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Somebody said that the lesson of the 60s was the fact that all the paranoids turned out to be right!
Cut-Ups are taking the actual matter of writing as if it wee the same as the matter involved in sculpting or in painting... and handling it with a plastic manner. The Dreamachine is something else again, as it gives an extended vision of one's own interior capacities, which could also be overwhelming.
Painting itself looks to me like it's on its way out - as though it were dying on the vine. And this recognition of one's own interior possibilities might very well supplant it.
Well, it's also difficult to live with, because people - as recently as this week, where I've been frequenting all the art dealers that I know who are sitting there ensconsed in their art fairs dealing in million dollar, half million dollar pictures that they have hung around the walls of their stalls - are just sitting there on their balls saying, 'You know that's what we're doing, and you, dear Brion, as much as we appreciate you, you're still very avant-garde... We're tired old gentlemen, you know - if you'd only come to us twenty years ago when we were full of enthusiasm...' Of course, twenty years ago I did.... I've known them that long, and they gave the same answer then. They were all after ten minute masterpieces by Andy Warhol or Frank Stella or any of those stars that they've invented, who sell for huge sums of money.
And half of their Durers are fakes! At least half. Obvious fakes. And they say, 'Yes, yes, we know they're fakes, but you know, they've been here so long - they were given by somebody in the eighteenth century, so they have some kind of historical value, and we're not saving them simply because they are real or are very good, but....'
Do you know how much the idea of having a room to yourself has changed the whole sexual scene? In fact, I think that really the basis of the sexual scene is the fact that it's been possible to be able to be alone to do these fancy things that you've thought up.
I was once sitting with a man who had four wives and I suggested that any one of his wives might have seen him with his clothes off and he was shocked at the idea. And sex is very quick, and religious law demands immediate washing after it so it's all bangbangbang amd shoo.... zoot to wash yourself! None of this langurous lying around and this luxury situation that everybody's thought about; for our ancestors that never really existed at all.
Everybody loses a little something here and there on the way through this rat race.