Ginsberg On Acid

“Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.”― Allen Ginsberg

In 1959 Allen Ginsberg took part in the now famous LSD experiments at Stanford University, at the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute. Financed by the CIA and using psychologists that were secretly working for the CIA, the experiments were aimed at seeing the effects of psychedelics on the human mind (and how it might be controlled)…on human behavior. It was a time of massive experimentation around the drug, which was seen by many scientists as having potential to both unlock the mysteries within the brain as well as promoting positive mental health affects on the human.

Ginsberg’s first acid experience happened while he was being monitored, with electrodes taped to his head, and outside stimuli like “recordings of Wagner and Gertrude Stein in the lab” introduced during various stages of his trip. He left the experience thinking that LSD was a safe drug, something potentially worth while. As he further experimented with it outside the bounds of the laboratory, he came to understand how acid could be a spiritual awakening…a mystical experience that seemed to him much more powerful than any offered by organized religion.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs

On this day, June 2nd, in 1959 Ginsberg wrote his poem, simply called Lysergic Acid, about these experiences. That was the first of many poems he wrote either under the influence of psychedelics or about experiences being under the influence, and he used his platform as a famous poet to take to the streets and the airwaves, amplifying the positive goodness of the drug. On William Buckley’s Fringe Line television show, when the conservative host posed questions to Ginsberg about the hippy movement and about psychedelics, Ginsberg pulled out a book of his poems and read one he had composed when under the influence. It was quite a sight, the clean cut Buckley with his annoyed stare directed at the poet and the hairy, unruly Ginsberg, with his pointer finger conducting his rhyme and rhythm, as he read an excerpt from Wales Visitation.

June 2nd is an interesting date for Allen Ginsberg and LSD. The Paris Review had interviewed him in 1966 and reported that after doing LSD dozens of times, Ginsberg felt that his body was having a harder time with it…he was getting “monster vibrations.” when under its influence. Ginsberg wrote back on June 2nd, 1966 (letter below) to say that he had recently dropped some acid in Big Sur (one must assume it was at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin) and that it went well (the letter is below). Better than well. No problematic side effects.

Ginsberg, like Neal Cassady (to a smaller extent) was a bridge between two of the great 20th Century American countercultures: The Beats and The Hippies; he was a narratorial voice to “the best minds of (his) generation” and future generations. He pushed boundries while finding his own Truth. With the recent decriminalizing of psychedelics, with the cultural normalizing through books by Michael Pollan and Ayelet Waldman, through the incredible works of MAPS and the dozens of ways psychedelics have once again been shown to help with depression, PTSD and other health issues, Ginsberg’s voice seems prophetic; the negative blow-back of Timothy Leary’s Tune In And Drop Out message has been replaced with a tune-in, go-deep and open-yourself-up-to-new-possibilities, the mantra Ginsberg spouted 64 years ago.

Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg at the Human Be-In

The poem is below as is the response to the Paris Review article. I leave you with an excerpt from an interview Ginsberg did with a student after a lecture he gave on July 17, 1978 (you can hear a recording of the entire lecture here):

Ginsberg: I want to follow that up [that reading and discussion of Wordsworth’s “..Tintern Abbey”] with a poem of my own related to that, taking off from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, approaching a similar problem, or taking a similar approach to the problem – in this case, how to deal with phantasms, thought-forms, furies, monsters, of an acid trip, in poetry.  First of all, how to deal with the problem of in that exalted, or high, state of acid or psychedelic space – how to write poetry to begin with, how to approach poetry. Is it possible to approach poetry?  Is it self-contradictory? – and what would be the path to stabilize the poem, so that it wouldn’t just become hodos chameliontos,  the continually changing chameleon of mind-trips

Student: I don’t quite get why it would be self-contradictory.

Ginsberg: Well, I see that it was more, my approach to it, originally, was self-contradictory because – taking an acid trip, and then wanting to gain something, bring back a poem, maybe a poem about God or something, see God and bring back a poem! – pay your mind, see God, bring back a poem, cash it in to The New Yorker, get a hundred dollars, take the money and run back to the next..universe. 

