Date: 29.03.23
Location: Ruigoord. The Netherlands.
Attendees: Hans Plomp (interviewee), Ana Collins (interviewer).
Ana Collins: Good afternoon Hans! Could you please tell me how you first met Ira Cohen, and what your initial impressions were on meeting him?
Hans Plomp: Ja, I think I met Ira through Amsterdam’s main prophet (he wouldn’t like the word) of the sixties, of the psychedelic movement – Simon Vinkenoog. He was a great poet in an international context. Well through him I met Ginsberg and Vali Myers, and Ira – because his place was a kind of meeting place for international poets, for travellers. They knew that Simon’s house was always open.
AC: Like a literary salon?
HP: Yes, but more informal. Whenever you got in and you had some nice stuff on you, then the doors were open. There were very special people there occasionally.
So that’s where I met Ira for the first time. At first I thought that he was a bit pompous – well you know Woo, Ira! – all over the place.
AC: Imposing, larger than life…
HP: But then, soon I realised that he had a very open mind for other people, and he had a kindness. I also knew him as a grumbler – grumble grumble. To me and my girlfriend he was very friendly and respectful.
After meeting in such a way – with laughing gas…it must have been at the very beginning, one of the first meetings – we did it with a guy called Ronald Sauer, he was also a San Francisco poet…but, anyway when you see each other at that level – so I saw actually his ancient soul so to speak, and he saw me obviously because, from that time on we always greeted each other with respect and warmth. But ja, I always felt there was a kind of personality cult – I can’t say…but I’m much more of a community person, so , like in Ruigoord visitors don’t even know who I am. But this would not happen to Ira if he were here. We also have people here like Olga the big blonde German woman who is really a strong presence when she’s here and it’s ok, it’s ok.
AC: Likes to be centre stage.
HP: Likes to be centre stage and likes to be noticed. That’s ok. Many artists are like that. They are mainly moved by themselves. Very few artists are concerned with supporting other artists. In the sixties it was more common. You had groups like – you know Provo, or the Beats or whatever, but in the eighties it became like – pshhh – bestseller culture and get yourself known and whatever…
AC: More individualistic and self-promoting.
HP: More individualistic, ja. So, I got stuck in the sixties here in Ruigoord and I love it. So, most productions here are anonymous so to speak, or dedicated to the – pfff, whatever – the goddess…but generally we use no names. That’s quite different.
AC: A particular ethos to not seek personal acclaim.
HP: Ja it’s also the American culture that is very much name – and fame-oriented. I know this one, I know this one, I’m a friend of that one. I mean, ok, that’s fine.
AC: Name-dropping.
HP: It’s a part of what you see a lot of in the States. Also, people support each other, like Bobby and John Solt. But Ira was always, ah, I wouldn’t exactly say a Guru, but I, ah, think he had a very high opinion of himself. Of his mastery.
AC: It’s interesting, recurring motifs I see in Ira’s work, his photography and films especially – masks and mirrors appear in different guises. Perhaps Ira liked to wear the mask of a Guru, and sometimes being the Guru hides who you really are behind this Guru posture, perhaps.
HP: Ja, ja. I mean, whenever he took the Guru role, at least he was a master of crazy wisdom – so…being a Guru and crazy wisdom. Ganesh Baba was also for him like, wham! When Eddie Woods published “Ins and Outs” in one of the issues there is a translation by Ira of wonderful sayings of Ganesh Baba….and it’s hilarious. Ira loved him and respected him. Of course in that wisdom being a Guru is a joke.
AC: The cosmic joke.
HP: It’s a good joke but it’s a joke.
AC: Did Ira recieve initiation from Ganesh Babaji?
HP: Not as far as I know, no. He was too…I never took initiation because I never kneel, only for a lady. I like to share my knowledge or whatever, my experience, on a level of friendship and equality and fun. I don’t like any of that kneeling and bowing…blah blah blah.
AC: Paying obeisances.
HP: I think Ira also didn’t really do that. An artist, there are not so many artists who do that. They probably have their inner muse or whatever. Being a Guru.. I say follow no leaders, lead no followers. Follow your star, your inner voice, your heart. Your lady, your beloved friend. But that’s only my opinion.
AC: Could you please tell me more about the cultural scene in Amsterdam at the time that you first met Ira? You mentioned Simon Vinkenoog…
HP: Ja, he was a key figure. It must have been the early eighties, after the first meeting with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, all these poets who came to Amsterdam in I think 1978 for the first time for the big festival, the One-World poetry festival. I was one of the organisers so then I started meeting them all. Ira came a bit later. I guess he was in Nepal. So, in the early eighties, when I met him, there was a quite lively literary scene. We called it the poets’ circus, it was like spoken-word performance, not just dull reading from a book. Jamming and music, and so there we performed together, and Ira, whenever he was here he took part. In Vondelpark there was quite a big open amphitheatre or stage. There we had a big gig I remember. We travelled to many other places. Also from Ruigoord we travelled to Kathmandu. Ja, of course he organised many things, the Ying Yang bar in Kathmandu and we met Petra, Petra Vogt. So that was also a very strong connection with the East.
AC: It seems like they had a very intense symbiotic relationship and shared a rich creative period there.
