Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues from here
AG: Okay, “A Memorable Fancy” (in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) – This notion is, as I(‘ve) said, a take-off on Swedenborg‘s “Memorable Relations”, Swedenborg’s imaginary or visionary conversations with various prophets and historical figures:
“As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyment of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments. When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & red by them on earth.”
(..in Casey Junior High School!) – “corroding fires” (is his) making a pun on his own method of etching his prophetic books, because the etching was done with corroding acids. With a stylus he would make the design and then bathe the plate in acid to make an impression, which then, filled with ink, (he would) paste onto a page and leave the ink impression line on the page, which is, I think, the way he did it. He invented his own method of engraving. We may not have mentioned this before, but he was from childhood an apprentice printer and engraver and draftsman. His trade was that. He worked at it for a living. He made his living doing engravings and copies as an artist, as a journeyman workman artist, and he was a great technician in that, an extraordinary technician, and invented his own way of engraving, finally. So this is a little pun, so to speak. He himself is the mighty Devil in black clouds. Blake.
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
Actually, that’s an amazing statement. In other words, it’s a kind of empathetic imagination which any kid has had imagining himself a bug or a bird or an eagle. Trying to imagine what the sense worlds of an owl or an eagle might be like compared with the human sense. In other words, you see a bird high up with amazing eyes, if eagle or vulture, capable of seeing microscopically particular detailed leaves and snakes and worms and rabbits from (a) height of miles. So there’s an immense world of delight, unimaginable to the human sense. So he’s saying, “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” In other words, your five senses don’t cover that territory. And that’s very similar to a famous Zen …
Student: Koan?
AG: … couplet. It’s not a koan, it’s a couplet. I think it’s in a series of couplets called.. Zenrin-kushu – Z-E-N-R-I-N..K-U-S-H-U, which you’ll find in Volume I of R.H. Blythe‘s – B-L-Y-T-H-E – Haiku (in four volumes. In Volume I. “In the vast inane..” – (that’s the great immense world of delight) – “In the vast inane there is no back or front,/ The path of the bird annihilates East and West. – “In the vast inane there is no back or front,/The path of the bird annhilates east and west.” Back/front, East/West, the contraries – the rational contraries, the Aristotelian thing that it’s either “A” or “Not-A” – it’s either east or west. The Urizenic method – back/front, east/west – “the path of the bird annihilates East and West.” “In the vast inane”. So Blake is saying “infernal” here – the nature of infernal wisdom. And the Zen term here, as translated into English was “inane – the infernal inane. Because that (occurs) in Romanticism later. I think some slick comment writer, maybe Oliver Wendell Holmes in 19th century America, talks about (Edgar Allan) Poe or (Percy Bysshe) Shelley exploring “the luminous intense inane”, making it as an insult – Poe expanding his imagination into the luminous intense inane. [Editorial note – Allen is, in fact, most probably thinking of Shelley and Matthew Arnold‘s assessment of Shelley as a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain“]
But in this classic case the inane means infernal.
to be continued