Mind Writing Slogans

by Allen Ginsberg

"First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters." - William Blake

I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)

• "First Thought, Best Thought" - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts." - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "The Mind must be loose." - John Adams
• "One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." - Charles Olson, "Projective Verse"
• "My writing is a picture of the mind moving." - Philip Whalen
• Surprise Mind - Allen Ginsberg
• "The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!" - Basho
• "Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman
• "...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? ... Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." - John Keats
• "Form is never more than an extension of content. - Robert Creeley to Charles Olson

• "Form follows function." - Frank Lloyd Wright*
• Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. - A. G.
• "Nothing is better for being Eternal
• Nor so white as the white that dies of a day." - Louis Zukofsky
• Notice what you notice. - A. G.
• Catch yourself thinking. - A. G.
• Observe what's vivid. - A. G.
• Vividness is self-selecting. - A. G.
• "Spots of Time" - William Wordsworth
• If we don't show anyone we're free to write anything. - A. G.
• "My mind is open to itself." - Gelek Rinpoche
• "Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound." - Charles Reznikoff

II Path (Method, Or Recognition)

• "No ideas but in things." "... No ideas but in the Facts." - William Carlos Williams
• "Close to the nose." - W. C. Williams
• "Sight is where the eye hits." - Louis Zukofsky
• "Clamp the mind down on objects." - W C. Williams
• "Direct treatment of the thing ... (or object)." - Ezra Pound, 1912
• "Presentation, not reference." - Ezra Pound
• "Give me a for instance." - Vernacular
• "Show not tell." - Vernacular
• "The natural object is always the adequate symbol." - Ezra Pound
• "Things are symbols of themselves." - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
• He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
• General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
• For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." - William Blake
• "And being old she put a skin / on everything she said." - W. B. Yeats
• "Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." - Jack Kerouac
• "Details are the Life of Prose." - Jack Kerouac
• Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. - A. G.
• "Economy of Words" - Ezra Pound
• "Tailoring" - Gregory Corso
• Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. - A. G.
• Syntax condensed, sound is solid. - A. G.
• Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. - A. G.
• "Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." - Ezra Pound
• "... awareness ... of the tone leading of the vowels." - Ezra Pound
• "... an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . - Ezra Pound
• "Lower limit speech, upper limit song" - Louis Zukofsky
• "Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia." - Ezra Pound
• "Sight. Sound & Intellect." - Louis Zukofsky
• "Only emotion objectified endures." - Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)

• Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
• "Alone with the Alone" - Plotinus
• Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
• "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" - Zen Koan
• "What's the face you had before you were born?" - Zen Koan
• Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
• "Stop the world" - Carlos Castafleda
• "The purpose of art is to stop time." - Bob Dylan
• "the unspeakable visions of the individual - J. K.
• "I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly." - Chuang Tzu (Tr. Burton Watson)
• "Candor" -Whitman
• "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." - William Shakespeare
• "Contact" - A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W. C. Williams, Eds.
• "God appears & God is Light
• To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
• But does a Human Form Display
• To those who Dwell in Realms of Day." - W. Blake
• "Subject is known by what she sees." -A. G.
• Others can measure their visions by what we see. - A. G.
• Candor ends paranoia. - A. G.
• "Willingness to be Fool." - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "Day & Night / you're all right." - Gregory Corso
• Tyger: "Humility is Beatness." - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
• Lion: "Surprise Mind" - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche &A.G.
• Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness" - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability" - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "To be men not destroyers" - Ezra Pound
• Speech synchronizes mind & body - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth" - Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
• "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" - Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Make it new" - Ezra Pound
• "When the music changes, the walls of the city shake" - Plato
• "Every third thought shall be my grave - W Shakespeare, The Tempest
• "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." - W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
• "Only emotion endures" - Ezra Pound
• "Well while I'm here I'll
• do the work -
  and what's the Work?
  To ease the pain of living.
  Everything else, drunken
  dumbshow." - A. G.
• "... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world's ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise." - Carl Rakosi
• "To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." - Gelek Rinpoche
  Naropa Institute, July 1992
  New York, March 5, 1993
  New York, June 27, 1993