More Ginsberg-Blake
Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 lectures on William Blake continue (with this, from February 1st 1979). The tape begins in media res. Preliminary notes leading up to a detailed analysis and observation of Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
AG: …'(Swedenborg) had wrote “Memorable Relations”, (Emanuel) Swedenborg did, (which are) little chapters of (his) visionary meetings with angels. His writings (declares Blake) are “the linen clothes folded up.” (“Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: His writings are the linen clothes folded up”) If you’ll check through the book you’ll find Blake’s annotations on Swedenborg’s texts, in which he’s combating or contradicting various notions of Swedenborg. Apparently he was pissed off at Swedenborg because finally he felt that Swedenborg was not merely a mystic but a predestinarian; that is, (believing) that everything is predestined and locked into place. (Blake also felt) that there’s some kind of coldness about Swedenborg’s systematics – that they’re too rationally systematic. And so Swedenborg’s writings are “the linen clothes folded up”, that is to say, according to (Geoffrey) Keynes’, false systems – false rationalistic systems. False systems or rationalisms.
Alicia Ostriker has some comment on this that’ll open it up to you a little more. “In part, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell records Blake’s reactions to Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish engineer turned visionary, whose many works were being translated into English in the 1780’s. Blake met John Flaxman, a fervent Swedenborgian, in about 1780, and Blake attended the first General Conference (in London) of London Swedenborgians in 1789. There was much to attract him. Swedenborg was an enthusiast, he believed in “Divine Humanity” in the Bible as God’s dictation to inspired men, in minute and total correspondences between the natural world and the world of the spirit, and in the possibility of ordinary people attaining spiritual revelation. Swedenborg also exalted sexuality and formulated the image of a ”Grand Man”, whose bodily form was the form of Heaven.” – (that “Grand Man” will be the same as Albion, or is a seed idea for Blake’s Albion, who is the whole or risen man, composite of a balanced relation between the four basic tempers – reason, emotion, body, and imagination)- “(F)urther reading, however, persuaded Blake that Swedenborg’s theology and morality were conventional in part and his imagination limited. On Divine Providence ,(Swedenborg’s text), he annotates, “Cursed Folly!”,’ and calls Swedenborg a “Spiritual Predestinarian.” The Marriage of Heaven and Hellattacks Swedenborg as inflated and pompous. Blake’s “Memorable Fancies” parodies Swedenborg’s “memorable relations” of spiritual experiences.”
Then she notes, as everybody else has noted, that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “constitutes Blake’s first full-scale foray on religious, political, social, and literary orthodoxy;”, ((Blake’s) first large-scale attack on it) and his first “self-confidentally exuberant announcement of his own principles.” I think Mona Wilson, the second major biographer of Blake, points out that this is his entry into the mystic path – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Keynes and Erdman and others, Foster Damon, all point out that it’s turning heaven and hell upside down, using the word Hell for Heaven and Heaven for Hell, and using devils to mean inspiration – divine imagination – and using angels for square, rationalistic dopes. Because without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is a passive that obeys reason, according to the religions, says Blake. Evil is the active springing from energy. Good is heaven – evil is hell. So from now on Blake is going to take on the voice of the Devil and speak of active energy rather than passive obedient goody-goody boy-scout reason.
to be continued