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ALLEN GINSBERG
occupation with alteration of consciousness, from an early text of
1951, Junkie,
pseudonym William Lee, the last pages discussing
yage,
a drug in South America, as perhaps being the final fix. So we already
had "native moments," what Whitman calls "native moments," which
we then began checking out with ancient moments and ancient
texts. And then, in the early fifties in San Francisco we ran into
Gary Snyder, who was already studying Zen Buddhism and sitting,
doing regular meditation, and Phil Whelan, who was a Buddhist poet
from Reed College like Gary, both of whom had met Williams up
in Reed College in 1948, the same year that I picked up on Williams.
INT: So it all sort of converged?
GINSBERG: Yeah. Now the Zen practice was paying complete absorbed
attention to the immediate teapot and teacup in front of you and
pouring the tea with complete absorption and intention, with the
mind focused there, observing every wavelet and droplet coming out
of the spout into the teacup and then serving it with complete
presence to the person in front of you. Blake's proposition was that
"concrete particulars" were the essence of poetry and consciousness
observation to see eternity, uh, no, "to seek all Heaven in a grain of
sand, and eternity in an hour." Williams's proposition from American
roots was: "so much dependsj
uponj
a red wheelj barrow/ glazed
with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens." When Williams said
"so much depends," he means all human consciousness depends on
direct observation of what's in front of you. So all those tendencies
converged at once around '48 to '53 in our consciousness, and I
think elsewhere, too. See, Berkeley at the time was going through
what was called the Berkeley Renaissance, where Harry Smith the
great filmmaker was hanging around with Jack Spicer and Robert
Duncan the poet, and Timothy Leary was on the scene and knew
Robert Duncan. And that was called the Berkeley Renaissance,
where Harry Smith was beginning to experiment with optical phe–
nomena in relation to mandalas and Tibetan and American Indian
psychic color effects, who built machinery for casting light-color
shadows on the wall, who left his machinery to a guy named Jordan
Belson in San Francisco who was a great filmmaker, who made a
movie called
Mandala
in the fifties and was one of the first people
in
the mid-fifties, with Gerd Stern, to begin experimenting in large
movie theaters with oils on water on plates with light casting on a
movie screen, which led to light shows, which led a decade later to
large-scale use of that in Ken Kesey's experiments with Neal Cassady
on mixed-media feedback. Which then led to the trips festivals, elec-
