More Ginsberg from 1981 Naropa class (from October 6, 1981) continues from here
AG: I forgot where I was, exactly..
Student: You just described (epiphanies)
AG: Oh, epiphanies right. How did I get to epiphanies? Satori.. You asked about Satori in Paris
Student: You were describing the circle of people in Visions of Cody and…
AG: Oh, yeah, the construction of Visions of Cody. So he wanted to take those moments and write a novel in which the structure of the novel, for the first time, would be the intense moments or the epiphanies or the flashes or the illuminations, rather than a chronological story or a narrative, linear story, or a beginning, middle, and an end – that the beginning should be the first great flash, the central flash of awareness, or of compassion, or of poignancy, and then follow it up with a description of all the other epiphanies related. And make a novel of flashes, so to speak. Like when he used the (phrase) “I flashed on my mother.” “I flashed on my mother on her death bed,” or “I flashed on my high school teacher when he started weeping in class,” or “I flashed on when I was twelve years old I stumbled in the attic.” That way.
So he wanted to write a novel where each chapter would be a flash and each chapter also would be one exhaustive, spontaneous, scribbling down of everything he remembered at that moment of writing about that flash (having considered it a little, having pre-considered it, run his mind over it first). And so I think the outline for Visions of Cody is an outline of flashes, or an outline of epiphanies, or an outline of intense moments, and so the title Visions of Cody, rather than On The Road or The History of Cody, or… So it’s in and out of time, it’s in and out chronologically. Which actually is a fantastic idea for a novel, for a large piece of prose, and it’s the closest you can get to whole mind, in a way, because if you start to build a structure for an artwork on the basis not of, “Well, I (have) to tell the story, then I’ll put the flashes in when they come chronologically” but “I’ll tell the flashes and tell the story about the flashes as part of the flashes.” So actually then what you’d be doing is following the nature of your mind a little bit more closely, rather than going through the sort of boring and laborious, and maybe slightly distant, effort of trying to build up the characters and trying to introduce it and say, “In 1849, the river flowed down and by the Merrimac where factories (were) built, and then one day a young man named my father came down from Canada and got a job in a cigar store.” Instead of, just immediately go to the moment that he remembers his father the most- his father weeping, say. At the time it seemed to me a fantastic idea, and I don’t know anybody else who’s written such a novel, except one person, where Kerouac got it, actually- which was (Marcel) Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu – In Search of Lost Time). In the first book (Swann’s Way) (Proust) describes how as a young sophisticated man (he) Proust had visited a relative and she had served him tea. and he dunked a little cookie called a madeleine into the tea. and suddenly got this enormous nostalgic satori flash vision recollection, in which his whole life opened up for him, because he remembered when he was a little kid he used to go to a little country house where they had had a house and every Sunday he’d be served that, or every day they’d have tea with that. And as soon as he tasted the cookie it brought back the whole scene to him and he saw the whole village and the fields around it and all the characters in one moment – like a drowning man recollecting his entire life.
Has anybody had that experience? You must have, because you’re looking around. Yeah?
Peter Orlovsky: My mother had it when she was drowning.
AG: Yeah. Not necessarily a drowning experience, but just an experience.
Student: It’s really strong with smells, I think.
AG: Yeah, you get minor ones. Maybe even a major one with smells. Actually it was a combination of smell and taste, not sight or anything else that turned Proust on. Because I read it in class – those pages, which you might look up, if you’re interested.
And then the rest of the six or twelve or.. huge volume of The Remembrance of Things Past is a reconstruction of that moment of flash. A reconstruction of everything. Actually, Proust retired from the world and went to a little cork-lined room and spent the rest of his life writing this one huge, vast book, recollecting everything up to that moment of flash or epiphany. I forgot what Proust calls it. Probably an epiphany or an illumination {Editorial note – “privileged moments” is the most commonly used term in Proustian studies]
This last summer (1980), I taught a class called “Twentieth Century Heroic Expansive Poetry” (in) which I chose sections of what I thought were the big monumental works of the 20th century and so I xeroxed a couple pages of Proust which have that description. So everybody that was around Naropa then knows that particular moment.
Well, Neal Cassady read Proust aloud very brilliantly in the early ‘Forties and that influenced a lot of Kerouac’s prose toward the end of the writing of The Town and the City, for monumental sentences, combining Proust’s long, long sentences, which are sometimes a huge page-long. The thing I remember, the flash I have of that, is Cassady around Columbia University, in a house of a student who’s now working on The New Yorker, getting high on grass and reading several pages of Proust aloud, and reading one sentence by Proust that began with a description of the Baron de Charlus‘s curly black hair and sort of got into his hair for about a half a sentence and it ended with all the possible associations, ending with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Like reading in a crystal ball.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately two-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately nine-and-a-half minutes in