Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  DJB: The collaboration lowered your inhibitions, in terms of the way you expressed the creative urge?

  Allen: Well, no. If you’re just writing for yourself and your friends, then you don’t have to develop inhibitions. People develop inhibitions from the commercial or social situation, they’re not born with them. So in this case, since we didn’t expect to succeed and we were just having fun with each other, we just never developed those inhibitions. So as a result, we never developed the manner or style of counterfeit literariness that is characteristic of most university or academic poetry or prose. You know that Burrough’s scene, the routine about the talking asshole in Naked Lunch? Well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to be published. I mean, at that time it was considered impossible, so it wasn’t thought of in that realm at all. It was thought of as being just intelligent humor between friends.

  DJB: Speaking of Naked Lunch, what did you think of the way that you, Burroughs and Kerouac were portrayed in the film adaptation?

  Allen: Well, Kerouac was a good deal better looking than the character in the movie. Martin was somewhat of a wimp. I don’t mind that because I’m a wimp, but I can read ‘The Market Section’ - which was what he read over the couple fucking - much more vividly than the poet in the film. Four days before I saw the film I was teaching a graduate course at CUNY entitled, ‘Literary History and the Beat Generation.’ I didn’t know that scene was in the film, but I read ‘The Market Section’ to the students when we were discussing Naked Lunch to give them a sense of Burroughs as a panoramic poet.

  It’s one of the most beautiful passages in Burroughs, and the seed of all of Naked Lunch basically, as it intersects the past and future. "In expeditions arrived from unknown places, leave for unknown places with unknown purpose. Followers of obsolete trades....Carriers of viruses not yet born." This is the interplanetary time-zone market. The guy who played Burroughs did well, except when it came to doing the routines like the talking asshole or the "Hespano Suiza" auto blowout. Burroughs always did that much more uproariously and with fascinating vigor that you’d roll around on the floor laughing. The guy in the movie did it in a relatively dignified monotone, so that you don’t get any of the gregarious wildness.

  RMN: Did you like the movie otherwise?

  Allen: I thought that Burroughs’ plot was better than the movie plot. The movie plot begins with the Kafka figure being assassinated by two detectives who come to hassle him. Then, in the book, when he rebels against the authority figures, the whole long novel scene turns out to have been an hallucination. So it paralleled many mystical experiences, where you suddenly realize that everything before was maya or samsaric delusion. Burroughs empowered himself, so to speak, by rebelling against Law. It was a very important point that Burroughs was making, but that point is not made in the movie.

  On the other hand, Burroughs approves of cut-ups, that’s his genre. So he enjoyed it, because it’s an improvisation on his work, in his own style, that he might well have done himself. The bug powder comes from a book called The Exterminator, so they made combinations of Naked Lunch and this other work plus Queer. Burroughs says a very funny thing. He quotes John Steinbeck when asked, "What do you think of what they’ve done to your book?" and he says, "They didn’t do anything to my book. My book is up there on the shelf." (laughter) So I think he liked the idea of them cutting up and improvising on his texts. I went to visit Burroughs about three weeks ago. We made thirteen 90-minute tapes, which are being transcribed for an interview for a Japanese magazine, so we went to the movies and saw the picture.

  DJB: That was the first time either of you had seen it?

  Allen: It was only the second time he’d seen it and it was the third time I’d seen it. I liked it more watching it with him because I began to see that the hooks which interpolate the movie make a little more sense than I’d thought. It may make complete sense, but I haven’t been able to figure out the very end. Is that reality, or is that unreality?

  RMN: That was left unanswered.

  DJB: Maybe intentionally. Tell me, how do you see the beat movement of the fifties having influenced the hippy movement of the sixties - and how do you see these cultural movements influencing events occurring today?

  Allen: There are a lot of different themes that were either catalyzed, adapted, inaugurated, transformed or initiated by the literary movement of the fifties and a community of friends from the forties. The central theme was a transformation of consciousness, and as time unrolled, experiences that Kerouac, Burroughs and I had, related to this notion - at least to "widening the arena of consciousness." For example, this world is absolutely real and final and ultimate and at the same time, absolutely unreal and transitory and of the nature of dream-stuff, without contradiction. I think Kerouac had the most insightful grasp of that already by 1958. So that one spiritual insight - which is permanently universal - led to the exploration of mind or consciousness in any way shape or form.

  Whether it was Burroughs through his exploration of the criminal world, or Kerouac through his exploration of Buddhism, or Gary Snyder’s zen meditation practices, or myself who worked with the Naropa Institute under Tibetan Buddhist auspices. Spiritual liberation is the center, and from spiritual liberation comes candor or frankness. So from 1948 on, Burroughs was writing on the Mind, and this somehow moved on to gay liberation, although at the time it wasn’t called that. You simply called it ‘explicitness’ and ‘openness.’ In 1952 Burroughs presents his manuscript and it’s totally overt, 100% out front and out of the closet - not even thinking he’s being out front, it’s just there because there never was a closet.

