this funny monologue, asking the man on the cross, "How does it feel to be up
there?" There’s a possibility . . . everyone sees Dylan as a Christ-figure,
too, but he doesn’t want to get crucified. He’s too smart, in a way. Talking to "the
star" who made it up and then got crucified Dylan was almost mocking, like a good Jew
might be to someone who insisted on being the messiah, against the wisdom of the rabbis,
and getting himself nailed up for it. He turned to me and said, "What can you do for
somebody in that situation?" I think he quoted Christ, "suffer the little
children," and I quoted "and always do for others and let others do for
you," which is Dylan’s hip, American-ese paraphrase of Christ’s "Do unto others
. . .," in "Forever Young."
So there was this brilliant, funny situation of Dylan talking to Christ, addressing
this life-size statue of Christ, and allowing himself to be photographed with Christ. It
was like Dylan humorously playing with the dreadful potential of his own mythological
imagery, unafraid and confronting it, trying to deal with it in a sensible way. That
seemed to be the characteristic of the tour: that Dylan was willing to shoulder the burden
of the myth laid on him, or that he himself created, or the composite creation of himself
and the nation, and use it as a workable situation; as Trungpa would say,
"alchemize" it.
We had another funny little scene — I don’t know if these will ever be shown in the
film, that’s why I’m describing them — with Dylan playing the Alchemist and me playing
the Emperor, filmed in a diner outside of Falmouth, Massachusetts. I enter the diner and
say, "I’m the emperor, I just woke up this morning and found out I inherited an
empire, and it’s bankrupt. I hear from the apothecary across the street that you’re an
alchemist. I need some help to straighten out karmic problems with my empire
. . . I just sent for a shipload of tears from Indo-China but it didn’t seem to
do any good. Can you help, do you have any magic formulae for alchemizing the
situation?" Dylan kept denying that he was an alchemist. "I can’t help, what’re
you asking me for? I don’t know anything about it." I said, "You’ve got to,
you’ve got to be a bodhisattva, you’ve got to take on the responsibility, you’re the
alchemist, you know the secrets.” So he asked the counterman, who was a regular
counterman at a regular diner, to bring him some graham crackers and some Ritz crackers,
ketchup, salt, pepper, sugar, milk, coffee, yogurt, and apple pie. He dumped them all in a
big aluminum pot. Earlier, I had come in and lay down my calling card, which was an autumn
leaf, just like the one Dylan pocketed in the graveyard — the leaf which runs through
many of the scenes in the movie, representing, like in Kerouac’s work, transiency,
poignancy, regret, acknowledgement of change, death. So I threw my calling card leaf in
the pot and Dylan threw in a piece of cardboard, and then he fished out the leaf, all
muddy, and slapped it down on the counter on top of my notebook, where I was taking down
all the magical ingredients of his alchemical mixture. Then I said, "Oh, I see the
secret of your alchemy: ordinary objects." "Yes," he said, "ordinary
mind." So that was the point of that. Next I said, "Come on, look at my
kingdom," and he said, "No, I don’t want anything to do with it" and he
rushed out of the diner. I followed him out, like in a Groucho Marx movie, and stopped:
turned to the camera, lifted my finger, and said, "I’ll find out the secret."
Then we redid the scene and, coyote magician that he is, with no consistency, he suggested
towards the end of the scene, "Well, why don’t we go look at your kingdom?" So
he led the way out and we went to see the "empire." He was completely
unpredictable in the way he would improvise scenes. All the scenes were improvised.
PBC: During the Rolling Thunder tour some of the participants expressed the hope
that it might continue as some sort of functioning community. Are there any indications
now, several months later, that that may come to pass, either through the film or another
tour of the Midwest?
AG: I don’t think it was intended to be a continuously functioning community in
any formal way, like people living together. I don’t think the energy would depend on that
group of people continuing any more than, say, all the San Francisco poets living
together. I think it might be necessary for those people to disperse and de-centralize,
and also for Dylan to try something new — not do just one thing, but continue
open-hearted experimenting.
PBC: With (by now) ten years added perspective to your heralding a "new
age" in The Fall of America, what are your present views on what the artist
and the poet can do to hasten the advent of that "new age?"
AG: To paraphrase the poem: "make laughing Blessing." That particular
quotation (which begins this interview), is probably the happiest and most optimistic, and
at the same time the most egotistically righteous, lyric in The Fall of America. It
invokes the spirit of both Hart Crane, who committed suicide, and Whitman, who didn’t
commit suicide, in building an American bridge to the future. I don’t know, though. I
don’t have any simple answer to what the poet can do or should do.