HP: They had a kind of, it’s hard to say…she was very German and he was very Jewish and they were not so very peaceful, I don’t know. In the end of course it exploded and she became a nun.
AC: I believe with the Brahma Kumaris in India.
HP: The Brahma Kumaris, ja. No, I lost contact with her.
AC: So, she took a very dedicated spiritual path. Ira was perhaps more eclectic in his spirituality – as you were saying about not taking initiation from Ganesh Babaji.
HP: I think Ganesh Baba would send you away if you asked for his initiation. He was more a Guru like that. Go your own way. The sayings of Ganesh Baba are unforgettable. “When you fuck a Western woman you fuck a Western woman, when you fuck an Indian woman you also fuck her grandmother in heaven”; “The first lesson India will teach you, everyone will die”….I think there are about like a hundred sayings translated by Ira. I have them in Amsterdam unfortunately. One of the Ins-and-outs publications.
AC: Did Ira have particular artistic influences that you were aware of?
HP: Ja, in a sense. Not always, but very often he was expressing some kind of spiritual level in his work which was not always easy to understand. There were references to many religious concepts – all kinds of things.
AC: Universal beliefs. Ira appeared to have a deep interest in and knowledge of different mythologies and creation stories.
HP: Ja, ja. He was a kind of epic poet. He didn’t write quatrains or sonnets like I do. I’m more like, short. He was kind of the American school of, like Ginsberg – long, long, long poems with a kind of, ja, very rhetorical reading of the poem – that’s a different approach from what I have. But, as I said, I prefer to write short poems, for me a sonnet is about enough generally that I need to express what I want to express…but the Americans are much more tell, tell, tell…
AC: Much more verbose.
HP: Verbose. Ja. That’s okay. I think the American literary scene is also responsible for now the spoken-word movement – hip hop, rap. it’s not just four lines, it’s not like a quatrain or something, it goes on – woo! That’s ok, fine if you can deal with that. I like it also.
But, I think through Ira, if you look at this book here, I started to write longer poems. For me, this one – “a letter for the sky.”
AC: Will you read it, please.
HP: Aww, it’s not so good. Two-and-a-half pages.
AC: So, you were in fact influenced by the style of the American poets with whom you associated.
HP: Yes, you see – this is generally my length. I can read that. Ira loved it.
AC: “The Beast is loose!”
HP: Okay. For you Ira. I can’t find at the moment the poem I wrote for you, but this one you liked:
The beast is loose! The beast is loose!
Although I have not seen it yet
the world around me looks quite mad:
everywhere they’re running fast,
indeed the bravest are the last,
but everyone is running now.
The beast is loose! We don’t know how!
Parents crying to their gods,
on their knees, pathetic clods.
As the age-old nightmare rides
everybody runs and hides.
The beast is loose! The beast is loose!
But the goddess of the wood
knows and smiles: Mmm, it feels good.
The beast is loose!
Everybody seems to know;
no doubt then it must be so.
Looks like I am the only one
who is still happy, having fun,
the only one who did not see.
Oh god, maybe the beast is me!
AC: That reminds me a bit of Nietzsche – you know, the staring into the abyss at the monster staring back at you, lest you become it.
HP: Yeah right, ja! Also in the Bardos, if you realise that the demons are products of your own fear, you will be liberated.
AC: (giggling): That’s a lovely one, and interesting that it appealed to Ira’s nature and sensibility.
HP: Oh yeah. To his sense of humour. He also had a fine sense of humour. Unfortunately, in a way, I’m a Zen Buddhist. I mean I’m nothing, but Zen Buddhism appeals to me a lot. The philosophy – but it’s also kind of absurd and incomprehensible. There is a Zen saying which I use a lot, which I have to use a lot, because many of my friends are dying. Which to me is like a liberation – but that’s another thing. Not that I’m happy about it, okay?
AC: But ultimately we must let go of everything.
HP: Let go…and I heard from Simon after his death, where he gave me a full account, after his death he gave me a full account of his trip through the Bardo – fantastic. I wrote a small book about it.
I tried to contact him like I often do with friends, people who go, I give it a try, some respond some don’t. Simon responded very clearly, some other people responded very clearly. Ira – I could sense him, I could sense him, (sighs) but I never was able to contact him, in a simple way with a direct connection. I had a feeling he was very much going through, hmmhmmmm, quite ooh heavy stuff in a way and very serious, although he wasn’t. Now that you say it, I will try to find out where he is, I haven’t for a long time, just to find out, and, if I don’t get an answer, at least I get a feeling, that he’s fine, he’s ok, he’s where he should be. I saw a friend of mine, also a Ruigoorder, Theo Klee: Ira loved him, he was a very visible fellow who coloured his moustache green, he was a great artist, and also that crazy wisdom, but anyway he died, he fell down the stairs in Amsterdam half a year ago and he died, that’s a quick way, that’s for sure, and he was smiling at the bottom of the stairs, so they thought maybe he didn’t break his neck, so maybe it was a heart attack or a stroke, so I tried to contact him two days after, and I saw him, he was lying on his back the way he used to lie next to his house – he built a kind of paradise here – have you seen it by the little pond? Then I saw him the way he used to lie in the sun, and now he was lying like that on a cloud – he was feeling very good, he didn’t realise he was dead, he was just feeling like wow, feeling good.
