New Blues Dialog #3

In a Tim Leary State of Mind
I am a character in a literary hallway. Those aren't shadows passing all around me. Those are literary guides. Stop one. Ask him...or ask her, it doesn't matter. Whoa. The best one to ask is coming down the hall now. It's Albert Murray the writer. His literary character name is Scooter, from Gasoline Point, Alabama. The briarpatch, as he calls it in his lectures. He's wearing glasses. He swears he wanted to be an intellectual as a kid in the briarpatch. I'm stopping Albert.

"I live in a literary context," Albert guides. He's a literary guide. I live in a literary context, too. It was easy and slick as snail glide to learn that from Albert. We're on a first-name basis because I've read his books. He doesn't call me anything because he doesn't know my name but if he did he'd call me by my first name. "...my whole thing is to process it [the stuff of the abstract continuance--Albert Murray refers to the Civil Rights Movement as an abstract context, a political context] into a literary statement. So, I always thought in terms of heroic action, of conquering the world. I was not interested in 'escape,' I was interest in conquest. That's a different thing all together." He's right! He's right! I'm screaming up and down the hallway. Papa Hemingway turns around and speaks to Albert Murray. W.H. Auden calls Albert by his first name. "And don't let me forget to mention Auden, because nobody loves Auden anymore than me. Man, I'm an Auden man from way back. Couldn't write the blues, but he could write everything else."

An Auden poem:

The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

_From Homage to Clio, 1960 ________________________________________

I read this poem very loudly in the hallway. Albert Murray laughs. "That's the way it works, I pick up whatever the other guy's music is--in this case, Auden's--and then I play a tune too. To me, you can write more poetry in prose than if you restrict yourself to certain verse forms." Whoa, Albert, that's good. I like that. More poetry in prose.

It's noisy as hell in the literary hallway. While still in the briarpatch, Albert thought, "'This is a rough place, I'm going to have to be a hero.'" Keep on talkin' Albert. Keep on talkin'. But then we're talking writing. Like writers talk books and libraries and info and experience. Albert talking about growing up in the briarpatch, "I was beating that. I was better than that. I wasn't their conception of me, I was my conception of me. And my conception of me came from the great books of the world. That's what I thought of human possibility, not what some dumb-ass white guy thought a colored guy should be doing and feeling. Do you see what I'm saying? So I was not impressed with certain things as achievements that they thought of as achievements."

This is more or less old Doc Tim Leary's basic philosophy, though Leary to me was like Auden is to Albert Murray. I heard Leary's song; his poetry; "Tune in, turn on, and drop out." That's a simple little poem; easy to memorize. A part of RIGHT NOW, the only NOW, the only point in time where you are really who you are whether you say you are or not.

I duck into a quite place in the literary hallway. Timothy Leary ducks in there with me. Timothy admits he had dreams of being a writer as a young man. "You've written, man," I say, "I read your stuff all the time, though I did acid out in California long before I heard of you and Baba Ram Das--in an Allen Ginsberg interview in some literary journal." And old Tim Leary was big-time for a while until the Feds got him and lobotomized him or atomized him or something then he turned to looking into the cosmos for his truths.

Here ya go, read a little Tim Leary--"go with us now, back in the pages of history, when out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great Doctor Tim Leary..."
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The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.

• These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
• They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
• They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.
• They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
• They have claimed private, personal ownership of God'd land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
• In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
• In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory educationto coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
• In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
• In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
• In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
• In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
• For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
• In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
• In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
• They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
• In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
• They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
• They have enlisted an army of informers.
• In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
• They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.
• They are bores.
• They hate beauty.
• They hate sex.
• They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.
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If you'd like to read more of old Tim, then tune in, turn on, and drop out HERE:
www.erowid.org/culture/characters/leary_timothy/leary_timothy_declaration.shtml
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Tim Leary.

Tim's really high now. They shot his ashes into space!

theturnedontunedin&droppedoutgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler