Spotlighting yesterday Victor Bockris‘ remarkable new book The Burroughs-Warhol Connection, we thought we’d take a backward glance to an earlier book of his, November 2000’s Beat Punks – (“The “poet laureate of the New York underground scene” chronicles three decades of electrifying artistic expression”) – in particular the sections on Allen.
Today, selections from the chapter, “Allen Ginsberg on Heroes” (Allen verbatim – conversation edited from several hours of tape. “It is not”, Victor points out, “exact to the syntax, breaks, interruptions for questions or divigations of the original taped conversations”)
The recording was made, he explains, in 1977 – “at his Lower East Side apartment on 12th Street at one o’clock on a December afternoon. We sat in a spacious comfortable kitchen, drinking tea and talking for a couple of hours while a secretary methodically typed a manuscript in another room. A half-dressed blonde girl appeared from a side room, smiling…”
“What is most impressive about Allen Ginsberg, apart from his constant generosity, is that he is always interesting and one can always “rediscover” his work. He particularly enjoys talking about people whose work has influenced him, or whom he greatly admires.”
AG: “Heroes are okay if you learn from them. I’ve learnt a lot from Kerouac who was a hero to me, and I learned a tremendous amount from Burroughs. From Kerouac, spontaneous mind and Buddhism, from Burroughs, blank mind and wiping out the word – unconfusing and disentangling semantic difficulties. I learnt certain kinds of heart straightforwardness and simplicity and practical earthiness from Peter. I learnt a lot of love charms from Neal Cassady and a variety of association and simultaneity of reference from Cassady, and I learnt three-chord blues from Dylan, and I learnt from nearly everybody.
But I also learnt from people I never met. I learnt elegance of homosexual romance from Genet before I met him, and I learned laconism and interruption of thought and oddly wielded human syntax from Louis Ferdinand Celine before I met him. I learned some sense of modern line lengths from William Carlos Williams before I met him, though I never really understood it until I heard him speak. And then I learnt excited heartfelt confrontation soul to soul from Dostoevsky, who I never met, and then I learnt some blues sense from Lead Belly, whom I never met, and I learnt Titanic inspiration hammering on heaven from Beethoven and Bach. I mean there are transmissions. I learnt mellowness from Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Wyatt. I learnt cranky humor from Christopher Smart. I learnt visionary apprehension from William Blake. I learnt tolerance of my own vagaries and sexual romances from Whitman. So I’m a media freak myself
Whatever image of myself or Kerouac or Burroughs was spread in the ‘Sixties began with. smelly inarticulate image passed through the hands of the CIA and transformed to become a sort of bum kick, originally. It was only subliminally that any kind of generosity was transmitted, or any sense of reliability. Any negative aspects of my character like aggressiveness, confusion of thought, those were picked up on and exaggerated. And what virtues I had came through just by sheer force of virtue rather than by any kid of transmission through Time or Life or the New York Post or whatever medium there was. And as far as television is concerned, I was never allowed to get up and say what I really felt in my own language. I was never, for instance, allowed to read “Howl” on television. That would have been against the law. So I think the problem is not heroes, it’s the medium.
So the problem then is to make use of the media for transmission of the spark of intelligence, awareness and awkwardness. The person who does it has to be very straightforward
I do believe in teachers, though I would say, if you meet your teacher blocking your path to enlightenment, cut him down. That’s the old Buddhist terminology. If you meet Buddha on the path to enlightenment, cut him down. But to cut him down, to cut the teacher or the hero or the media star down in a spirit of resentment is a mistake and will lead perhaps to the only permanent hell that does exist. It’s called the Vajra hell, the unbreakable Vajra hell, which is refusal of intelligence, refusal of awareness. Any action against the hero or the star system which is taken out of resentment or anxiety or jealousy obviously will only lead to more resentment, anxiety and jealousy, and so can’t be of any usefulness,”
to be continued