Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience continues from – here
Student: Could you talk about that experience on the train in Kyoto to Tokyo?
AG: Well, it wasn’t really. There isn’t enough time and it wasn’t relative to the central, it wasn’t really that …
Student: To renounce….
AG: It was more superficial. It was more superficial. Not having the text, there’s not enough time and it was just sort of a, 1963, coming back from India I realized I wasn’t going to make it back to heaven by forcing and by insistency and by continued churning over and over that experience, so I just started crying in a train in Japan, realizing that I wasn’t going to get to heaven. And the minute I began crying I found myself in heaven again, very briefly. So there’s a poem called “The Change” which records that. But that’s just one moment of disillusionment, or one, say, more poignant moment of the slow process of getting the monkey off my back.
The remarkable thing was that I stupefied myself from 1948 until about 1973, which is a long time. That’s twenty-five years preoccupied with one single thought. There are some early poems that recorded different early takes on this kind of this experience. I immediately saw poetry as an hermetic or secret way of talking about experiences that were universal, cosmic, and that everybody knew about but nobody knew how to talk about, nobody knew how to refer, nobody knew how to bring it up to front brain consciousness or present social consciousness, so these are poems from 1948 where I first found myself a poet with something to talk about.
[Allen reads next his poem, “Vision 1948″]
Dread spirit in me that I ever try/ With written words to move,/Hear thou my plea, at last reply/To my impotent pen:/ Should I endure, and never prove/ Yourself and me in love,/ Tell me, spirit, tell me, O what then?/ And if not love, why, then, another passion/For me to pass in image:/ Shadow, shadow, and blind vision./Dumb roar of the white trance,/Ecstatic shadow out of rage,/Power out of passage./Dance, dance, spirit, spirit, dance!/ Is it my fancy that the world is still,/ So gentle in her dream?/ Outside, great Harlems of the will/Move under black sleep:/ Yet in spiritual scream,/ The saxophones the same/As me in madness call thee from the deep./ I shudder with intelligence and I/ Wake in the deep light/And hear a vast machinery/ Descending without sound,/Intolerable to me, too bright,/ And shaken in the sight/ The eye goes blind before the world goes round.
The last thing was a description of the last experience of terror, feeling that I was going to be turned upside down and eaten up.
“The air is dark….” So, beginning to realize I was getting hung up on it,
The air is dark, the night is sad,/ I lie sleepless and I groan./ Nobody cares when a man goes mad:/He is sorry, God is glad./Shadow changes into bone./Every shadow had a name;/When I think of mine I moan,/ I hear rumors of such fame./Not for pride, but only shame,/Shadow changes into bone./ When I blush I weep for joy,/And laughter drops from me like stone;/The aging laughter of the boy/To see the ageless dead so coy./Shadow changes into bone.
“Shadow changes into bone” was my symbolic language for meaning thought, high intellectual thought, ambition, idealized desire, actually comes true and you do get to see a vision of eternity which kills you: So shadow (mind, insight) changes into three-dimensional bone.
to be continued