Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience – continues from here
AG (to Student): But you haven’t had any (visions) in your sleep?
Student: I don’t realize my dreams….
AG: You don’t remember them? No, well, okay. That would be an interesting project. First thing in the morning, check back. So, “Never take until they try/unless they try it in their sleep/and never some until they die.” [(Allen quotes here from his 1948 poem in The Gates of Wrath, “The Eye Altering Alters All”)] I had assumed that death was a complete consciousness so that there’s a line in (T.S) Eliot, “The complete fire is death.” [Allen is presumably referring to the lines in Eliot’s “Little Gidding” here (from Four Quartets) – “the communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living“]
So I thought that was what he meant; that when you die everything opens up and you see everything. So, “I ask many, they ask me./This is a great mystery.” And I titled it, “The Eye Altering Alters All” out of Blake. So that was a direct reference to a visionary experience and actually it was the first poem I wrote immediately after that.
to be continued