Nelson Gary: Interview Part II

Click here for poems and Interview Part I

DG: Because Daniel Yaryan has worked so hard to bring Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts to the poetry community, he is often associated with Beat culture. Yet it wouldn’t be fitting to describe your book as a Beat project. Could you elaborate on these dynamics?

NG: It might seem incongruous that Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing is getting published by Daniel Yaryan, a Beat publisher, poet, and author. I’ll start with where I first learned Beat culture—my parents, particularly my father. He attended Occidental College where he majored in Business and minored in Eastern Philosophy. My father did the latter because he fell in love with Beat writing, particularly that of Jack Kerouac. The first time I ever met Daniel Yaryan was at one of his Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts readings at his pad in the NoHo Arts District. He’d converted it into this really hip art installation called The Kamstra Sparchive.  When he met me, he was amiably, enthusiastically beaming, and he gave me a hardcover copy of Memory Babe, a book about Jack Kerouac, by Gerald Nicosia. Well, I thanked him and, of course, I read it. Loved it! Turned my dad on to it, he dug it too.  I’m not totally removed from the Beats, but I’m not totally with them either.

My place with them isn’t altogether dissimilar to that of William Everson aka Brother Antoninus, and I know Daniel perceives this. We’ve talked about it. Brother Antoninus’s Christian erotic mysticism is in the same house but a different bedroom from my own. In the foreword to Pharmacy Psalms, Daniel, who was one of his publishers and pallbearers, explains the connection between the deceased poet’s work and mine as well as the fact that Brother Antoninus was a counselor like me. I believe these parallels are a significant reason why Daniel published the book. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m dismissing my relationship to Beats. I mean, Harvey Kubernik, who wrote the liner notes for Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish recording and who was the Project Coordinator of the Jack Kerouac Collection recordings, wrote a blurb, a testimonial, for Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, so I have some connection to the Beats, and again, more than with anyone else, it starts with my dad. While my pop explored the Beat lifestyle, Buddhism appealed to him. My mother also practiced Eastern philosophy, Hinduism, chanting “om” in the sixties and into the seventies during which she was a successful psychotherapist and author, worked for Dr. R.D. Laing, and was a guest on TV talk shows. During my childhood, as was the case with many children who grew up in the sixties, which were spiritually, intellectually, and behaviorally influenced by the Beats, I recognized that there were no boundaries; therefore, there existed a certain and undeniable experiential oneness. It cast the shadow of otherness, but it's only a shadow. The shadow was openly embraced and integrated into the oneness—kind of Jungian.

What I'm guessing appeals to Daniel Yaryan as a Beat or Neo-Beat about Pharmacy Psalms is that it’s the memoir of an individual who experiences many different things, some of them apparently divergent, even radically so; it’s the narrative of someone who practices multiple faiths, has vices and virtues, passes few judgments and condemns no one, other than Satan. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say it's a Beat book, and I wouldn't say it isn't. There are too many literary styles and spiritual practices that I have pioneered in Pharmacy Psalms that either have little or nothin’ to do with the Beats, but one or two of them do have something to do with that movement.

I founded cosmic pulp in Twin Volumes, but it’s one of more than a few pioneering styles in that text. When I read Daniel’s Sorcerers: Through Dimensions Infinite, I let him know he’d written the first cosmic pulp book from cover to cover, and we bonded in a major way, on a literary basis, after that. Pharmacy Psalms has cosmic pulp in it. This probably appealed and still does appeal to Daniel as a publisher. As I stated in one of the emails I sent you about form, lasting innovation usually occurs on a solid foundation of tradition. The Beat Generation is a layer of that solid foundation because it was part of my upbringing and it’s part of my social milieu. But it’s kind of like this. If you’re a Christian in the company of Buddhist friends, you share some beliefs in common with them, but that doesn’t make you a Buddhist. With the Internet, transculturation, which can be good or bad, happens much quicker than it did when I was growing up in a household with a mother chanting "om" and a Beatnik stockbroker of a father, who's never been as successful as James Merrill's dad was playing the market.

I’ve made some points about why Daniel Yaryan would publish me when he publishes exclusively Beats and Neo-Beats. I’ve drawn commonalities with Beat lifestyle and Pharmacy Psalms, but, of course, the proverbial beat has gone on since that movement and passed into postmodernism. Authorship is a major question in Pharmacy Psalms.

This is how I see it. In Western civilization, the question of authorship has probably never been as debated as it has been with the Holy Bible. In the Judeo-Christian world, the belief is that divinity, the creator of the cosmos, authored it, and human beings manually transcribed the messages. The human being is deemphasized as author and is author only in name as a point of reference.

Postmodernism also raises many questions about the difficulty of an individual claiming original authorship of a text in the here and now. Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing was authored by Helen, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and manually transcribed by me—and Father and Son did have proverbial hands in it. The Holy Trinity is one. Yet one thing must be said. Just because there’s a considerable amount of intertextuality in it, just because it elevates the Word/word to the highest plateau—but nevertheless possesses a highly personalized, pancultural spirituality—and just because it negates me to a level of author only in name—doesn’t mean there’s necessarily enough there to make it a postmodern text.

If you're a Bible-believing Christian, then you believe the following verse: "You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. And we are witnesses of this fact!" (Acts 3:15). Therefore, in terms of claims of original authorship by a Christian, they’re tenuous at best, and on this score, that of original authorship, the Christian is a postmodernist. In another verse, Luke 7:35, of John the Baptist and himself, Christ says, "Wisdom is vindicated by all her children." Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, is Christ's ultimate mother, and before the existence of time or anything else, she taught him how to communicate, how to author, so it’s strongly intimated that she’s an author too. Wisdom is widely known as “the mother of all the Buddhas” in the East. In Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns­—for Nothing, the verses are, for the purposes of discussion, hers in almost every case—not “Skull,” for instance.

There are still many other elements of Pharmacy Psalms that don’t make me any more comfortable calling myself a postmodernist than calling myself a Beat. I founded intimatism, transatlantic twilight language, cosmic pulp, superficialism, and invisible poetics, this one with S.A. Griffin. Invisible poetics is a revival of where it all starts, people transcribing the words of immaterial spirits.

DG: Triadic lines are a big part of Pharmacy Psalms and in general, also, the number 3. How do these factors come together?

NG: While transcribing Pharmacy Psalms, I admit that I spent a few weeks agonizing over the long lines turning into prose, including the metered, rhymed ones, strange as that may seem. I wasn't finding anything in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics that either confirmed what I was doing or could inform it. I turned back to the poems of first Vladimir Mayakovsky, then William Carlos Williams: their triadic-line poetry. Williams created stepped lines to reconcile the freedom in free verse with form. In a lot of my triadic lines, I didn’t at all need Williams' creation because I wasn’t transcribing in variable feet but rhyming, syllabic verse, but I wanted to anchor it in an American antecedent not just a Russian or Soviet one. I got tetradic lines more under the influence of Mayakovsky. The process for creating the forms was an organic and a dynamic one. I believe that the long poem is a form in and of itself, and if Shelley felt the need to write a defense of poetry in general centuries ago, then today it needs to be defended, nothing more than the long poem. What's the point of poetry when all it has to distinguish itself from prose is line breaks?

My challenge was like the problem that Charles Wright had encountered in wanting to retain Imagistic ideals with towering Whitmanesque lines not collapsing into prose. He solved his problems through extending the line by dropping part of it and calling the drop "low riders," a mention of which is made in Pharmacy Psalms. John Ashbery chose not to deal with long lines well in Flow Chart. While I think Ashbery wrote some truly great poems, I didn't enjoy Flow Chart because it doesn't have enough in terms of form to define it as poetry and distinguish it from prose, other than a salute to Old Man Whitman. As far as content, it's a great poem!

Poetry, by and large, is as in exile as Dante was. Poetry used to command the most respect of all genres. Now it commands the least. In The Divine Comedy, there are three worlds (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso). Dante uses the number 3 in different ways throughout these long poems, and there are three of them. For him and his scholars, three represents the Holy Trinity. In emails, I’ve informed you of the wind of the Holy Spirit, Aja, Wild Wind, “the breath of God,” and the breath of me stepping down in triadic lines as being representative of the Holy Trinity, the source of all (for me), but I forget this divinity was invisible, had no material presence during the process of Pharmacy Psalms. The triadic lines are also all any of us have—mind, body, and soul.