AC: Beatific.
HP: Then another friend – a lady, Monica – who was also very strong here, and she died and she saw him, she saw him float by, and she said, “Hey Theo, are you there?” and he looked at her and he said, “Hey, Monica, how is this possible, you’re dead?” (Laughing).
AC: Touché!
HP: That’s what I saw, and then I thought “Okay, they’re all right.
AC: So, I guess Theo was very attached to this place, to Ruigoord, while I guess Ira was most attached to the apartment in New York which had belonged to his parents.
HP: I think so too, ja. It was a lovely big apartment and there were always many people visiting. Marina was very helpful to him. There was another ex-girlfriend of his, she had a big apartment in New York. She was very close to him, and, from a distance she was very worried about everything. But they couldn’t do much, there was a lot of female power, well-wishers, shanti support…
AC: I’d like to ask you about Angus Maclise because his name has come up often as a strong influence on Ira and he also left his body too soon in Kathmandu.
There’s the poem written by Ira six days after Angus left his body, when he was to be cremated – by the river in Kathmandu. Eddie Woods gave me this copy yesterday- “Ballad for the Gone Maclise.”
HP: No, I didn’t know him. I never met him.
AC: So, prior to when you and the Ruigoord poets went to Kathmandu, he must have already died. He seems to have been quite dynamic within the Kathmandu scene of the time. I really like that poem.
HP: I like it too. That’s exactly – you see – a little bit why I was kind of disappointed when, at his death, Ira….because here it says everything. “The five Dhyani Buddhas transcend your deep freeze and await your burning…the blessings of your friends crackle with ghee….passing through the Bardo keyhole. Listen once more to those Tibetan horns, they are calling you past Freak Street where you sold the White Goddess for junk, forget all your regrets and go now with the egret, put on your robe of sky.”
Such enormous wisdom there.
AC: He had all the knowledge….but he was sadly challenged to apply it at the end…
HP: I had more friends – a great I Ching master – and he now has, what do you call it? Parkinsons, Dementia.
AC: Then they are no longer themselves, you get just small glimpses of who they were. This is something I have heard about Ira, that the medication he was given at the hospital had a very damaging effect. The negative side-effects of these strong sedative medicines. One loses the essence of the person in some ways.
HP: I still think that, if you are aware of the circumstances of your body, then it needs to stay here, it’s like a bio suit.
AC: Your vehicle.
HP: And when you realise that this biosuit is no longer fit for living in, in your higher state –
AC: It’s like shedding a snakeskin almost.
HP: Ja, I hope I will be able to be in the spirit to really deeply wish to leave this body.
I hope I will be helped, and, if this doesn’t work, I will do the euthanasia then. Because I don’t want to pass that threshold when you’re no longer yourself. That’s terrible, when you have to go into an old people’s home where people are just rocking in their chair or crying all day – no, no, no!
AC: If possible, one prefers to go with grace and dignity. The same even with animals, when you have a dear pet you don’t want them to suffer an undignified end.
HP: Ja, I know. We had a medium here. We do such things occasionally. A medium, which Ira also loved – these kind of things, the esoteric. One of the things which struck me most, she said, “There’s a cat here” – because that’s how she worked – “there’s a cat here, there’s a person here.” And then she describes the cat. She said, “it’s dead and it’s lying in the basket. It wants to say something to someone, it looks that colour”…and then the woman stood up and I said “that’s how I found my cat when I came back from a short holiday – dead in a basket – and I was very shocked and grieved, I felt guilty and so on, and then the medium said “But the cat wants to tell you that it died on purpose while you were not there, because it didn’t want you to suffer when it died – the cat wants to tell you that it’s fine…”I thought, “Wow!”
Ja – the woman recognised it instantly. When you’ve read my little book, you’ll see. I mean I’m not a Calvinist who thinks this life is a vale of tears. I love this life and I love nature and I love a lot of the people, but I think what humanity has done with this planet is like on the edge of torture.
AC: It’s not looking very optimistic at this stage.
HP: Not…but I’m optimistic because Simon (Vinkenoog) in one of his communications said 2026 will be the turning point, and it will not exactly be like “Hallelujah, here we are!” It will be the collapse of a lot of the securities that people have – mortgages, stock markets, banks.
AC: These illusions of security that are unstable and ephemeral, in fact.
HP: Then, there will be common sense. There’s you, there’s me, there’s Ruigoord, there’s the earth, the birds are singing. If you leave it alone, it grows again and we can be part of it but first of all we should take our hands off this planet in the way we’re dealing with it now. I see in Ruigoord that this is possible, for me this is like an experiment in the middle of hell, because we are surrounded here by the worst industries – petrol, coal. One of the indigenous wisdom-keepers who love to stay in this place because they feel it is indigenous Dutch land, was saying this – if you leave nature alone and you keep out the worst people, destructiveness and hard drugs…
The Burgermeister, the Lord Mayor, she came recently to congratulate us on our twenty-five-year new contract.
AC: That’s great, to have that sense of security.
