PARTISAN REVIEW
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tronic cut-up mixed-media decor which led into use of that omni–
present rainbow of consciousness in the Fillmore.
INT: So it all started in '48?
GINSBERG: I don't know if it all started then - it crested then. From
gossip I know, there was a lot of tip-of-the-iceberg showing, or the
mountain rose above sea level just about then. Synchronicity. It was
inevitable, cause it was the end of the war. A couple of years after
the end of the war, so everybody's mind was beginning to drift. The
thing I wanted to point out was that there was a breakthrough of,
let us say, an enlarged or cosmic consciousness or a big consciousness.
There was that consciousness breaking through the social norms and
the social repression of consciousness and through the institutionalized
repression of consciousness, right then and there.
INT: That's where school fits in.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
It
was the use of grass, and peyote and other psyche–
delics then, already in the early fifties and in the mid-fifties. Let's
see, there was the catalytic contact with Black culture in the shift of
rhythmic base of the body, which is well known, like in
On the Road,
which describes that period, actually, which Cleaver read, recognizing
Kerouac's discovery - Cleaver enjoyed recognizing Kerouac's discovery
of that repressed aspect of American body-rhythm and humanity.
INT: Kerouac's description, which is quoted in
Soul on I ce.
Are you
now, are you just into meditation now, or are you doing....
GINSBERG: I was out in Detroit last week, raising money for John Sin–
clair, on a platform with William Kunstler. And then in court testi–
fying for Sinclair before the judge.
INT: Some people I've known that have really gotten into meditation,
sometimes they even stop smoking grass.
GINSBERG: Yeah. Well, I should stop smoking cigarettes and I'm asham–
ed that I do, these last couple of months. . . . The Buddhist thing
is one way of understanding the relation between action and medita–
tion. The first of the Bodhisattva's vows - the Bodhisattva
is
one
who sets himself on the path to enlightenment, or perhaps glimpsed
enlightenment, and now wants
to
incorporate it completely. So the
Buddhist Bodhisattva's vows are as follows: Sentient beings are num–
berless, I vow to save them all. Passions are numberless, I vow to
extinguish them all. The gates of the
dharma
(truth, nature) are
numberless, I vow to enter every one. And the fourth: Buddha-path
most high, I vow to follow through. Now the first vow is "Sentient
beings are numberless, I vow to save them all." That means that
anybody who is a Bodhisattva on the path is not allowed to go to
Nirvana all by himself alone and disappear into eternity like the
