PARTISAN REVIEW
257
Carr and I had this big argument as to whether if you carved a walking
stick on the moon, was it art or not? Burroughs said, "I never heard of
such a stupid question!" In other words, art is whatever you want to
define it as, it's only a three-letter word. Burroughs's attitude was that
w·e were giving the word an essential identity outside of any use we
might make of it, so if we wanted to use the word art to describe the
walking stick on the moon, then it was art, and if we didn't want to
use the word art, it wasn't. He just said: "It's too starved an argument
for my sword," so he cut through arbitrary conceptions like a Zen
master. It's like the goose in the bottle
koan:
if you put a full-grown
goose inside a bottle with a narrow neck, how do you get the goose
out without breaking the bottle, or damaging or bruising the goose?
That's one of the first
koans
that you meditate on if you're studying
Zen. Another is the
koan
"Does the dog have a Buddha nature" the
Zen master J o-jo was once asked, and he answered, "Wu," which
means no in Chinese. Why did Jo-jo say
Wu?
... Well how do you get
the goose out?
Int:
I don't know. How?
Ginsberg: (claps hands loudly)
It's out! Same way you put it in, with
words. It's only a conceptual bottle. So Burroughs resolved the prob–
lem of whether a walking stick on the moon was art or not in exactly
the same way.
Int:
Did Pound reinforce this approach to language?
Ginsberg:
I hadn't started reading Pound then.
Int:
What about when you visited him in '67? Was he talking then?
Ginsberg:
A little bit, in answer to very specific questions. I have a
journal I kept on that which should appear in the next
City Lights
Journal.
I wrote it a long time back, and gave it to Laughlin [James
Laughlin, publisher of New Directions], and he sent it to Olga Rudge
who got upset, and I couldn't at first figure out over what. Laughlin
said it was because I had mentioned in the journal about how I had
smoked a stick of grass at the table on Pound's eighty-first birthday.
Then I saw Olga Rudge earlier this year in London, and apparently she
objected to my quoting something Pound said to me. He said,
"The
Cantos
are a mess, stupidity and ignorance all the way through, and
the worst stupidity was stupid, suburban anti-Semitic prejudice."
Int:
Why did she object to that? I mean, had Pound said it?
Ginsberg:
Uh hum. But she maintained that Pound was not anti-Semitic,
and it was a misunderstanding to think of him as anti-Semitic in the
beginning.
Int:
Was Pound's statement an apology?
Ginsberg:
Well, she didn't want to see it as an apologia, and it wasn't
