Allen Ginsberg on Nineteenth-Century Poetry continues from here
Earlier debate between Helen Luster and Allen Ginsberg can be found here, here, and here
Helen Luster: Well, actually, you could turn it the other way – that mutability would leave and there would be something that would go on, you know.
AG: Yeah, it might.
Helen Luster: It would change into something else.
AG: We’d interpret it as …
Helen Luster: do you see what I mean?
AG: … a shower, or cloud changes into raindrops, changes into …
Helen Luster: Yeah.
AG: … flower moisture, changes into milk, changes into baby bones, changes into old man bones, changes into …
Helen Luster: Yeah but what the change …
AG: … a worm.
Helen Luster: … from life to death would be, perhaps – you don’t know. It depends. If it’s nothing but dust, that’s static. But mutability means it might be …
AG: Well.
Helen Luster: … something else.
AG: The physical matter might mutate into something as he describes, but then what about the spirit?
Helen Luster: Yeah.
AG: Gregory Corso has a poem called “The Mutation of the Spirit”, though, (which I forgot, I don’t know what he was saying in it though). I think when you’re dead, you’re dead, myself.
Helen Luster: What about all these people that are supposed to be … I mean I keep hearing about all these people who are supposed to have this death experience, you know, and…
AG: Well, then the spirit came back to them, which is breath. And got some more oxygen in them and the whole thing woke up for a while.
Helen Luster: But they also have this experience of going down a corridor and meeting with the light, and all that sort of thing.
AG: I took acid, too. But I don’t know. I don’t know. I wouldn’t bank on it.
Helen Luster: No, I wouldn’t either.
AG: So?
Helen Luster: But it’s kind of interesting.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately fifty-seven minutes in