Allen Ginsberg at Georgian Court continues from here . ( See the full video – here)
AG: So, maybe I’ve gotten myself into a corner here. I don’t have any writing of my own really that fits all that notion but I was thinking more of Kerouac. So, okay, I’ve talked a bit. We’ve been studying..one other, one, two, since we’ve now got into mind space rather than physical space, let’s dig a little bit of Gregory Corso, have you studied any of him? – Gregory Corso, is he on your curriculum?
Student: Yeah. “Riprap“
AG: “Riprap,” that would be Gary Snyder. Give me a moment [Allen searches book] … Okay. (Let me see if I can) find a specimen of Gregory Corso which opens up that state of mind and space. Okay. “Birthplace Revisited,” a very early poem, from the ’50s. Among the Beat writers (Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, myself, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen would be the core group, I would say), Corso, I think, is among the greatest of the poets. This is a very early lyric but the same space I was talking about between waking . . . sleep and waking, the claustrophobia of sleep and waking.
[Allen reads Gregory Corso’s “Birthplace Revisited“]
The lights are on; other people are/ moving about./ I am with raincoat; cigarette in
mouth,/ hat over eye, hand on gat./ I cross the street and enter the/ building./ The garbage cans haven’t stopped/ smelling./ I walk up the first flight; Dirty Ears/ aims a knife at me…
I pump him full of lost watches.”
So, this is about the same situation now. He’s in a claustrophobic situation, a nightmare. Again, “Dirty Ears / aims a night at me knife at me dot dot dot.. I pump him full of lost watches.”
Time transshifting – “lost watches.” Well, this from childhood – kids have watches, they lose them, they talk about watches, they steal watches. But “I pump him full of lost watches” means “I suddenly awake from the daydream”, in a way.
In another little space shot. I suppose you could apply it:
[Allen Ginsberg reads Gregory Corso’s “Italian Extravaganza”]
“Mrs Lombardi’s month-old son is dead// I saw it in Rizzo’s funeral parlor,/A small purplish wrinkled head./ They’ve just finished having high mass for it;/ They’re coming out now/…Wow, such a small coffin!/ And ten black Cadillacs to haul it in.”
So that would be just the contrast between the little, tiny coffin and the extravaganza, Italian extravaganza, the wedding . . . I mean the funeral!!
So, for Gary Snyder, that sense of space, in and out of space, is totally present as a Zen student and a Buddhist. The sense of open space, emptiness, vastness and emptiness and silence, is part of the basic aesthetics, and even state of consciousness of meditation practice in Buddhism or Zen – or Tibetan-style meditation. The awareness of the discontinuity of thoughts, or, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest, when Prospero has resolved all of his problems and is ready to go home to retire and die on his magic island, and it’s the general event, “where every third thought shall be my grave”.
So, thought number one, thought number two, thought number three, thought number four. So, in that sense even Shakespeare noticed that thought is sequential and perhaps even discontinuous. ‘Cause one minute you think about hot dogs, and the next minute you think about your coffin. There’s a gap in between, and nobody knows where the next thought will come from. So, it’s all totally surprise mind. So that, in Buddhist terms, they speak of thought as “unborn”, (like the universe, unborn), in the sense (that) you can’t trace it back to its form, you can’t trace a thought back to its root, it appears like a flower in the air and dissolves. It rises, dissolve, rises, flowers and dissolves, and is replaced, maybe in a sixtieth-of-a-second later, with another thought like the movies, one frame after another, it appears continuous, but when you sit and meditate, you realize it’s discontinuous, that there is a gap in between thoughts). So that phrase by Shakespeare, “every third thought shall be my grave” is quite interesting. Kerouac pointed that out to me, that particular Shakespeare number.
AG: So, an example of discontinuity of thought, gap and space between thought, can be found in most poetry but, say, in our tradition in America, the.. pre-figuring the deep interest in Zen and Buddhism, space, mind space, empty space, you can find in William Carlos Williams. For some examples of attention to the space in your mind and realization of the nature of mind as open space, interrupted by thoughts, so to speak. I’d like to read two short poems by Williams which are known to most of the Beat poets and interesting to them. One is called “Good Night.” It’s 1917:
[Allen Ginsberg reads William Carlos Williams’s “Good Night”]
“in brilliant gas light/I turn the kitchen spigot/and watch the water plash/into the clean white sink./On the grooved drain-board/ to one side is/a glass filled with parsley —/
crisped green./ Waiting/for the water to freshen —/I glance at the spotless floor — :/ a pair of rubber sandals/ lie side by side/under the wall-table/ all is in order for the night./ Waiting, with a glass in my hand/— three girls in crimson satin/ pass close before me on
the murmurous background of/the crowded opera —/ it is/ memory playing the clown —/three vague, meaningless girls/full of smells and/ the rustling sound of/ cloth rubbing on cloth and/little slippers on carpet —/high-school French/spoken in a loud voice!/ Parsley in a glass,/still and shining,/brings me back. I take my drink/and yawn deliciously./
I am ready for bed.”