HP: Far into the future. I’ll die here, but, anyway, she came and she said “How? how did you manage?” And I said, “Well this is what happens if you let people be for fifty years now, and you kind of push out the worst elements and let nature have her way and let people build what they love best, and then you get this. Water the flowers, water the people, water the talents, build cosy houses, plant fruit trees.”
AC: So, you were one of the original founders of Ruigoord?
HP: Yeah, that’s an incredible story, because we were very eager to travel to Morocco and follow the trail of these Beats, Burroughs, Ginsberg, to go to a country and blow your mind with another culture. A lot of people went down to Marrakesh and so did I, and, on one of these trips to an oasis in the south, there was a French woman when I came there in my deux-chevaux. She was very ill all alone in that oasis, and I took her to the hospital about 150 miles away, and that was that. And then, two years later, I was walking somewhere in Amsterdam and I met her, and I thought, “Wow, what are you doing here, you’re well?” She said “Yes, I’m visiting a friend, who is quite busy because he discovered a village which they are demolishing and he put some chickens in an old house there.” I said “a village that they are demolishing? Where is it?” She said “Very close to Amsterdam – Weegoord, Weegoord!” I said “Never heard of it.” She said, “Well, I’ll take you there.” – I was fascinated – a whole village they’re demolishing without anybody knowing about it.
The whole village they were demolishing with anybody knowing about it. That was on purpose, of course, because they were afraid we would fight for it – because then, in those days, they also wanted to demolish the centre of Amsterdam – not the chic parts but all the Jordaan, all the beautiful little parts they wanted to demolish and build some Rotterdam….
AC: Brutalist skyscrapers?
HP: Yes! They were envious of the bombing of Rotterdam these people, because Rotterdam could make a huge industrial harbour for the new age, and Amsterdam was still a mediaeval beauty. So, they wanted to get rid of most of old Amsterdam and build another Rotterdam. But anyway, so the Frenchwoman took me to meet her boyfriend – this was farmer’s land with beautiful villages, this was an island in the sea originally. Reclaimed land is a specialty of the Dutch, but, in the meantime with all this oil, ore, coal, they destroyed the old landscape and the course of the river and now it’s completely dead land. Holland is dead. 99% of the water is far below the European standard of quality. It’s all poisoned. Then, all the poisons from Europe come here – from the Rhein, from the Main – here is the Delta. Bleh! It’s a horrible country, really. It’s like the Amazon – what’s happening there happened here a thousand years ago. They cut down all the woods, killed all the animals, and now they’ve killed the soil as well, the rivers – with poisons and pesticides.
AC: It’s so densely populated, the Netherlands.
HP: It is overpopulated too. But, in the West it’s all multinationals. All these big factories – chemical factories – they are put here by the river so they can dump their chemical shit here, and the fish are dying.
It’s all American money, Chinese money, multinational companies.
We have given up everything. Holland doesn’t exist any more in my opinion. Even the language we are giving up. Now if you want to study Dutch at the university, it’s in English – it’s incredible! All the advertisements are in English. By giving up the small Dutch culture we had, we are also no longer part of the European culture, we are part of the American culture.
AC: Do you think, with the EU, there’s a homogenisation of culture?
HP: Twenty years ago, we had French, German, to learn in school, we could have Italian, Spanish, with it. Now, it’s just English. Not even Dutch. Of course, it’s also the business people. I mean, it’s a tiny country, and we have robbed half of the world; it’s quite something. We are a robber state, basically.
AC: All of the Old World have blood on their hands, in terms of the colonial history.
HP: That’s true. All the riches of Holland, the grand houses of Amsterdam, it all comes from the slave trade and from Indonesia – which we squeezed out.
AC: Then, the positive side of this country – tolerance?
HP: As it was always. Because it’s business, number one. They don’t care what religion you are as long as you buy. Businessman’s equality. We don’t care what the colour of your skin is as long as you pay. That’s okay, because it also made Holland the liberal country that it is, where people like Descartes could publish their works – which had been condemned by the Vatican. Condemned in France. So, a lot of Free thinkers came here, and they could publish their work.
AC: Yes, I’m very interested in the history of censorship, and, when I was talking to Eddie Woods yesterday, he was telling me the story about the Ins-and-Outs press, when they published…I forget the name of the cartoonist, but it was quite graphic offensive cartoon images of the Queen.
HP: Eddie was arrested. It became a big story but eventually it was thrown out of court because they didn’t want it to get more publicity.
AC: I had thought that the Netherlands was pretty liberal about sex but I guess where the Royal family is concerned.
HP: Yes, I could tell you my story. The first time I started to realise the incredible censorship that actually is here was when two Russian writers came in the eighties from the Soviet Union.
Somehow, there was a possibility of getting them liberated. They were facing imprisonment, these two writers, and they were quite famous in Russia, maybe infamous and the regime didn’t like them, and the people loved them, but they came to Holland, and everyone was like, “Wow, who brought these Soviet writers here?”
Then, a few years later, I read an interview with them, and they said, “It’s terrible, nobody is interested in what we write or what we do.”
So, when my books turned more towards trying to describe my psychedelic experiences and whatever in an understandable way, then I was kicked out of literature, together with my whole generation.
AC: I had thought the Netherlands had been at the forefront of progressive thought about doors to expanding consciousness?
