Allen Ginsberg on the Proverbs from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell continues from here
AG: Well, I want to skip to some of them that are my favorites. If I’m skipping one that anybody really likes, please expound it. But I’ll just go on to the ones I can expound naturally without having to think too hard.
“What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.” – Like Jules Verne in “Voyage to the Moon“. Science fiction. Or I remember in 1956 and ‘7, Peter (Orlovsky) and I and Gregory (Corso) and (William) Burroughs were thinking about the fall of America, or thinking America was going to have a nervous breakdown, and it did, say, with Watergate or with the Vietnam War – it had a big nervous breakdown. “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.” Shadow changes into bone. A thought turns into reality. That’s sort of like a karmic shot, also, that a collection or set of thoughts will ultimately come through if you cling to them enough, or, if the fool would persist in his folly long enough he’d become wise. It would relate to that, also.
Which, for instance, actually,…”What is now proved was once only imagined”. This is the proof. What is now proved in proof. What is now proved and in proof, the mass edition of Blake’s prophetic books, was once only imagined. At one point he only imagined them, and then he only made nine copies of this, so this was only imagined once as being something for everybody to read, and now it’s proved, it’s really here. Everybody’s reading it and there’s a mass edition in public with thousands of copies and it’ll (be an)influence from 1975 on, it’s going to influence an awful lot of people. It’s like having Western-made koans, or a Zen master with Western pictures, too. Pictures and words, or wisdom that breaks through the rationalistic Urizenic Western civilization mind. So the fact that we’re sitting here looking at these, is the proof of that particular pudding.
to be continued