Allen Ginsberg on “The Proverbs of Hell” from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell continues from here
AG: Alright, so – “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” That might be considered like the Lafayette situation (He desired liberty but he didn’t really act when it came time to cut off the (King’s head which) bred the pestilence of continuous excessive rebellions and head-choppings) – “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” And a perfect example (would) be J. Edgar Hoover, who was actually a homosexual, which people didn’t really know, but because he either “acted not”, or was so much in the closet, he extended his repressive venom in every direction. I had a friend when I was in college in 1944 who was groped by J. Edgar Hoover in one of the lobbies of a big hotel in Washington (D.C.). He told me about that back in the ’40s, so I knew that all along. But Hoover was notorious finally for breeding social pestilence on that issue of erotic liberty. His agents would always have to wash their hands so they wouldn’t be sweaty when they shook hands with him, and his agents would get fired for fucking in hotels with girlfriends, much less boyfriends. And he was constantly blackmailing Martin Luther King and accusing King’s secretaries of being pimps and saying that King was nothing but a whoremaster and taping his delights with girls in hotel rooms, trying to blackmail him. That’s the kind of pestilence. “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”
Peter Orlovsky: Someone said that he had dirty pictures of Marilyn Monroe going down the steps of his stairs in his house.
AG: In his house, yeah, he had some from his FBI files. He had all the porn he wanted. However, he’s dead.
So, “The cut worm forgives the plow”. There is a cutworm. Does anybody know what a cutworm is?
Student: I think you get it in corn.
Student (2): In corn, yeah.
AG: Yeah, I’m not sure whether the phrase “cut worm”.. – cutworm cuts through the corn?
Peter Orlovsky: Cuts a baby corn?. When corns is much less than six inchs high …
AG: Yeah.
PO: … or five inches high, the cutworm just cuts it right up and eats it above the ground, something like that?
AG: Is that what works? Yeah. So I’m not sure whether the cutworm here is a technical term or the worm which is cut by the plow (and) forgives the plow.
PO: Oh, I think it’s the worm that’s cut by the plow.
AG: So do I. But there is a possibility..
POL Are we worms, though, or….
AG: Yeah.
PO: … in this thing here?
AG: If you get mad at cancer. If you get mad at the bomb that falls on you. It’s like you get mad at the car that drives you down. At that point when you’re cut and broken open, ready to get out, or disappear, I don’t think you get mad at the car. Or the instrument of cruelty, or the typhoon, or the roof you fell off of, or the sidewalk you hit. You might not even (get mad at) the guy who murdered you, you know? I mean after, when it’s inevitable and you realize you’re gone, you probably (don’t) unloose any kind of attention to (anger). You get into probably a deeper place than resenting the insanity of the person who did you in.
Tape ends here and then continues (in media res)
AG: … from the clouds. The clouds from the earth, and the light from the darkness, and being from non-being, to begin with, because, otherwise (you’d figure), “if they had never done that, I never would have got cut by that plow, and I wouldn’t have been hurt right now”. Well, you know, you’d have to get mad at the entire universe! So it’s like the cutworm forgives the universe for existing.
Student: The male from female?
AG: Yeah. Does anybody like “Dip him in the river who loves water”? I’ve never understood it.
to be continued