HP: In the beginning, yes, okay but then, during the eighties the climate changed, of course Thatcher, Reagan – and we lost contact also with the British and the American underground somehow. I don’t know what happened – and then my whole generation, the people who created that particular phenomenon of the sixties, whatever that was, they were kicked out by the new generation of critics who had all gotten a diploma at the writer’s school, because that was the new thing: if you wanted to become a writer you had to get your diploma, and the people who got their diplomas – they became critics – because they couldn’t write but they could critique, and they became the committees who defined what was art and what was not, and a whole generation was completely cut out of Dutch literature. It became very boring again.
AC: Do young people find Dutch literature and poetry boring?
HP: They would rather play computer games. It’s a big test – I never thought the test would be like this, whether you could exist independent of technology, if you can walk in the woods without your telephone, that that would become the main criteria for survival. I didn’t realise it because what is going to collapse is that. It’s going crazy. If I want to make a bank payment I have to have passwords, security and apps.
AC: It’s quite insane now – these imperatives – and people that cannot adapt to these new procedures are left behind.
HP: So, 40% of the Dutch, including me are.
So, if I want to buy a ticket for an event, I have to have a smartphone, and a QR code, but I refuse to have a smartphone, I prefer to come with money or whatever, or even slip in through the back door. I just read an article saying that 40% of people are excluded and cannot participate in the digital society.
AC: Likewise, when the democratic process becomes digitalised, like in Switzerland with voting in referendums. It does marginalize and leave out people who lack the tech literacy.
HP: Fortunately, I have Masja (my wife).
AC: That’s it! If you need technical support, best to ask a younger person!
HP: Now, the media are full of warnings about AI chatbots. But what’s the problem? Switch off your computer, switch off your phone!
Here we are. When I see the Fiery Tongues festival, there’s nobody staring at his phone. When I walk in the city or sit on public transport, everyone is on their phones.
AC: Everyone is hypnotised by their screens.
HP: Here, everybody is hypnotised by the people, the music, the nature, the children.
AC: What impact do you think Ira Cohen had on the creative scene during his time in the Netherlands?
HP: I think, in the Netherlands, at least to me and to other people who liked him – he brought the notion that this spiritual element that he represented could be part of literature.
Because people like him – you don’t see them in Dutch literature. Maybe in the USA you have Allen Watts, and Meltzer, who function on this higher level as writers – but in the Netherlands – maybe, I don’t know why – but anything that has even a touch of spirituality or psychedelics – now it’s changing. Sexual freedom was still a little bit allowed but if it became tantric or sacred sexuality, there was such a cynical Calvinist mentality.
AC: Very rational!
HP: Very rational. And Ira, whatever happened? He came like a… I don’t think he plays any role in the official literary history of Holland. You are now recording what was to me one of the most important parts of my life, the connection with the Americans, with the Beats, with Ira – this cultural exchange, also with the German writers, the French, Jean-Jacques Lebel. It was very international also, and Ira showed me many others in Holland how spirituality could be included in literature on a level where it’s not preaching or guru. Ira always had a kind of tongue in cheek approach which to me represented a high form of literature which had no existence in Holland except for Simon (Vinkenoog) maybe, and, in all modesty, some of my colleagues and me from the sixties, some of the writers and singers. They had this next-level thing, and now it’s all down to “Oh, my grandfather was a Nazi in the war and I was abused by my cousin”…. it’s all very important stuff, but the madness has gone, the joy has gone, the surrealism has gone, it’s all middle-of-the-road.
Of course there are many more female writers. I support very much the feminine aspects of life, including in men. The creative voice, the wisdom and the justice, all the things that are connected in ancient wisdom with the goddesses, the Muses, the seasons, the elements, the rivers.
If you are in a patriarchy the sun is male. In German it’s still female, die Sonne. In Japanese also they say the sun is female. These are remnants of the matriarchal past, which, to me, is more logical. The sun is the mother, and the planets are her children, and she nourishes them.
AC: In the most ancient of Northern European cultures – the Norse, the Finns and Hungarians, the solar deity is feminine. In the Maori cosmology, it’s Mother Earth and Sky Father.
HP: I mean, I don’t really care, it’s so beyond “he” and “she”. I think, after the emancipation of women – which definitely took place on many levels – maybe not everywhere in the world.
AC: Even the wider availability of contraception was a massive step towards emancipation of women and freedom of choice.
HP: Absolutely. But still, in many cultures, the women are the most conservative – even cutting the clitoris of their daughters.
AC: Yes, often the mothers and grandmothers in traditional societies perpetuate these traditions.
If a young women rejects it, she is cast out by her family and rejected by her tribe.
HP: So, this is an incredible phenomenon that people who have been brutalised often perpetuate it – because if they don’t uphold the tradition, then their own suffering would have been useless. I’ve read some of the songs that the mothers sing when they do this to their daughters, and it’s really heavy – like “You think you have pain now – well you should have seen me. You think you can stand straight – now you will have to crawl.” Really heavy!
AC: This ancestral trauma cycle.
HP: But I really think that the only solution to the problems of the world are with the women or what one calls female. Women are far superior to men.
In all academic studies at the university it’s the women who excel. Whether it’s alpha or beta, the women are better. Males are inferior. How did they do it all these years? By clubbing down, beating down the wisdom goddess. By beating down the justice goddess…beating down with this stupid male ego.
