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sort of sound, which is really nice. Are you doing any more work on
this? Are you going to put out another album?
GINSBERG: I did twenty-one out of the forty-five songs, so I'll make
another album now and complete the whole cycle, for Volume II of
that and that'll actually be monumental, because it'll be the com–
plete
Songs of Innocence and Experience
from beginning to end,
every one of them put to tune. I'll probably do that this spring. I've
been writing the music down.
INT: As it comes to you?
GINSBERG: Working on one song at a time. You've been picking up on
one song at a time as it rises, politically significant, like the "School–
boy," "How can a bird that is born for joy / sit in a cage and sing?"
I began working on around the time of Kent State, last year. You
notice that the poems have a particular reference, a little hermetic
sometimes, to any time-space continuum, to any political event, and
individual poems, like
koans,
like Zen
koans,
have a relevance right
now either to -like it appeals to certain emotional softnesses and
tendernesses and innocencies which are completely repressed in the
revolutionary-counterrevolutionary battle, so they have to be recalled
with things like the schoolboy poem. As I get into sitting - medita–
tion - which I've been doing a lot of lately, Blake's gnostic transcen–
dental psychedelic inner glow comes on
INT: So it works both ways.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
INT: That's what's so incredible about it. You said somewhere - I read
Indian Journals
fairly recently - you said that Blake was sort of your
guru.
GINSBERG: Yeah. Cause I'd had what would normally be considered
a religious experience with Blake in 1948. When I went to India,
running around looking for a guru in 1962-3, one funny thing that
Srimata Krishnaji, a lady saint from Brindiban, recommended was
"Take Blake for your guru." Since guru, the teacher, is not necessarily
a human or living human incarnation, it might be any influence,
even a bird or the giant piteous cat-squeak of a whale recorded on
a machine. Anything that will catalyze the total consciousness is the
teacher. So she said, "Take Blake for your guru," and that put him in
the context, oddly, of the Indian transcendental scene. In a personal
way, though historically Blake always has been in that context, cause
he's an eighteenth-century vehicle for Western gnostic tradition that
historically you can trace back to the same roots, same cities, same
geography, same mushrooms, that give rise to the Aryan, Zoroastrian,
Manichaean pre-Hindu yogas.
INT: I didn't know that.
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