Okay, so what happens here? The subject is the nature . . . is the changes in his mind, the movement of his mind. It isn’t necessarily anything in the outer world. He’s observing how his mind moves from one thought to another with gaps in between. Beginning with coming downstairs, a drink of water, late at night, turning on “the kitchen spigot”, watching the water “plash”, brilliant gas light, crisp green parsley, glass on the “grooved drain-board”. Everything lucid – very present, very clear. Then he spaces out waiting for the water to freshen. Maybe keyed off by the rubber sandals under the wall table: “Waiting, with a glass in his hand – / three girls in crimson satin / pass close before me on / the murmurous background of / the crowded opera.” Then he comes back to himself and says, “memory playing the clown,” what am I doing here thinking about this? Then he spaces out again: “three vague, meaningless girls … / the rustling sounds of / cloth rubbing on cloth and / little slippers on the carpet / the high-school French / spoken in a loud voice! / Parsley in a glass / still and shining / brings me back.” So, the movement of the mind, that’s interesting there, that’s his subject matter.
It’s a little bit appropriate (that) around 1917 isn’t it? that Einstein proclaims relativity, saying that a measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal world. So that here is Williams around the same time examining the measuring instrument – the mind itself. And much poetry and art from that time on, goes back to look at the mind, or the consciousness itself, or the materials of consciousness – the relativism of the phenomenal world. That it’s not fixed and stable but does depend on the observer. That ultimately the appearance of the universe is determined by the observer. There is no such thing as objectivity because we are all subject or observers. There is no absolute objectivity, as Einstein points out. Because who is the one that’s proclaiming or who’s observing? Well, it’s us, a person. So that actually is consonant with the great proclamation by Whitman, “I celebrate myself and sing myself,/ And what I shall assume you shall assume.” So, Whitman’s word for that was “Person”, with a capital “P”. That that was the center. Person is the center of our consideration as human beings, not some fake, supposed, objective, externalized standard, because there is no external since we are the observers of the external. The only thing we know is what we see of the of the external. So, all we know is our minds. We don’t know the real external and perhaps the real external doesn’t even exist outside of our minds.
So that brings us back to the notion of the Romantic – i.e. the subject or subjective, or Persons, as being the ultimate arbiter or the ultimate reality, rather than a supposedly objective reality imposed on us by the machine, or by inventors of machines, who want to say that the external machine world, with its arithmetical regulation, is reality and we are not reality. So that finally the individual becomes intimidated and thinks that he is not real, but the external world is real. That he is not real, but the nation is real. But any good libertarian knows that the nation is a figment of the imagination, and the personal perception is the only thing that exists, actually, for us. We cannot know more than what we know (and the only thing we know is what we smell, see, hear, taste, touch, and think – and guess and measure). But, nonetheless, it’s all us measuring, and it all comes back to the observer, as Einstein said – the appearance of the phenomenal world is determined by the nature of the observer. So that brings us back to the romance of being alive in the world, (with the universe, which is not dead), and that the external universe is not dead except as we interpret it as dead.
So, I think that probably was a key insight that the Beat writers had because they were interested in what is the texture of consciousness, what’s the nature of consciousness?
That was the reason for experimentation in.. with drugs, the reason for the movement toward Eastern thought and meditative practice, (an actual practice of meditation), reason for interest in art and poetry as communication between real people about their subjective realizations and perceptions. The following-out of the Whitman’s suggestion that poets of the future in America should specialize in candor – C-A-N-D-O-R. You should end the schizophrenia between official thinking and what they thought themselves, what people thought, and what was the thought that you’re supposed to have, or the thought that you’re allowed to have, the official thought, (or the party line, as they used to call it in Russia, where the same schizophrenia was even more pronounced). So how to avoid the almost inevitably imposed schizophrenia , split-personality laid on us by hyper-technology, which assumes that nothing is news unless it’s on the radio, that our feelings are not important, but what is proclaimed as official is important. So that, how to reclaim our own lives from the usurpation of State, media, and stereotype, how to actually awaken from the great dream of some laid on us, what Blake says six thousand years ago, “Six Thousand years of sleep,” [Allen references here, Blake’s line in Jerusalem – “I beheld the Visions of my deadly Sleep of Six Thousand Years”] with the imposition of a hierarchical monotheistic thought system, referring the origin of all things, not to ourselves but to an external Creator who we could not know and was there to reward or punish us. So, Blake said that the Western notion of the Divine was in fact Satan, was satanic, because it imposed on us highway robbery of our own subject, our own consciousness. That’s.. So that’s the old hermetic notion that, that runs through the Gnostics and the Hermetic philosophers up through Blake, and finally up through Shelley, and probably up through Burroughs, certainly, and somewhat to Kerouac and to my own work, which is probably the reason for our interest in Buddhist or Eastern thought. Because in Eastern thought there is no central personality of the Divine, like there is in fundamentalist Islam, plus, a priestly class, to tell you what God said, or a fundamentalist interpretation of Christian, or fundamentalist interpretation of Jewish, or fundamentalist interpretation of Hindu, as we’ve been seeing lately in the communal riots in India. The Buddhist and Confucian thing does not assume a central reference point but assumes, like, an open space and the only reference point is completely open space, accommodating space, endless space, no beginnings, no ends. So, I guess that’s the basis, philosophically, of what most of the poets of the Beat generation were into and it’s not so far away from the interest in studies of the early Romantics actually, Coleridge, Blake, (and in his earlier years probably Wordsworth and Shelley certainly). Now, have you have got any questions? I’ve been blabbing along around for sixty minutes, for particularly no good reason -Yes?
Lecture ends here but continues with a Q & A session – to be continued