6

Allen Ginsberg On Heroes

(The following is a conversation edited by Victor Bockris from several hours of tapes. It is not exact to the syntax, breaks, interruptions for questions or divigations of the original taped conversations.)

I visited Allen Ginsberg 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.

I asked Allen a series of direct questions about certain key cultural figures, and he answered, sometimes at length, sometimes briefly. For the sake of clarity, I have omitted my questions and simply present his responses as they were spoken.

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.

Heroes are okay if you learn from them. I’ve learnt a lot from Kerouac, who was a hero to me, and I learnt 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 Cassidy and a variety of association and simultaneity of reference from Cassidy, 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 learnt laconism and interruption of thought and oddly wielded human syntax from Louise 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 Dostoyevsky, who I never met, and then I learnt some blues sense from Leadbelly, 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 a 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 kind 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 awakedness. 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 enlightment, 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.

Bob Dylan

Dylan is one of my heroes, he seems like a mighty, triumphant Beethovenian fist shaking at heaven always, and in his later phase, greater and greater, richer. Also, as an oral poet he’s supreme: I think he can pronounce his vowels and consonants better than any other bard.

In conversation, he’s subtle, very witty, as in songs, but more subtle, he’ll say a thing which sounds very plain and ‘disruptive’ until five minutes later you realise he was actually saying something absolutely simple and straightforward that takes you by surprise. Like he kept telling me all through the Rolling Thunder tour that I was a king, but that I hadn’t found my kingdom. Which is like terrific, right? [Laughing] Total flattery and at the same time total realism. Also, I always felt that he had very shrewd judgements for me. It very often takes me years to catch up with some very casual remark. Like years ago, way back in the Sixties, he asked me to write songs for him and I disdained the notion thinking that I was some kind of velvet poet. And not that he needed it; he was just encouraging me to do something. But he was being absolutely totally friendly, and I reacted paranoiacally, thinking that he was putting me on, or that he was coming on superior, whereas actually he was being totally friendly and quite humble, totally straightforward, and I didn’t take it straightforwardly. And it resulted in me learning music and working with him later and then finally writing my own songs. So at the moment, I’m dying for him to sing one of my songs.

I first met him around ’63, ’64. When I first came back from India, I met Charlie Plymell in Bolinas. I’d never heard Dylan and Plymell played me one of his first records, including the line I’ll know my song well before I start singing, and I burst into tears when I heard it, it seemed so clear and so heroic. ‘I’ll know my song well before I start singing.’ It sounded like the best of any great writer, Rimbaud or Shelley – some Shelleyian Promethean statement as to the role of the poet – and it seemed such a miracle that somebody had emerged self-born in the middle of America with so much awareness and such confidence and sense of prophecy, that I started crying. Then I met him by surprise: came back to New York and was staying at Ted Wilentz’s house when he was running the 8th Street Bookshop and Wilentz had a welcome home party and Al Aronowitz brought Dylan around. But I didn’t know until last year that Dylan had actually read some of the beat poetry and had quote ‘his mind blown’ unquote. Which he said had happened with Kerouac’s ‘Mexico City Blues’ that somebody had handed to him in Minnesota. He said he didn’t know what the words meant then, but it blew his mind; I guess the open form and the American rhythm.

I think there’s a natural progression in Dylan’s work and I always think of it in terms of Yeats. Of mountain peaks and valleys, mountain peaks and valleys, with succeeding intensification and succeeding reality and succeeding genius. Seasons, you know, like A Season in Hell, seasons, different seasons, but they’re being inevitable and natural seasons and so not to be criticized from a pop point of view: “Is this going to be a bestseller or not?” I mean not from a crass, commercial point of view.

See, all through the period when he was supposed to have been so dumb, there were a series of very great songs – ‘Lay Lady Lay’, or ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ – which are so mellow and so beautiful to hear now, that one doesn’t realize that at the time they were received with disdain, as if he’d lost his power. So after a period of hysterical crescendo in Blonde on Blonde, he came down – as was natural and healthy and inevitable – to becoming a family man and re-humanizing himself. And the result of that was some very beautiful, calm, sweet songs. And then he did what really one would have wanted him to do – a large record of all his sources – which is the Self Portrait. I’m glad he gave us those footnotes, his sources. Like, you know, what more generous thing could he have done? So he replaced hysteria with generosity and some pop reviewers spit at him.

