Another great one from the Village Voice ‘Clip Jobs’ series – Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives. This one, from December 12, 1968, Vol. XIV, No. 9 – “Remarks on Leary’s Politics of Ecstasy”
(This essay was subsequently published in Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan)
“By the late ’40s of this memory Century the people I knew best and loved the most had already broken through the crust of old Reason & were dowsing for some Supreme Reality, Christmas on Earth Rimbaud said, Second Religiousness according to Spengler’s outline of civilization declining through proliferation of non-human therefore boring technology; Blake had called “O Earth O Earth return!” centuries before, echoing the ancient gnostic prophecy that Whitman spelled out for America specifically demanding that the Steam-engine “be confronted and met by at least equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine aesthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness – ” Ezra Pound’s mind jumped to diagnose the dimming of the world’s third Eye: “With Usura the line grows thick…
The essay continues and can be read in its entirety – here