Three worlds are presented in Pharmacy Psalms. They aren’t segregated as they are in The Divine Comedy. One of them is the green world containing fantasy, mental illness, and illusion; the second is the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world. It contains the material world, practical sense, and reality. The emerald world contains superconsciousness, peak experiences, transcendence, enlightenment, liberation, and salvation. And in the book, there are many dark nights of the soul—call them, hell on earth. (Of course, one person's heaven is another person's hell.) In fact, in Half-Life Hymns, there’s an entire container, a large section, about the Harrowing of Hell; it includes the ripped Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven and Hell are detailed less emphatically in other places in the text. These worlds, these places, including Heaven, Hell, and states like those of the bardo, aren't cast in such way that it prevents readers from interpreting them on the page and considering them in their own lives. In the East, the self and the material world as apprehended by the senses are illusions; whereas in the West, they are the opposite, so these three worlds, in the pancultural Pharmacy Psalms, are open to interpretation.

I think of David Krieger with the triadic lines of Pharmacy Psalms in relation to the Soviet Russian and American problems after World War II and into the present-day. David was basically my godfather. He wrote poetry and was the co-founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 10 times. He’s now deceased. He’s been an inspiration in my life in terms of waging peace to benefit others with respect to human rights, something I know you do too. After his death, I was thinking of him in relation to all these triadic lines in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns and couldn’t help but think of them as a Trinity bomb being dropped, even though the historic Trinity bomb wasn’t dropped. It was detonated at a test site in New Mexico in 1945. There’s no contradiction in terms of one of the book’s subplots: I internalize Armageddon mind, body, and soul: an event, as destructive as it is, that the Holy Trinity may allow to happen.

However, even more so than the triadic-line poetry—invented by William Carlos Williams and brought forward by Vladimir Mayakovsky or the “low riders” of Charles Wright—the volume makes use of the tetradic line. This has the same cause in terms of long, rhyming syllabic lines, hinting at what to do in the shadow of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with form: give it an anatomy of rhythm and rhyme. Lyric Anastasia Summers!!! Given the frequent lyrical content of my long poem, I’m going to refer to these lines as quartets—not that tetradic isn’t a musical term, but it’s one not used by people outside of music composers very often. When a poet has whatever it is—the audacity—to call a volume Psalms and Hymns, musical forms, then why not go all the way and call lines quartets?

In my view, what’s symbolically true about the triadic lines in terms of the Holy Trinity and even a Trinity bomb, those indented lines reflective of wind and breath, carries forward into the quartets. To me, the quartets represent the four points of the cross, east, west, north, and south (the four directions), and the four dimensions of the space-time continuum. One of the main courses taken in the volume is to be “crucified with Christ” and take up my cross. The quartets represent a cross, mine, his, or both, which one depends on the individual reader’s interpretation. Two of the many Bible verses, which return in the volume, are Ezekiel 37:9–10 in which the prophet is commanded to prophesy to the wind in order for it to come forth as the four winds and resurrect the dead. Scenes of death are many in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, and the dead are resurrected in the form of the Marigold People, those who encourage me to take certain directions in my life, including getting a master’s in forensic psychology. The Holy Trinity is implicit in the four winds in some Biblical interpretations. The one making the commands is Father. The one carrying them out is Son, and the four winds are the Holy Spirit.

In describing the creation of the universe, many quantum cosmologists have described the big bang as “a cosmic bomb.” Because my belief is that the Trinity created the cosmos, it could be said that the beginning of the universe was a Trinity bomb. Some people describe the brain and universe as being holographic. In an endnote for “Police Gazette,” I added the only quantum cosmology paper that I’ve ever had published. While investigating the beginning of the cosmos of four dimensions, I discuss the implicate order of film in the projector and the explicate order of it on the screen. The triadic lines are the implicate order of the explicate order of the tetradic ones, the quartets.

DG: In our correspondence you have mentioned a term called “transatlantic twilight language.” How does this relate not only to Pharmacy Psalms but to your aesthetic approach in general?

NG: Transatlantic twilight language has a relation to the twilight language of the East and benefits from observations made by deconstructionists. To start with the latter, we know that language is unstable because words come in and out of use and meanings of the same words change. Some of the same words have essentially opposite meanings—for instance, "intimate." Here, I don't mean as an adjective as you brought up in an email with respect to the virtue of informality in life as in poetry.

I’m referring to the word "intimate" as a verb. It means "to imply, infer, hint" or "state, make known." The first definition requires interpretation; it’s suggestive, whereas the second doesn't require interpretation. To write in the first style of intimatism, one needs to be a Symbolist; to write in the second style, one needs to be an Imagist. To do just one or the other is boring for me as a poet and transcriber in long form, and more importantly, it’s not the way life is in terms of communication. In poetry, I do my best as an intimatist to have a dynamic exchange between the two modes of the action word, "intimate."

As a poet and someone who graduated a university with a linguistics emphasis, I’m satisfied that intimate, as I’ve described it, is the pulse of human communication, not just verbal language. The profession of a psychologist is more about nonverbal communication, including tone of voice, vocalics, if the person is any good at it, than verbal communication. Observing the client's nonverbal communication, yeah, that’s it. That’s the piece! particularly in forensic psychology because clients verbally lie more often in this specialty. An expression may have elements of both definitions of intimate, but it never or rarely has neither. When I say "pulse," I do ascribe life to communication, particularly oral communication because it’s on our breaths, our life forces.

Twilight language of any kind makes a point of generating multiple meanings, including paradoxical ones, even occasionally contradictory ones. It even generates utter nonsense. It’s as if deconstructionists stole this idea and draped it over all of language, but not all language is this way. There are Imagist poems and instruction manuals. They use precise language. Without ambiguity, interpretation is severely limited in many cases. Manuel Schwab, the only poet who practices intimatism after my introduction to it, has said, "I want to reach out for something outside my field of perception to have the unknown reach back out to me and reveal itself." His parents are professors, and he grew up with Jacques Derrida in the mix.

The unknown linguistically reaches out to me in the unstable, changing, therefore living verbal language in a way that George Steiner discusses as "real presences." There couldn’t be anyone further from a deconstructionist than Steiner. Steiner believes that everything written, which is truly literary, is underwritten by a divine, benevolent presence. What can I tell you, David? That's not my experience with words on and off the page. There are presences that are malevolent, even evil, human, floating ones (see my friendnotes in Pharmacy) and those in nature, including pets. After years of working on becoming one with the universe through multiple spiritual disciplines, I’d have fleeting experiences of this, but they established a little bit of a foundation for this. Through loving interspecies communication with Dylan, my now deceased Siberian husky whom I didn’t name, my oneness with the universe was firmly established. Appreciating the fullness of my bond with him, I could see my oneness with the animal kingdom, and from there, everything else in the universe just unified in a permanent and dynamic way. Incidentally, the first shamans were from Siberia. As far as human communication in the context of morality and ethics, I agree with David Hume, who voices the following opinion in Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul: most people aren’t good or evil but “float” somewhere in between most of the time. Transatlantic twilight language has a particular resonance with floaters, and I'm a nonjudgmental thoroughfare.

I refer to Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond as the Twilight Lady, and she is immanent in the language as twilight language and transcendent of it. She’s "a real presence," to use Steiner's terminology, who carries many others as the wind, God’s breath. She's not a character. I became acquainted with her first as a maggid, a holy helper, after decades of Kabbalah practice, a hoped and worked for result for the Kabbalist.

In terms of preexisting poetry movements, Symbolism and Imagism, Pharmacy Psalms takes language, the best found object in the context of Dada and goes back and forth between the two schools of poetics. Imagism is the way to limit the multiple meanings. It’s the contraction of the heart of the poem with its collage, titles of poems, cantos: Wisdom's collage, as it's called in the book. Symbolism is the expansion, which invites interpretation.

Intimatism is an awareness that empowers. I didn't invent intimatism any more than Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity.

