Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa class on William Blake continues from here
AG: How many of you have the Erdman Blake here? The text. How many don’t? Did you know it was assigned at all? Well, for those of you who are going to take the course, that are not just sitting in the first few days, you might as well get that. And how many of you have the Blake Dictionary ? Anybody here? Well, on page two hundred and twelve of the Blake Dictionary you’ll find an outline of Blake’s system corresponding to this.
Of course (for) these four elements, the Buddhists also have characters.
I guess the blue is … I don’t know their names. Who’s the blue, Eskhobya?
Student: No, Akshobhya.
AG: Akshobhya – Ratnasabhava?
Student: Yellow
AG: And then the red is passion is what? The lotus? padma?
Student: Amitabha
Student (2): That’s not Padmasambhava?
AG: No, it would be some padma form of Buddha, or what? Red. I’ve forgotten his name. Red is ruby, is what?
Student: Amitabha
AG: Maybe. And the green?
Student: Amoghassiddhi
AG: Amoghassiddhi
So the Buddhists have Buddha families, so to speak, and they have a main central figure of that color with those characteristics of that aspect of consciousness.
Amazingly, Blake has a very similar set-up with his passion, reason, body, and imagination. Very similar set-up of colors. I think he also has figures to go with it. There’s some designs to go with it. As I said, his may be derived from Kabbalistic Tree of Life precedents, as well as Pythagorean and alchemical designs, which I’m not any specialist in.
If there’s anybody here who is a specialist in Buddhist iconography, please keep checking that out as we go along, and we may be able to find out correlations between Blake’s system and (the) Buddhist’s system, and if there’s anybody here who’s in the class who’s a specialist in Kabbalistic systems, or hermetic systems, please keep reminding me of any correspondences or parallels and check it out or do a little research as we go along also.
I have a good-sized collection of Blake books, biographies, analyses, ([and) essays in the library, for those of you who will be in the course for this session, and it might be a good idea for each of you to select one book or another, which we’ll assign when we get settled the next class. There’s an early two-volume edition of (Alexander) Gilchrist’s Life of Blake , there’s Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition, which is a big, two-volume work showing his alchemical and hermetic sources, there’s giant books of engraved designs, a large book of all his illustrations for other people’s books, and there’s stuff on his politics by Mark Schorer, Foster Damon’s Blake (His Philosophy) and His Symbols, I think, which you can get in the library. So maybe when we get settled I’ll want everybody to take one specialized book and then as we discuss the whole thing that’s coming on we’ll have a panel of experts – Yeah?
Student: Is that here (Naropa campus) or on Pearl Street, the library?
AG: My collection is on Pearl Street, I think, though we might get it over here. We’ll find out. I have about twenty-five or thirty really interesting and sometimes rare books. Like the early Gilchrist biography is very expensive. It’s a couple hundred dollars. I’ve just been collecting cheap books, anything under a hundred dollars on Blake that I could find over the years.
to be continued