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ALLEN GINSBERG
utopians, that they expressed the "divine insanity of noble minds"?
Ginsberg:
I think Burroughs would reject that as sentimental rhetoric
because he feels that he is more of a precise scientist investigating
regions of consciousness forbidden to common understanding by the
Control agencies, and the
danger
of such investigation is physical pain,
madness, "the Ovens," but the factualist investigator armed with var–
ious antivirus exercises such as rubbing out the word can ultimately
resist, though there may be certain aspects which you can't resist ...
and what you can't resist that most dismays him at present comes in
the phrase "At Hiroshima
all
was lost" ... or so he said this year when
I went to see him to find out what he was thinking lately. He said that
the project was to get out of the body--as the soul or spirit gets out
of the body--but that the problem with the atom bomb is that its
temperature is so high that it's a " killer of souls." So human beings
have arrived at a situation where they can be the Killer of Souls. So I
said, traditionally, with the gnostics or Buddhists, there is no soul to
kill, the void is impervious to the meta-physical heat of the bomb. He
answered that all that Buddhist and Hindu mytho logy was very ama–
teur, compared with the kind of precise investigations that might be
conducted now in a highly chemical and technological age. For Bur–
roughs, yoga and Buddhism are primitive methods of achieving detach–
ment; it can now be done more immediately through electronic
means.
Int:
But less intuitional.
Ginsb erg:
Well, just as he uses the physical table as a place to put his
mind to cut up, putting the words on the table rather than inner
meditation only--so he sees mechanical aids, like a Yankee inventor,
as being a possibility; and also he says we can't turn back, we've
already advanced into a highly mechanized, electronic dimension , and
that may be the Path. So he puts down the rural commune back-to–
nature aspect of what Gary Snyder and myself are doing, saying that
it's retrogressive, that we're too deeply plunged into the science–
fiction reality situation now. For Burroughs the problem is not so
much the fact of science or experiment, as it is that it's being
con–
trolled,
that secrets are being kept--like the Army is the only one
that has real license to experiment with acid anymore and maybe
scientology is another extension of the CIA network. So his idea is
"All secrets out" now.
Int:
So resistance becomes openness?
Ginsb erg:
Right, by making use of secret materi al and t urning it against
Control Agencies, and by realizing that there are a few simple princi–
ples of technology that everyone can understand and master which