A journey is about many things, including discovery and "risk," as you mentioned in an email. Pharmacy Psalms is motivated by stopping crimes against humanity perpetrated to this day against those diagnosed or misdiagnosed with mental illness (and lesser offenses—ha!). If a homeless person told us he was born of a virgin, we’d never believe that, and we’d incarcerate him for loitering and drug him behind bars. And importantly, we’d consider everything else that came out of his mouth to be worthless. The forensic psychology atrocity is twofold. Society’s paid-for criminal justice system incarcerates the mentally ill for basically nothing, particularly the ones who were homeless just before, and in doing so, the system more than occasionally violates human rights. Psychiatry, which tries to fit difficult people into the predominant fabric of society, often violates human rights in doing this, so that’s a forensic psychology issue.

Laws are written based on Christ’s "do unto others," and this is explained more eloquently but informally in Pharmacy Psalms. Jesus not only gave the Sermon on the Mount, but also gave much of humanity its conscience. The point is if you take Jesus meeting the devil in the wilderness to be the same as the Buddha being harassed by the demon Mara, take both these events as hallucinations, one still can't take away their contributions to giving the human race a meaningful portion of its humanity. Today, we don’t give people the same respect because of the inhumanity or ignorance of psychology, especially psychiatry. Therefore, transatlantic twilight language mounts a relentless war against all or nothing thinking in general but particularly in this area, clinical theory and practice. The field doesn’t look at these consumers’ delusions and say they have revelations too or just maybe they do. Let’s have emotional empathy and intellectual understanding and differentiate between the two for the good of the client and others, including all of society. The client has hallucinations. How many mental health professionals are open or even capable of determining how many of them are visions? All or nothing thinking diagnoses are pathetic, lazy, ignorant, and/or barbaric, and they’re systemic. I hope this book changes this atrocity. For all the points made and unmade in Pharmacy Psalms, it's, to a degree worth mentioning, a Pointillist painting to change the world's view of madness, divine and other.

DG: Film and cinema play a role in not just Pharmacy Psalms, but they’re also very much connected to your family in general. How do these dynamics play out?

NG: Apart from co-directing Modify, the bestselling, seminal documentary about body modification on Netflix, my brother has also worked in the camera and electrical departments on set. The unflinching courage and graphic detail in which he captures people being creative with their bodies, their senses, strongly connects to my Focusing practice. Eugene T. Gendlin’s Focusing was influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of Michel Foucault’s teachers. Merleau-Ponty believed the body isn’t an object. It’s a subject. He believed the body is more central to experience than thought. Look around, look at all the bodies from the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and war-torn Europe when absorbing World War II. Accept that this is where all the brilliant thoughts, strong emotions, and sharp perceptions had gotten us because we hadn’t paid enough attention to the body and its sensations.

When people die, what’s missed most obviously and most definitely is their bodies. We can remember their spoken thoughts and expressions of emotions. We can retrieve ideas and emotions, sometimes even in the books of the dead—or their journals. What really hurts is that we can’t ever feel their physical presence with ours: ours touching theirs or ours with theirs in living proximity or even distance.  There’s a bodily abyss in this relationship called saudade.  Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was the book I almost finished before entering graduate school for forensic psychology. At the end of graduate school, I was teaching Focusing at Golden Space and practicing it myself. By the way, forensic psychology is anywhere that the law intersects psychology, so conservatorships, unfit parents, and illicit drug use are parts of the specialty not just violent crime. My brother Jason has worked on many films that aren’t anywhere close to as controversial as Modify.

He worked for Christopher Nolan on Oppenheimer, and my brother is currently working for him on The Odyssey, a film adaptation of the Homeric epic. Indeed, cinema has always been a major part of my family with other members employed in the film industry, such as my Aunt Jeanne, who danced with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She also danced with Bob Fosse, but that was onstage. There’s a little bit of a similarity between Fosse’s All That Jazz and Pharmacy Psalms. There’s something in common with Angelique, the angel of death, and Joe Gideon, who’s based on Bob Fosse, and Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and me. In fact, in Space: The Scrapbook of My Divorce, one of my mother’s books, my name is Gideon, and after the divorce, Gideon is usually what she called me because I was named after my father, and she didn’t want to be reminded of him. Wisdom’s Collage is an alternative title for the book, and this has something to do with the subtitle of my mother’s book.

Film has been an integral part of my life since I was a kid in Sunday School. Mark Marshall, my Sunday School teacher, was George Lucas’s projectionist at Industrial Light & Magic, so my brother, our friends, and I would go there after church and learn about film. A Winner Never Quits is a movie about my father as a child and the baseball player Pete Gray. He was good friends with the Carradine brothers while they were alive, and he remains close friends with Stacy Keach. My dad was good friends with Terry Gilliam when they were growing up. As for the film industry and me, I worked on the William S. Burroughs project as a consultant and screenwriter. I did coverage for Penny Marshall, the actress, director, and producer.  I ghostwrote one screenplay. My second text, which won a national chapbook contest, is called Cinema. My first is called XXX. The aesthetic ideals of film are unsurprisingly part of Pharmacy Psalms, most evidently in the poem "Beat Film: Infinite Self-Denial (Double Future).”

Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond refers to me as multiple things in the poem but nothing more frequently than as a "gigolodeon." It’s a Frankenword that fuses the words "gigolo" and "nickelodeon," an early movie theater where a film could be watched for a nickel without it watching back.

In "Pharmacy History," one of the epigraphs is as follows: "The languages, cities, and foreigners were there and only consciousness could survive the confusion. The Odyssey, which probably followed the Iliad by at least a century, is a myth marking the transformation. The heroes who battle before Troy 'were the will-less gigolos of divinities' whose Olympian rivalry was in bloody impasse. It took 'wily Odysseus' and his Trojan Horse to break free, conquer Troy, and defying gods wander homelessly abroad using the serpentine wits of an exiled Adam" (Charles Hampden-Turner, “Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes,” in Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes, editor Marcel Kuijsten).

In the even more experimental “Hearing the Unheard Suite,” Charles Baudelaire is quoted in the middle of the poem. In his Intimate Journals, he states, “The most prostitute of all beings is the Supreme Being, God Himself, since for each man he is the friend above all others; since he is the common, inexhaustible fount of Love.” Therefore, first and last, the gigolodeon is a man after God’s own heart. In twilight language, the high is often juxtaposed with the low. Only the child molester and murderer are considered by society to be lower than the “prostitute.” What twilight language, especially transatlantic twilight language, does then—one of the many things it does—is make the reader question whether they’re being judgmental or even condemning of others. Transatlantic twilight language, with its ambiguities, confronts readers with their black and white, all or nothing thinking as well as other cognitive distortions, expands their minds, opens their hearts, and frees their souls. In The Philosophy of the Tamil Siddhas, a must-read book, T.N. Ganapathy calls the twilight language employed by them “shock-therapy.” In “‘ntuition’s Colors: Red, White, and Blue,” Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, has me quote R.D. Laing from The Politics of Experience: “We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be.” So, literally and/or figuratively we’re these two things, but we’re other things too, so is God. As far as God being a murderer, Sodom and Gomorrah.  We’re made in God’s image. The part of God that the gigolodeon works to emulate is being an “inexhaustible fount of love.” But let me clear, let me be transparent. The gigolodeon has Armageddon inside of him. It’s best to get honest about the top and the bottom, the base, and admit most of the time, it’s about floating in the middle in ambiguity.

I played professional tennis on small circuits and came one round away from qualifying for the 1984 Olympics when I was 16. To excel or even compete on that level, the player must—and I mean must—have killer instinct. There are no two ways about it. On the tennis court, it served me well until I was 22 and met some Soviet defectors. I started teaching them tennis; then soon after that, they gave me a house and told me to make sure nobody disturbed the crates of diamonds and cocaine stored in one of its rooms. I admit it! I was a jewel jackal who sold cocaine. You can sell pot and be a nice person to every one of your customers and hangers-on. Cannabis customers and cocaine customers are two different clienteles. Let’s put it this way. The killer instinct is an asset and sometimes even a necessity when selling coke—not that I murdered anyone literally. My weapon was my tongue. I said things, which I regret, that caused the ancestors of the people, whom I insulted, to mourn their living descendants.

