Allen Ginsberg’s January 23 class at Naropa on William Blake continues from here
Student: Isn’t it possible that he derived that system from Hermeticism and Kabbalah?
AG: That’s what I was saying before. Yeah. He was a manuscript dealer in kabbalistic and hermetic manuscripts, and he was very subtle and wise and learned in that area. Oh, yeah. Sure. Certainly. It’s just that he was a loner. He knew a lot of people of his time and he was very familiar with the work of Thomas Taylor, the neo-Platonist who had translated all of the Gnostic fragments. And Taylor’s works are now collected in the Bollingen Series, and they are background to some of Blake’s work, also. As they were to (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge, (Percy Bysshe) Shelley, and Bronson Alcott, and the Brook Farm experimenters and the Transcendentalists in America. They all had that common source – Thomas Taylor’s translations from Gnostic fragments of ancient times – Pythagorean hermetic works, mysteries, Eleusinian mysteries. So Blake knew all that. In other words, I’m saying he didn’t have a scholarly guru..
Student: Yeah.
AG: ..in a formal situation. And he had lots of informants, and lots of manuscripts. But that’s what’s so interesting, is that (he’s) a genius with lots of informants and manuscripts and connecting with secret societies that actually cause revolutions. And connecting with Thomas Paine sufficiently that there’s a myth that it was Blake that warned Paine to get out of London before the police busted him and Paine got over the Channel and went over to France to work on the French Revolution, because Blake himself tipped him off. So Blake was in the middle of a very odd underground thing, sort of in our own day like (Timothy) Leary of Abbie Hoffman, or someone like that – that is, dealing with figures like that, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft ..
When I mentioned Visions of the Daughters of Albion, many of the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft.. do any of the ladies (sic) here know of her work? She was an early feminist. She was a friend of Blake, and she was married to William Godwin. Is that right? Is that correct?
Student: She was his daughter.
AG: Daughter.
Student: She was married to Shelley.
Student: That’s Mary Shelley.
Student: Mary Wollstonecraft was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s …
AG: Same?
Student: … mother.
AG: Ah, yeah, right. And so therefore was married to Godwin.
Mary Wollstonecraft, the wife of Godwin, who was one of the first great modern writers on Women’s Liberation, was a friend of Blake, and Blake went to their house for soirees and discussions. In fact “An Island in the Moon“, his early satire, may be a satire on the conversations in that household.
So, as I say, he was a very subtle man socially, and he knew lots of geniuses. He was right on, connected with the revolutions of mind in his time.
Now, getting to (“The Book of) Urizen. It began with:
“Lo, a shadow of horror is risen/In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!/ Self-closd, all-repelling..” – (Naturally – this is on page sixty-nine. this self-enclosed circle will be found on page sixty-nine!) – “..what Demon/Hath form’d this abominable void/This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? – Some said/”It is Urizen”, But unknown, abstracted/Brooding secret, the dark power hid.”
So this dark power created time, spaces and earths and globes of attraction, and eyeballs and ears and human hearts, and stoney ages and spines and ribs and con-globing trembling circulatory systems, and nervous systems and ears and emotions and bodies and consciousness.
If you go through the Book of Urizen you’ll find that it does parallel the development of the five Skandas – (the) five heaps, or five appearances of the Buddhists. (It’s) very similar. If you want some outline of that, check out the teaching I did of the Book of Urizen in Spring 1978, on the tapes (sic).That’s two weeks’ lectures dealing with that. [Editorial note – Allen’s lectures here have been transcribed and are available on The Allen Ginsberg Project – see, for example – here} Correspondences between the five Skandas, the five heaps of appearance – which is the Buddhist description of the growth of self with noses and eyeballs (and) senses – and Blake’s.
The idea here, at this point in Blake, is that actually the eyeballs create what we see. The ears create sound, the nostrils create smell. In other words, that the external phenomenal universe is a projection of our own nervous system. What Einstein said, basically. “The Eye altering alters all.” The measuring instrument determines the shape of the universe.
So the measuring instrument being our eyeballs, ears, and senses, therefore we determine the external projection. We determine the projection around us. We determine the phenomena around us by the very nature of our eyes. In other words, if we didn’t have nice blue eyes we wouldn’t be able to see blue, so to speak. If we didn’t have eyes that saw color, there would be no color. If we didn’t have ears that picked up particular vibrations, then nobody would know anything about sounds. It wouldn’t exist unless we existed to pick up on them. In other words, unless you can turn on a radio, the symphony doesn’t exist coming through the air like that. It might exist in another dimension, but not there.
So, finally a giant web of sensations, thoughts, imaginations, perceptions, is formed, dark and cold, created by reason, stretching outward – (on page 81, line 5 – from “The Book of Urizen, chapter VIII part 6) – “Cold he (Urizen) wander’d on high, over their cities/In weeping & pain & woe!/And where-ever he wanderd in sorrow/ Upon the aged heavens/A cold shadow follow’d behind him/Like a spiders web, moist, cold, & dim/Drawing out from his sorrowing soul/The dungeon-like heaven dividing./Where ever the footsteps of Urizen/Walk’d over the cities in sorrow.”
to be continued