Allen Ginsberg at Naropa, 1976, on Blake and Visionary Experience continues from here
Student: Could you say something about Kerouac‘s development in those days (1948-1952)?
AG: Well, yeah, just one related thing. When I had my Harlem experiences, he was quite matured by (then). He’d already written The Town and the City, or was preparing to, or was in the middle of that, his first book. But he, I think, had not yet had quite that prophetic shudder of ’60s transcendental freak-out mind. It’s a characteristic thing. I don’t think he’d had a totally visionary experience, though it was built into his nature – a sense of mortal transience, transitoriness, dream transitoriness was built into his nature and into his early prose. But I don’t think he’d had a full-scale breakthrough at the time. I wrote him a long mysterious letter, not quite referring (to it directly but) telling him something big had happened to my mind, that I entered the kingdom of eternity and that I would come through and teach him as soon as I could. {Editorial note – see Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg – The Letters – AG to JK Summer, 1948]
When he read it it looked to him like I’d really gone nuts. Like, “Poor little Allen, he wants to make something. He’s going to come and teach me about eternity. Ah, the poor little kid.” So I don’t know, except that he was struck by the sudden seizure of total un-New Jersey-esque middle-class Jewish boy’s seriousness on my part, that I’d suddenly gotten to be a fanatic of some kind, instead of a nice little boy from Paterson who was always wandering around saying, “Discretion is the better part of valor.” All of a sudden I was raving about angels in eternity and he couldn’t … his reaction was he sent me a funnier letter than I sent him, saying sort of like, “America is a permissable dream providing you remember that ants have Americas.” – [Editorial note – Allen is quoting here from Mexican City Blues – 51st Chorus – “America is a permissable dream providing you remember that ants have Americas and Russians”] – or “Eternity is a permissable dream if you remember that ants have eternities and little eternities are had by baby mules and misty fields.” Actually that’s not what he said, but it’s another poem. But he sent me a very funny letter back.
Actually the transaction, the emotional transaction I recorded in a poem called “The Lion For Real” which is the lion symbolic of that Blake vision. Each stanza covers a different attempt on my part to communicate to the professor, to Kerouac, to my family, to my psychiatrist. The line there is “I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions/But you said your mother was mad don’t expect me to produce the Monster for your Bridegroom” or something. [Editorial note – two early stanzas read -“Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him ‘Lion!’/He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries/I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogriff Unicorn/Ants/But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom’s bathroom.”/ But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smoky Mountain retreat/’I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions/But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father/hath no lion/You said your mother was mad don’t expect me to produce the Monster for your Bridegroom”]
Then, however, a couple years later, I don’t know when, I think early ’50s, Kerouac was in a similar situation of isolation and was sitting in a field in North Carolina in the backyard doing a little yoga breathing that he’d just learned and suddenly he describes some seizure he had in which his eyes closed and everything turned to gold and he fainted and fell back and saw everything in the universe as golden ash. And that’s described in a text called “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity“. I think I immediately recognized that he had had some kind of spiritual breakthrough or incident or visionary experience and from then on we knew what we were talking about back and forth or we began to correlate our mysterious “X” consciousness.
to be continued
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