After the Soviets falsely accused me of snaking diamonds, one of them stuck a Mauser to the back of my skull and escorted me out of the house they’d given me and that I’d accepted as their dupe, their live-in, readymade fall guy, the only American in the group. Now broke, homeless, and hunted, my survival was all about my tongue at Rebecca’s, a bar, and in bed with women, whom the Soviets would never expect me to be with. As Helen puts it in the book, “The hard heart of the sultan can turn into the soft heart of the gigolo in a beat.” This is exactly what happened, and Helen chronicles it. Everything I did hustling women, mainly older ones, I learned from the babes who’d bed me for some extra white goddess—on the house! There was no verbal transaction between the women I hustled and me, and there was none between the babes who hustled me. These were tacit understandings. I mean, in the sack, it was about nonverbal communication more than anything else. The difference between nonverbal communication and verbal communication is like the difference between showing and telling in storytelling. The book is showing; this interview is telling—maybe in more ways than one. The gigolodeon not only has an Armageddon inside him. He has another aspect to his character, Big Brother. In my interpretation of Diamond Dogs, a concept album inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and influenced by William S. Burroughs cut-up technique, which the author got from 1920s Dadaists, Halloween Jack starts off as a gigolo, then becomes Big Brother. In Orwell’s masterpiece, after Winston Smith is brutally tortured for rebelling against the totalitarian regime, it states, “He loved Big Brother.” That’s the last sentence of the fuckin’ book!

In Pharmacy Psalms, there’s a progression to me recognizing I’m Halloween Jack, meaning I’m the gigolodeon and I’m Big Brother. Big Brother is my mind. My thoughts are my citizens. In Half-Life Hymns, I rule over them in a place that’s both living and dead called Lazareth, a place of 24-7 twilight. A place of simultaneous life and death is easy to acknowledge intellectually but challenging to live in on a regular basis because human beings aren’t conditioned to experience their cells that way. Discovering Lazareth presents a major challenge to me earning a master’s in forensic psychology in Half-Life Hymns. Big Brother is also the King of Lazareth, Christ’s bondservant, slave, Helen Aja Hammermith-Bond’s gigolodeon, and the Holy Trinity’s devadasa, who’s shared with other “deities,” spirits, after having been liberated from being Mother Nature and Father Time’s unicorn, a prostitute who services opposite-sexed couples. I, Big Brother, the gigolodeon, am rendered skyclad, naked, naked as Christ on the cross, in the world but not of it for others to read as a layered statement of faith in transparency and a statement against shame.

Big Brother is all about “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Can I make peace with Big Brother and the gigolodeon within myself? Can I soften Big Brother’s heart and harden the gigolodeon’s spine? Of course, to take what are largely opposites and make them complements is a process shown in the volume, and it’s as personal as it is universal. As a poet, Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond makes everything walk in proverbial line through me. Gnosticism argues that, under the dictates of all conventional, well-known Christian theology, the body is a prison. Of course, most all conventional, well-known Christian theology regards the body as a temple. As an experiment to gain some objectivity, Helen, Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, casts me as a gigolodeon, which is the body as a theatre showing many visions, literary films, not just of the prison, the temple, and the hotel, and not just things within me or within the measurable, empirical environment. And while Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond, Lady Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, does all this and nothing at all (nothing at all, one of the mystical treasures of the book in the common, almost banal, sense, nothing at all, meaning everything and nothing dynamically together simultaneously), she also recognizes me, in Lazareth, as Big Brother, for it is written Proverbs 7:4 in the New American Bible: “Say to Wisdom, ‘You are my sister!’” I have said it many times worshipfully with ardent love and profound respect for her and done so experientially: mind, body, and soul.

Because you have read what I've written about "will-less" divine madness "with great interest," the gigolo aspect may make sense in terms of marrying Wisdom in “Prelude: Timeless Pointlessness" in a mystical way because of the power differential between a mortal and the eternal Holy Feminine, but it also relates back to my time escaping homelessness 36-plus years ago through being a gigolo to multiple women and one man once and not only coming to terms with it, but also putting it to good use in narrative in a setting between this life and the next, though no purgatory.

In I-statements of me, the gigolodeon, throughout Pharmacy Psalms in a state of extreme negative capability through divine madness, there are people quoted and behaving who aren’t me from Satan to the Holy Ghost to angels, demons, and well-known human beings as well as others known by next to no one. The screen is the page on which Helen-Wisdom essentially projects the cosmos in montages, sections with titles as if they were poems. The lines are subtitles of an unseen, supernatural marriage, which has writing at its shared heart. How real, unreal, or more real than real are Plato’s once-removed forms, Baudrillard’s simulations, Magritte’s pipe?  How real is a book?  How real is one of its lines, especially if it never existed anywhere else, other than within the person who put the winged words on the previously dove-white page? The gigolodeon is both the faculty to play roles and the facility to play them in.

The titled sections stand alone the way credits in a film do, but they’re part of one picture. Onstage, it’s about the narrative being moved along by words, specifically the human voice, more than anything else. In cinema, what moves the narrative along is images. The long poem, at least Pharmacy Psalms, has both voice and image by design. While I don't at all think it’s necessary for a long poem to be lyrical or all in dactylic hexameter like the Homeric epics, I think that it needs to have a soundtrack like a film. In the end, being that my work has echoed the ancients in order to step forward into the unknown on some foundation, Helen’s the perfect narrator because of her brilliant gift of mimesis. She and her husband discuss her coming out to the Trojan Horse containing all the soldiers hidden, unseen to rescue her, and how she imitated all their wives' voices so well that they wanted to pose greater risks to their lives by irrationally coming out to them, people who weren’t physically there. I can help people hearing voices, even if they’re not ultimately Helen, Wisdom, “calling out to all” humankind. In one way, Helen’s behavior by the horse is trickery, and in another way, it's evidence of one who’s one with the cosmos. The latter isn’t a way that any serious academic or casual reader thinks of Helen largely because they don’t know her as a religious figure: Helen Dendritis, nurse of the young shoot, a most ironic epithet given her association with the Trojan War. This association is so strong that Greeks define her abduction as the event that made them a nation.

My brother and I discussed my mother who’s close to central in Pharmacy Psalms, debatably central. Our mother was a musical prodigy, exhibited sculptor, and well-known psychotherapist, who had an IQ of over 180 and attempted suicide over 35 times. She didn’t attempt suicide only because she was in a state of hopeless discontent or one of abject boredom. She attempted it to face her mortality in a complete way, not really wanting to complete suicide. It was her belief that humanity's inability to face mortality in a healthy way was at the root of many of its problems. Additionally, the near-death experiences produced euphoria unlike anything else—for her. When she physically went across the pond, died, and was brought back to our side of the pond, she felt it gave her some additional objectivity about life. As a psychotherapist, she used this objectivity to help others be more objective. These suicide attempts, for lack of a better term, affected her neurologically, as did her faith in psychiatry: medications and electroconvulsive therapy (shock treatment).

One time she entered a halfway house after a manic episode. She met a much younger man there. He was malingering, a criminal faking mental illness to avoid being incarcerated. They struck up a romance. I hate to think of my mother this way, but the narrative forces me to do so. My mother had been a fashion model, and she was still attractive. This guy ultimately abducted my mother and prostituted her against her will for six months. He was caught. I saw him once and gave him a pass ("DSM-5 and Karma: Fire and Water"). Daniel Yaryan, after reading this poem in Pharmacy Psalms, called my action in this scene "Christlike." My mother never recovered from what this guy did to her, and my forgiving action never sat well with my family or me, so a major part of Pharmacy Psalms is a Goddessey to get to a place to make peace with how I addressed it and address it differently. To get to this place with this individual, a pimp, who victimized my mother, requires becoming a gigolo again and descending to Hell by way of Serpenthouse in order to face him one more time. With this major subplot, the cinematic text is somewhat Dantesque. There’s a poem about Twin Volumes, and the reader knows that this is the story of a person who writes poetry dictated by the Holy Spirit. In a film about a poet, it’s good to show the character reading or writing her poetry or having voice-overs of her doing the first. It doesn’t work too well to have a film about a poet without anything to do with the poet doing poetry, other than a line from her or someone else saying that’s what she is, a poet. In Pharmacy Psalms with its gigolodeon and much else, it’s the individual reader's choice to decide what’s an example of pure poetry and what’s reportage from events in my life. Helen and I don’t pander to readers. I’ve only had one near-death experience, and it was the only time that I ever saw Helen outside of me. It was important in creating an atmosphere of my mother with what are called "blue-light, flat-line specials" in the book, ways of going across the pond in transatlantic twilight language. To kill this question, I’m going to quote the words of Harvey Kubernik on the back of Pharmacy Psalms, then Chögyam Trungpa from “The Mirror of Crazy Wisdom,” Just Dharma.

