Lengthy and remarkable TLS signed “AG,” six pages on five sheets, 8.5 x 11, December 12, 1959. Letter to Donald Cook, research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. Ginsberg discusses his work, censorship, drugs, sex legislation, writing, mass media, education, Zen, publishing, and more. In small part: "I'm trying to finish a book of poems or get mss. ready for City Lights this month, and am taking off for Chile…other than that am overloaded with mail (I answer, unwisely, everything) and people (everybody I ever knew)—'outnumbered' as Kerouac says he is. So can't come to Washington…A german scholar I know, Karl O. Paetel has been assembling a bibliography of beat and related material."
Ginsberg provides a lengthy list of said material, then continues: "re Obscenity the whole thing boils down to practice of making private hip material public, i.e. putting into literature material which otherwise would be reserved among friends. i.e expanding the area of public communication, to include the real. re censorship these might be born in mind: Howl—customs seizure & later police seizure, trial etc., Chicago Review—supression by U of Chi academic creeps, resignation of editors and founding of, Big Table—second class mail privileges taken away by Summerfield. Trials now on…orlovsky Corso & myself rescude from Boston Police by ACLU for selling it at Harvard in bookstore., Evergreen Review—mail privileges now taken away as of last month…Naked Lunch—by W.S.Burroughs—Olympia press, unavailable in US (Grove will print it later precipitating another legal hassle I suppose)—I have no time to tell you the details of all the petty supressions, times I have been cut off the air for suggesting change in marijuana laws, times publishers have censored this or that phrase or sentence out of work published by me or Kerouac or Burroughs, constant warnings…
Re Drugs, the best scholastic outlines of what's wrong with the situation regarding Junk to be found in writings by Alfred R Lindesmith…Supression of drugs I see basically as a function of police state brainwashing…Re sex legislation, obvilously time to abolish it all. No amount of middlebrow worrying about proper legislation obviates the fact that any sex legislation is a murderous attack on the human image…
The primary artistic-technical key thing you must remember is at the root of all the literary activity & new free speech—this is: that there has been a basic shift in prosody, i.e. in the measure of the line of poetry. That is, the basically English oldworld accentual count of the line has been replaced (following the tradition of experiment of Pound & especially W.C. Williams) by a new open-field free spontaneous method of composition (not unlike Miller, Stein etc) which has shifted the basic measure of the line to the actual speaking breath (rather than the mechanical accent. Plato 'When the mode of music changes the walls of the city shake.' Thus the new poets score their poems on the page according to rule of Breath, or breath-phrases…Something as radical has happened to the measure of poetry as has happened to the measure in Science (relativity) or painting (abstract expressionism) or music (12 tone scale & jass) or say architecture (Wright). Williams stands in relation to American Poetry as F.L. Wright stands in relation to Architecture as Cezanne stands in relation to later cubist developements & abstraction in European & American painting…
Re public reaction, mass media—you must also gras the astonishing & in fact fantastic (I was always idealistic) corruption of the mass media to understand the debasement of idealistic notions that's taken place wherein the figure of the beatnik has replaced the original 'beat' sincerity…Obviously US approaching a historical crisis of which the beat generation noise is the merest froth on a great horrible wave…The difficulties of real communication in an age of evil octopus mass communications is as difficult as it always has been & is restricted to a few personal forms…
I had some Lysergic acid (twice) in Stanford this summer. It is unlike any other drug—does deliver classic aweful satori, taken under right circumstances (lie down darkroom absolute stillness meditation & transcendance out of body literally to a Vision of Eternity.) (only external stimulus shd be music—Wagner Liebestod maybe). Have you tried it can you and can you get me some? more?" Here, on the reverse of the fourth sheet, Ginsberg writes, "I.E. Tell Fleming & Ike that the Beat Creeps are the only mentally healthy pipple around."
Ginsberg continues: "Zen: don't forget to put footnote to your report saying you were the first one ever gave me a book on Zen to read…I'm not Zen Buddhist as you know, just interested in some techniques they've worked out both for meditation & aesthetic expression." He goes on to discuss Zen and publishing, before concluding: "One thing I do know (which everybody always knew) is that the US is absolutely Mad. gets serious as the historical situation shifts & US psyche incapable of responding. Whitman's Democratic Vistas (very pessimistic) accurately describes the present USA spiritual impasse." He adds a handwritten postscript, "Any specific questions, write me; send me the report and I'll read it & criticize. Mailer's address is in NY—73 Perry St NYC. I know him—but I warn you, he is not like Henry James of whom T.S. Eliot said 'He has a mind so refined that no idea can violate it.' i.e. his mind is molded by a notion of a 'God with boxing gloves' as Orlovsky commented." In very good to fine condition, with light creasing and staining, and small areas of paper loss along the edges. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope, with a handwritten note on the reverse: "P.S. Kerouac & I have made small statements which will be broadcast on Monitor program on Tuesday."
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