PARTISAN REVIEW
259
been ordered to disperse. We felt we had a legal right to stay, all those
who wanted to leave could and the rest would invoke passive resist–
ance, sit on the ground and offer themselves for arrest. Genet, being in
the country illegally, having come in through the Canadian border,
had to cut. So I think Richard Seaver took Genet away, and Bur–
roughs and I stayed.... And
Gen~
gave a speech to the Yippies saying
that he hoped that some day the skyline of Chicago would be covered
with vines, that he felt it was necessary for writers to be with the
younger people in body as well as sympathy.
Solomon:
I remember reading that Genet said at that time that he had
had much experience eluding the police so it was nothing for him.
Int:
I'd like to return to Burroughs's theory of evil. What would you say
is its source?
Ginsberg:
Well, originally it was analyzed by William Lee, the factualist
(perhaps representative of a trust of giant insects from another galaxy)
in
Nak ed Lunch.
But since then, in
Nova Express
and
Ticket That
Exploded,
and more recently in
Exterminator!
and
The Job
and
Wild
Boys,
the agency of the hallucinating Word is a virus from Venus so
it's not other galaxies anymore--it's an external, extraterrestrial
threat from within our own solar system.
Int:
Would you go along with the notion that madness is the norm in
Burroughs's fiction?
Ginsberg:
I would say the norm is metamorphosis.
In
Burroughs's
fiction, madness is the normal behavior of the political world, but it's
also a medium that A.
J.
Benway and the factualisis are able to handle
and deal with and use as the material for their examination . .. and
sometimes get caught in as is possible for an explorer to get caught in
a sticky wicket, or as Burroughs himself feels that he has been caught
in certain areas that he could not handle with drugs like psylocybin
and LSD, or yage originally. But madness is
not
his ultimate goal,just
the obstacle. This is why Burroughs's geography is so similar to gnostic
and Tibetan procedural maps. The wrathful deities are the guardians
of the gate to
Sunyatli,
blue space ... except Burroughs is ascribing all
these wrathful deities to a plot by the Control Forces. So his books
really are investigations of his consciousness to "trace along the word
lines" to the
source
o f the control.
Int:
So he has a greater conspiratorial sense of history than even you do,
I guess?
Ginsberg:
Mine is a little more mundane like investigations of CIA in–
volvement with dope trafficking in Indochina (which was I think a
successful investigation).
Int:
What about applying Longfellow's remark on the transcendentalist