HARVEY KUBERNIK 

Instead of seeing the literary movie, Nelson Gary invites you inside the theater of your own skull.

CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

In the scriptures, a crazy-wisdom person is described as “He who subdues whatever needs to be subdued and destroys whatever needs to be destroyed.” Whatever your neurosis demands, when you relate with a crazy-wisdom person, you get hit with that. Crazy wisdom presents you with a mirror reflection. A mirror will not compromise with you. If you don’t like what you see, there’s no point in blaming the mirror.

DG: The concept of the gigolodeon is intriguing. Can you give more insight about its usage in your work and life?

NG: The gigolodeon is “will-less,” infinite self-denial—in my case because of having taken on the Seal of Solomon a few years into my Kabbalah practice. Service to others is one of the main things my life is about. The gigolodeon is a symbol of that, which inspires questions about boundaries with selflessness. One of the symbols Lil and I have on our wedding bands is the Seal of Solomon. She’s about 12 years older than me. People have raised their eyebrows and talked shit ‘bout her being stupid, not hip to me being a gold-digging gigolo. Not anymore, but in the mid-eighties to the early nineties. Hell, back then, even though she was the breadwinner, I was a trustafarian, number one:  I had enough of my own money. Number two, when I was hustling, those women were really wealthy—Marina del Rey rich. When I started living with Lil, we were living in Pentagrama City, Panorama City, in the barrio. My God, if I were a whore like I once was, I would’ve been living on a motherfuckin’ mansion on the weekdays and a yacht on the weekends! Not a few blocks away from fuckin’ Blythe Street, a permanently barricaded street, in one direction, and a drive-in movie theatre right outside our home with the next-door neighbor’s wall graffitied on a regular basis—shoes hanging from the phonelines. We were less than a mile from Sepulveda Boulevard, which is pretty much nothing but armed drug dealers, bugaboos, and dancing, porn-performing prostitutes on that street and in its motels. I know because I was a chemical dependency counselor on Sepulcher Boulevard for years. One morning after the next before I’d go to work, I’d get the message in chalk on mine and Li’s walkway leading up to our mailbox: “El diablo es blanco.” I went through all this hell because I was in love with Lil, no other reason. Over thirty years of marriage says it all.

Nevertheless, the gigolodeon is a bit of a statement about older women with younger men then and now. I’m taking a stand for them. Would’ve been nice if someone had done the same for Lil and me when I was 19 and she was 31, but now it’s unnecessary. Well, a few people did, such as Giancarlo Negrini, who encouraged me to get with her the first time in her apartment in West Hollywood where she was livin’ before Panorama City. I was living in Calabasas Park back then. There’s a dimension to the gigolodeon that’s sharp satire bleeding as black humour delivered deadpan. This is all in the book as one of the many dimensions of the gigolodeon.

I remember when I first started going to AA meetings with a mind to stay clean and sober. They’d say an alcoholic is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex—damn right! I straight up say it in Pharmacy Psalms: Big Brother is an egomaniac in the inferiority complex of the gigolodeon. Big Brother is a powerful presence, but sometimes he throws his weight around, and instead of coming across as an intellectual or spiritual heavyweight, he comes across as a bully. Big Brother may not see it all like God, but he, I, see a lot not only through bringing it all to the obedience of Christ, but also Buddhist thought watching in the book. I was bullied in that way as a child until I became a bully that way as an adolescent. I’ve topped from the bottom, not in bed, but in certain social situations—a switch: Big Brother, the gigolodeon.  There’s nothing special about me as an alcoholic recovering from being an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I just say it differently: Big Brother, the gigolodeon. And truthfully, there’s much more to Big Brother, the gigolodeon, than AA, as you know from this interview and the book than a 12-step insight. 

Being “will-less,” the gigolodeon is as obedient or disobedient as the deity wants him to be. Truth be told, Helen Aja, Lady Wisdom, sometimes loves a bad boy. It was a massive responsibility for me to get this book accomplished because of the source of the greatest grief, her grief, the grief of the Holy Spirit. Christianity grieves the Holy Spirit profoundly and utterly by the practical belief that the Holy Spirit is entirely male. In Hebrew, in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit is feminine. When we get to the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is no longer feminine because now it’s all Greek to us. The sevenfold Spirit in Isaiah and Revelation has one that’s her. Wisdom. Wisdom is the only one of them with a speaking role in the whole Bible, and she perfectly contains the others in Proverbs.

Satan slithers his way into all religions; Christianity is no exception. More times than I can possibly count, including from Christian clergy and theologians, I’ve heard or read that Satan is in the church. We’re born as children of God with the serpent Satan slithering in our bloodstream until we’re nothing, ash, or dust—you get it. All this talk of the Holy Spirit, all these prayers to him, wouldn’t it be something if he’s Satan, the subtle master of deception? Don’t forget: the Holy Bible says he’s “the god of this world.” It’d explain many things about the church’s history. Revelation specifies that the Church Age must end. Maybe this is the reason why. It’s horrifying to consider. I’m no Stephen King—I’m your everyday Edgar Allan Pulp. I, the gigolodeon, have an Armageddon inside me, and I gotta get through it to make it to new Jerusalem, one of the major subplots. It’s Big Brother undercover as the gigolodeon who faces off with Satan in the final showdown. All this is extensively detailed as I work towards answering Christ’s prayer for “absolute oneness” with him, as Oswald Chambers calls it. From a Jungian perspective with respect to the male’s process of individuation, the final phase is the consummation of the Christ within with Sophia, the female Holy Spirit. I believe there’s a male Holy Ghost who’s not Satan but that the devil has done and does do a convincing portrayal of the other. The relationship of Spirit to Ghost is like the relationship of the body’s living cells to dead ones.

Because of how Sophia, Wisdom, the Holy Spirit, has been neglected and the negative repercussion of this for her and the world at large, the level of responsibility I felt to get it right was greater than any I’ve ever known as a poet or writer, including writing for Jubilee 2000 to get Congress to intervene in the slave trade in Sudan. If the world or even just Christianity came around to Wisdom as the Holy Spirit, the world would be wiser and therefore safer as well as more peaceful and loving.

The gigolodeon is a new kind of bent and twisted everyman, transcribing from a place of God-breathed, spirit-possession, but a gigolodeon doesn’t have to be Judeo-Christian. The gigolodeon isn’t an automaton or else the Spirit wouldn’t want much to do with him. He’s a useful bloke in himself with many different symbolic values in the text. They intimate a constellation of poetic, artistic, social, and spiritual statements about how many people, places, and things literally and metaphorically are. The Apostle Paul says that one should be crucified with Christ. Without this, seeking to answer his prayer of oneness with him cannot—it just can’t—be answered in a meaningful way. After crucifixion, the Bible says Christ preached in Hell for three days, but he tells the crucified thief, who believes in Him: "Tomorrow we meet in Paradise." This theological discrepancy is first addressed in part at the beginning of "Hearing the Unheard Suite." Theologians from the beginning of Christianity have called this the Harrowing of Hell. They don't mean "distressing" by harrowing; that's the modern usage.  Harrowing, now archaically, means "plundering, robbing." This makes sense with the thieves' death of crucifixion and the later prophecy that Christ "will come like a thief in the night." In Pharmacy Psalms, the Harrowing of Hell is an adventure story.

