Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell continues from here
AG: Now the voice of the Devil in Plate IV... Incidentally, if you have the plates – [Plate III] – “Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell” – you notice that there’s a woman at the bottom stretched out with her hands raised out, completely opened up to heaven under the skies with a little baby whose hands are also stretched out being born. And the male and female principle, or the contraries, are running off from this birth, kissing, floating in the air. I think the female is floating in the air and the woman is running, kissing. Just on the right through the clouds. And on the top is a woman bathing in the flames and enjoying the flames of energy. If you look closely, you’ll see all sorts of funny little marginal notations in the book, like that little strange line after human existence, four lines from the bottom in the original picture. There’s a little man and a woman holding hands on a floating leaf. Do you see that? It’s love and hate are necessary to human existence. These are the contraries holding hands. And also on the opposite page, The Argument page, you’ll see two female figures climbing a tree and the one who is up in the tree is handing down something to the lady below who’s standing sort of indolently with her arm around the phallic trunk, and some insight is being handed down, like the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is being handed down. So there are constant little hints throughout, even in the texts – little tiny cartoons of the ideas or suggestions for how to interpret the ideas in the words if you look at the pictures. So the pictures are actually worth following and following carefully, and Erdman’s accountings of the pictures will point out all the details for you. It will locate all of the details one by one that scholars have been looking at for a century and finally get all summarized up. Because (I’ve discovered that) if you look at the pictures, (unless you really turn on to some grass and settle down with a good light and a magnifying glass and really examine them), you won’t notice everything that’s there, and there’s a great deal of interesting detail there. So the Erdman or the Keynes book (Erdman’s Illuminated Blake and Keynes’ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) are really useful for focusing your eyeballs, both on texts and on the illustrations to the text.
to be continued