Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Four Zoas continues from here
AG: “….(The) wondrous building & three Central Domes after the Names/ Of his three daughters were encompassd by the twelve bright halls..” – (The three daughters there are interpreted, I think by Ostriker, as the Fates – The Three Fates – Atropos?… three Fates that weave man’s destiny and… What are their activities?
Student: They pull of the thread …
AG: One of them….
Student: … they cut it off to show how long it (is)
AG: One cuts the thread.
Student: Yeah.
AG: One pulls it out.
Student: One spins it.
Student: Lachesis spins.
AG: What are their three names? Atropos..
Student: Lachesis spins.
AG: Iris.
Student: And Atropos cuts. I don’t know what the third one is.
Student: I don’t know the third one either.
AG: Iris.
Student: The third one of them measures it.
AG: Yeah.
Student: The first weaves it, the second measures it …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … the third cuts it.
Student: There’s also the reference to the diagram of the Mundane Egg in Milton
AG: Well, I haven’t looked at that in a couple of weeks now. Probably. I suppose. Let’s try it. He has a mundane …
Student: Mundane egg..
AG: … shell, yeah.
Student: …there’s the egg and then there’s the..four circles
AG: Yeah.
Student: …Urizen at the bottom.
AG: Yeah, you can find that in …
Student: Yeah, it’s somewhere..
AG: … in your Blake Dictionary. But I don’t think … if we get into that we’ll never get off!
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here beginning at approximately seventy-nine minutes in minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty-and-a-quarter minutes in