My mother was a Christian mystic, who was strongly influenced by St. John of the Cross. He coined the phrase, "dark night of the soul," and described it in his poetry and prose. This was later in her life when she became a Christian, as I've discussed. I didn’t know who Jesus Christ was until I was seven. I walked in on my mother's first suicide attempt, and she called me Jesus Christ. I only talked to my grandmother Helen for about three years.  And most of our conversations were similar to the communication between Danny Torrance and Scatman Crothers, shining one to the other. My grandmother Helen had been held responsible for my father losing his arm and almost losing his life. She ceased talking for a significant period.

For all the talk of poetic, Homeric Helen, there’s also my grandmother. She’s a major part of the reason I called my maggid what I did and what I do. My communication with my grandmother was supernatural, as was and is that with my maggid. In other words, the name Helen isn’t only literary. It's also personal.  My initial personal experiences with Christ couldn’t have been much worse. When I heard that John the Baptist was born with the Spirit of Elijah, a recitation of the Holy Scripture, as a child, I told my Sunday school class that this was an example of reincarnation, having been raised with Eastern thought. Because I was born on Halloween and made these kinds of comments, I was considered the Antichrist by some and called von Hellson by all my age. I was molested in a funeral home behind the family veil while my father read 1 Corinthians 13, “the Love Chapter,” at the soapbox with my dead Grandma Helen more adjacent to him than me. My mother, in manic states, would sometimes think I was the Second Coming. I had terrible fears I was the opposite. I would come to refer to these as “dark nights of the soul.” This going back and forth being Hegelian thesis, antithesis, and synthesis started at a young age. Part of Pharmacy Psalms was telling two secrets, which I withheld from my mother and basically everyone else: my relationship with the Holy Feminine and my occasional delusion that I were the Antichrist. The book is completely open about the Messianic delusions of bipolar disorder, which I’ve experienced, though I haven't had a manic episode since 1998. Messianic delusions for someone who’s manic are as common as sunshine in Los Angeles. It was these shadows that formed the anatomy of the Antichrist. Part of my grateful dead to my mother was to do the whole Hegelian triad thing in verse. "Character is plot, plot is character" (F. Scott Fitzgerald). “Dark nights of the soul” eventually went black, noire. They became long enough that—after being crucified with Christ, who, covered in sin, was the antithesis of Himself on the cross—the Harrowing of Hell could happen. Virgil wasn't my guide. My guide was Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond before the harrowing, during the harrowing, and after the harrowing. A tablet is named, in part, after the Harrowing of Hell in Pharmacy Psalms. The point is that the dead, though little mentioned, can motivate a significant amount of action in the elegy. The gigolodeon who seeks revenge against the pimp who abducted and prostituted my mother I think that not just a story but also a plot is important in a long poem. Pharmacy Psalms has a plot and several subplots, and they're important because there are numbers of pages that significantly concern themselves with states of consciousness, lack thereof, and how these states and their absences change and how they don't. Can we tell the story of consciousness? Not if we do it completely consciously. The gigolodeon is entranced by the spirit who possesses him for a purpose.  Christ didn’t need me to be his gigolodeon. Wisdom did. And does—ha!

DG: Pharmacy Psalms is full of transitions, seemingly from one place to another—a method you have described as “green drama.” How do you employ it and, as an associate therapist, what relevance does it have to psychology and madness, given that unstable minds do make associations between untenable ideas?

NG: The green world is a dramatic structure of Shakespearean romantic comedy; it follows a blueprint designed by Peele from the tradition of medieval ritual theater firmly established by Greene and Lyly (Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays). The ritual theme is the triumph of life through love over the wasteland, the Tohu wa-Bohu. It has affinities to the theme of consummation, the marriage of the Lamb and his bride, in Revelation. For multiple reasons, including those that follow the stated ritual theme and its Apocalyptic affinities, transitions from one environment to another happen in Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, so do transitions from one voice to another as well as transitions from one form of verse to another, not to mention, transitions from one state of mind to another. What’s central to the green world is the dramatic transition from radically different environments. This can be perceived with far less effort in A Midsummer Night's Dream than the influence of Ovid on Shakespeare in this play or, for that matter, in all probability, Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing. As You Like It also contains a wilderness forest as a green world, so does The Merry Wives of Windsor, as does The Winter's Tale.

To break the fourth wall of literary criticism, the green world and the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world are examinable in terms of mental illness and mental health respectively up to a point well worth making now. What I’m going to tell you, the poetry shows. Importantly, the green world isn’t only one of different mental illnesses, but also one of different fantasies. Psychosis has a relationship with fantasy; one of the differences is that an individual experiencing psychosis believes what a person, who is mentally healthy, knows to be a fantasy—fantasy is an ingredient of cosmic pulp. Mental illness and mental health have a strong relationship with illusion and reality, but there’s a worldwide debate about which is which in terms of the self as well as the world, and this is illustrated in the main text. In large part, Eastern philosophy holds that the self and the world that it perceives through the senses are illusions while Western philosophy holds the opposite. (My different first and secondhand experiences with these philosophies and others on these subjects are best expressed in the text.) Of course, how one perceives the self and the world has major effects on decision-making and behavior. Therefore, this matter is unquestionably of high significance not only to clients, mental health consumers, and clinicians, mental health providers, but also to everybody else. One of the pictures that transatlantic twilight language paints is that the self and the world are a bit of both and neither because illusion and reality are conceptualizations as the disagreement between East and West demonstrates—and whether regarded as illusions or realities, the self and the world are also conceptualizations, social constructs.  Selflessness, infinite self-denial, is an experience of consciousness that can’t be categorized by any definition of self, and selflessness can’t be meaningfully defined as itself. What it can be, however, is experienced and communicated; when the self, illusory, real, a bit of both, and neither is denied, other concepts can be cut through and denied to the point where pure consciousness is reached. Pure consciousness is a wholeness that includes the unconscious, and it’s in this state where the soul is best and most wholly experienced in the world but not of it.

The battles of reality, revelations, and visions against illusion, delusions, and hallucinations are essentially spiritual ones about which the field of psychology can and does offer insight. Throughout Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing’s poetry, sacred literature and literature in general, as well as psychology in theory and practice, are densely and dynamically interwoven as the green world, the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world, and the emerald world. This dynamic interweaving propels transitions from radically different yet interrelated states of mind. The emerald world, the one that can make the most revolutionary difference in terms of these two and all others, is, for specifically me in this text, as emerald as that of the tablet of Hermes, the thief, inventor, and, of course, messenger. The throne (encircled by a rainbow gleaming like an emerald [Revelation 4:3]) is—again, for specifically me—the place of superconscious experience apprehended by Christ consciousness. The green world exists between everyday existence and superconscious experience. The attunement of the superconscious mind to ordinary and non-ordinary states is extraordinary with awareness of both to an extent that can be reasonably considered detailed and complete, dynamic yet ultimately changeless. It can prove beneficial to take stock of superconsciousness by bringing C.G. Jung’s words to mind: “There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.” The real-life drama of those in the green world consists of conflicts between revelations and visions battling delusions and hallucinations. This psychospiritual warfare can be resolved in the emerald world by removal of the delusions and hallucinations without negating the meaning and value of the revelations and visions. Importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, in my personal and clinical opinion, an experience of the emerald world doesn’t need to contain Christ or anything else, which mine does, for it to be valid. Negation is almost always the societal goal when these battles are addressed in the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world, even by mental health professionals, especially by them (us). Oftentimes, this arrests self-actualization, a widely tolerated violation of human rights. To continue in a humanistic psychology framework in relationship to self-actualization, peak experiences are also individualized, though they can be generalized to fall into one or more of the following three subjective categories: spiritual transcendence, higher self-awareness, and/or a greater sense of fulfillment. Many peak experiences are almost universally accepted as that, peak experiences. This brings their authenticity as such into question, for they lack meaningfully distinguishing characteristics, which make them truly individualized.