PBC: Theodore Roszak’s chapter on your work, in The Making of a Counter
Culture, quotes Wordsworth:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.
As you approach your 50th birthday, your life outwardly seems to be the opposite of
Wordsworth’s dictum. Would you credit your Buddhist viewpoint and practice with having
made the difference?
AG: My own common sense, and my experience of my mother’s madness as a kind of
preventive antitoxin, as well as the ripening of my own awareness and peaceableness
through shamatha meditation.
PBC: Prior to your vision of Blake in 1948, had you ever gone through an
agnostic, or questioning, period concerning religion, spirituality, God . . .
and, if so, did that vision bring you back to the realization of the imminent
transcendence of God within everyday reality?
AG: I had absolutely no interest in religion, God or spirituality before the
vision, although Kerouac and I had concocted a search for a "New Vision" back in
1944-45.
PBC: An aspiritual "New Vision?"
AG: Yes. We didn’t have any idea what we were looking for.
PBC: Your experience seems to parallel what many young people underwent in the
sixties and seventies. First, de-programming themselves from heavy religious conditioning
they had undergone as children, and then coming back to a spiritual sensibility, either
through drugs or . . .
AG: I never had any religious conditioning and I never came back to any.
PBC: You’re fortunate in that case.
AG: Yeah, thank God!
from New Age Journal, April 1976. Copyright ? by Peter Barry Chowka. Online Source
Interview with Ginsberg (8/11/96)
INTERVIEWER: Could you tell me how you personally
experienced the restrictive Cold War atmosphere that came through the Fifties?
ALLEN GINSBERG: Well, part of that atmosphere was the sort of anti-Communist hysteria
of McCarthyism, but culminating in ‘53 or so, with the execution of the Rosenbergs. It was
a little harsh. Whatever they did, it wasn’t worth killing people, you know, killing them.
I remember sending a wire to Eisenhower and saying: "No, that’s the wrong
thing." Drawing blood like that is the wrong thing, because it’s ambiguous; and
especially, there was one commentator on the air, called Fulton Lewis, who said that they
smelt bad, and therefore should die. There was an element of anti-Semitism in it. But I
remember very clearly on the radio, this guy Fulton Lewis saying they smelt bad. He was a
friend of J. Edgar Hoover, who was this homosexual in the closet, who was blackmailing
almost everybody.
But that year, ‘53, I was living with William Burroughs in New York, and he was
conceiving the first routines of Naked Lunch, which were parodies of Cold War
bureaucracy mentality and police state mentality. And I remember that year very vividly,
that Mosaddeq was overthrown in Iran, in Persia, because it was suspected that he might be
neutral, or left, though he wasn’t, but he really wanted to nationalize the oilfields,
which the Shah later did anyway. And I remember the CIA overthrew Mosaddeq, and he wept in
court; and we’ve had karmic troubles and war troubles with Iran ever since. That was the
seed of all the Middle Eastern catastrophe we’re facing now.
[At the] same time, in 1953, the Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown, and I
was much aware of that, despite the neutrality of the American papers and the lack of real
reporting. The actual event was that Allen Dulles was running the CIA, I believe; John
Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State; they both had relations to the… I
think it was the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm. The Sullivan and Cromwell law firm were
representing United Fruit, and so, for the United Fruit’s interests we overthrew a
democratically elected leader … Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. And that was followed by…
well, what is it?… 30 years or 40 years of persecution of the Guatemalan indigenous
peoples, with the death of 200,000 of them – at least so the New York Times says -
particularly under the later leadership of General R?os Montt, who turns out also to have
been a disciple of Pat Robertson, the right-wing moralist, Bible-thumping Christ
announcer, assuming for himself the morality and ethics of Jesus.
