In fact in Peru with witch
doctors taking Ayahuasca one night I came face to face with what appeared to be
the Image of Death come to warm me again as 12 years before in Harlem, that all
this me-ness of mine was mere idea vanity & hollow & fleeting as the
mosquitos I was killing in the tropic night. In fact, tho I’d made a principle of Non-identity, I was
scared to have my identity taken away, scared to die – clinging to the
self-doomed (transient by nature) pleasures of dependable love, sex, income,
cigarettes, Poesy, fame, face & cock – clinging, frightened, to stay
in this identity, this body, vomiting as it was – and seeing its doom as
a living monster outside me that would someday EAT ME ALIVE.
Thus faced with human limitation
I turned back from Eternity again and wanted to stay the Allen I was & am.
At this point frightened, seeing
my basic saint-desire might be death & madness, I wrote Burroughs long
letter from Peru asking for advice – Burroughs who had kicked junk habit and
thus in very real way kicked his own identity habit, as can be seen in Naked
Lunch hints.
His answer, go right ahead, into
space, outside of Logos, outside of time, outside of concepts of Eternity &
God & Faith & Love I’d built up as an identity – Cancel all your
messages, said he, and I also cancel mine…
And what was he doing with his
Art? He was cutting it up with a razor as if it weren’t no sacred texts at all,
just as he was cutting up all known human feelings between us, and cutting up
the newspapers, and cutting up Cuba & Russia & America & making
collages; he was cutting up his own consciousness & escaping as far as I
can tell outside of anything I could recognize as his previous identity. And
that somewhat changed my identity since that had been something built I had
thought and permanently shared with him…
Now the serious technical point
that Burroughs was making by his cut-ups, which I resisted and resented since
it threatened everything I depend on – I could stand the loss of Peter but not
the loss of Hope & Love; & could maybe even stand the loss of them,
whatever they are, if Poesy were left, for me to go on being something I
wanted, sacred poet however desolate; but Poesy itself became a black to
further awareness. For further awareness lay in dropping every fixed concept of
self, identity, role, ideal, habit & pleasure. It meant dropping language
itself, words, as medium of consciousness. It meant literally altering
consciousness outside of what was already the fixed habit of
language-inner-thought-monologue-abstraction-mental-image-symbol-mathematical-abstraction.
It meant exercising unknown and unused areas of the physical brain.
Electronics, science fiction, drugs, strobiscopes, breathing exercises,
exercises in thinking in music, colors, no thinks, entering and believing
hallucinations, altering the neurologically fixated habit patter Reality. But
that’s what I thought Poetry was doing all along! But the poetry I’d
been practicing depended on living inside the structure of language, depended
on words as the medium of consciousness & therefore the medium of conscious
being.
Since then I’ve been wandering in
doldrums, still keeping habit up with literature but uncertain if there is
enough Me left to continue as some kind of Ginsberg. I can’t write, except
journals and dreams down; as the next step if any for Poetry, I can’t imagine –
Perhaps we’ve reached point in human or unhuman evolution where art of words is
oldhat dinosaur futile, & must be left behind. I also stopped reading
newspapers 2 months ago. Also the paranoid fear that I’m degenerate robot under
the mind-control of the mad spectre of Burroughs. Except that it finally seems
(after dreams of killing him) that he has only taken the steps, or begun to
take, steps toward actual practice of expanded consciousness that were in the
cards for me anyhoo, since the first days of mind break-up with Blake, and of
which I was repeatedly reminded in drug trances.
I side effect of loss of
dependence on words is the final break-up of my previously monotheistic
memory-conception of one holy eternity, One God. Because all that
conceptualization depends on the railroad track of language. And actual
experience of consciousness is not Nameable as One. I suppose this is all in
sophisticated form in Wittgenstein.
Meanwhile I am carrying for the
last few months a dose of mushroom pills which I have been too fearful to take.
Waiting for a day to look into that, or be that, THING, again. And
operating still on language, thus this letter.
What to do about Cuba? Can the
world Reality (as we know it through consciousness controlled by the Cortex
part of the brain) be improved? Or, with expanded population & increasing
need for social organization and control & centralization &
standardization & socialization & removal of hidden power controllers
(capitalism), will we in the long run doom man to life within a fixed and
universal monopoly on reality (on materialist level) by a unison of
cortex-controlled consciousness that will regulate our Being’s evolution? Will
it not direct that evolution toward stasis of preservation of its own reality,
its idea of reality, its own identity, its Logos? But this is not the problem
of socialism, this is the problem of Man. Can any good society be founded, as
all have been before and failed, on the basis of old-style human consciousness?