Also, the male part of the cortex is old and flawed.
AC: Also, before contraception was widely available to women, before there were options for family planning, for example if a woman was getting pregnant and having a baby every year then she didn’t have much time for anything else. That was also a way that women’s power was kept down, kept contained in the household.
HP: Of course! Twelve children was normal in Holland just fifty years ago, in Christian families. Pfff!
But, now that we have Ruigoord, which I consider a portal of the female power, a portal of the goddess, I think the goddess manifests in women. We have the women and they represent all these things. Now in Ruigoord you see that if you let women have their way in making decisions, it’s incredible. All these powers are stored in women, really – wisdom, justice, fortune – if they are unified, if they can catch each other’s hands, through the Xi Pings and Putins and whatever in the United States.
If they can hold hands together and say c’mon, let’s get rid of these guys with their guns and their shit – and it will happen, I’m sure. It’s too stupid. I don’t blame only Russia because I think also the United States and Israel and Turkey, Iran – they all have their stake in this.
AC: These Strong man populist leaders supporting the military-industrial complex.
HP: The arms industry – pfft! And suddenly the money for the development of poorer countries goes into defence in Holland. It’s incredible.
So, I hope the world will see that this way is just a dead-end street, the male way of solving problems. I’m sure the women will say, “What are these frontiers? Why are there frontiers? Why can’t we stand together around the world?” This is what these wisdom-keepers are telling us also. But, then, on the other hand, they are flying around the world and they want beefsteaks.
Here we try to reduce that. Following the mood of indigenous people.
AC: This consciousness of taking only what you need.
HP: But they like to hunt, for instance, hunting deer – they kill it and strip it.
AC: Using every part of the body.
HP: I don’t think we will have to go back to that in the West, this kind of primitive living.
But, in the meantime every year more pesticides are being spread over the earth in Holland. If you drive through much of the Dutch landscape it’s just glass houses. But I’m so happy to be part of what I think is the future. It looks like the past, because this was a very rich village – sixty, seventy years ago it was a rich village. When I came here and saw it for the first time, with the friend of the Frenchwoman, the one I met at the oasis – I came here and I saw a village of three-quarter demolished houses – nothing – a few of these old houses – this is an old house…and the church standing and I heard they were going to tear it down in a few months, everything, and put sand over it the way they do everywhere to build up the land and then put oil tankers on it – because they still had this vision of this becoming another Rotterdam, really, they wanted oil tankers stretching from Amsterdam to the sea. Then I saw this church, and, somehow I felt this island – and it said, “Help! Help! Help! We don’t want to disappear.” Then I went to the priest, who was still living there. I knocked on his door and said, “What’s going to happen to this church?” He almost burst out crying, and said, “They are going to tear it down, I have no money. Only twenty people come to the Mass here. I get no money from the bishop because they sold it all to Amsterdam. It’s terrible, terrible…” Then I said, “But what if we make a movement to save it? We just had a big fight in Amsterdam to save the old centre, and we succeeded, but in the meantime Amsterdam was destroying all the villages around – and we were looking at what was happening in Amsterdam so we didn’t notice – but, if we get that energy here, maybe we can save the church.” He said “Okay, I’m begging you.” Then, his housekeeper whom he had been living with for twenty years there, she came and she said, “I’ll pray for you, I’ll pray for you!” And that’s how it started actually – the miracle – through this Frenchwoman – and then it became a series of miracles. The history of this village is a total miracle. At every moment when it was supposed to be collapsing, with the oil industry and everything, such a lot of money, millions – and we’re nothing, we’re just like nothing, we shouldn’t be here, this is a high-security area, this should be fenced off…but we’re here.
It’s a strategic position – but we didn’t do it for that.
We just thought “Oh! This church!” – and then, through a miracle, we got all these houses. We didn’t even know that. So it was just one miracle after another – which expressed the will of this whole island to remain – and later we found out there’s a big ley line going through this island, so it’s powerful, and also you saw the symbol on our church, I guess which came, it’s on the top on the steeple, because the cross that was there was struck down by lightning – Pkkow! And was just hanging there, and then we decided to put our own logo there – which means that, when the female and the male unite, the eternal spirit smiles, and it looks like a face, with two eyes in it, a smiling face. For me that we’ve been able to put this on a Christian church without any big thing being made about it, this is what we represent – when the female and the male spirit unite, the eternal spirit smiles, and a lot of people pick up on it. There’s no other ideology. We tend to be vegetarian with the meals, the energy which is mysterious when the male and the female unite, and it does.
The women are very very strong – more women than men – and beautiful too. There are children too.
AC: The children are also growing up with strong positive female role models.
HP: I’m totally happy that this not only exists but that it’s proving to be wonderful. Because there was a big techno festival two kilometres away from here at the same time, this last weekend, and one person got stabbed and died, and two people were mortally wounded. I mean they’re still alive but critical.
The organisers decided to stop that techno beat because it was making people aggressive, and they started to play quieter music, and people left quietly, but this event at Ruigoord (Fiery Tongues poetry gathering) was happening at the same time, and there was no security, no police, no fences.