Mental health consumers and mental health providers are players in the green world and the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world. The emerald world exists between, within, and beyond them, but in most therapeutic interactions, it’s a place, a state, unvisited. Taking into consideration the popularity of some theoretical orientations in psychology and the unpopularity of others, this destination is rarely a therapeutic goal. It’s outside the scope of most clinicians' secondhand experience and even more clinicians' firsthand experience.   Many, if not most, clinicians deny the validity of the emerald world and even consider its presence evidence of serious mental illnesses. These factors restrict a colossal number of mental health consumers from going back and forth from the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world to the emerald world without experiencing the green world. Because of this restriction, they become psychospiritual refugees, who are made invisible and unheard through labeling and other conditioned, societal responses.

To a certain extent, they’re victims of psychology disappearing into the robotic totalitarianism of mindology. There are psychology orientations that I’ve mentioned that aren’t succumbing to this, such as the Jungian, existential-humanistic, and transpersonal approaches, but one that I haven’t mentioned, which is of equal importance to me is Black/African psychology (I learned about it at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology as a forensic-psychology graduate student in a program designed by Dr. Debra Warner, an authority in this specialized field, and it has changed both my life and practices as a clinician). Black/African centered psychology focuses on Spirit. Spirit is omnipresent, according to this approach, so everything is interconnected, and principles of harmony are emphasized. Victims of mindology are homeless in the sense that they’re excluded (pharmakoi) from society. This exclusion has a painfully long history of ignorance, hatred, and even atrocity. Stereotyping and socially stigmatizing groups of people is superstitious and inhumane. The responsibility for this not to happen is with clinicians whom all pretty much knowingly and willingly allow their diagnoses to become labels. Labels result in the objectification of individuals and their dehumanization to varying degrees, all significant ones (no matter how minor). "Do no harm" is overlooked when diagnoses become labels, the shorthand of social stigma and societal superstition. Truly, irrationality as societal superstition is one issue that clinicians should be treating much more diligently, starting with that which they foster through diagnoses. Addressing the potential and actual trauma of diagnosis will be one activity that’s part of an organized, psychospiritual, social justice movement called Vénus Noire. In terms of the mental health profession, we could prove much more convincingly that psychology isn’t what Richard Feynman likened to "Cargo Cult Science."

If I didn’t believe that these aims could be accomplished, I wouldn’t have enrolled in a Forensic Psychology master's program to train as a counselor. I know what I’ve specified should be accomplished. The reasons are I’ve been a consumer of the mental illness-treatment system for most of my life and a professional therein for almost as long. Another problem with this system is the psychopathologizing of unethical behavior, usually as a result of criminals malingering and outsmarting clinicians. I agree with Dr. Allen J. Frances, whom I had the joy of hearing lecture at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology (Los Angeles campus), who stated elsewhere that most criminal and/or "bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely." During my many years working in substance abuse social work and chemical dependency counseling, I’ve had this proverb in mind: What do you get when you get a thief clean and sober? A better thief. The first time I quit drugs and alcohol, I abstained but didn’t recover. I changed precious little beyond achieving abstinence, the main observable and measurable, clinical goal. The second time I quit drugs and alcohol, I changed radically and have been recovering, growing, ever since.

Oftentimes, court-ordered clients "program," meaning in a cognitive-behavioral therapy setting, they do all that’s required with respect to that which is observable as well as measurable without resistance, but they make no or too few intrapersonal changes; therefore, they become better thieves. The court-ordered clients who make intrapersonal changes are usually the ones who resist, particularly at first. Others, who don’t change internally, program, do their homework, and sometimes beat the system. They, however, usually end up hurting themselves and others whether the system catches up with them, which it usually does.

Clinicians, particularly forensic psychology ones, must thoroughly understand clients’ biopsychosocial-spiritual backgrounds and existential situations in terms of individual survival within their specific communities—and I mean, both literal and figurative survival. In a forensic psychology setting, helping clients to open-up is a major part of the job, but if clients can’t survive in their environments outside the consulting room, this must be addressed in a professional manner with due diligence, including clinical consultation, if necessary: for example, connecting with outside resources or assisting clients in navigating through the relevant system(s). The clinical populations for whom I have worked have been diverse, not just ones consisting of figurative and literal thieves. All the same, most of their individuals have been forensic psychology clients, lawbreakers; their uses of substances have usually been illegal, and working with me has often been the result of them having to participate in a court-ordered program. (Diversity must be inclusive and structural, not merely cosmetic, to refer to the intersectionality work of Kimberlé W. Crenshaw that goes further back than Angela Davis and all the way back to Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” [1851]). Are mental health consumers, clients, with serious mental illnesses, whether or not they’re in remission, citizens of the world to the vast majority?

Most of us, those diagnosed and misdiagnosed with serious mental illnesses, are, at best, marginalized citizens of the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world, the predominant state, the state of the majority. Most of us are aliens registered with prescriptions and a wardrobe that bears labels on the outside of every article of clothing, even when mentally healthy: the green world’s interactions with the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world and emerald world are versified in the text proper in far more ways than this. The verbal microaggressions against us occur on a regular basis from virtually everywhere, even the news, with little or no concern from the speakers of them or most of their listeners, and while this is hurtful and distracting, sometimes even traumatizing, the challenge is less with words than it is with the incontrovertible evidence of fear, ignorance, and hatred that they represent, and the nonverbal oppression against us is as bad, if not worse. When most of us are in the green world, we’re excluded from the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world of the vast majority, which we’re actually in more often than we’re not. I’m relatively certain many before me, including Dr. R.D. Laing, whom my mother knew personally, have questioned whether clients, with the aforementioned conflicts, would be more at home in the emerald world and that, in fact, this is their true home of natural focus—or rather, excuse me, supernatural focus. Furthermore, I’ve questioned whether it’s better for such clients with diagnoses of serious mental illnesses, in which these conflicts are partially addressed, to be helped more to the emerald world than to the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet one, which is lacking in revelation and vision. The reason being is that the mental illness-treatment system almost universally fails to see the whole proverbial picture, the clients’ revelations and visions along with their hallucinations and delusions, let alone retain, even nourish, the revelations and visions. Too many rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world clinicians are incapable of perceiving a holy person as such, unless the holy person looks and behaves the proverbial part in the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world according to its preexisting presentations, ideas, concepts, constructs, of what a holy person is. This has less to do with actual life in the emerald world than many would be willing to accept.

Certainly, there are elements of the rocks-are-hard, water-is-wet world, green world, and emerald world within one another, but their borders are undeniable, though, of course, they can and are often crossed. One world is in another just as one nation's products are in another's. We know this because of the relationship between the client and clinician, the mental health consumer and mental health provider. They’re generally two distinct and separate entities, though I am and have been both, as have a good many others. I believe that all three worlds exist, to some degree, in all people, whether they’re mentally healthy, have a mental illness, or are spiritually advanced.

Years ago, I successfully worked as a counselor, journalist, and published poet while progressing in my Kabbalah practice. I saw Dr. Samantha Rutherford, a psychiatrist, for medication maintenance and quarterly psychotherapy sessions. Sometimes, we discussed spirituality as it's practiced in India, one of her travel spots, on account of my work as a Kundalini yoga teacher. This job was concurrent with my work as chemical dependency counselor and wordslinger. Exchanges about emerald-world matters strengthened our therapeutic alliance, but, in the three-world system I’ve mapped out, such exchanges with other clinicians, mental health providers, and me as a client, mental health consumer, have been a precious rarity.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

NG: I’ve been tremendously busy working on several books. Daniel Yaryan’s Mystic Boxing Commission will publish my deceased mother’s Frenzy at Moonstone Beach, a noire novel and psychological thriller, so I’ve been looking at that with enormous enthusiasm. He’s also publishing my Three Vénus Noire Tales. These books are, of course, erotic and noire. I love James M. Cain. Without The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of Cain’s masterpieces, Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, would never have been, by his own admission, able to write The Stranger, which is widely considered his best work. The first two Tales are written in first person as females. Mind of a Killer, Heart of Victim features Dr. Anastasia Maeve McBride, a forensic psychologist, at work and at play, coming to terms with her past in the adult entertainment industry while being confronted with a corrupt, sexist criminal justice system, which endangers her life, not to mention the peril posed by conducting collateral interviews—part of her job. In Broken Mold in the Wind, hypersexed and brilliant Ariel Carmelo-Singleton, a big pharma heiress, is on trial for the mass murder of 73 people by arson after a debatably unconstitutional coercion of a confession, which she maintains is a false one. She’s also an installation artist with a history of serious mental illness, so she’s seeing Dr. Ross Gabriel Marlowe, a forensic psychologist, to assist her unconventionally at home after she bails out. These are both novellas. “Newport (1984)” is a short story, from the omniscient point of view, that takes place after the funeral of Flower, a prostitute and adult performer, in a cheap motel. She’s Charlene Aurora Chandler’s good friend.  Charlene does the same work. She talks about “the beast,” the pervasive stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and hatred of her for her work, to Chao-Xing Tara Cross, a female Kundalini yoga teacher, Flower’s. The narrative is an exploration of the limits of empathy and communication contextualized by the history of the term “politically correct” used by leftist intellectuals in 1970s to today’s cancel culture.