Can a vast human-teeming world “democratically” regulate itself at all in
future with the kind of communications mechanism this present known & used
consciousness has available? How escape rigidification and stasis of
consciousness when man’s mind is only words and these words and their images
are flashed on every brain continuously by the interconnected networks of radio
television newspapers wire services speeches decrees laws telephone books
manuscripts? How escape centralized control of Reality of the masses by the few
who want and can take power, when this network is now so interconnected, and
the state so dominant, and the leaders of the state have decision of the
Network? Democracy as previously sentimentally conceived now perhaps impossible
(as proved in U.S.) since a vast feed-back mechanism, mass media, inescapably
orients every individual, especially on subliminal levels. Same problem for
Russia, China, Cuba.
I have no notion of future state
or Government possible for man, I don’t know if continuance of machine
civilization is even possible or desirable. Perhaps science may have to
dismantle itself (or kill the race) – this is parallel to individual
intellectual experience of cycles of reasoning leading back to non-intellectual
“natural” life. However I assume (for no good reason yet) the latest cycle of
human evolution is irreversible except by atomic apocalypse, so I suppose
Science is here to stay in one form or other, and civilizations too. I think
the possible direction of development, then, to solve problems created by vast
population & centralized network control, is toward increasing the
efficiency and area of brain use, i.e. widening the area of consciousness in
all directions feasible. I.e. telepathy might annihilate mass media power
centers of control. In any case the old sense of identity of human
consciousness, the sense of separate identity, self & its limited language,
may alter. Individuals may have to step into hitherto unrecognizable areas of
awareness, which means, for practical purposes, unrecognizable or undiscovered
areas of BEING.
The change may be so far out as
to be unimaginable to present day 2-dimensional political consciousness, or
even 2-dimensional Poet’s consciousness. I may have to (willingly) give up say
being me, being Poet A.G., (or unwillingly depending on how fixed my cravings
for security & the old life are). The social changes I can’t even guess. It
may be that we find the material reality we take for granted was literally an
illusion all along. We may not have bodies. Nothing can be assumed,
everything is UNKNOWN.
Space exploration is secondary
and only triumphant in limited areas of consciousness; whereas an evolution or
scientific exploration of consciousness itself (the brain & nervous system)
is the inevitable route for man to take.
I see no reason why no government
on earth is really alive in this evolutionary direction. All governments
including the Cuban are still operating within the rules of identity forced on
them by already outmoded modes of consciousness. I say outmoded since it has
brought all Govts. to edge of world destruction. No govt., not even the most
Marxian revolutionary & well-intended like Cuba presumably, is guiltless in
the general world mess, no one can afford to be righteous any more. Righteous
and right & wrong are still fakes of the old suicidal identity.
Next day continued:
Now the Cuban Revolutionary
government as far as I can tell is basically occupied by immediate practical
problems & proud of that, heroic resistances, drama, uplift, reading &
teaching language, and totally unoccupied as yet with psychic exploration in
terms which I described above. When I talked with Franqui of Revolucion
in NY he parroted the U.S. imperialist line against marijuana and added, “It
should be easier for a poet to understand a revolution than for a revolution to
understand poetry.” Poetry here meaning my contention that poet had right to
use marijuana. He gave me all sorts of rationalistic arguments against social
use of marijuana – tho he added liberally that he himself was not personally
opposed to it. And also I see that there has been no evidence of real technical
revolution in Poesy or language in recent Cuban poetry – it still is old hat
mechanistic syntax & techniques. So that it is obvious that any, meaning
ANY, medoicre bureaucratic attempt to censor language, diction or direction of
psychic exploration is the same old mistake made in all the idiot academies of
Russia and America. Arguments about immediate practical necessities are as far
as I can tell from afar strictly the same old con of uninspired people who
don’t know what the writing problem is, and don’t have any idea of the
consciousness problems I’m talking about…
I’m NOT down on the Cubans or
anti their revolution, it’s just that it’s important to make clear in advance,
in front, what I feel about life. Big statements saying Viva
Fidel are/ would be/ meaningless and just 2-dimensional politics.
Publish as much of this letter as
interests you, as prose contribution to Cuban Revolution.
Oct. 16, 1961
Athens, Greece
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