Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
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.
DJB: I’m curious about how your experiences with psychedelics affected your writing and your life in general.
Allen: Well, I wrote a couple of good poems on them - with mescaline, acid, nitrous oxide, marijuana and amphetamines. So those are direct influences on my writing. But aside from 60 or so pages, the spiritual effect of drugs was not extensive in creation of texts.
DJB: What kind of relationship do you see between madness and creativity?
Allen: I don’t really know, it’s an old stereotype. When we talk about certain states of madness, what are we talking about exactly? Somebody on a roll, who’s very active and talking to himself, dominating his space and people working around him, like Picasso? Or someone in a manic phase of manic depression, which is often very creative? Or how about full-blown schizophrenia? In a lot of those states, you’re cut off from the surrounding environment so it would be impossible to produce anything concrete.
DJB: Have you ever experienced the fear of going mad?
Allen: A couple of times, on psychedelics. I remember in 1948 I had a hell of an experience; an ominous, threatening universe. I’m sure that madness, paranoia or megalomania came in then.
RMN: I read something you once said in reference to language which was, ‘man’s power of abstraction dooms us to lose touch with detail.’ What did you mean by this? Isn’t that what poets do?
Allen: Well, when did I say it and under what circumstances? How do I know what I said? (laughter) That’s a very common, almost trite, stereotypical thought. I’m sure it’s, in general true, but I probably never said it in those words. I probably said some general thing like that, but ‘man’s power of abstraction’ - bullshit!
RMN: I take it you don’t agree with the statement.
Allen: Well, I’m struck just now by the vulgarity of the expression, the phrasing.
RMN: (laughter) I have a problem with the first word, actually.
Allen: Well, so do I. "Woman’s power of abstraction?..." Actually, I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s a temptation to think that. I think it’s civilization’s power of abstraction, or the development of abstracted power that could lead to a loss of contact with detail. Hypertechnology so to speak.
RMN: And language, in that context, plays a part in the process?
Allen: No. That’s the semiotic, deconstructionist, Burroughsian view. That’s not my view at all. It’s the opposite, in fact. I think it’s a fascist statement, frankly. It attacks language and it attacks people talking. It’s an attack on communication, actually. I would say that language joins heaven and earth and joins mind with body. It synchronizes them through speech, poetry, language and words which connect abstraction with the ground. It is also obvious that continuous generalization and abstraction lead to mixed judgment and manipulation of phenomena in an inappropriate way; but to make a general statement as blanket as that discourages the attempt at sincere communication, or description of what you are experiencing.
By using that kind of generalization like ‘man’s power of abstraction’, the Marxists had to convince writers that they are not worthy of writing because they don’t really represent the proletariat - only the abstract interests of the upper-middle-class or the bourgeoisie. The Catholics have convinced people to burn books and burn people because they or their work doesn’t represent the true word of God. And deconstructionist, semiotic poets have used it as a way of avoiding interacting with phenomena, of interacting on a heart-felt level with their own experience of living. That generalization has always been an excuse to hard-nosed students of their own perceptions to be cool, you know, to play it cool. That is to say, that words don’t count, that this is abstract, therefore I don’t want to make any comment. It’s been a way of diminishing expression. In Blake’s description of the Urizen quality - "boundedness" arises. Your-Reason, the figurative reason of the symbolic description, creates a hyper-abstraction, a hyper-rationalization.
RMN: What do you think was so special about Blake as a poet?
Allen: He had a good mind. From Blake’s point of view, hyper-rationality, hyper-abstraction leads to the nuclear bomb, from the point of view of reason, trying to assert power over feeling, imagination and the body. If any one of them tries to take over, then it disrupts the whole balance of nature.
DJB: What do you think happens to human consciousness after biological death?
Allen: I don’t know. The Tibetans say that some kind of aetheric electricity or some kind of impulse moves on. I think it’s a good idea to cultivate an openness to the possibilities that might occur. When you’re drowning, once you’ve stopped breathing, there’s still about eight minutes of consciousness before brain death, and there have been people who have been resuscitated, so something is there. In that eight minutes, what should you prepare for? My meditation practices are on the breath, so then what happens after I stop breathing? (laughter) I asked my guru this question and he started laughing. He said that was the purpose of the advanced meditation practices, the visualization, the mantra, the mandala, all that stuff. He said, "If I were you, I wouldn’t pretend this or that, openness or emptiness, I would go along with whatever made the process more comfortable."
As for what happens after death, I’ve always been a little skeptical about anything persevering. I think the process of dying takes over, whatever you think, and goes on automatic. What you think may be harmonious with what happens, but what happens is going to happen in any case. Sometimes I think that you enter open space and become open space. In the last moment you don’t want to be pissed off, even if there’s no re-birth. So it’s a good idea to get into the frequency of some kind of meditative practice, in case there’s no after-life. In case there is, it’s also a good idea. It prepare you for whatever situation. "Do not go gently into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light." You know that poem? It seems the worst advice possible.