Informant38

Allen Ginsberg died a few days ago. You knew him, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about him.



I was very moved to hear about it. I've known Allen off and on since back in the late '50s, although I didn't get to know him well until the early '60s. We weren't close friends, but we'd stop on the street and talk. Although Allen wasn't a Christian, in a way he really was the one true Christian of the last 70 years. He was absolutely fearless. I once saw him read a poem about the Hell's Angels right in front of a whole gang of them. He wasn't fazed for a moment. He had the qualities of a genuine shaman. He may not have been the greatest poet of his generation, but he was absolutely the real thing as a teacher and as a shaman. He didn't do anything for the publicity, or to advance himself. Many of the greatest things he did never made the newspapers. He believed in the holiness of things, and he stood against the American public's complacency at a time when we really needed it. Attacks are already being made on him, three days after his death. I find that disgusting. I miss him already.

Robert Stone in Salon April '97

and again:

He's depressed and when he looks at the books on his shelf they all seem so useless to him. Is your sense that literature can only help you so much?



It's partly a sort of joke at my own expense. I think that writers are often jerks -- and in my work, inquiring jerks. I often find myself in the role of inquiring jerk, and often have in the past when I was in Vietnam or on a shrimp boat or wherever. So it's partly a joke, but it's also a somewhat serious comment on the fact that, sure, literature can only get you so far. Anything can only get you so far. I value narrative in literature and insight more than I value anything else -- that is, I value insight anyway. So literature and narrative, poetry -- anything that represents insight in language -- is something I see as very valuable. And when that fails people they're in real trouble. And when my characters experience this failure of their most beloved works to pull them through, they're in extremis.

and again:

You don't condemn him. But he's wrestling with some pretty dark things.



You can take the darkest impulses and turn them into art. On the other hand, art that employs language can never separate itself from moral perspective because the imperatives of language are necessarily moral. The imperatives of insight are necessarily moral. Something like humor is moral; it represents a moral perspective. It's very hard for art to remove itself from a moral reference point, and it's impossible for art that's made out of language to separate itself from a moral reference point, because it consists entirely of judgments. Often those judgments are difficult and laced with incredible ambiguity, but ambiguity is not the absence of morality. It's just a confusion about morality.