Then, at a time people were saying he was at the lowest point, he wrote his most divine song, which is ‘Knock Knock Knocking On Heaven’s Door’. Everybody was yelling at him – for not being ‘active’? for I don’t know what – but around that time he wrote ‘Forever Young’, which I think will be as lasting as ‘White Christmas’. ‘Forever Young’ is a fantastic anthem, which some day will be heard sung around campfires in the Sierras. [Sings] ‘Forever young, forever youuuuuuung …’ It’s like a beautiful thing to sing; it’s a family song, which is how it was intended. Like ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River’ or something. Dylan wrote something that permanently gilds the family twilight Christmas evening.

And then, finally ‘Idiot Wind’, which is, I think, his greatest crescendo song and, as he’s playing it these days, I think his greatest sort of Wagnerian piece of folk rock.

I thought the rhyme of Idiot wind, blowing there in circles around your skull/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol was amazing. Also, as I was doing a lot of yoga, it seemed to me he had, by his own nature, come down to some basic realization of breath (prana), and actually the whole song is about It’s a wonder you can still breathe. And later, Feed yourself.

It seemed to me to be a declaration of independence from what is called, in technical Buddhist terms, ‘the Ego of Dharmas’. That is to say, being hypnotized by one’s own outside world and past and one’s creations in the outside world. Because there’s that great line about Being on the borderline between you and me/Finally free/You never know what pain I rise above. Which is tremendously Bodhisattva-like. Where is ‘Idiot Wind’?

[Looks it up in a beautiful, spiral-bound boxed edition of Dylan’s Songs: 1966–1976. Allen had just gotten his copy and was very pleased with it.]

When I first heard him sing this – they ride down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy – I thought he was referring to Kerouac. I followed you beneath the stars haunted by your memory and all your raging glory. So I began taking that personally, thinking he was talking about us Beatniks. I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free. It sounds like his declaration of independence from his fathers.

So, when I first heard that, I megalomaniacally thought he was declaring his independence from me. And then I realized that he was actually declaring his independence from all me’s. From all me’s everywhere in every direction, so that almost anybody could interpret that as being personal, in showing some real separation out into solitude on his own, and the acceptance of solitude and individuality, and actually his emergence above pain of clinging and attachment and mystification, to some kind of almost godless glory, isolate, seeing the complete nothingness in the world, the emptiness of the world.

And you’ll never know what pain I rise above/As well as your holiness or your kind of love. He’s like disdaining all the daughters of Mara, all the temptations of the world, attachments to the world, fears. And then, Idiot wind blowing through the buttons of our coats/Blowing through the letters that we wrote/Blowing through the dust upon our shelves – it’s like a universal energy, empty energy, which he’s recognised. So it seemed, psychologically, a great statement of attainment of powers, and also like a national prophecy: Blowing like a circle around my soul/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol. It’s all Watergate too, so it’s the nation, the ego of the nation.

That’s another thing about ‘the Ego of Dharmas’, which has to be the ego of ideas, the ego of your own creations, the ego of your projections, the attachment to some permanent sense of their reality, realizing that they’re actually all ‘idiot wind/blowing in the wind’. Also still ‘Blowing in the Wind’. Change: the Buddhist’s second noble truth; existence is change.

Well, it just seemed a very noble song, like the kind of nobility you don’t often see, the nobility of a great bard. Which is what the whole Rolling Thunder tour was about. And also a very strange alchemical thing in the sense that he had to take all this money and all this machinery and all this electricity to create a ten-foot-square spot where he would be completely free to stamp his foot in time to what he hears in his own head as music, and create on the spot a new rhythm each time he played ‘Idiot Wind’ or any other song, and play each song differently each time with all the musicians completely there in their bodies, alert, listening, sensitive, receptive, and respondent to his changes of time and beat, his elongation of the vowels, so they get up on the stage and howl, in the sense of elongated vowels, with complete self-confidence and authority and solace, solitary loneliness, in the middle of 27,000 people and half a million dollars worth of equipment: in a ten-foot square place where one person can totally express himself freely and actually express a good deal of the emotion of the crowd of people around him, speak for people in a sense, speak for others, speak for himself and others at the same time. So ‘Idiot Wind’ seems to me like an acme of that.

