,
Alison Colbert
A TALK WITH ALLEN GINSBERG
INT: I
want to ask you first about the recording,
Songs of
Innocence and Experience,
which I listened to recently. I want to
ask you when the idea for the music and the songs came to you.
You said in the liner notes that you had a vision of sorts.
GINSBERG:
Many years ago, described at length in a bunch of interviews
five, six years ago. Mainly,
Paris Review
No. 47 ... of, uh, Blake's
voice, not a vision of auditory illumination, but specific music to
the voice on the way back from Los Gatos
in
a Greyhound bus to
San Francisco coming from Darshan with Neal Cassady's ashes. A
couple of lines kept running through my head in musical tone.
Fayette 'fayette, thou art bo,ught and sold
and sold is the happy morrow
Thou gavest the tears of pity away
In exchange for the tears of sorrow.
which is a fragment of Blake, not
in Songs of Innocence and Ex–
perience,
about the French Revolution, about Lafayette's relation to
Tom Paine, and Lafayette's defense of the king and queen.
INT:
He sold out, in other words.
GINSBERG:
Yeah, Blake was saying, though Lafayette was like a big
American revolutionary, he sold out for
pity.
That is, I gather.
INT:
I'm a little rusty on history.
GINSBERG:
So am I, so am I, but it keeps floating up out of my rusty
unconscious. Anyway, this tune came with it, for the first time and
then I had confused it with another poem called "The Grey Monk,"
which has the lines
«But vain the Sword
&
vain the Bow
They never can work War's overthrow"
