Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (52 page)

DJB: By what’s happening around you?

Allen: Yeah. It’s maybe part of the same process with which I used to shield myself from the chaos, and it’s made me sort of aloof. I’m just guessing. I mean since we started talking about one thing, I just transferred it over to the other - from my mother to travel. I might have a different answer for a different context, but since we started out with a very definite idea, I just transferred it to the other, because it’s an aspect of the other, but it’s not the whole story. I mean, obviously I saw a lot of anthropological blah blah.

A lot of different views, a lot of different folk ways, different ways of wiping your behind after going to the bathroom, different ways of eating, talking, different kinds of poetics, different religions, meditation practices, different primitive rituals, different takes on the universe, different nationalisms, different chauvinisms. Experiencing a lot of different things makes your mind more wide-screened, or more tolerant. It makes you more sophisticated - or maybe less sophisticated. One of the basic things that’s changed is my habit of wiping my ass with toilet paper. Now I wash my behind afterwards. I got that from North Africa and India. Kerouac has a whole book about that.

DJB: I’m curious as to how important you think it is for writers and artists to have a sense of community. How did your experience with other writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs affect the style of your own writing?

Allen: Oh, it affected it very much. Kerouac persuaded me to stop writing rhyme poems and revising everything fifty thousand times; to just lay it out on the page in the sequence of thought-forms that arise in my mind during the time of composition. This is traditional with twentieth century painting and calligraphy style. Shakespeare never blotted a line according to Ben Johnson. With Kerouac and Burroughs, it wasn’t so much their instruction as the whole ambiance - their directive candor and informality. We were writing for our own amusement and the amusement of our friends, rather than for money or for publication. We assumed that nothing would be published from the very beginning . So the private world of my friends became the center of our artistic activities, rather than the public world of publishing, media, universities and literature.

DJB: The collaboration lowered your inhibitions, in terms of the way you expressed the creative urge?

Allen: Well, no. If you’re just writing for yourself and your friends, then you don’t have to develop inhibitions. People develop inhibitions from the commercial or social situation, they’re not born with them. So in this case, since we didn’t expect to succeed and we were just having fun with each other, we just never developed those inhibitions. So as a result, we never developed the manner or style of counterfeit literariness that is characteristic of most university or academic poetry or prose. You know that Burrough’s scene, the routine about the talking asshole in Naked Lunch? Well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to be published. I mean, at that time it was considered impossible, so it wasn’t thought of in that realm at all. It was thought of as being just intelligent humor between friends.

DJB: Speaking of Naked Lunch, what did you think of the way that you, Burroughs and Kerouac were portrayed in the film adaptation?

Allen: Well, Kerouac was a good deal better looking than the character in the movie. Martin was somewhat of a wimp. I don’t mind that because I’m a wimp, but I can read ‘The Market Section’ - which was what he read over the couple fucking - much more vividly than the poet in the film. Four days before I saw the film I was teaching a graduate course at CUNY entitled, ‘Literary History and the Beat Generation.’ I didn’t know that scene was in the film, but I read ‘The Market Section’ to the students when we were discussing Naked Lunch to give them a sense of Burroughs as a panoramic poet.

It’s one of the most beautiful passages in Burroughs, and the seed of all of
Naked Lunch
basically, as it intersects the past and future. "In expeditions arrived from unknown places, leave for unknown places with unknown purpose. Followers of obsolete trades....Carriers of viruses not yet born." This is the interplanetary time-zone market. The guy who played Burroughs did well, except when it came to doing the routines like the talking asshole or the "Hespano Suiza" auto blowout. Burroughs always did that much more uproariously and with fascinating vigor that you’d roll around on the floor laughing. The guy in the movie did it in a relatively dignified monotone, so that you don’t get any of the gregarious wildness.

RMN: Did you like the movie otherwise?

Allen: I thought that Burroughs’ plot was better than the movie plot. The movie plot begins with the Kafka figure being assassinated by two detectives who come to hassle him. Then, in the book, when he rebels against the authority figures, the whole long novel scene turns out to have been an hallucination. So it paralleled many mystical experiences, where you suddenly realize that everything before was maya or samsaric delusion. Burroughs empowered himself, so to speak, by rebelling against Law. It was a very important point that Burroughs was making, but that point is not made in the movie.

On the other hand, Burroughs approves of cut-ups, that’s his genre. So he enjoyed it, because it’s an improvisation on his work, in his own style, that he might well have done himself. The bug powder comes from a book called
The Exterminator
, so they made combinations of
Naked Lunch
and this other work plus
Queer
. Burroughs says a very funny thing. He quotes John Steinbeck when asked, "What do you think of what they’ve done to your book?" and he says, "They didn’t do anything to my book. My book is up there on the shelf." (laughter) So I think he liked the idea of them cutting up and improvising on his texts. I went to visit Burroughs about three weeks ago. We made thirteen 90-minute tapes, which are being transcribed for an interview for a Japanese magazine, so we went to the movies and saw the picture.

DJB: That was the first time either of you had seen it?

Allen: It was only the second time he’d seen it and it was the third time I’d seen it. I liked it more watching it with him because I began to see that the hooks which interpolate the movie make a little more sense than I’d thought. It may make complete sense, but I haven’t been able to figure out the very end. Is that reality, or is that unreality?

