Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience continues from here
Student: Didn’t you have a hard time with some of the realizations that went along with it, like I think you said at one point, kind of a cosmic demonic sense?
AG: I hadn’t gotten to that yet. I’m still actually knocked out by the fact that there is that much common ground between us here in the room and I’m just trying to figure out what is the actual ground, because I’ve been talking about solitary, more or less as if it’s just my own property, but obviously everybody has that property, everybody owns a piece of that.
Student: We’re all spiritual materialists in the end.
Student(2): There’s that (Michael) McClure essay in (Meat Science Essays) about the (elf-light)
AG: Yeah.
Student (2): That’s what it’s about, that whole thing is that Anglo-Saxons actually had a word for it, which was the …
Student: aelf-scin
Student(2): … aelf-scin, yeah
[“I turned to Anglo-Saxon and I began leafing in dictionaries of that speech. Almost first I opened to the word aelf-scin – shining like an elf. The reference was to the light that gleams from objects! This is the light I saw for many moments and for extended lengths of time. It threw me into fear nd blankness. It was the real visionary horror of the inert world about to become hallucinatory vision. BUT if those great Anglo-Saxon men saw there light and named it – natural phenomena – then what is there to fear from it? What is there to fear from elf light? From elf-scammer..”]
AG: He has a little poem, also. He has a couple of poems. McClure has his descriptions. That’s why I like McClure because I recognize in McClure a sort of hermetic language referring to that kind of experience, and also a very practical descriptive nature description, or mind nature description.
ELVES
WE
DO
NOT
BELIEVE
that all of the oil that is burned
and the mountains of food
to be consumed
or the construction
of the huge ceremonial
vehicles
will broaden
our knowledge
of
poetry!
We ask for the rainbow
and
the keys
to Elf Land.
Keep your fucking war!
So his terminology is Elf Land.
Here’s his description of the particular illumination or glow:
THE GLOW
for Imamu Amiri Baraka
IT IS THE GLOW OF BEING
and the swelling outward
of the energy
and vigor
that we accrue
(surrounded by the aura
of the past)
that
IS
BEAUTY!…
(So his terminology lately is beauty. Just simple).
Finally
we know
beauty
is truth.
(And the past
is the actions
with which we feed
ourself and learn that
it is not our gloomy
nemesis.)
– So
the physique
of our gestures
is truth.
Vibrating like the simplest
living crystal
and making spirit loops
of exquisite complexity and power.
*****************
HALOES
for Anne Waldman
THERE ARE HALOES
AROUND EACH BEING
– fields of ripples
and of bumps that space
uses to create
the past and future
– like
a
bloody tusk
or
an airy kiss
in
the
RIGHT
NOW!
THOSE SOFT, ALMOST FURRY, QUILTS
of actuality!
So strange,
so lovely
when we relax
and watch them.
Student: Allen?
AG: Yes
Student; Which book was that from?
AG: Jaguar Skies
Student: Is that his newest?
AG: Yeah, I think. It’s (from) New Directions ...
Anne Waldman: It just came out.
AG: … ’75, ’76. It’s got a Blake epigraph: “How sweet I roam’d from field to field …” as a beginning.
to be continued