snaxforgandhi
On a mission...apparently
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2009
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Greetings Earthlings,
I know I am dancing dangerously close to the brink of geekdom here, but I simply could not pass up posting this piece when I came upon it in my travels about the Wide World of Web.
It is an essay (I know, half of you are already cringing, right? This one's awesome though, you'll see... Plus, if you die while you're reading it, everyone will think that you were intellectual and sophisticated) written by Allen Ginsberg in 1966 and published in "The Atlantic Monthly," a widely circulated literary and cultural magazine founded in Boston in 1857 that is still in circulation today. Think: Boston's version of "The New Yorker."
Those of my generation should need little introduction to Ginsberg's work. For those of you who do not know of the man, I will not even attempt to edify you here. Suffice it to say that along with characters like the Chicago Seven's Abbie Hoffman ("Steal This Book",) Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden (famed later as a member of California State Assembly and the State Senate,) Tim Leary, et al., he was instrumental in forging the social and political climate of the 1960s. These guys wrote the book on conscientious civil disobedience, like, literally! A poet, he was also a man of the previous, beatnik generation, and was a contemporary and friend of men like Jack Kerouac. In fact, the first chapter of Kerouac's infamous 1957 "On The Road" was an account of a meeting between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. (Google the man)
An outspoken and controversial proponent of marijuana (You think this pro-cannabis business is tough these days? This was back when a doob could get you a dime in the big house!), this essay is self-described as being written to those who had zero firsthand knowledge of the drug, yet condemned it in the most draconian terms. Basically everyone who wasn't a hippy in North America.
People love Ginsberg (with reason) and people hate him (with reason,) but wherever you stand there is no denying that the dude could write.
For us old timers, this is a really fascinating trip down memory lane and a chance to contrast the MJ culture then and now, and for you young squirts (you know who you are, yes you with the Che Guevara T-shirt on, and the mega-bead hemp jewelry
) it is a chance to glimpse a snapshot of the socio-political landscape in the U.S. in the sixties that hasn't been "cleansed" and filtered thru the "official version" scrubbers utilized by those who write todays history textbooks. It may help you to grock what's up with all of us ol geezers when we go off about how "things used to be!"
Enjoy,
~Snax (He Whose Wife Rolls Her Eyes At Him)
Copyright © 1966 by Allen Ginsberg, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1996, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1966; The Great Marijuana Hoax; Volume 218, No. 6; pages 104 - 112.
HOW much there is to be revealed about marijuana in this decade in America for the general public! The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena.
A few people don't like the experience and report back to the language world that it's a drag. But the vast majority all over the world who have smoked the several breaths necessary to feel the effect, adjust to the strangely familiar sensation of Time slow-down, and explore this new space thru natural curiosity, report that it's a useful area of mind-consciousness to be familiar with. Marijuana is a metaphysical herb less habituating than tobacco, whose smoke is no more disruptive than Insight.
This essay, conceived by a mature middle-aged gentleman, the holder at present of a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, a traveler on many continents with experience of customs and modes of different cultures, is dedicated to those who have not smoked marijuana, who don't know exactly what it is but have been influenced by sloppy, or secondhand, or unscientific, or (as in the case of drug-control bureaucracies) definitely self-interested language used to describe the marijuana high pejoratively. I offer the pleasant suggestion that a negative approach to the whole issue (as presently obtains in what are aptly called square circles in the USA) is not necessarily the best, and that it is time to shift to a more positive attitude toward this specific experience.1 If one is not inclined to have the experience oneself, this is a free country and no one is obliged to
I know I am dancing dangerously close to the brink of geekdom here, but I simply could not pass up posting this piece when I came upon it in my travels about the Wide World of Web.
It is an essay (I know, half of you are already cringing, right? This one's awesome though, you'll see... Plus, if you die while you're reading it, everyone will think that you were intellectual and sophisticated) written by Allen Ginsberg in 1966 and published in "The Atlantic Monthly," a widely circulated literary and cultural magazine founded in Boston in 1857 that is still in circulation today. Think: Boston's version of "The New Yorker."
Those of my generation should need little introduction to Ginsberg's work. For those of you who do not know of the man, I will not even attempt to edify you here. Suffice it to say that along with characters like the Chicago Seven's Abbie Hoffman ("Steal This Book",) Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden (famed later as a member of California State Assembly and the State Senate,) Tim Leary, et al., he was instrumental in forging the social and political climate of the 1960s. These guys wrote the book on conscientious civil disobedience, like, literally! A poet, he was also a man of the previous, beatnik generation, and was a contemporary and friend of men like Jack Kerouac. In fact, the first chapter of Kerouac's infamous 1957 "On The Road" was an account of a meeting between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. (Google the man)
An outspoken and controversial proponent of marijuana (You think this pro-cannabis business is tough these days? This was back when a doob could get you a dime in the big house!), this essay is self-described as being written to those who had zero firsthand knowledge of the drug, yet condemned it in the most draconian terms. Basically everyone who wasn't a hippy in North America.
People love Ginsberg (with reason) and people hate him (with reason,) but wherever you stand there is no denying that the dude could write.
For us old timers, this is a really fascinating trip down memory lane and a chance to contrast the MJ culture then and now, and for you young squirts (you know who you are, yes you with the Che Guevara T-shirt on, and the mega-bead hemp jewelry
Enjoy,
~Snax (He Whose Wife Rolls Her Eyes At Him)
Copyright © 1966 by Allen Ginsberg, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1996, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1966; The Great Marijuana Hoax; Volume 218, No. 6; pages 104 - 112.
N O V E M B E R 1 9 6 6
First Manifesto to End the Bringdown
"I've never had a chance to explain my position on this subject without interruption, and to a large audience," says the poet Allen Ginsberg about the myths, the lore, and the legal aspects of marijuana. "So people mistakenly think I'm asking people to take dope-fiend dope."
by Allen Ginsberg
HOW much there is to be revealed about marijuana in this decade in America for the general public! The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena.
A few people don't like the experience and report back to the language world that it's a drag. But the vast majority all over the world who have smoked the several breaths necessary to feel the effect, adjust to the strangely familiar sensation of Time slow-down, and explore this new space thru natural curiosity, report that it's a useful area of mind-consciousness to be familiar with. Marijuana is a metaphysical herb less habituating than tobacco, whose smoke is no more disruptive than Insight.
This essay, conceived by a mature middle-aged gentleman, the holder at present of a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, a traveler on many continents with experience of customs and modes of different cultures, is dedicated to those who have not smoked marijuana, who don't know exactly what it is but have been influenced by sloppy, or secondhand, or unscientific, or (as in the case of drug-control bureaucracies) definitely self-interested language used to describe the marijuana high pejoratively. I offer the pleasant suggestion that a negative approach to the whole issue (as presently obtains in what are aptly called square circles in the USA) is not necessarily the best, and that it is time to shift to a more positive attitude toward this specific experience.1 If one is not inclined to have the experience oneself, this is a free country and no one is obliged to