FERLINGHETTI: “He lived so many flames. Today the youth, like the 20-year-olds, are really turned on to Ginsberg and the Beat poets, but the thing they’re turned on to is the apolitical part. One forgets how political the Beats were in the ’50s, which was the Eisenhower and McCarthy era. And that’s a flame that seems to be flickering these days.”
KESEY: “He was a great warrior. I think that’s more important than his poetry. In fact, in later times, I haven’t read much of his poetry at all, because the warrior aspect of Ginsberg has loomed much larger. When we went to the Vietnam Day parade up in Berkeley, they had been interviewing the Hells Angels—all the Hells Angels were gonna come out and oppose the opposers—they were gonna come out and start a riot, is what it was.
“So Allen asked me to take him up there, to where the Angels hung out in this big white house in Oakland, and we went in there, and here’s all these big brutes holding their beer cans, with their beer bellies and their beards, and Ginsberg goes right in and starts talking to them. And you look around, here are these great big mean-looking guys wearing swastikas, pretty soon Ginsberg has just charmed the hell out of ’em, until there’s not gonna be a riot. He took himself into that—they marveled at him. It was the courage, again, the courage of this man to come into this situation and defuse it.”
KRASSNER: “I knew Allen more as a researcher and an activist than as a poet. Abbie Hoffman and other political activists like Ed Sanders were influenced by Howl, but as a researcher, Ginsberg had meticulously acquired files on everything that the CIA ever did, and I’m happy that these are included in his archives [at Stanford University].
“The one image I have of him from Chicago in 1968, when we were holding our Yippie counter-convention—as opposed to the Democratic ‘convention of death,’ as we called it—the police were in Lincoln Park tear-gassing and clubbing people, and Ginsberg sat in the middle of it like some kind of stoned Buddha, chanting Om over and over again, and people gathered around him, and he led them out of the park, and it created a kind of mystical force field, so that the cops just ignored them, and he was like the Pied Piper of Peacemaking. Allen just articulated the consciousness of people who knew that the mainstream culture was a sadomasochistic bizarre mess.”
KRASNY: “What do you do with the kind of bizarre mess that some people would claim is characteristic of Ginsberg in the wake of his death, all the NAMBLA [North American Man/Boy Love Association] stuff, and his apparently not only supporting that organization, but also expressing favor where little boys are concerned, sexually, and also using drugs somewhat recklessly and excessively as some attribute to him?”
KRASSNER: “Well, that’s the risk of free will. Allen has always admitted, you know, he would go to a poetry reading and say he was hoping to meet a young boy there. He was honest about his perversion of pedophilia, if that’s what it was, but it may have been just a fantasy. He was for dialogue, and he was nonviolent, so it’s just interesting as to what he considered the age of consent. A few months ago he told me it was 18.”
COYOTE: [chuckling] “It’s just so funny. I mean, as a father of two kids, I’m repulsed by the idea of pedophilia, but you know, by the same token, it’s Allen. It probably wasn’t easy being Allen. It’s easier to be some of us than others of us, and I think that Allen’s great courage was to be unequivocally who he was. And when he went to Cuba and announced that he wanted to have oral sex with Che Guevara, it actually was to Castro’s detriment, in my mind, that he threatened to lock him up, or threw him out.
“The thing that Allen represented to me was more than the Beats, more than anything else—I harken back to Gary Snyder’s great phrase, “the great underground,” which he calls the tradition, coming from the Paleolithic shamans on up to the present—the tradition of yogins and healers and midwives and poets and artists and people who stand for archaic, earth-centered values, life-supporting values. It’s like a great river that kind of surfaces in various cultures around the world at different times. It’s squenchless, transcendentalist for just one little rivulet of it. And Allen was a great prophet for it.”
KESEY: “When we [Merry Pranksters] went to see Leary at Millbrook, Ginsberg was on the bus, and we had pulled over somewhere, and he was up immediately, sweeping the stuff out of the bus with a little broom, and Cassady at the wheel said, ‘Looky there, it’s our Jewish mother.’ And he was the Jewish mother, in some way, to a whole literary movement. He did all he could to help all of his friends get into print, all the time. He was a great benefactor to this art, and worked very, very hard to have his friends have as much fame as he did.
“We had a poetry festival some years ago up here in Oregon, and the way we were doing it, during the day we had a stage outside of our basketball court, and we had headliners that were gonna be on that night, and during the day people read poetry and we judged it, and they were gonna be the people that read with Ginsberg, and during the day all the people in the field outside gradually trickled into the basketball court, like 3,000 people in there, and we were gonna charge them $5 apiece, but they were already in there. Allen said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’ And he got up there with his harmonium, and he began, Om, Om. Pretty soon he had ’em all Om Oming, and he just gave a gesture like that, stood up, walked out, and 3,000 people walked out with him, so we were able to charge ’em money.”
KRASSNER: “We’ve been praising Allen so much, but I’ll give you one little revealing story. On one hand, he was a pacifist. I remember when he first started taking LSD, and he thought that world peace would come about if only John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev would take acid together. And yet, I remember a scene—this was in the early ’70s—Ken Kesey and I and my daughter Holly, who was a young girl then, were visiting William Burroughs in New York, and he had this huge loft, and a cat, and a lot of cardboard boxes, and he was wearing a suit and tie and high-top red sneakers.
