Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s “Tyger..” continuing from here
AG: (“What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry”) – So the “fearful symmetry”. What’s the “fearful symmetry” then? = So the symmetry itself is the fact that it’s all exfoliating from one mind, or from human mind, into the direction of tiger, or into the direction of lamb, but it’s all symmetrical to the mind, or to the imagination. It’s all a projection, or exfoliation, or an architectural construction, coming out of the mind, like the….
Student: Like the mandala?
AG: Yeah, like the mandala, or like (a) plutonium plant, or like architecture, and it’s all simulacrum of the human mind, or it’s all likeness to the human mind.
Student: So is that like the material world is an image of the …
AG: Yeah.
Student: …like the spiritual or….
AG: Yes, that would be the same thing, too. That’s like the old Zodiac(al) man, the man in the Zodiac with human organs, and things like that.
Old Kabbalah. Old Kabbalistic ideas – (Hermeticism) – “As above, so below.”
But “fearful symmetry”. So Northrop Frye has a whole book called Fearful Symmetry. Somebody I guess is (reading that). Who’s reading that? I guess James (sic) is going to read that, look that over, find out what he interprets. I’ve never figured out the “fearful symmetry” completely…
to be continued