* The limitation of nuclear power, even for peace, is necessary because it permanently poisons the planet as now exemplified in the anno8uncement that they’re building this tomb or sarcophagus around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, noting that it will have to be buried for hundreds and hundreds of years in the concrete egg case because whatever would hatch out that egg is just too poisonous for the planet to handle. So the whole problem of nuclear waste which as been postponed for consideration all these years is now going to have to be taken up, and they’ll have to solved. Otherwise we leave a legacy of permanent poisoned eggs all over the planet as one by one the present nuke plants have to be shut down and encased. Right now Maine, where we are, is going through throes of joy that it’s been eliminated from a list of places where the government is going to make their nuclear waste dumps and that their Texas Panhandle has been selected. And in Texas – I was just there – the Panhandle people are now beginning to rise up and revolt because they don’t want it either. So actually nobody wants it. When it comes down to the bottom line, what do you do with the waste? Nobody will accept it. * Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911-1977) wrote Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper, 1973), reprinted, 1989: Edward Palmer Thompson’s (b. 1924) best known work, is Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1966) SA: That’s just what’s happened in England. Conservative MPs one after another, when the waste comes to their area, get up and say, “No, we’re not going to have it.” AG: That’s an admission that the scientific equation has not been solved, and yet we’re still like the sorcerer’s apprentice, commanding the broom to carry the water for us, not knowing how to stop the broom. Sooner or later some kind of biological saving grace or instinct for survival is going to determine an end to even peace nukes to reduce the high price of existence in the hypermaterialistic, hyperscientific age. So I think the implication of the sixties was, as Blake pointed out, that hyperrationalism has created chaos so that the body’s existence, the existence of feeling, and the existence of the poetic imagination, the fantasy and dream, the poetry, have to be acknowledged as equal partners in Albion, the whole man. That was Blake’s formulation and that Blake quote that was used as the motto for the original Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation* was “England, awake, awake, awake,” so as to awaken Albion. I forget the rest of it, but it mentioned Albion, defined by Blake as the whole man, not only reason, but reason in balance with heart feelings, the body, and the imagination. * The Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation, also known as Wholly Communion or the International Poetry Reading, was held on June 11, 1965, at the Royal Albert hall in London. Nineteen poets read, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Fainlight, William Burroughs, Ernst Jandl and Gregory Corso. So I think the implication in 1967 was a breakthrough of imagination, a breakthrough of recognition of the health of the body of the individual and the planet as against the poisons of hyper-industrialization, and breakthrough of recognition of the health of the body of the individual and the planet as against the poisons of hyper-industrialization, and breakthrough of human feeling again: a return to human feeling after the homogenization and objectification or reification of human feelings due to automatic reproduction I the computerized machine age. So these are the stakes, not just drugs: drugs were the catalysts to recognize some of it. December 1960: Allen Ginsberg from High Priest, by Timothy Leary Here is a statement for Sandoz. Is it okay? Have had experience with mescaline, LSD-25, and psilocybin. The mushroom synthetic seems to me the easiest on the body physically and the most controllable in dosage. The effects are generally similar, subjectively. Psilocybin seems to me to be some sort of psychic godsend. It offers unparalleled opportunity to catalyze awareness of otherwise unconscious psychic processes. To widen the area of human consciousness. To deepen reification of ideas and identification of real objects. To perceive the inner organization of natural objects and human art-works. To enter the significance and aesthetic organization of music, painting, poetry, architecture. It seems to make philosophy make sense. It aides consciousness to contemplate itself and serve some of the most delightful functions of the mind. As if turning the volume on a receiving set, background and FM stations can be heard. The effects are not unnatural. I have experienced similar things without use of chemicals catalysts, and correspond to what I, as a poet, have called previously aesthetic, poetic, transcendental or mystical awareness. A kind of useful, practical cosmic consciousness. I think it will help mankind to grow.