  So that would take us to ‘55 with Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. The latter’s major theme is in biology and he had insights regarding the reclamation of consciousness, ecological themes. It’s not your traditional poetry. It’s modern American folklore, and it influenced everybody. By 1950, Kerouac had already written On the Road which included the sentence, ‘The Earth is an Indian thing.’ A very beautiful slogan.

  DJB: I’m not sure I understand.

  Allen: Well, it ain’t an Empire State thing! Local knowledge of plants, geography and geology, comes to the people who live a long, long, time in one place without a lot of mechanical aids and who relate to the land itself. It’s like bioregionalism, which comes out of a sort of Indian-type thinking.

  DJB: So then do indigenous and Indian come from the same root?

  Allen: I don’t know. Kerouac also in On the Road, reflected Oswald Speagler’s view of the "Fellaheen" people living on the land near the Nile, tilling the soil and sailing their boats up and down, who were not affected by the changes of the Egyptian empire. They just stuck there, century after century, putting in whatever crop they were putting in, gathering it and pounding rice. So, "the earth is an Indian thing."

  DJB: Do you see the earth as being like an organism?

  Allen: No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. (laughter) No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority.

  DJB: That’s interesting, that you see the Gaia hypothesis as monotheistic and fascist whereas other see it as liberating.

  Allen: Well, you’ve got this one big thing. Who says it’s got to be one? Why does everything have to be one? I think there’s no such thing as one - only many eyes looking out in all directions. The center is everywhere, not in any one spot. Does it have to be one organism, in the sense of one brain, or one consciousness?

  DJB: Well, it could be like you said earlier, about how reality is simultaneously real and a dream. Maybe the earth or the universe is many and one at the same time.

  Allen: Well, yeah, but the tendency is to sentimentalize it into another godhead and to re-inaugurate the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic mind-trap.

  RMN: What do you think about the New Age movement?

  Allen: I don’t think all this crystal beads and channeling is spiritual. I don’t want to put d
own the New Age, but only an aspect that seems like "spiritual materialism."

  RMN: Do you see it as a less valid phenomenon than say, the sixties counter-culture?

  Allen: No. I think the New Age movement is basically a very good thing. Healthy foods, ecological understanding - that’s all fine. It’s just very specific spiritual materialism that seems to me to be the problem; accumulating experiences as credentials for the ego.

  RMN: In the fifties, did you anticipate that a cultural revolution was in the making?

  Allen: Not in the fifties, no. But I think that the sixties were politically awry because of animosity. You know, the notions of rising up and getting angry, i.e., using anger a a motif.

  RMN: Didn’t that anger lead to a lot of positive social change though, like in the area of human rights?

  Allen: No, no. Things started fucking up when people got angry because they started action from that angry pride. By 1968, 52% of the American people thought the war over in Vietnam was a big mistake, but instead of leading people out of the war, seducing them out, people got out onto the streets and got angry.

  RMN: Just because half the people in America thought the war was a bad idea doesn’t mean that would translate into political action. It was the anti-war movement which vocalized those concerns and effectively changed government policy--whether they were angry or not.

  Allen: No, if you do it that way you get it all wrong. You immediately open the door for crazies and the double agents to come in and fuck everything up. You need absolute discipline and for everything to be calm, otherwise where do you get to? You know that if you get excited while you’re doing martial arts, you lose. You have to be stabilized, balanced and centered. The guy who gets excited becomes off-center, off-balance, and falls on his own weight. So there was this idea that if you set one blade of grass alight, the whole nation will follow suit, "prairie file". All we have to do is to get together and physically attack the police and then all the negroes and hippies in America will rise up and abracadabra! (laughter) Oh God! Lunatics! A bunch of lunatics! And it prolonged the war.

  RMN: In the present situation, growing unrest and dissatisfaction has spread from farmers in the mid-west to the unemployed in inner cities to middle-class suburbia. Keeping in mind what we’ve seen in Eastern Europe, do you believe that an American revolution is possible?

  Allen: Well, what do you mean by revolution? No, I don’t think so, because if you mean violence, I don’t want to be around - and it wouldn’t be interesting. It would be just another group of jerks getting up there with their fucking gun, thinking they have this power. It happens every time. It happens endlessly. If we ever get into one of those left-wing, right-wing revolutions, it could be worse than any country on earth. The Americans are the most stupid and heartless....

  RMN: And the best armed.

