with Duncan and Olson and everybody around, and then continued. When Bhaktivedanta arrived
on the Lower East Side in ‘66 it was reinforcement for me, like "the reinforcements
had arrived" from India.
PBC: You mentioned your trip to India in the early sixties. Do you consider that
to be very significant in your orientation afterwards toward your present spiritual goals?
AG: My trip wasn’t very spiritual, as anybody can see if they read Indian
Journals. Most of it was spent horsing around, sightseeing and trying the local drugs.
But I did visit all of the holy men I could find and I did encounter some teachers who
gave me little teachings then that were useful then and now. Some of the contacts were
prophetic of what I arrived at later here in America, because I met the head of the Kagyu
order, Gyalwa Karmapa there, and saw the black crown ceremony in Sikkim in ‘62 or ‘63. He
subsequently visited the U.S. with Trungpa as host. I went to see Dudjom Rinpoche, the
head of the Nyingma sect and got one very beautiful suggestion from him about the
bum LSD trips I was having at the time, which I’ll quote again: "If you see something
horrible, don’t cling to it; and if you see something beautiful, don’t cling to it."
PBC: Has LSD been less of a factor in your life lately?
AG: Less, though it was a strong influence and I think basically a good
influence. I went through a lot of horror scenes with it. Finally, through poetic and
meditation practice I found the key to see through the horror and come to a quiet place
while tripping.
PBC: Do you ever find it possible to do serious meditation while under the
influence of drugs, or do you find the two exclusive?
AG: I haven’t tried since I’ve been more deeply involved in meditation. The last
time I took acid, I went up into the Teton Mountains, to the top of Rendezvous Mountain,
and made a little sitting place on the rocks, near the snow. Just sat there all day,
unmoved, unmoving, watching my breath, while white clouds pushed casting shadows on the
stillness of the white snow. It was like sitting up in the corner of a great mandala of
the god-worlds thinking of the hells — bombing Cambodia — going on down the other side
of the mandala, the other side of the round earth; and then breathing, and the thought
dissolving, and the physical presence of the place where I was resuming, sitting in a
white snowy place in the middle of the whole "empty" vast full universe.
PBC: The reason I asked is that most teachers I’ve heard of have counseled
against using drugs or have said they’re an impediment on the path, although many people
have reported experiencing profound mystical meditative states while under the influence
of certain drugs, and that drugs have opened them to a more expansive consciousness.
AG: I think that even those teachers who disapprove of the use of drugs by their
students do credit the LSD wave with opening up people’s awareness to the possibility of
alternative modes of consciousness, or at least a search for some stable place, or perhaps
leaving their imaginations open to understand some of the imagery, such as the wheels of
life. Trungpa’s position is that "psychedelics" are too trippy, whereas people
need to be grounded; everything is uncertain enough as it is. The world, societies, mind
are uncertain. What’s needed is some non-apocalyptic, non-ambitious, non-spiritually
materialistic, grounded sanity, for which he proposes shamatha meditation and
discourages grass and acid, which is logically sensible. I think he may have some more
ample ideas about that for specific situations.
Peter Barry Chowka: I want to talk a little about the concept of
"egolessness," which is something a lot of us have trouble defining and
practicing. Last night you mentioned the three marks of existence are "change,
suffering and egolessness."
Allen Ginsberg: Trungpa lectured on that at Naropa last year, very beautifully,
and I turned it into a stanza:
Born in this world
you got to suffer
everything changes
you got no soul
representing suffering, change/transiency, and anatma or no permanent essential
identity, meaning, in a sense, non-theism, or nonselfism. It’s a description of the nature
of things, by their very nature. It might knock out Krishna and Joya and God and some
notions of Christ and some notions of Buddha. It may not necessarily knock out devotion or
the quality of devotion, though.
PBC: How long ago was your poem "Ego Confession" written? I’m curious,
because the line in it that I picked up on was the first one: "I want to be known as
the most brilliant man in America."
AG: Yeah, it’s obviously a great burlesque, a take-off on myself, shameful,
shocking. (laughs) I wrote it in October ‘74, listening to Cecil Taylor play in a
nightclub in San Francisco, sitting next to Anne Waldman, who is the co-director of the
Kerouac School of Poetics at Naropa. And I was so ashamed of what I wrote down that I
wouldn’t let her see it, I hid my notebook from her with my hand. Within a month I
realized that the poem was funny.
PBC: Do you have any new poems in your notebook that you’d care to read for us
while we’re on this trip to Baltimore?
AG: I think the text of the "Gospel of Noble Truths" hasn’t been
printed anywhere. It’s a gospel style song, for blues chord changes one/four/one/five/ and
next stanza return to one. There’s another reflection of that theme in a poem I wrote
along on the Rolling Thunder Review.
