Diane di Prima is a San Francisco writer and poet who also works in healing,
Magick, and Alchemy. Some of here recent books are: Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York Years,
Pieces of a Song – Collected
Poems, Zip Code, and
Seminary Poems.
I spoke to Diane in her cozy book lined San Francisco apartment. We spoke
of rebellion, liberty, conditioning, and on being a women in the beat generation.This
is a transcript of our recorded conversation.
JM | When you started out as a
writer in the 50’s, were there a lot of control systems set up to punish anyone
who tried to break out the consensus mold?
DD | It was a weird time. Especially
for women. Rebellion was kind of expected of men.
JM | When men rebelled they were
romantic, free. Women who rebelled were categorized as being nuts.
DD | Yes. Nuts or a whore, or
something. Yes.
JM | Do you feel it’s any different
now?
DD | Not much. I think there’s
been a lot of lip service paid to how much women have managed to advance. The younger
women that I know are behaving pretty much like women have always behaved. Maybe
they don’t have so much of the middle class housewife dream, but they’ll still be
the one to get a job, while the man does the writing or the painting or whatever.
I can think of example after example of this. I think that the internal control
systems that have been put in place for women haven’t been dented. It’s such a big
step forward to single mom, but so much more could be going on besides that.
JM | That’s where the most effective
censorship and control systems reside, inside ourselves, our head!
DD | Yes! How it gets there is
interesting too.
JM | How do you think they get
there?
DD | I would guess that it starts
in the womb. Getting imprinted with the language pattern that’s around you. The
way people move, the way they hold themselves. To break it you’d have to do some
really deliberate debriefing, on every level. The place where I was lucky in my
own life was that I had a grandfather who was an anarchist. I didn’t see much of
him after I was 7 because my parents thought he was bad for me, but from 3 to 7
I saw a lot of him. I was still malleable enough so some debriefing occurred there.
He would tell me these really weird fables about the world. He would read Dante
to me and take me to the old peoples anarchist rallies, and all this showed me these
other possibilities.
JM | So you had an early imprint
of a kind of… anti-authority, authority figure. (laughs)
DD | (laughing) Yes! Aside from
being an anti-authority authority figure, the imprint that I got from him and my
grandmother as well, was of two people who weren’t afraid, at least from my child’s
point of perspective. They would just go ahead and do what they believed in. In
all the other years of my early life I never encountered anyone else who wasn’t
afraid. I think kids today may be a little better off in that they encounter a few
people who either aren’t afraid, or who will go ahead and try something anyway,
whatever it is. There’s a possibility of that model, but during my childhood that
was a very unusual model.
I was born in 1934, during the Depression, and everyone seemed to be frozenwithterror. We…..will….do… what….we….are….told!
(laughs) and I don’t think it’s changed that much. Every day people
are told that they should be afraid of not having health insurance, they’re going
to die in the gutter, and to be afraid of all these things that aren’t threats at
the moment. Of course there are present threats but nobody’s paying attention to
those.
DD | No. What you’re seeing is
an old problem in the arts. Everything is always co-opted, and as soon as possible.
As Cocteau used to talk about, you have to be a kind of acrobat or a tightrope walker.
Stay 3 jumps ahead of what they can figure out about what you’re doing, so by the
time the media figures out that your writing, say, women and wolves, your on to
finishing your Alchemical poems or something. It’s not just a point of view of rebellion
or outdoing them, or anything like that. It’s more a point of view of how long can
you stay with one thing. Where do you want to go? You don’t want to do anything
you already know or that you’ve already figured out. So it comes naturally to the
artist to keep making those jumps, that is, if they don’t fall into the old “jeez,
I still don’t own a new microwave” programs.
JM | Reminds me of a story about
Aldous Huxley. When asked if he had read all the books in his quite impressive library
he replied, “God no! Who would want a library full of books that they had already
read?”
DD | (laughs) It is true that
rebellion is coopted, but then it always gets out of their hands, it slithers in
some other direction. Then they go “oh, how can we make this part of the system?”
Like rap. OK, they are co-opting all this regular rap, but now this surreal rap
is starting, native tongue, surreal imagery, spiritual anarchism rap, it’s not about
girls or politics or race and it’s starting to happen.
JM | Is this something your daughter
brings to your attention?
DD | Yes, I go over once in awhile
and catch up on what’s going on. You see as soon as something is defined, it wiggles
off in another direction. I don’t think that it’s such a big problem in the sense
of reaching a lot of people. How does the artist reach a large audience? The people
that know are always going to find the new edge, but the mainstream are not that
smart or the guy making a top 40 record is not that smart. It often takes them a
long time to figure it out. Now that is a problem, because we don’t have the time.
We need to reach everybody, right away, because we have to stop the system dead
in its tracks. It’s no longer a question of dismantling the system. There isn’t
enough time to take it apart, we just have to stop it.
JM | Do you feel that there’s
a somewhat centralized or conscious attempt to defuse radical art or rebellion through
co-option, or is it just “the nature of the beast”, so to speak?
DD | I think it goes back and
forth. There are times when it’s conscious, but not a single hierarchical conspiracy
but rather a hydra-headed conspiracy. Then there are other times that it doesn’t
need to be conscious anymore, because that’s the mold, that pattern has been set,
so everyone goes right on doing things that way. I’m not quite sure which point
we’re at right now in history. It’s so transitional and crazy that I wouldn’t hazard
a guess. Just check your COINTELPRO history to see an example of a conscious conspiracy
to stop us. Other times it was just a repetition of what has gone on before. Like
the ants going back to where the garbage used to be. (laughs)
DD | Yes, and it’s all in place
when the next so called conspiracy comes along, which is very handy, isn’t it? I
Wonder how we’ve made this monster we have here?