It’s wasn’t according to the rules. If you organise an event you must have security. This was called a Poetry happening. Well, nobody expected it to be aggressive. In fact the number of visitors make it a festival in the eyes of the authorities, so we would need a permit and a certain amount of security, first aid, ambulance on site – and the fact that we could do all this without all that, and that there was not one incident, that shows to me that is was really fantastic.
Caring and empathetic. To me it was very important that there should be no techno. I mean techno in itself – if people put on their own earphones, I don’t care – but they also take the liberty to be so loud that it terrorizes everybody. I’m very much against it. Which is stupid – a whole generation that was here, they brought it from Goa. Well we bring it from Goa. Psy Trance.
Fuck off, man, they never went into India. Never. Goa turned into a horror trip. Heroin, police, corruption. When we were there with Ira in the early times, there were Indian musicians playing, there was maybe a passing Rolling Stone playing. Then when this came in, mass tourism came in, corruption came in, all the Goan boys got addicted to heroin – horrible, horrible, horrible.
People here started to promote that. The Goa trance scene. Then, every weekend – boom boom, tickets twenty euros, and every drug available. Ok. Is this Ruigoord? And I thought it wasn’t.
AC: There are enough places you can go for that here in the Netherlands.
HP: That’s mainstream…and then, the son of one of the big organisers, took an overdose and died, another child got addicted to crack…I said, this is absolutely not Ruigoord. It was said that this was the new energy, this was what we had brought from India, this was the new drug ecstasy that you have to go with it. I mean I’m not against ecstasy at all, but this combination, to me it was fatal – and it came to the church, and I said okay, now the devil is taking over, there’s no culture, there are no story-tellers, nothing, you can’t even recognise the music that’s being played.
There are no songs, it’s a machine, one guy with a machine – so I thought “Okay, so now music has been taken over by robots, and this is the result and we’re promoting it here – because it comes from Goa. I got sick of it.
AC: I think there’s been a resurgence of actual human musicianship in recent years – almost as a pushback – against as you say, music being taken over by robots. Audiences do love to see real people playing real instruments – the musicians’ craft.
HP: Absolutely. When these parties were going, I couldn’t sleep. There are poor children, families, here – they were in the church. All night, the windows were like – vibrating – we couldn’t sleep, and then I went to the church and I talked to these kids who were doing that, some of them our own kids, and they said “Well man, fuck off, this is the new generation. You’re now like your father who came to your room when you were playing rock and roll, now you come here and you stand there. Go away old hippy. This is our time.” It was terrible for me to see this deteriorate into that. Like, a lot of stuff, a lot of subcultures, did – but then the Corona came and it was a blessing. All these big parties stopped. Apart from that, a lot of strong women got studios here. I wasn’t much involved in that. But I loved it – a lot of studios that had been built were vacant and were then taken over by strong women. One time I suddenly saw this bunch of guys who were running this partyhouse in the church which I’d squatted. I couldn’t do anything about it. But then the women came in, and they took over, and the whole macho thing starts to crumble, it was like a natural development. And then young artists moved in after that – ones that had somehow been chosen by the women, and then the whole climate changed and we have – well, we still have a lot of boom-boom, but, you know, it’s like in the background.
AC: Because that was a massive scene in the Netherlands, the techno and psy trance.
HP: Ja! Well when we were in Goa with Ruigoord, the balloon company. Every year we went to Goa with a lot of people from Ruigoord; we were there six months.
AC: Anjuna or Arambol?
HP: Vaga was basically it…Now it’s horrible. Vaga – when we arrived there was nobody. There were just a few fisherman, people like Ira, a few freaks.
AC: It’s interesting to hear about Ira in Goa as his pastimes in the Himalayas are much better documented. Not much about South India
HP: No but he wasn’t really settled there. But he was there – and there were many people there. Of course many people from Pune came there. In the beginning it was kind of a hotspot. Then when the first techno party happened – I still remember it – because, every year, we organised a festival there with live music, Indian musicians and Western musicians, but all live – and then these parties came, and one of my best friends – a specialist in Indian music, classical Indian music, a very refined European but also an Indian Goa head guy – he went up to the DJ – Dr. Bobby he called himself – from Detroit, who had brought this techno music to Goa and organised the first techno party, together with free ecstasy, I think and then the music, I don’t even want to call it music, then the sound started up – like war drums, Ngggh! Nggh! Nggh! And he walked up to the guy and he punched him right in the face. The guy was shocked. He said, “Why, why did you do that?” Then, Pete said, “For what you’re doing now to the music scene here.” After that, mass tourism! Oh woah, woah, woah! Slowly, it took over, and then, after a while, they were the only parties that were there. Now, of course, it’s over if music is taken over by machines, then all is pretty much lost because music is the highest faculty. The cosmic language is music – the music of the spheres, the birds, everything – is singing and roaring and bellowing and miaowing – and I think it’s a great miracle when someone plays the flute, a drum, a violin, and then the effect of it all is something beautiful. But in this music, there’s one guy with a machine, an electric-whatever device and, if the system crashes and there’s no device, the music stops, and all the people who play flutes and drums, they can still play. I was so shocked that music – the most sacred facility of people has become automated. But, fortunately, there was a pushback, and we have the completely new generation here that want to hear flamenco, jazz, and whatever – so we passed through it, I always saw Ruigoord as a few years ahead, an experimental testing ground. Well, to my great joy, I saw that happen. Without any plan, the music collapsed, and a new generation came in and they’d heard it all before and it’s nothing.