“We all decided to visit Ginsberg in the hospital—he’d had a stroke, and part of his face was paralyzed—he was in bed there, and I introduced him to my daughter, and he graciously struggled to sit up and shake hands with her. But he was kind of weak and deep into some kind of medication, and he blurted out—what they would call in psychiatry a “primary process”—he blurted out, ‘Henry Kissinger should have his head chopped off!’ It was some kind of Ginsbergian Tourette’s syndrome.”
KRASNY: “There’s been a lot of solemn talk, so I’m glad you added that note of levity. Ginsberg would want, I think, a discussion about his life to be infused with a lot of humor and satire, don’t you think?”
KRASSNER: “Oh, absolutely. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you’re walking around with an Uncle Sam hat and Mahatma Gandhi pajamas, chanting ‘The war is over’ when the war was at its height. But that act inspired Phil Ochs to write his song ‘The War Is Over’ and to organize rallies in Los Angeles and New York on the theme of ‘The war is over.’ ”
COYOTE: “I think that Ginsberg represented an enlarged notion of sanity—which is not to say it’s not without contradictions, which is not to say it’s not as stained and tattered as anything else. You may not like the fact that Gandhi tested his celibacy by lying naked with young girls, or that Freud was shooting cocaine while he was working out his psychotherapy theories, or that Martin Luther King had sex with women outside of marriage, but to me, what these facts do is reinforce the humanity of the person in question and remind us that we don’t have to be perfect to make contributions, that we can struggle against the dark or the undeveloped sides of our nature and still make a contribution, and I think that’s kind of the beacon Allen is. The thrust and underpinnings of his life were fundamentally sane in every venue. That’s really what I respect him most for.”
FERLINGHETTI: “I think maybe you could say Allen started out mad and became saner all his life, and then he became more quiet, I think, in his last years, and this was an influence of Buddhism, I believe. He died as a Buddhist, he didn’t want any support systems. There
were Buddhists around him at all-night vigils the last two nights, and he died the way he wanted to die.”
KESEY: “Ginsberg had a terrific laugh. I was just trying to think, what was I going to miss most? Even in the most serious moments, this thing would bubble up and bark forth, his eyes twinkling. It was a great laugh, and I’m gonna miss him.”
ROBERT ANTON WILSON: “KEEP THE LASAGNA FLYING”
Most likely your daily newspaper didn’t acknowledge the death of Robert Anton Wilson on January 11, 2007. He was 74. The prolific author and countercultural icon had been suffering from post-polio syndrome. Caregivers read all of his late wife Arlen’s poetry to him at his bedside and e-mailed me: “He was quite cheered up by the time we left. He definitely needed to die. His body was turning on him in ways that would not allow him to rest.”
In his final blog five days earlier, Wilson wrote: “I don’t see how to take death seriously. I look forward without dogmatic optimism, but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.” Actually, it was expected that he would die seven months earlier. On June 19, 2006, he sent this haiku (with one syllable missing) to his electronic cabal:
Well what do you know?
Another day has passed
and I’m still not not.
We originally became friends in 1959 when his first published article graced the cover of The Realist. It was titled “The Semantics of God,” and he suggested that “The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe that ‘God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to ‘God’ as ‘he.’ ” Wilson then began writing a regular column, “Negative Thinking.”
In 1964, I ran another front-cover story by him, “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb,” which began: “The future may decide that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein, who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world, and Timothy Leary, who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former. Leary may have shown how our habits of thought can be changed.”
Wilson took that notion as his personal marching orders, altering the consciousness of countless grateful readers of his thirty-five books—from Sex, Drugs & Magick to Everything Is Under Control: An Encyclopedia of Conspiracy Theories—all written with the aid of that good old creative fuel, marijuana. He once told me about his creative process: “It’s rather obsessive-compulsive, I think. I write the first draft straight, then rewrite stoned, then rewrite straight again, then rewrite stoned again, and so on, until I’m absolutely delighted with every sentence, or irate editors start reminding me about deadlines—whichever comes first.”
He became a pothead in 1955, but a few years ago he told the audience at a Prophets Conference, “I haven’t smoked pot in about twelve . . . hours, and I want you to know it’s great to be clean.” He enjoyed peppering his presentations at such distinguished New Age events with “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers,” and was disinvited from participating in future Prophet Conferences because, said the organizers, “What we feel to be important to your insights are being lost to the audience when packaged in hard and harsh language.”
Wilson once described his writings as “intellectual comedy.” He told an Internet database, Contemporary Authors: “If my books do what I intend, they should leave the reader feeling that the universe is capable of doing something totally shocking and unexpected in the next five minutes. I am trying to show that life without certainty can be exhilarating, liberating, a great adventure.” He called his philosophy “Maybe Logic,” which became the title of a documentary about him.
Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm commune, writes, “I had the good fortune to visit with Robert at his house and meet his wife. When I saw the beautiful relationship between them, I understood why the sex scenes in his books are so nicely written that they stand out above everyone else’s sex scenes that I’ve read. One of my next encounters with him was standing on the sidewalk of a cold November day in Amsterdam waiting for a taxi. He didn’t have enough of a coat, and he was standing in the cold with his collar turned up and his hands stuck in his pockets. It was a while after his wife had died and he looked quite forlorn. We collected him up, put a warm coat on him, and put a joint in his mouth. It was a real hoot to get to be friends with one of my very favorite writers. His book The Illuminatus is a benchmark in science fiction and contemporary paranoia.”
Wilson wrote his own obituary in an autobiography, Cosmic Trigger: “According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994—George Washington’s birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen friends had already called to ask to speak to me, or—if they still believed in Reliable Sources—to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered that the news of my tragic end had appeared on the Internet: ‘Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. [He] was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology and off the wall humor. Mr. Wilson is survived by his wife and two children.’”
R.U. Sirius, co-author of Counterculture Through the Ages, writes, “Robert Anton Wilson enjoyed his first death so much, he decided to try it again. As the result of medical expenses and problems with the IRS, he found himself in a financial squeeze towards the end of his life. Word went out and the Internet community responded by sending him $68,000 within the first couple of days. This allowed him to die with the comfort, grace and dignity that he deserved. He taught us all that ‘the universe contains a maybe.’ So maybe there is an afterlife, and maybe Bob’s consciousness is hovering around all of us who were touched by his words and his presence all these years. And if that’s the case, I’m sure he’d like to see you do something strange and irreverent—and yet beautiful—in his honor.”
WHO THE HELL IS STEW ALBERT?
After Larry “Ratso” Sloman ghost-wrote Howard Stern’s autobiography, Private Parts, he compiled an oral biography of Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Dream. Stern wasn’t impressed.
“Well,” said Ratso, “Stew Albert likes it.”
“Who the hell is Stew Albert?”
Stew was the first one to turn me on with marijuana. We met in 1965 when I was invited to emcee the first Vietnam teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus, and he introduced me to a supersize Thai stick. “Now I know why we’re fighting in Southeast Asia,” I observed—“to protect the crops.” That quote became a headline on the front page of the Berkeley Barb, together with a photo of me smoking a joint.
Stew never got the media attention that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin did as co-organizers of the Yippies, although he was the personification of an activist. He also served as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker. During the protests in 1968 at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago, Abbie bought a pig to run as the Yippie candidate for president, but Jerry thought it wasn’t big enough or ugly enough, so Stew went with him to buy another pig, bigger and uglier.
Stew was the first demonstrator there to get hit by the police with a billy club. After his head was stitched and bandaged, we went to a Western Union office and sent a telegram (recently deemed an obsolescent means of communication) to the United Nations, requesting them to send in a human rights unit to investigate violations in Chicago. Stew, who had acted as a liaison between the Yippies and the Black Panther Party, told me, “Malcolm X, and then the Black Panthers, had planned to take their case to the UN.”
We were both unindicted co-conspirators for crossing state lines to foment rioting, unindicted because they were afraid we would have a freedom-of-the-press defense. In addition to our being there as protesters, S
tew covered the counter-convention for the Berkeley Barb, and I covered it for The Realist.
I published a couple of Stew’s articles, one on the legacy of Che Guevara, another on Stew’s campaign for sheriff in Alameda County. He came in fourth, winning in Berkeley with 65,000 votes. Later, he became a go-between for Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Leary wanted to take LSD with Cleaver, who told Stew that he was afraid Leary would try to program him, but Cleaver said yes to acid, provided he could wear his gun during the trip.
Stew died at the age of 66. I’ll miss his integrity, his passion and his sense of humor. When he wrote a memoir, he decided to title it Who the Hell Is Stew Albert?
Previously, he had co-edited with his wife, Judy Gumbo, The Sixties Papers, a collection of documents underlying the countercultural history of that era, from Tom Hayden’s “Port Huron Statement”—the credo of SDS (Students For a Democratic Society), currently undergoing a rebirth on campuses—to Robin Morgan’s feminist manifesto, “Goodbye to All That.”
Albert and Gumbo had found an illegal surveillance device under their car; they sued the FBI and won. Ironically, part of the settlement enabled them to buy a computer, with which they produced that book, now used in college courses across the country.
KURT VONNEGUT LIVES!
Several months before Timothy Leary died, he told me, “I watch words now. It’s an obsession. I learned it from Marshall McLuhan, of course. A terrible vice. Had it for years, but not actually telling people about it. I watch the words that people use. The medium is the message, you recall. The brain creates the realities she wants. When we see the prisms that these words come through, we can understand.”
During the Cold War, hysteria over the word “Communist” was the forerunner of current hysteria over the word “terrorist.” The attorney general of Arizona rejected the Communist Party’s request for a place on the ballot because state law “prohibits official representation” for the Communists, and in addition, “The subversive nature of your organization is even more clearly designated by the fact that you do not even include your zip code.” Alvin Dark, manager of the Giants, announced, “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.” And singer Pat Boone declared at the Greater New York Anti-Communism Rally in Madison Square Garden, “I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into Heaven than taught into Hell by the Communists.”
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