Lay down Lay down yr Mountain Lay down God
Lay down Lay down yr music Love Lay down
Lay down Lay down yr hatred Lay yrself down
Lay down Lay down yr Nation Lay yr foot on the Rock
Lay down yr whole Creation Lay yr Mind down
Lay down Lay down yr Magic Hey Alchemist Lay it down Clear
Lay down yr Practice precisely Lay down yr Wisdom dear
Lay down Lay down yr Camera Lay down yr Image right
Yea Lay down yr Image Lay down Light.
Nov. 1, 1975
PBC: Is Dylan the "Alchemist" in those lines?
AG: Yeah, the poem is directed to him, because we were considering the nature of
the movie we were making, which will be a nice thing, a sort of "dharma
movie," hopefully, depending on how it’s edited. The movie made along the Rolling
Thunder tour (120 hours of film which will have to be reduced to three) has many "dharma"
scenes. It was like a Buddhist conspiracy on the part of some of the directors and film
cameramen; the director Mel Howard was out at Naropa last year. In every scene that I
played I used the Milarepa mantra "Ah" and kept trying to lay it on Dylan
or the audience or the film men.
PBC: Much of Dylan’s music, even from the middle, electric period of his career,
has impressed me as being very Zen-like in a lot of its imagery. Knowing him well as you
do, do you think he has been influenced by Zen or Buddhism?
AG: I don’t know him because I don’t think there is any him, I
don’t think he’s got a self!
PBC: He’s ever-changing.
AG: Yeah. He’s said some very beautiful, Buddha-like things. One thing, very
important, was I asked him whether he was having pleasure on the tour, and he said,
"Pleasure, Pleasure, what’s that? I never touch the stuff." And then he went on
to explain that at one time he had had a lot of pain and sought a lot of pleasure, but
found that there was a subtle relationship between pleasure and pain. His words were,
"They’re in the same framework." So now, as in the Bhagavad Gita, he does
what it is necessary to do without consideration of "pleasure," not being a
pleasure junkie, which is good advice for anyone coming from the top-most
pleasure-possible man in the world. He also said he believed in God. That’s why I wrote
"Lay down yr Mountain Lay down God." Dylan said that where he was, "on top
of the Mountain," he had a choice whether to stay or to come down. He said, God told
him, "All right, you’ve been on the Mountain, I’m busy, go down, you’re on your own.
Check in later." (laughs) And then Dylan said, "Anybody that’s busy making
elephants and putting camels through needles’ eyes is too busy to answer my questions, so
I came down the Mountain."
PBC: Several of his albums have shown his interest in God, especially New
Morning.
AG: "Father of Night," yeah. I think that is, in a sense, a
penultimate stage. It’s not his final stage of awareness. I was kidding him on the tour, I
said, "I used to believe in God." So he said, "Well, I used to believe in
God, too." (laughs) And then he said, "You’d write better poetry if you believed
in God."
PBC: You’ve been fairly close to Dylan for a number of years now . . .
AG: No, I didn’t see him for four years. He just called me up at 4 a.m. and said
"What are you writing, sing it to me on the telephone." And then said,
"O.K., let’s go out on the road."
PBC: He was encouraged by a letter you’d written him about your appreciation of
his song "Idiot Wind?"
AG: Denise Mercedes, a guitarist whom Dylan admires, was talking to Dylan, and
he mentioned to her that he was tickled. I had written a long letter to him demanding
$200,000 for Naropa Institute, to sustain the whole Trungpa scene, just a big long kidding
letter, hoping that he’d respond. He liked the letter, he just skipped over the part about
money. (He doesn’t read anything like that, I knew, anyway.) But then I also explained
what was going on at Naropa with all the poets. I said also that I had dug the great line
in the song "Idiot Wind," which I thought was one of Dylan’s great great
prophetic national songs, with one rhyme that took in the whole nation, I said it was a
"national rhyme."
Idiot wind
Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Dylan told Denise that nobody else had noticed it or mentioned it to him; that the line
had knocked him out, too. He thought it was an interesting creation, however he had
arrived at it. And I thought it was absolutely a height of Hart Crane-type poetics. I was
talking earlier about resentment. "Idiot Wind" is like Dylan acknowledging the
vast resentments, angers and ill-temper on the Left and the Right all through America
during the sixties, calling it an "idiot wind" and saying "it’s a wonder we
can even breathe" or "it’s a wonder we can even eat!"
PBC: Right, and directing it at himself, as well.
AG: Yeah, talking about it within himself, but also declaring his independence
from it. There’s a great line in which he says, "I’ve been double-crossed now for the
very last time, and now I’m finally free," recognizing and exorcising the monster
"on the borderline between you and me."
PBC: You’ve obviously been impressed by Dylan and his music during the last
decade.
