“PAUL: There’s this thing that’s grown up out of this materialist scene that everyone’s got into, which is that for everything to exist on a material level you’ve got to be able to discount any things that happen which don’t fit in with it. And they’re all very neatly disposed of these days. It’s great. It’s really very neat, I mean the way for instance IT would just be immediately labelled as “just one of those papers, that’s all” and that’s it. And pot is just that, pot is “just drugs” and LSD is “just drugs” and every form of drugs is “just the pit of iniquity, the black pit of terrible decadent disgusting people always fall into”. There is no thought on anyone’s part WHY anyone takes drugs but there’s thought on their part why they take drink. They’re quite willing to think about why they take drink, why they need a drink though they’re not maybe willing to admit that they take a drink to get drunk! I mean most people think: “Oh no, no, no, I don’t drink to get drunk! No, no, no, I take a drink occasionally. I do take a drink at parties but I must say I don’t take a drink to get drunk.” You know, this sort of Annie Walker attitude to it all… There’s something sort of dirty about drinking to get drunk, but if you do happen to get a bit drunk, it’s all right. But nobody will ever admit that they’re all standing there pissed because they wanted to get pissed which is the truth of it. It must be the truth, otherwise they’d stick to orangeade. You see then, the drag is then, that if you’ve seen the possibility, not only the possibility, the probability of there being many many more things than you know at the moment. I mean, I told you for instance that I didn’t like dogs and cats, until I got a dog and a cat and love them for what they are, just ’cause they’re dogs and cats. I’m quite willing to accept that dogs and cats are dogs and cats. And I still find that there’s a vague little sort-of sadistic thing in me about dogs and cats and if I ever have to punish her [his dog Martha] I can do it quite easily. Which I hate. MILES: If you’re able to see everything in its own terms, do you find that this has eliminated the western thing of finding some things beautiful and others repulsive? PAUL: No. You see, the pity about operating like this is that my act is not adapted to this. All that I have learned and the way I talk and the way I act doesn’t really fit in. There are still the kind of hang ups like “I don’t like dogs and therefore…” There is still a lot of me which has learned a lot of wrong things, that has based a lot of things on fallacies. I can’t just accept everything, that’s it, because I can’t just suddenly say, “Right, everything is as I know it is and I know I ought to accept it all.” It’s difficult when you’ve learned for 22 years of your life that it isn’t like that at all, and that everything is just the act and everything is beautiful or ugly or you like it or you don’t, things are backward or they’re forward. And dogs are less intelligent than humans, and suddenly you realise that whilst all of this is right, it’s all wrong as well. Dogs aren’t less intelligent… to dogs, and the ashtray’s happy to be an ashtray. But of course we think it’s just an ashtray and that kind of hang up still occurs. I still keep thinking of things just like that, people just like that as well. It’s pretty difficult to accept someone who’s lousy. I still impose the old rule of “Do I like them or don’t I like them?” [and] then I can’t see anything in them, it’s still difficult to see the good in bad because I’ve been trained that bad is bad… there’s no bad in bad, and I know I’m wrong. And all this is on a wider level. MILES: How does this approach effect your dealings with people? I mean it’s a very isolated position, very objective, existentialist. Does to make contact easier or…? PAUL: It can do. The trouble is, at the moment I haven’t got it going yet. It’s really a question of now seeing more of what it’s about. It’s now a question of trying to put those things into practice and when I think something which sort of says the kind of thing that I’ve learned in days gone by, it tends just to stick. Instead of being able just to say: “Oh well now, that’s rubbish, obviously, because I’ve found since that I do like dogs.” But obviously a little bit if the other, just because of sheer weight, 22 years as opposed to two, trying to learn it like this, see I’m really at the beginning of this stage. This is why other people say: “I see all your ambitions as Beatles have been fulfilled. You know you’ve done just about everything, you’ve played in every country in the world. What does it feel like?” And it feels exactly the same as it did when I was trying to get five quid for a guitar. It’s a beginning again, there’s no end. But I know I’m going to need a new set of rules and the new set of rules have got to include the rule that there aren’t any rules. So I mean… they’re pretty difficult. They’re pretty difficult…”
baratheonpilled
amandla
andulkaphoto
2087
theartofmadeline
