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ALLEN GINSBERG
light, in fact. But once she began reflecting the mirrors multiplied
until the entire Indra's net of creation was established, like billions
of mirrors shining on each other, creating a giant illusion of space
and time. So, it all wound up in the Garden of Eden.
INT: Which is sort of what I expected. Is this the same as the Pandora
figure?
GINSBERG: Probably they're parallel put-downs. Parallel anti-Women's
Lib put-downs.
INT: Yeah. Because Kate Millett talks about this a good deal. She doesn't
talk about the Indian. She talks mostly about the Western.
GINSBERG: The really interesting thing to realize is that the Indian and
the Western converge
in
their origin. They come from the same
Garden of Eden, or the same Middle Eastern source. The reason
we don't know much about it is that when Constantine the Great
accepted~ -
Christ as a Roman Emperor accepting Christ, he also
became Pope. So it was a political deal. So the Christians had to
make a deal to eliminate all the heresies, and that was the Council
of Nicea.
INT: The many, many cults.
GINSBERG: Yeah. These were the gnostic cults. So the books were all
burnt around 313 A.D. The only records we have of them, which
Taylor translated, is from the early Church fathers, arguing against
these heresies, heresies like saying, I think Heraclitus said, "Every–
thing we see when awake, is death; and when asleep, dream." In
other words, the Buddhist
maya.
Everything we see when awake, is
death, is the same thing as the Hindu or Buddhist proposition that
all, or the Burroughsian proposition, that all apparent sensory feel–
ings, thoughts and impressions are illusory. So, in other words, what
happened in the fourth century is that the basic Indian understand–
ing that the apparent physical universe
is
only apparent, and really
is a dream-structure in which we're trapped, because attached to a
thing that's real- that was extirpated from Christ-doctrine, and also
the books wiped out and burned, so that it took people like Para–
celsus, BOhme, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Emerson, to perpetuate that
memory out of their own intuitions and glimmerings - and also
checking out the hand-me-down legends and texts, the oral transmis–
sion. Poetry's carried it all along. Poetry's carried the dream-insight
all along.
INT: I wanted to ask you about William Carlos Williams. I read the
poem you wrote about his death, which I liked. I just had always
had the impression that he was a very beautiful man, by all accounts.
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