Allen Ginsberg’s July 20 1979 Naropa Institute William Blake class continues from here
AG Following “..Urizen” is “The Book of Ahania“, 1795. 1789, the French Revolution. Blake in 1795 is getting on to be about thirty-eight. Maturing his system. He said, “I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another man’s.”
[Editorial note – “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s/I will not reason and compare: my business is to create” – Allen is quoting here from Blake’s Jerusalem Chapter 1 plate 10 line 20]
So he actually set out to write his own bible, and these prophetic books are part of his own bible. And in these prophetic books he’s working out all the different psychological elements he’s discerned in his own nature. From early recollections on, and that is actually trying to create a whole universal symbolic system that anybody else can use.
He’s no dope. In a sense he’s a very learned man. He’s apprenticed and practiced painting and he’s examined a great deal of painting, and he’s read or handled perhaps a lot of Hebrew manuscripts. He might have even been a Hermetic manuscript seller. That is, his shop, or his house, may have been a center for used books, but used texts. So says Harry Smith, at any rate, who’s a modern-day disciple of Aleister Crowley or a familiar of Aleister Crowley. Perhaps his son, actually. There was some rumor of that
[Editorial note – rumors spread by Harry ! – Harry was not biologically-related to Aleister Crowley – see Bret Lunsford – Sounding For Harry Smith (2021)]
Anyway, Harry Smith points out that Blake may actually have dealt in Hermetic manuscripts – Kabbalistic writings. So his system is informed with all sorts of Gnostic and heretical and Hermetic traditional figures, pictures, symbols, language. Foster Damon‘s library was one of the best Kabbalistic libraries in America or in the world and Damon specialized in that area of Blake.
Now, in reading Blake it’s pretty simple. So what I had assigned was the Erdman/Bloom complete text and A Blake Dictionary. They’re both expensive books, but they’ll both last you a long time and you can work with them the rest of your life. And dabble in Blake all you like. The Illuminated Blake would probably be good to have, though one-by-one color illustrations are coming out (sic). I didn’t assign it because we’ll do (mostly be) doing “Vala or the Four Zoas”, which Blake never made pictures for, or never printed pictures. It wasn’t
a prophetic book.
Even this book that we’re going to get into – “Ahania” – apparently, according to Damon, he suppressed it because it was a tentative book. It was sort of an experiment. Maybe he didn’t feel that it fit into his entire system perfectly. It was a working experiment. In seeing (that) if reason has taken over from nature and has limited us to our clay feet, tongues, and eyeballs and limited us to a short mortal span, and if the entire infinite universe above the Rocky Mountains, including the sky, has been reduced to our noses and eyeballs, and dies with us, what caused that and what has been lost and what energy has been suppressed or forgotten or put into the back of the mind, what becomes subconscious, what madness is going to result when we try and make a breakthrough, what derangements are we subject to?
So he was working that out in a book called Ahania, or the Emanation, or feminine principle, or projection, or worldy projection, or lost soul, or space around Urizen, Urizen’s double or shadow, or Urizen’s complement. What complements Urizen? What’s the other side, the other half that reason is not taking into account? What emotions, what pleasures, what energy? So he’s experimenting with that.
And then he begins to run into trouble because he’s got some personal problems in his own life; he can’t make any money and he moves out of London to Felpham, down to Southern England, for the first time. He’s London-born and bred, and he’s a city boy, and around this time he tries to create a great, huge, epic work, bigger than Milton’s “Paradise Lost” – as big as Dante, encompassing all of his thought and all of his symbols and working them all out, and he can’t do it; it doesn’t hang together exactly. So that’s what’s called “Vala or the Four Zoas” – the four basic principles.
to be continued