Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience continues from – here
AG: ..Well I had a vision..
Student: (And it’s easy to forget..)
AG: Well, it turns out that a lot of people can remember things. That’s the whole quality of poetry. The whole power of poetry is that you can remember and then write down little details of what you saw. For instance, I always thought, in a way, that William Carlos Williams, a modern poet, who was supposed to be just common-sense and naturalistic, was really recording a high moment of perception, visionary, when he said, – “so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel/barrow/ glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens”.
I thought maybe he was making a little symbolic icon of a moment of heightened consciousness. Probably he wasn’t. Probably he was just sort of saying, “Well, let’s see what kind of detail?” He was interested in detail, but I wasn’t sure that it was actually a representation of a special moment of my kind of visionary experience.
Student: Allen?
AG: Yeah?
Student: Did Williams see any of his poems in these terms, in terms of vision or illumination?
AG: Ah, I never asked him. I never asked him. I think it’s the same thing. I think this would come into the realm of that thought I had before, that actually it may be that this is just ordinary consciousness and people are so daydreamy and neurotic they’re just not in their bodies, not seeing what’s in front of them most of the time anyway. So Williams was experiencing his ordinary, everyday Rutherford consciousness.
Student: But he seemed happy about it I would think it’s) hard to …
AG: Yeah, naturally.
Student: …(hard not to) seem happy. It seems you can’t have this experience unhappy, or….
AG: Oh, yeah. You can have….
Student: In fact, (but) then you’re psychotic, then.
AG: Yeah. Well, okay, what is.. Go on, you haven’t….
Student: Is your visionary experience like (William Blake‘s) concept of (a vast eternity)?
AG: I couldn’t hear the last three words.
Student: Is it like in Blake …
Student: “Eternity in a grain of sand” –[Editorial note – This is, of course, a citation from the opening of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” – “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.”]
Student (2): … eternity in a grain of sand?
AG: Yeah. Well, to find eternity in the cornice roof of an apartment or a grain of sand, yes. Yes, I assumed that that was what he meant, that being able to see in any part of the universe, any place in the universe, some fragment of an infinitely vast design, whether it be the square red brick or salmon-colored squares of wall facing, which were assembled from many corners of Colorado, or Gods knows where all the sand and water came from to plaster up on that wall and where the hands came from that put it there, like an assemblage of phantoms just to get that wall up there and then the wall itself’s still here, shining out. So that’s part of a much larger design whose roots are all the way back – Yeah?
to be continued