RMN: That was left unanswered.

DJB: Maybe intentionally. Tell me, how do you see the beat movement of the fifties having influenced the hippy movement of the sixties - and how do you see these cultural movements influencing events occurring today?

Allen: There are a lot of different themes that were either catalyzed, adapted, inaugurated, transformed or initiated by the literary movement of the fifties and a community of friends from the forties. The central theme was a transformation of consciousness, and as time unrolled, experiences that Kerouac, Burroughs and I had, related to this notion - at least to "widening the arena of consciousness." For example, this world is absolutely real and final and ultimate and at the same time, absolutely unreal and transitory and of the nature of dream-stuff, without contradiction. I think Kerouac had the most insightful grasp of that already by 1958. So that one spiritual insight - which is permanently universal - led to the exploration of mind or consciousness in any way shape or form.

Whether it was Burroughs through his exploration of the criminal world, or Kerouac through his exploration of Buddhism, or Gary Snyder’s zen meditation practices, or myself who worked with the Naropa Institute under Tibetan Buddhist auspices. Spiritual liberation is the center, and from spiritual liberation comes candor or frankness. So from 1948 on, Burroughs was writing on the Mind, and this somehow moved on to gay liberation, although at the time it wasn’t called that. You simply called it ‘explicitness’ and ‘openness.’ In 1952 Burroughs presents his manuscript and it’s totally overt, 100% out front and out of the closet - not even thinking he’s being out front, it’s just there because there never was a closet.

So that would take us to ‘55 with Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. The latter’s major theme is in biology and he had insights regarding the reclamation of consciousness, ecological themes. It’s not your traditional poetry. It’s modern American folklore, and it influenced everybody. By 1950, Kerouac had already written
On the Road
which included the sentence, ‘The Earth is an Indian thing.’ A very beautiful slogan.

DJB: I’m not sure I understand.

Allen: Well, it ain’t an Empire State thing! Local knowledge of plants, geography and geology, comes to the people who live a long, long, time in one place without a lot of mechanical aids and who relate to the land itself. It’s like bioregionalism, which comes out of a sort of Indian-type thinking.

DJB: So then do indigenous and Indian come from the same root?

Allen: I don’t know. Kerouac also in
On the Road
, reflected Oswald Speagler’s view of the "Fellaheen" people living on the land near the Nile, tilling the soil and sailing their boats up and down, who were not affected by the changes of the Egyptian empire. They just stuck there, century after century, putting in whatever crop they were putting in, gathering it and pounding rice. So, "the earth is an Indian thing."

DJB: Do you see the earth as being like an organism?

Allen: No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. (laughter) No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority.

DJB: That’s interesting, that you see the Gaia hypothesis as monotheistic and fascist whereas other see it as liberating.

Allen: Well, you’ve got this one big thing. Who says it’s got to be one? Why does everything have to be one? I think there’s no such thing as one - only many eyes looking out in all directions. The center is everywhere, not in any one spot. Does it have to be one organism, in the sense of one brain, or one consciousness?

DJB: Well, it could be like you said earlier, about how reality is simultaneously real and a dream. Maybe the earth or the universe is many and one at the same time.

Allen: Well, yeah, but the tendency is to sentimentalize it into another godhead and to re-inaugurate the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind-trap.

RMN: What do you think about the New Age movement?

Allen: I don’t think all this crystal beads and channeling is spiritual. I don’t want to put down the New Age, but only an aspect that seems like "spiritual materialism."

RMN: Do you see it as a less valid phenomenon than say, the sixties counter-culture?

Allen: No. I think the New Age movement is basically a very good thing. Healthy foods, ecological understanding - that’s all fine. It’s just very specific spiritual materialism that seems to me to be the problem; accumulating experiences as credentials for the ego.

RMN: In the fifties, did you anticipate that a cultural revolution was in the making?

Allen: Not in the fifties, no. But I think that the sixties were politically awry because of animosity. You know, the notions of rising up and getting angry, i.e., using anger a a motif.

RMN: Didn’t that anger lead to a lot of positive social change though, like in the area of human rights?

Allen: No, no. Things started fucking up when people got angry because they started action from that angry pride. By 1968, 52% of the American people thought the war over in Vietnam was a big mistake, but instead of leading people out of the war, seducing them out, people got out onto the streets and got angry.

RMN: Just because half the people in America thought the war was a bad idea doesn’t mean that would translate into political action. It was the anti-war movement which vocalized those concerns and effectively changed government policy--whether they were angry or not.

Allen: No, if you do it that way you get it all wrong. You immediately open the door for crazies and the double agents to come in and fuck everything up. You need absolute discipline and for everything to be calm, otherwise where do you get to? You know that if you get excited while you’re doing martial arts, you lose. You have to be stabilized, balanced and centered. The guy who gets excited becomes off-center, off-balance, and falls on his own weight. So there was this idea that if you set one blade of grass alight, the whole nation will follow suit, "prairie file". All we have to do is to get together and physically attack the police and then all the negroes and hippies in America will rise up and abracadabra! (laughter) Oh God! Lunatics! A bunch of lunatics! And it prolonged the war.