PARTISAN REVIEW
309
or is the convenience of acid and the inconvenience of acid being
rejected? I don't know, I just know what I read in the papers....
Cleaver's very intelligent, as the interview and his writings show,
and thoughtful. He's in a very hideous situation, as we all are, but
he's taken on more of it than most people and he's accepted respon–
sibility for starting a government-in-exile which he's trying to defend
as a legitimate and structured and viable and long-range thing, so
that it can't have any goofing around diplomatically. But it seems
to me that any such large decisions as to what the role of acid is in
histo,ry and consciousness is something that would have to be evolved
out of the people. But the question still is if he's rejecting it as a
hedonistic thing or as a yoga thing.
I
don't find acid fun. The issue
is the usefulness of that modality of consciousness which sees all things
as equal and sees even death as a trip equal to other trips.
If
the
revolution can't be built on the oldest tradition of human knowledge
understood by every antique tribe on every continent - then what
kind of Third World is being articulated when the root lies in neolithic
tribal earth-knowledge - including Shamanism, magic dance theater,
song from the heart, orgy in community, speech with animals, vision
quests and trances, herbs from desert and forest. It's a question of
getting back to aboriginal mind, and tribal lore.