On the Hard Rain album, even in diminished volume, there’s still the sense of slowdown of time and the slowdown of the song and even the gaps in the song where there’s a moment of silence, and you don’t know whether the song is continuing, and all of a sudden it continues with the same logic as before. So he’s stepping in and out of time. It’s noticeable in the fantasticalness of his pronunciation of consonants. The thing that I kept thinking is that expression on his face which looks like pain and/or disdain, or sneer, is really just a mouth working, his face trying to pull back his teeth to pronounce his ‘t’s clearly enough to be heard into the microphone, to hear a single ‘t’ or an ‘s’ above all the roar of the other electrical instruments, to be heard as a human syllable and be understood by the ear so that music had word, it had word in there. That’s why he’s a great poet in the sense of great orator. That’s the best oratory I’ve heard, or the best recitation of poetry. It was a great poetry reading …

In between the concerts we made movies, almost every day there was a scene to act in, so that would take up half a day or morning: we worked very hard putting on a concert and making movies simultaneously, no chance to get up and laze around all day and not worry about anything and then jump into another concert. Dylan actually was working on the afternoon of a concert: like going out to Kerouac’s grave in a caravan and sitting there, and then having a concert in Lowell that night. Singing all the night before and having to get up at 10 am or something, a lot of energy.

Since the tour, he’s just disappeared from my vision. Gone back up to heaven.

Patti Smith

I was surprised by Patti Smith’s rise. It’s sort of heartening to see how somebody else could get ahead. I wonder how she’ll do.

I’ve been teaching Rimbaud this year – she idolizes Rimbaud – and I’ve been reading Rimbaud’s late, last letters when he was dying, about how miserable life was and “all I am is a motionless stump” and I’m wondering how she’s going to deal with that aspect of heroism. How will she deal with suffering? How will she transcend suffering and become a lady of energy, a sky-goddess, singing of egolessness? Because so far her proposition has been the triumph of the stubborn, individualistic, Rimbaud-Whitmanic ego: but then there is going to be the point where her teeth fall out and she’s going to become the old hag of mythology that we all become. And I think she’ll be equal to dying. [Laughing] We all are.

(There follows a brief excerpt from an August 1972 interview with Patti.)

VICTOR BOCKRIS: Why are your influences mostly European: Rimbaud, Cendrars, Celine, Michaux?

PATTI SMITH: It’s because of biographies. I was mostly attracted to lifestyles, and there just wasn’t any great biographies of genius American lifestyles except the cowboys. But you can read my book, Seventh Heaven (Telegraph Books, Philadelphia, 1972) and who do you get out of it? Edie Sedgwick, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Joan of Arc, Frank Sinatra. All people I really like. I’m shrouded in the lives of my heroes.

BOCKRIS: Tony Glover says in his review of Seventh Heaven that you are writing a poetry of performance. What does that mean to you?

SMITH: I think part of it is because of Victorian England, how they crucified Oscar Wilde. Poets became simps, sensitive young men in attics. But it wasn’t always like that. It used to be that the poet was a performer and I think the energy of Frank O’Hara started to re-inspire that. I mean in the Sixties there was all that happening stuff. Then Frank O’Hara died and it sort of petered out, and then Dylan and Allen Ginsberg revitalized it.*

Arthur Rimbaud

He’s a hero to those who know about him because he’s a model of life, and he had extraordinary physical beauty and beauty of mind. In a way he succeeded in possessing the truth in one body and one soul. He succeeded in completely entering his life and acting without looking backward, acting without second-guessing himself or without shadow-making gestures that had no shadows in the sense of self-conscious ego-manipulation. So that, despite his suffering, at the end of his life he seems to have been completely immersed in existence 100 percent. And he may have wound up dying in eternity rather than dying in a shadow world of lies and self-deception. Must read his late letters from Africa.

The only thing is, Rimbaud doesn’t seem to provide a ‘final solution’ to ego or ego’s aggression. What Rimbaud is, is fantastic aggression and charm and intensity and intelligence, and a funny soft-spot kind of sexual humility, and openness to being fucked by life. But his myth seen crudely might lead younger people who don’t have some stable meditation into nonsensical suicides.

Jimmy Carter

I was afraid that he, being a deistic- or theistic-minded person, might take his ego seriously enough to start an atomic war on some moral issue connected with divine principles. As a non-theist, I thought it was somewhat dangerous to have a hysterical theist in the White House. But I voted for him, because I heard that Ralph Nader liked him, and that he had a good record on ecological matters in Georgia. And also because he promised amnesty to the soldiers who didn’t want to fight Nixon’s war.

