AG at Naropa, (Naropa class) 1981, continuing from here
AG: Yeah. I’m finding a lot of times the only time I really get any work done writing is after spending a long day and doing whatever I’m doing, like everybody else, and then everybody else has gone to bed and I’m alone finally at about two in the morning I begin writing.
Student: Yeah.
AG: And then if it’s any good, it’ll carry me on until ten or eleven the next morning. “Kaddish” I came home at five in the morning after shooting some speed and methamphetamine and also some morphine, so I couldn’t go to bed anyway. And then I started writing, thinking, “Well, I’ll write an hour or two about my mother and then I’ll go to sleep,” because I’d been up all night. Because I had some more amphetamine with me, too. But then it got getting good, so I just kept going and I went, I think, from Saturday morning at five when I got home, all the way up through Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening. And then I was just getting started, because I’d just gotten into it. And so I think I took some more amphetamine and a little bit, a tiny bit of mescaline that I had around, or something – a tiny bit – and a little bit of morphine to sort of smooth it all out, because I didn’t want to get too nervous.
Student: That’s a recipe for a poem.
AG: And Peter (Orlovsky) came and brought me tea (because he saw I was doing something funny). So I had a room of my own – I just closed the doors and kept going. But life was going on outside, like people going to work and coming home from work. And it went through Saturday night all the way through late Sunday afternoon. By the time it was late Sunday afternoon, my head was getting funny, like I was going off on tangents or beginning to cut and trying to revise and making, like chicken scratches on the paper. You know that thing on amphetamine? Has anybody tried to write on amphetamine?
Student: Ah..
AG: See, the reason I quit in the ‘Forties was, although there was inspiration, you know, the fever to go forward, at a certain point a fatigue in the amphetamine, the thing begins to feedback, doubling back on itself and you begin, say, crossing out one word, and you’re not quite sure of that, but that interrupts the rhythm that you did to the end, so you have to go cross out every word and then reconstruct another rhythm, and then that isn’t quite right so you have exfoliate from the adjective about six feet, like that. A whole bunch of different things in that direction. And by that time you’ve stopped your forward march. So you might cut and say, “Okay, I can’t fix up this sentence, but I’ll go forward now.” But then the first phrase you do of the next sentence you get stuck and start making…. Ever see photographs of spiderwebs when the spiders have been given different drugs?
Student: No.
AG: Apparently the amphetamine-head spider-heads’ spiderwebs, they start off perfect and very, very powerful, but then they go off in one direction – get all hung up in one direction and so the spider will have the filament coming from six or seven directions – they’ll fill in one and get very complicated on one side, and the rest will be left empty. Whereas I think the acid ones do symmetrical nice ones. Maybe the grass-head.
So that’s the trouble with amphetamine writing. However, Kerouac did that. What I started to say was, he took amphetamine I think for The Subterraneans, for that series of books that he did in the early ‘Fifties, which are his major work in a way.
AG: What time is it?
Student: It’s … it’s about quarter to two.
AG: What time do we go to?
Student: It usually goes to about three, if you take a break.
AG: Shall we take a break in the middle of a sentence..?
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately seventy-one minutes in and concluding at approximately seventy-six-and-a-half minutes in