JM | OK. Say we stop it dead in
its tracks. What then?
DD | It would be nice to say it’s
unimaginable, wouldn’t that be great. That would be my hope! (laughs) For one thing,
we’d have to use the same tables, wear the same shoes longer, read a lot of the
same books, maybe for the next few hundred years. Dumps would become valuable places
to mine!
JM | They already are to me!
DD | To some people, yes, but
not to enough people. Screeching to a halt seems like the only possible solution
and I’m not even sure how you would go about it. Of course the good old general
strike would be a nice start.
JM | As long as we’re on the subject
of deconstructing, how do you feel about the predominant intellectual fad of postmodernism,
deconstruction, and the nihilism implicit in these systems?
DD | Well, when I read that stuff,
it’s so frustrating. Western thought always keeps stopping on the brink. It never
really makes that extra step. It could really do with an infusion of Buddhist logic.
At least 4-fold logic and then what’s beyond that. It seems that although it’s dressed
up in new language, nothing really new has happened in philosophy in the 20th century.
Well, maybe not since Wittgenstein. It seems like the same old thing. You know,
sometimes when people ask me for poems now, I’ll send out poems that have been lying
around for years, I don’t always have new poems lying around everywhere, and these
things that I wrote as cut-up stuff, cutting up each others’ dreams in workshops
and such. I’ll send these out. Everyone seems to be taking them very seriously and
publishing them. They think I’m working off of some language theory when actually
these are just things I did for fun.
JM | What are you doing now?
DD | I’m working on 2 prose books.
One is called “Recollections of My Life as a Women”. I’m 120 pages into it and I’m
still 8 years old. I’m still dealing with how the conditioning happened. In my generation
a lot of it happened with battering, you got hit a lot, and screaming. Your basic
conditioning came through abuse, not really different from concentration camps or
anything else. I think someday we’re going to look back on how we’re handling kids
at this point in history and wonder how we could treat them such. Like when people
say “How could women stand it when people did such and such?” We’ll be saying that
about the way children are treated. [Note- Since this interview this book has been
completed and published.]
JM | What’s the other book?
DD | The other prose book is called
“Not Quite Buffalo Stew”. It’s just a rollicking, fun, surreal novel about life
in California. It’s in the first person, and in the 2nd or 3rd chapter in I found
out that the “I” that was the narrator was a man, so that breaks a lot of rules
already. The “I” is a drug smuggler named Lynx. There isn’t a whole lot of continuity,
just whatever scenes wanted to write themselves.
JM | Are you using any kind or
random/divination systems, i.e., cut-ups, grab bag, I Ching, Tarot, coin tossing,
etc.?
JM | What do you see in the future
for poetry and literature?
DD | I would like to see authors
really use Magick to reach themes. I’d like to see more work coming out of visioning
and trance. I’m really tired of reading about human beings! There’s all these other
beings, I’d like to see a real dimensional jump and I’d like to see people working
on the technical problems. Like when you come back from trance or visioning, or
drugs, and what you can write down about it at that moment. What you can make into
an actual piece, we haven’t figured it out yet. Yeats certainly didn’t figure it
out. It’s more than needing a new language. There are actual forms we need to find
or the forms have to find us, that will hold all that material without trying to
make it reductive. The attempts at visionary painting in the 60’s and Yeats’ last
poems show how vision didn’t translate into these old artistic forms. Of course
taking the raw material and presenting that as a piece doesn’t work either. Maybe
a blending of vision, word, and sounds can achieve something. We haven’t really
had time to think about what the computer is. Most of us still think of it as a
typewriter, or a calculator. We don’t think of it as its own dimension. It has its
own medium, possibilities, to bring this kind of material across. I also think about
deliberate invocation to find the plane or thing you want to write about.
JM | Do you see us as heading
into a post-literate society?
DD | Yes, we might be. I don’t
think that will stop poetry, in fact it won’t stop any of the arts at all. Even
if it’s oral there may be a split like there was in Europe when there was the written
literature in Latin and then there was the oral poems of the singers in the Vulgate.
We have that to a degree already with the poetry of the great songwriters. Really
though, I don’t think literate or post-literate really matters. Were cave paintings
literate or pre-literate? Did they read those paintings or just look at them? (laughs)
Of course the only reason a completely literate society was developed was for thought
control, and now that thought control can be done via TV, etc., it’s not really
needed anymore. They don’t want everyone reading Schopenhauer!
Everyone needs to remember that they can buy a small press or laser writer,
or copy machine, and go home and do what the fuck they please and it will take a
very long time for anyone to catch up with them all! No one seems to remember about
a few years ago in Czechoslovakia, without access to all this technology like we
have here, even with every one of their typewriters registered to the police, they
still managed to publish their work! In order to do this they would they would type
it with 10 carbon papers to make 10 copies! We are in a situation here in the US
where no one can register all the computers, no one can figure out where all the
copy machines are. Get one now! Remember we can do it without government money.
Government money is poison, take it when you need it, but don’t get hooked. We can
say what we want. They can’t possibly keep up with us all. Real decentralization!
JM | That’s great, helping people
to find their true desires, but do you think that we’re so full of false, spectacle
manufactured desires that we can no longer identify our true desires?
DD | I think it doesn’t take that
long to deprogram false desires. Anyone who knows that they have the desire to know
that about themselves, what their true desires are, will find the tools to do it.
Drugs, auto-hypnosis, you could also do it by following the false desires until
they lead to a dead end like Blake recommended…
JM | Hmmm… somehow that seems…
very American…
DD | Hmmm. You’re right.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artista convidada: Francesca Woodman (Estados Unidos, 1958-1981)
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 146 | Novembro de 2019
editor geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão | FLORIANO
MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
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