Monk & Ginsburg

Lysergic Acid

By: Allen Ginsburg

It is a multiple million eyed monster

it is hidden in all its elephants and selves

it hummeth in the electric typewriter

it is electricity connected to itself, if it hath wires

it is a vast Spiderweb

and I am on the last millionth infinite tentacle of the spiderweb, a worrier

lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self

one of the millions of skeletons of China

one of the particular mistakes

I allen Ginsberg a separate consciousness

I who want to be God

I who want to hear the infinite minutest vibration of eternal harmony

I who wait trembling my destruction by that aethereal music in the fire

I who hat God and give him a name

I who make mistakes on the eternal typewriter

I who am doomed

~

But at the far end of the universe the million eyed Spyder that hath no name

spinneth of itself endlessly

the monster that is no monster approaches with apples, perfume, railroads,

Televisions, skulls

a universe that eats and drinks itself

blood from my skull

Tibetan creature with hairy breast and Zodiac on my stomach

this sacrificial victim unable to have a good time

~

My face in the mirror, thin hair, blood congested in streaks down beneath

My eyes, cocksucker, a decay, a talking lust

a snaeap, a snarl, a tic of consciousness in infinity

a creep in the eyes of all Universes

trying to escape my Being, unable to pass on to the Eye

~

I vomit, I am in a trance, my body is seized in convulsion, my stomach

crawls, water from my mouth, I am here in Inferno

dry bones of myriad lifeless mummies naked on the web, the Ghosts, I am

A Ghost

I cry out where I am in the music, to the room, to whomever near, you, Are

You God?

No, do you want me to be God?

Is there no answer?

Must there always be an Answer? you reply,

and were it up to me to say Yes or No –

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

But that I long for a Yes of Harmony to penetrate

to every corner of the universe, under every condition whatsoever

a Yes there is… a Yes I am…a Yes You are… a We

~

A We

and that must be an It, and a They, and a Thing with No Answer

It creepeth, it waiteth, it is still, it is begun, it is the Horns of Battle it is

Multiple Sclerosis

it is not my hope

it is not my death at Eternity

it is not my word, not poetry

beware my Word

~

It is a Ghost Trap, woven by priest in Sikkim or Tibet

a crossframe on which a thousand threads of different color

are strung, a spiritual tennis racket

in which when I look I see aethereal lightwaves radiate

bright energy passing round on the threads as for billions of years

the thread-bands magically changing hues one transformed to another as if

the

Ghost Trap

were an image of the Universe in miniature

conscious sentient part of the interrelated machine

making waves outward in Time to the Beholder

displaying its own image in miniature once for all

repeated minutely downward with endless variations throughout all of itself

it being all the same in every part

~

This image or energy which reproduces itself at the depths of space from the

very Beginning

in what might be an O or an Aum

and trailing variations made of the same Word circles round itself in the same

pattern as its original Appearence

creating a larger Image of itself throughout the depths of Time

outward circling thru bands of faroff Nebulae & vast Astrologies

contained, to be true to itself, in a Mandala painted on an Elephant’s hide,

or in a photograph of a painting on the side of an imaginary Elephant which

smiles, tho how the Elephant looks is an irrelevent joke –

it might be a Sign held by a Flaming Demon, or Ogre of Transcience,

or in a photograph of my own belly in the void

or in my eye

or in the eye of the monk who made the Sign

or in its own Eye that stares on Itself at least and dies

~

and tho an eye can die

and tho my eye can die

the billion-eyed monster, the Nameless, the Answerless, the Hidden-From

me, the endless Being

one creature that gives birth to itself

thrills in its minutest particular, sees out of all eyes differently at once

One and not One moves on its own ways

I cannot follow

~

And I have made an image of the monster here

and I will make another

it feels like Cryptozoids

it creeps an undulates beneath the sea

it is coming to take over the city

it invades beneath every Consciousness

it is delicate as the Universe

it makes me vomit

becaude I am afraid I will miss its appearance

it appears anyway

it appears anyway in the mirror

it washes out of the mirror like the sea

it is myriad undulations

it washes out of the mirror and drowns the behodler

it drowns the world when it drowns the world

it drowns itself

it floats outward like a corpse filled with music

the noise of war in its head

a babe laugh in its belly

a scream og agony in the dark sea

a smile on the lips of a blind statue

it was there

it was not mine

I wanted to use it for myself

to be heroic

but it is not for sale to this consciousness

it goes its own way forever

it will complete all creatures

it will be the radio of the future

it will hear itself in time

it wants a rest

it is tired of hearing and seeing itself

it wants another form another victim

it wants me

it gives me good reason

it gives me reason to exist

it gives me endless answers

a consciousness to be separate and a consciousness to see

I am beckoned to be One or the other, to say I am both and be neither

it can take care of itself without me

it is Both Answerless ( it answers not to that name )

it hummeth on the elecric typewriter

it types a fragmentary word which is

a fragmentary word,

MANDALA

Gods dance on thier own bodies

New flowers open forgetting Death

Celestial eyes beyond the heartbreak of illusion

I see the gay Creator

Bands rise up in anthem to the worlds

Flags and banners waving in transcendence

One image in the end remains myriad-eyed in Eternity

This is the Work! This is the knowledge! This is the End of man!