Allen Ginsberg at Georgian Court, 1995, Q & A continues: – see here
Student (7): I was reading a book where you described the Beat movement as a “revolt against the machine”?
AG: Did I? I made a lot of descriptions, but I (didn’t use “the machine”). Well, those were not my words, (and) not “revolt”. I would say, “against hyper-technology”, that’s my opinion on it.
Student (7): Well, I was just wondering at what age you started thinking that something was wrong within the American dream, and like…
AG: Not the American dream, the whole world dreams that! The machine needs the hyper-technology.
Student (7): Well, is there, like, a specific instance that you were, like, describing?
AG: Sort of, a couple, a lot of them, accumulative. A friend of mine got into trouble and was arrested by the police when I was very young, and I realized that…[to Students] Can you hear me? [There’s a brief break as technicians fix the microphone]
Okay so, the question was there.. when..incident, incidents, accumulative incidents, that took me out of my so-called dogmatic slumbers – a lot of them! – I grew up wanting to be a labor lawyer, from having remembered from New Jersey, Paterson silk strikes – my mother imparted the history of workers struggles against the bosses, the use of police with..guns to strike-break and the attempted destruction of the labor movement, and I wanted to be a labor lawyer. When I was telling Kerouac about that one day, he said, “Listen, you’ve never been in a factory in your life, you’ve never been a laborer, you don’t know anything about labor, what are you? what kind of high-school ambition is this? – to be a labor lawyer when you don’t know anything about labor, you have nothing to know. You’re the son of a high-school teacher and you haven’t done a day’s work in your life except in the library, putting books back on the shelf, for thirteen-cents-an-hour, in 1937”. I suddenly realized that I was living in a kind of daydream. So, it’s an awakening of my own mind. Then a friend of mine got busted and sent to jail for manslaughter and I realized that the law, (though, as a generalization, the law might be good), it didn’t fit that case, you know, that the law really had nothing to do with what was going on there, that was like a tragedy of another dimension in another human realm. That all the law was (was) a bunch of abstract rules that people pay to follow those abstract rules, whether or not they fit the situation.
Then.. I got into a conversation about (art).. Is art social? Does it require an audience?, or is it solipsistic? If you carve a walking stick, is that art? If you put the walking stick on the moon where nobody saw it, would that still be art? And, as an old lefty, I said, “It’s got to be social”. And there was this friend I was with, who was smarter than me, who said, “It’s got to be solipsistic, “art for art’s sake.”” Then we took our argument to (William) Burroughs, and he said, ““Tis too starved an argument for my sword”, in the words of the immortal bard”. [Editorial note – Burroughs is quoting from Shakespeare’s Troilius and Cressida here – “I cannot fight upon this argument. It is too starved a subject for my sword”]. Then he explained, art is a three-letter word, you’re arguing about what art is, as if art is something, but art is anything you want to define it, you got to agree how you want to define the three-letter word. It’s not a word which has a built-in essence from God that it means one thing. So it’s whatever way you want to use the word. So, there’s no point in arguing about beauty, truth, whatever, you know. How do you want to use the word? Do you want to define it as social or do you want to define it as both, or do you want to define it as neither, (or) what? – See?. So those things were sort of breaking the crust of my opinionation, you know, the sort of automatic knee-jerk stereotype, buzzword, opinionation thought that I grew up with from high-school, or something.
Then, I remember I finally met somebody who was a junkie and I realized that he was sick, that it was like medicine, that he needed medicine, (like (with) diabetes). And then I said, “You should go to a doctor for a cure.” He said, “Oh, doctors don’t treat junkies anymore. They used to, until 1935, then the Treasury Department Narcotics Bureau drove them out of business”. I said, “You mean they violated their Hippocratic oath to cure people, or see people who are sick?” And he said, “Yeah, the government intruded on it.”
I realized that it was that the whole drug thing was a scam. This was around the same time I smoked some pot and realized that the whole government idea of pot was a scam too – that it was something that, you know, drove you to insanity, frothing at the mouth, all that …
So, I began questioning the whole set-up of ideas that were laid on me by the media, by the government. And then, I was gay, and I realized that that was normal – it was (just) me, or something, what was all the big fuss about? – why was that considered criminal (and people needing to be writing a) law about it? What shameful? And I just woke up and said, “What.. who put this scam on everybody?”
And if drugs, grass, and sex … that the government and the media have such a perverted view of grass and sex – then what about money? Then I began reading Ezra Pound on money and usury – And what about war? – And what about the military? And what about.. you know.. everything? – About Chinese medicine, about everything – about poetry.
Then, around the 1950s, I began noticing the military budget was creeping up and up and up and then the military was beginning to take over the country, as sort of the central God or reference point, as if that had more authority than anybody else. And by 1959, Life magazine came around to interview us, the Beat generation writers, and I said, “I always thought I was onto something, but if Life magazine thinks that we’re interesting, they must be awfully impoverished of mind, they must be in a bad way if they think that we know something, if they think that we got an official sort of …”. (The) newspeak magazine seems to think that we got something going.” I remember lying in bed trembling with the responsibility, realizing that America was completely nuts! That it was our job to make some change, you know, to break through the crust of habitual thinking and begin thinking, you know, what really.. where is our heart? where is compassion? where is feeling? where is subject? Well, who are we? What is all this stuff about?, you know.
Like “dope fiends” – the notion of classifying a human being as a “fiend” (like a witch, but a “fiend”, they used the word “fiend” – “dope fiend”, the common modification for somebody who maybe smokes grass – “dope fiend”). The notion of a “fiend”, a human fiend, seemed to me so nightmarishly, outrageously, insulting to any human spirit, anybody in trouble, somebody who was sick or something, that I.. One thing after another like that.
Then I was in Vietnam in (19)63 and talked to most of the reporters there, like David Halberstam, who became famous for books later. In 1963 they said that it was impossible to win the war, that the Vietnamese didn’t like us, and anyway, the Vietnamese were allied, not with the Chinese, but with the Russians, against the Chinese (because there was always a fight between the Chinese and the Russians, I mean the Chinese and the Vietnamese)over borders. I came back home, and I kept hearing about (the US) “containing” China, by arming the South Vietnamese against the monolithic Vietnamese Chinese bloc. It made no sense at all, you know. Are you following what I’m saying? The mythology then was that the Chinese and the Vietnamese were all Communist “gooks”, together, against us, and that, actually. the Vietnamese were fighting with, historically fighting with, the Chinese and had allied with the Russians against the Chinese. So, if we wanted to “contain” China, (which was the dullest “containment policy”, if you ever heard that phrase), the best thing to do would be to give Ho Chi Minh a lot of money. All you got to do is give a lot of money to contain China, instead of fighting them, (which is what we’re doing now! (1995))
to be continued