  Allen: Yeah. It would be worse than Cambodia. They’ll be sending junkies off to concentration camps.

  RMN: With social attitudes tending to swing from openness and tolerance to discrimination and fear, do you feel there can ever be any real collective advance towards enlightenment?

  Allen: Maybe not. Maybe the very nature of high technology imposes centralized authority. The nature of the bomb is such that once you have created it you need to have some kind of omnipresent surveillance to monitor it’s use. You can’t be open to people in other countries very much because you are constantly suspicious of their activities, maybe they’re making H-bombs just like you did.

  RMN: Do you feel hopeful that someday the spirit of cooperation will overcome humanity’s competitive and territorial urges?

  Allen: I don’t think that hope is useful at all here. I don’t think in terms of progress, particularly in the face of the hyperindustrialization because it carries too many connotations. It is technology which imposes more and more goals. "Science is a lie," said Harry Smith.

  RMN: Do you see the current hostility towards gays as a minor hiccup or as a serious regressive trend?

  Allen: Yeah, it’s a minor hiccup, but it’sa classic political thing - a lot of Republicans are cocksuckers.

  RMN: Looking at the general rise in fundamentalism, I’m left wondering, what went wrong? Why has it happened again?

  Allen: Well, I think the left fumbled the ball by allowing right-wing style closed-minded aggression to be part of their policy. It’s a fuck up, but it should be seen as a fuck up rather than something to be penalized for. Unless people get the idea, they’ll just repeat it over and over again, rising up angry, and then wondering why no permanent change has occurred. There’s a small band of thieves, right and left, taking it upon themselves to be dictators and leading everybody astray. On the left, they’re painting "Die Yuppie Scum!" all over the Lower East Side, but nobody knows who is a yuppie - do they mean me? Everybody thinks it means somebody else.

  RMN: We have witnessed the failure of communism and the inadequacies of capitalism. Do you think there is a political system which, if diligently applied by good people, could work?

  Allen: Well, I don’t think we’ve seen any real communism or capitalism.

  RMN: Do you think there are just too many people with too many special interests to be successfully governed?

  Allen: Well, no, it’s not that. One - it’s technological. ‘The hyper-technology fuels the non-human within me.’ Burroughs said that.

  DJB: Are you sure that it’s science and technology that’s the problem, or is it the way that the technology is applied?

  Allen: I think it’s science and technology. Once you’ve got an absolute weapon, then you have to have absolute control.

  DJB: Technology doesn’t have to be used for weapons.

  Allen: What has most of it been used for so far?

  RMN: To blow people to smithereens. But still, the availability of technology on a local, private level has vastly increased people’s access to information and has encouraged a decentralization of control. People are making their own TV programs, creating their own entertainment.

  Allen: Okay, so everyone can be a communicator, electronically hooked up with one another. Still, the central intelligence agency type human eye is the very nature of the machine. I wouldn’t want to absolute about it, but there is definitely two sides to the story that the solution for the world’s problems lies in the advancement of technology.

  RMN: What do you think are some of the biggest practical and perceptual errors that the government has made in it’s policy towards drugs?

  Allen: Well, obviously lumping all of the drugs together in one category but regarding the use of nicotine and alcohol as something apart. My proposition for drugs is: have marijuana as a cash crop for the otherwise ailing family farm. For junkies, well it would probably be better to get off the methadone - apparently it’s more addictive than heroin. Then once you’ve separated grass and psychedelics from "the drug problem" public consciousness, as Oscar Janiger is trying to do in his work with the Albert Hofmann Foundation, then you have to deal with cocaine and crack. So the consequences of the present drug policies have been further criminalization, further prohibition, more and more police and more and more surveillance. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the war on drugs has created a niche for military-minded demigods to prosper in.

  RMN: As history shows that prohibition does nothing to decrease demand, and as most of the money in the drug-war is being used to fight off the criminal element, why is it that so few politicians are willing to voice their support for legalization?

  Allen: We have this vanguard of fundamentalism that don’t want abortions, that don’t want drugs - and they’re very powerful. There’s a hard nut, a residue of energetic, active, organized, networked, technologically sophisticated censors - the neo-conservatives and the born-agains. It’s a composite of religious fanaticism and economic interest. The pharmaceutical companies are among the people opposing decriminaliztion because they make a lot of money in the drug business.

  The Coors beer people support the right-
wing Heritage Foundation and then you have Jesse Helms representing tobacco. So there’s that combination of economic interest. Then the national and state drug bureaucracies have one of the most protective lobbies in the nation, with a 12 billion dollar budget monopoly, hundreds of thousands of telephones, FAX machines, PR people, resources and files. So how do we get out of that? I don’t know, it’s always been a source of confusion.