For Preface—Apology, etc.
Poems, some of them in Empty Mirror have a wholeness and style of their own, a form which includes completeness and pleasing rhythm, others are just statements of fact. Whatever I have to say had best be left as is, as said, distortion removes original spring from the sentences, the purity of the thought, and the exactness of expression. What I really think is what I am after. There may be a way of getting nearer by more work, which I find oppressive and impossible. There may be a way of refinement to symmetry but this would take out what is important, the nakedness which is truth. Perhaps art is not truth, but otherwise art seems empty. Art may be greater truth than that which I offer, this may be appraised but not criticized.
Our thoughts where they meet reality are intense and poetical; this is the underlying idea. I have not written this book to prove it, but I have collected these fragments because they seemed interesting to others, and archetypical to myself, in my own life.
The only things we “know” are what we think in the moments we give ourselves away, “tip our mitt.” I prefer those rare moments in authors when they are not trying to formulate an official policy for themselves or the real world.
Throughout his life, Allen Ginsberg kept an extensive, descriptive record of his dreams, many of which included his friends and family, and involved alternate realities that Ginsberg found fascinating and revealing. The unfettered meanderings of the inner mind, uninhibited by the factors that controlled conscious thinking, was an obsession shared by Kerouac and Burroughs, whose selected dreams wound up in published volumes. “White Shroud,” one of Ginsberg’s major later works, was an example of how he worked a dream into poetry.
In this journal entry, Ginsberg writes about a dream involving Joan Vollmer, a close friend from his Columbia University days and the live-in companion of Burroughs. The two had moved to Mexico, their lives largely dictated by overindulgence in drugs and alcohol. One night, after a day of heavy drinking, Burroughs had been goaded into playing a game of Willian Tell, in which he was to shoot a glass placed on Vollmer’s head. Burroughs missed his target, and Vollmer was killed. Vollmer’s death haunted Ginsberg for many years, and he would occasionally write about her in his journals. The prose in this dream entry was eventually translated into the poem, “Dream Record: June 8, 1955.”