AG: He’s a great poet.
PBC: Is it possible for you to verbalize what kinds of influence he’s had on
your own style of poetry?
AG: I’ve done that at great length in the preface to a new book, First Blues,
which has just been published in only 1,500 copies, so it’s relatively rare. I wrote a
long preface tracing all the musical influences I’ve had, including Dylan’s, because I
dedicated the book to him. He taught me three chords so I got down to blues. Right after
Trungpa suggested I begin improvising, I began improvising and Dylan heard it, and
encouraged it even more. We went into a studio in ‘71 and improvised a whole album.
PBC: Which has never been released. Do you think it ever will be?
AG: Oh, on Folkways, or something.
PBC: Back to the Rolling Thunder Tour. Perhaps you can place it in the context
of the Beat movement of the fifties and the consciousness expansion of the sixties.
Something you said while on the tour indicated that you saw it as being perhaps that
important; you said that "the Rolling Thunder Revue will be one of the signal
gestures characterizing the working cultural community that will make the seventies."
AG: Wishful thinking, probably, but at the same time wishful thinking is also
prophesy. It seemed to me like the first bud of spring. I thought that the gesture toward
communalism — almost like a traveling rock-family-commune that Dylan organized, with
poets and musicians all traveling together, with the musicians all calling each other
"poet" — "sing me a song, poet" — was a good sign. The fact that he
brought his mother along — the "mysterious" Dylan had a chicken-soup, Yiddish
Mama, who even got on stage at one point . . .
PBC: Not to mention bringing his wife Sara and Joan Baez.
AG: Sara came, and his children came. And Sara met Joan Baez and they all acted
in the movie together, and Joan Baez brought her mother and her children, and Ramblin’
Jack Elliot had his daughter. So there was a lot of jumping family.
PBC: Sounds like Dylan tying up a lot of loose karmic ends.
AG: Right. As he says in the jacket notes to the Desire album,
"We’ve got a lot of karma to burn." To deal with or get rid of, I think he
means.
PBC: It was really a unique tour, bringing you primarily to small towns and
colleges in New England . . .
AG: The Beat moment was arriving at Jack Kerouac’s natal place, Lowell,
Massachusetts, and going to Kerouac’s grave.
PBC: Was Dylan moved during that experience?
AG: He was very open and very tender, he gave a lot of himself there. We stood
at Kerouac’s grave and read a little section on the nature of self-selflessness, from Mexico
City Blues. Then we sat down on the grave and Dylan took up my harmonium and made up a
little tune. Then he picked up his guitar and started a slow blues, so I improvised into a
sort of exalted style, images about Kerouac’s empty skull looking down at us over the
trees and clouds while we sat there, empty-mouthed, chanting the blues. Suddenly, Dylan
interrupted the guitar while I continued singing the verses (making them up as I went
along so it was like the triumph of the Milarepa style) and he picked up a Kerouac-ian
October-brown autumn leaf from the grass above his grave and stuck it in his breast pocket
and then picked up the guitar again and came down at the beat just as I did, too, and we
continued for another couple of verses before ending. So it was very detached and
surrendered; it didn’t even make a difference if he played the guitar or not. It was like
the old blues guitarists who sing a cappella for a couple of bars.
PBC: Has Dylan ever acknowledged to you that Kerouac was an influence on him or
that he’s familiar with his work?
AG: Yes, oddly! I asked him if he had ever read any Kerouac. He answered,
"Yeah, when I was young in Minneapolis." Someone had given him Kerouac’s Mexico
City Blues. He said, "I didn’t understand the words then, I understand it better
now, but it blew my mind." So apparently Kerouac was more of an influence on him than
I had realized. I think it was a nice influence on him.
PBC: Which poem was he reading from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues?
AG: It’s one toward the end of the book, which he picked out at random. I had
picked out something for him to read and, typical Dylan, he turned the page and read the
other one on the opposite side of the page. (laughs)
PBC: Which one did you pick out for him to read?
AG: "The wheel of the quivering meat conception turns in the void,"
the one that, I think, ends, "Poor! I wish I were out of this slaving meat wheel and
safe in heaven, dead." There was another one I picked which lists all the sufferings
of existence and ends, "like kissing my kitten in the belly, the softness of our
reward."
PBC: Was it your suggestion that Rolling Thunder include Lowell on the tour?
AG: No, Dylan had chosen it himself. We did a lot of beautiful filming in Lowell
– one of the scenes described by Kerouac is a grotto near an orphanage in the center of
red brick Catholic Lowell near the Merrimac River. So we went there and spent part of the
afternoon. There’s a giant statue of Christ described by Kerouac. Dylan got up near where
the Christ statue was on top of an artificial hill-mound, and all of a sudden he got into