Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lecture on William Blake’s Europe – A Prophecy continues from here
“Nam’d Newton; he siez’d the Trump, & blow’d the enormous blast!/Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts,/ Fell thro’ the wintry skies seeking their graves;/ Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation.”
And that’s because once that war trumpet was blown, so was the rationalistic justification and the entire Newtonian rationalistic description of the universe’s story, so to speak. Its system was revealed. And as we’ll see later on, Blake says, if you want to know Satan, find out his system. If you want to see Satan, if Satan is very vague, if you can’t quite understand what you’re up against, find out his system.
So the declaration of war on Europe revealed the ultimate disorder of the mind that attempted to create universal order. The European mind, the European rational scientific mind, just as, let us say, in our day the acme of Urizenic consciousness is the extreme exquisite powerful Meson Accelerator at …
AG: … Los Alamos. Like millions and millions and millions of dollars. Fifty million dollars in one domed room full of, like, giant claws and boxes and push buttons and vast metallic plates to keep in the radiation and millions of dollars (and) a million pounds of..million pounds of copper tubing in one room! – in one room a million pounds of it! – to calculate down to the least meson – the particles of the nucleus of the atom – and re-channel and direct them. And yet all of this is part of a larger system, which is actually just building a bunch of huge explosive bombs to blow everything up.
So it’s the extreme – the reductio ad absurdum – of Newtonian logic. Or the reductio ad absurdum of rational calculation separated from body imagination and emotional heart, which is the point he’s making.
Because that skeleton became visible, thus – “Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of” repressive “Angelic hosts,/” Fall “thro’ the wintry skies seeking their graves.” – (That blast of Newton making it all clear is really the end of the old order).
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-one minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-three minutes in