AC: They wanted to explore different music traditions.
HP: And they also wanted to explore the sixties, they want to explore the huayahuasca – but in a serious way.
AC: Yes, I wanted to ask your thoughts on how the substances affect a creative scene. For example, the psychedelic element that influenced Ira Cohen’s work, particularly “Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda” and the “Mylar Chamber” photographs.
Did Timothy Leary have any association with Ruigoord?
HP: Well, by the time Ruigoord was becoming more aware in that way, he was already corrupted, I mean he was already propagating satellites, with 150 people orbiting the earth. After his imprisonment, I think he was brainwashed. It’s impossible!
AC: He became like a CIA plant?
HP: He started to support NASA. For me, that was a no go. I think he was an incredible spirit. What I’ve read and heard about him, after his imprisonment, what happened to him?
AC: Forever changed.
HP: Ja. Ken Kesey, for instance, we met him.
He came to Amsterdam, and he was like himself. Ginsberg, of course, Gregory Corso – what a lovely idiot! I don’t think he would have survived the Me Too movement, Gregory. Wel, I did, so maybe…
AC: Well, those were different times.
HP: They were different times, yeah.
AC: Absolutely. And yet Gregory was much loved by very strong women, like Vali Myers or Babeth VanLoo for example, these really strong characters.
Eddie Woods and Jane Harvey were telling me a story about one night going out to a kebab shop with a group of women – it was Petra and Vali and a couple of other very strong women, and I think Ira was walking with them, but the four stately women were leading the procession to the kebab shop with Ira trailing in their wake.
HP: Babeth VanLoo is also very interesting.
AC: Yes, I was really fascinated to learn about her creative journey and her work with Joseph Beuys, this whole notion of art as a medicine for the planet.
HP: To me, poetry is prophecy and if it’s not that, then it’s nothing. Is that not so? I mean poetry, what is it, why is it so highly regarded? In the human experience? Poetry – wah wah wah.
AC: (giggles) Yes, it’s a high art.
HP: If I see Dutch poetry at the moment, it’s just trivial. Totally trivial. But a few poets, among them Simon Vinkenoog and myself and Diana Ozone – in fact all the poets who got the Ruigoord trophy.
AC: Yes, so who was the poet who got the trophy this year?
HP: Ja, this guy Binfies he performed on Sunday at 4 o’clock. He’s totally famous at the moment in Holland, but he used to sing texts of Simon Vinkenoog and other underground poets and he came here before he was famous. So we decided to ask him if he would be happy with the trophy because it’s nothing material, no money, nothing and he wrote back “Good heavens, the Ruigoord trophy is the greatest thing I could ever get!”
AC: He was honoured.
HP: Honoured…and he had just gotten another prize, a very big one, 100,000 euros just now and he came here and said, “Wow, man! I’m going to throw a party.” And I said “But we have no money – maybe €50 per artist. I mean you get maybe €5,000 for a performance. He said “Money is not important – I’m so honoured.” He gave a huge performance outside. Really, the whole crowd was boiling with excitement. It was an incredible gift he gave.
AC: The Ruigoord Trophy has been won by some luminaries of the counterculture.
HP: That’s what I think – but in the official world mostly these luminaries are not receiving any recognition. Some of them…because we also like to give the trophy to people who are recognised in, what I call “the outside world” and still have their great feeling for Ruigoord. That’s the bridge we’re seeking.
AC: While remaining true to their craft with integrity.
HP: Remaining true to their thing – and to come and perform for nothing when they would normally ask €5,000.
AC: It’s fantastic that in the Dutch cultural scene at this time there’s such enthusiasm for poetry, this sense of revival.
HP: Absolutely. Well I’m very modest in a way, but I think we represent the best surviving part of Dutch counterculture – and it’s connected to the international art scene, connected to surrealism, Dadaism, the Beat poets, it’s connected – whereas official literature is nothing, it’s, like writing a best seller and getting on TV to promote it. It’s starting to become a bit more engaged, because engagement had become…what? Engagement with your own career, or getting into the MOMA, getting on the bestsellers list, and that’s the aim for the rest, not much concern.
But that’s changing. I can see it – like today, there’s one of the biggest literary magazines of the Netherlands – it has a lot of people writing for it who were part of pushing back the spirit of the sixties. Now there’s a psychedelic revival, they say, and they wrote a whole issue of this magazine about psychedelics.
AC: There’s a notable movement towards using psychedelics as healing medicine, which was actually a notion that was part of the original Harvard experiments too.
HP: The strange thing is, all the writers in this magazine are the ones who used to condemn it, and now, in this revival – but not one of these writers to my knowledge, has actually gone through a psychedelic experience or were part of the sixties scene. It’s all the people who turned it down then and now they see that it’s coming back and that it’s become fashionable.
AC: They’re jumping on the bandwagon?
HP: I don’t care. It’s interesting. But to me it’s representative that none of us – the elders who started the psychedelic revolution and all – were even asked about it….