I’m editing two novels could that be called hybrid, but really more than anything else, they’re cosmic pulp. They’re the first two novels in a trilogy, which I wrote while taking breaks from Pharmacy Psalms. I was like Federico Fellini and Helen, Sophia, was like Giulietta Masina in these—a big difference in the power differential compared with Pharmacy Psalms. One of these novels is called Sheet Music for Guanyin. Sheet music has to do with musical composition, but it also has to do with sheets of acid—LSD (Love-Serenity-Devotion or Lucifer-Satan-Devil). In this novel, the sheets aren’t Owsley or any kind of L. They’re a chemipunk drug called atomic archetypes. They cause states that approximate spirit possession and sometimes cause dissociation. I discovered atomic archetypes after studying the correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung: they’re first written of in Pharmacy Psalms but not in the afterglow of chemical dust, as they are in these novels. In Twilight Lands, Florence Benton dominates Tracy Cameron, who molested him when he was her stepson. Florence entered his life as a stepmother after Virginia, his mom, was slain by homicidelic serial killer Clyde McGovern; before this, she was just one of his father’s many groupies. Divorced from Studs, Tracy’s father, the leader of Pseudominous (a rock band), who’s a global superstar, with classical training, Florence partners with Tracy, now the adult creator of the Twilight Lands, in a business relationship, which is toxic and sexually charged, selling atomic archetypes. They have many conflicts in their business dealings with others, including with the CIA and the homeless population, maybe more than in their interpersonal dealings with each other. There are Guanyin Clinics, black labs, in the book for rapidly reversible sex-reassignment surgeries, but this is only a small reason for Guanyin being part of the title.

In Twilight Lands, Guanyin Clinics are much more part of the narrative. It centers on Dr. Ross Gabriel Marlowe. A childhood trauma of his is examined in graphic detail. A psychotic pimp, with drug-induced psychosis, runs down Revelation, the last book of the Holy Bible, giving James, Ross’s identical twin brother, and Ross the lowdown on the Apocalypse in the presence of a prostitute with whom the 18-year-old Ross has just fucked, losing his virginity. At the end of his psychotic yet partially inspired sermon, the pimp sticks a piece in his mouth and blows his brains out—blood spatter and skull and brain fragment going all over the faces of the boys and the prostitute. Ross develops theophobia, which plagues him into adulthood, which Helen Aja Hammersmith-Bond cures, allowing him to have healthy fear of God as opposed to unhealthy terror, borderline paranoia. In Twilight Lands, along with seeing clients, Ross does experiments with Dr. Sophia Peoples, a forensic pathologist, and together, they co-author a book called What We Know About the End from Both Sides: A Pancultural Encyclopedia of Dying, Death, and Beyond. Before he meets Sophia, he gets experimented on by his posthuman girlfriend Maddy Scully’s furious mother, an engineer. Whether he knows the effects of the experiment or not is of the utmost concern to Terence Atlas, who has believed he has been having sacred sex with the goddess Kali, not Marlowe, and it’s open for interpretation which has been the sex partner of Atlas. Atlas murders Marlowe’s identical twin brother James, the owner of Red House, a publishing house that only publishing Vénus Noire narratives. Twilight Lands is an interrogation of reality and illusion. These pages pack everything together, other than the reader’s imagination, which is ignited in the first few sentences to go ahead and freely burn into a conflagration, which destroys illusions, by the book’s end.

You’ll like this: I dedicated Twilight Lands to Hubert “Cubby” Selby Jr. and my brother Jason, the co-director of Modify. Twilight Lands was influenced, to some extent, by Georgette, the transgender prostitute, in Selby’s banned Last Exit to Brooklyn. I remember reading The Room and discussing it with Drew Fellman, the film producer and son of Dan Fellman, the President of Warner Bros Distributing Corporation back then. At that time, Drew was frequently reading as a student at UC Berkeley. I told him to read The Room. He did, and he was nonverbally and verbally aghast. Drew is the most composed individual I’ve ever met, so his reaction almost shocked me. We both agreed about the level of the visceral abysmal in that book. While not Edgar Allan Poe, the Master of the Macabre, Selby’s pretty fuckin’ intense. I talked to Cubby about my conversation with Drew, a super-empathic and truly brilliant person, and said, “I dunno, Cubby. What can I say? The wrong book got banned. Last Exit to Brooklyn shouldn’t’ve been banned.  The Room should’ve been.” He laughed, thrilled. Without a question, it was the happiest I ever made him.

He went into interviews, telling people all about how The Room should’ve been banned, only he said that, I think, Henry Rollins told him this. Maybe Henry felt the same way as Drew and me and said it too. Who the fuck knows? Because this interview is of me, what I can tell you is that The Room is my favorite Hubert Selby Jr. book without a question. A lot of people I know love Requiem for a Dream. I remember laughing to myself once when Selby explained how much he fuckin’ hated literature that was a morality tale. I guess he hated Requiem—somewhere deep, cold, and silent within himself. I think all Selby’s works should be in the canon—strange as that might sound—and studied by university students, even Requiem because it/ll scare students away from drugs. Sure, his body of work don’t have anywhere near the emotional range of Shakespeare’s.  But then again, whose does?!

The Tribeca Film Festival made my brother and Greg Jacobson, the other co-director, sign documents specifying that if anyone had a heart attack or stroke that my brother and Jake had to assume full legal responsibility. One of the cameramen lost consciousness while they were shooting a breast augmentation operation. Even though it’s a common procedure, it’s maybe pretty extreme in terms of body modification, but, as the documentary makes clear, we all modify our bodies—for example, we get haircuts. Some of the critics griped that the film documents what filmed body modifiers did without making a moral statement, without drawing the line between modification and mutilation. It would’ve stopped being art if my bro and Jake did that. That line is to be drawn by each individual viewer. The documentary isn’t the sermon Requiem is, and therefore, Modify is an influence not just because of the rapidly reversible sex-reassignment surgeries at the Guanyin Clinics. True, gender-fluid Guanyin, who “hears the cries of the world,” holds a high place for me spiritually, especially as a person of letters and counselor. My mother’s book and my books are in the final editing stages.

Lil and I just finished Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which I’ve read before and plan to read again. We’ve moved on to Emmett Fox’s Sermon on the Mount, which I’ve also read. I’m the spiritual head of the household, and Lil’s the material head. It’s the same as Shiva and Parvati. Every day, I read wisdom from every walk of life down through the ages or current wisdom through an online group, and sometimes, I comment in the group discussion. I read passages of AA literature close to every day. Almost without fail, I read the Holy Bible daily, and this has been the case for many years.

I’m beyond excited to read Pnei Hashem by Anonymous; I’ve had to wait to do this for a long time. Monika Lightstone, who took the author photo for Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns—for Nothing, gave me this book. I think it was when a diverse group of us went to Vegas to see U2 at the Sphere. Pharmacy Psalms and Half-Life Hymns could’ve been by Anonymous. I considered that. Leaving my name off the cover—no need for Monika then, of course. She’s been shooting me for years—love her work! Maybe, if there’s a second edition, Nothing will be attributed to Anonymous. Like taking multiple subjects in school, I like reading more than one book in the same period and finishing them together. The other books on deck are Eric Walter White’s Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (Second Edition) and A.E. Hotchner’s Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties.

Click here for poems and Interview Part I