The story of his success is just an old Burroughs story of a good old boy coming round and talking. He wasn’t that new; he was a governor, they’ve run governors before. How did Wendell Willkie get nominated? How did Stevenson get nominated? I mean they’re all relatively unknown people in one way or another, without a power base. How did McGovern do it? I don’t think that’s so strange. It’s just another governor running for government against a representative connected with Watergate corruption stories.

I think what it means is that a significant portion of the population became disillusioned with the government lineage and simply voted for Carter to provide some relief. Not that they expected anything better. That’s why the vote was so close. Expecting something better would mean a greater movement toward liberating junkies from the thralls of the police state, medicalizing the junk problem and getting the government and the profiteers out of the junk business – both repressing and peddling – and I suppose it would also mean having total rekindling of energy sources and withdrawal from the addiction to petroleum and petrochemical sources, and a more humorous approach to government as theatre.

There might be a little more theatre under Carter, but again there’s a problem, which is he’s got a ceiling which is God. And his highest appeal is going to be God all the time, the way he’s set himself up, and that’s not much of a place to appeal to. It immediately stops all rational consideration of the situation.

His smile was kind of strange for a few days. For a couple of days just before the election, his smile became very sinister.

[Allen suddenly breaks into song:]

Stay away from the White House

Stay away I wish you well

Stay away from the White House

Stay away I wish you well

Stay away from the White House

Or you’ll go to Vajra Hell!*

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Another hero of mine is Chögyam Trungpa. He seems to have carried forward a practical, visible, programmatic practice of egolessness, and provided a path for other people to walk on.

He’s a Tibetan Lama trained from childhood in meditation practices, and he’s translated the esoteric classical meditation practices into Americanese so that it’s available to hippies and middle-class people, and has entered into the American scene in a very energetic way founding the Naropa Institute (in Boul?, Colorado) of which the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is a branch. He has made space for the nat? perceptions and accomplishments that solidified here already in literature, and he sees some correlations between our own natural intelligence and a kind of spacious wisdom characteristic of Buddhist liberation.

When I first met him I thought he reminded me a lot of Kerouac, partly because of the drinking, partly because the spontaneous shrewdness, partly because of the poetic nature of his talent drinks a lot sake … He says he wants to be reborn a Japanese scientist.

John Lennon

Just about half a year ago, before I went to teach the summer at Naropa, I went up to visit John and Yoko, they were in the kitchen with their baby, in very good shape, following a very strict diet. They gave me a copy of Sugar Blues and warned me about the imperialistic addictive history of sugar. He said one of the reasons he wouldn’t stay in Hollywood was everybody was killing themselves on dope and alcohol, or a lot of musicians, anyway: and he didn’t want to have a band unless he could have a band with musicians in good health.

Paul McCartney

I met Paul McCartney in his house in England in ’66. Mick Jagger was there, reading a book by Elephas Levi – a French astrologer who supposedly taught Rimbaud in 1870; Rimbaud had met Levi in Paris – a book with some astrological or alchemical design on the cover – and McCartney was painting designs on a red velvet shirt, which he gave me as a present when I left.

I told him a little bit about Blake, and he told me a big long story about how The Beatles had first got high on acid, it was a very funny conversation, some friends had given the acid to them in their coffee, and they went out in their limousine to some nightclub, and they stopped on the pavement and were looking down into the nightclub stairwell, and it was all full of garish neon, and it looked like the big mouth of a monster. They didn’t know whether to go in or not. And then there were all these people around when they got out of their limousine, looking at them, so they had to go in. And then once they got in it was alright.

McCartney has a kind of sweetness, a cherubic quality. It’s in his music, too.

* Like a true Beat Punk Patti’s chronology is a little messed up, but she got the spirit right. For a complete account of Patti’s visionary role as a leading Beat Punk, see my Patti Smith: The Biography (The Fourth Estate, London, 1998).

* Vajra Hell is the only permanent, unbreakable hell – total opaque selfhood: refusal of intelligence, refusal of awareness.

This interview with Debbie Harry conducted in 1996 is the most recent piece in the book, and is combined with some vintage material from 1980. There is a lot of continuity in my relationship with Debbie. Talking with her on the phone yesterday was no different than talking with her twenty years ago, except that she is more confident and stronger.