So many, many seeds of karmic horror: mass death, mass murder, were planted in those
years, including, very consciously for me – I was quite aware of it – the refusal of John
Foster Dulles to shake Zhou Enlai’s hand at the Geneva Conference which ended the French
war in Indochina, or was supposed to end it. Now the Americans had been sending France $40
million a year to pursue that war, and then the Americans cut off the funds, so the French
didn’t have funds. But as Bernard Fall points out, and many others, General Salan and
others maintained the war through the proceeds of the opium sales in Chelon, the Chinese
section of Saigon, and the war was funded for a while by them. Then, when the Americans
finally took over, with a puppet president, Diem who had been cultivated in the Merinal
Academy in the East Coast by Cardinal Spellman… another flaming faggot, who in disguise
was a sort of a war dragon and one of the instigators of the Vietnam War… so Diem was a
Catholic, and we had installed him as the puppet in a Buddhist country. So, when I arrived
in Saigon in 1963, coming after several years in India, I was astounded to find that this
Buddhist country was being run by a Catholic American puppet. And, in sitting down with
David Halperstam and I think Charles Morer and Peter Arnett and others, who were reporting
for the American newspapers, I got a completely different idea in the early Sixties, ‘63,
May 30th ‘63 to… oh, June 10th or so… completely different idea of what was going on
in the war than I’d had reading the papers abroad or in America. They all said that the
war could not be won; there was no light at the end of the tunnel; and Ambassador Lodge’s
reports to the President were false, or hyper-optimistic and misleading; and that they
were getting flak and criticism for reporting what they saw on the spot there. But to go
back to the Fifties, what was … it felt like in the Fifties – given all these karmic
violent errors that the CIA was making in Iran, in Latin America, the real problem was
that none of this was clearly reported in the press. It was reported with apologies or
with rationalizations or with the accusation that Arbenz was a communist, or that Mosaddeq
was a communist. Mosaddeq was mocked, especially when he wept in court, with tears that
were tears, and very tragic, both for America and Iran. And he was considered … you
know, in Time magazine, which was sort of the standard party line, like the
Stalinist party line, he was considered the… you know, some kind of jerk.
Of course, in those days Walt Whitman was considered a jerk, and William Carlos
Williams was considered a jerk, and any sign of natural man was considered a jerk. The
ideal, as you could find it in advertising in the loose organizations, was the man of
distinction: actually, a sort of British-looking guy with a brush moustache and a tweed
coat, in a club library, drinking – naturally – the favorite drug, the drug of choice of
the Establishment. And this was considered and broadcast as… advertised as the
American century. Well, you know, Burroughs and I and Kerouak had already been reading
Oswald Spengler on the decline in the West and the cycles of civilizations, and found this
proclamation of the American century a sort of faint echo of Hitler’s insistence on his
empire lasting 1,000 years, or the Roman Empire’s neglect of the central cities. And we
were thinking in terms of the fall of America, and a new vision and a new religiousness,
really, a second religiousness, which Kerouak spoke of in the Fifties, and exemplified,
say, with his introduction to Eastern thought into the American scene, from the beginning
of the 1950s through his book Mexico City Blues, poems which were
Buddhist-flavored, through his open portrait of Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bum(s),
the book The Dharma Bums – a long-haired rucksack revolution, a rebellion within
the cities against the prevailing war culture, and a cultivation of the countryside and
the beginning of ecological considerations and ecological reconstruction.
So you had McCarthyism, you had a completely false set of values being presented in
terms of morality, ethics and success: the man of distinction. You had to put down the
most tender parts of American conscience, Whitman and Williams. You had the aggression of
the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover and the alcoholic, intemperate Senator McCarthy working
together. You had a stupid Post Master General, Arthur Somerfield, who presented the
President, Eisenhower, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover on his desk, with dirty words
underlined; and it was reported, I think in Time or in Newsweek, that
Eisenhower said, "Terrible – we can’t have this!" And so there was censorship,
particularly censorship of literature towards…it was not… like, unconsciously or
inadvertently, the things that were censored were the anti-war, anti-macho,
anti-imperial texts, whether the beginnings of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the
Fifties, Kerouak’s Visions of Cody, which could not be printed in those days, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller. So we had D.H. Lawrence banned, Catullus banned; the
Satyricon and Petronius’ Arbiter couldn’t be printed completely in English,
it had to be printed in Latin in the Modern Library editions.
So we had electoral censorship, literary censorship. You had a large-scale electoral
censorship on a much more subtle, vast wave, with the CIA, bankrolling the Congress for
Cultural Freedom and a number of literary magazines, like Encounter, Truth,
(We Won in?) Africa, Demonat, and others. Stephen Spender, I
remember, used to complain to me that he’d bring in articles critical of the American
imperium in Latin America, and somehow Laskey, or whoever was working with him, or Arnold
Beichman, I don’t know – somehow, when he left their office, they would… it was rejected
and nothing but anti-Communist, anti-Russian screeds were there. Very good reporting in
that aspect, very good, but on the other hand there was no balance in reporting the
horrors of American imperial invasion and overthrow and CIA subversion – all over the
world, actually – much less CIA invasion of the intellectual body politic, with the
funding of the National Student Association, Congress for Cultural Freedom, all those
magazines; even the Pen Club was tainted with that for a while. So there was this invasion
of subsidy for a somewhat middle-right-wing party line. And the interesting thing is, most
of those people that were working in the CIA, that worked that out, were ex-commies; they
had the same Stalinist mentality: they just transferred it over to the right wing, and it