Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues from here
AG: So Blake made sense by turning everybody into big symbolic wheels. But now, if you want to know who these big symbolic wheels were in newspaper history, the David Erdman‘s Prophet Against Empire is (a) perfect guidebook to the politics. For those of you who are interested in post-revolutionary or revolutionary politics. – Can you all hear me?
Student: No.
AG: Am I talking loud enough?
Student: Yeah.
Well, (Urizen), where we left off, on page 85, at the end of Chapter II of The Book of Ahania line 45, had just prepared a bow and cast a poison rock, the rock of moral law, at the fiery rebel Fuzon, who was revolting against Urizen’s over-solidified rigid attempt to control the nature and the human mind, the human body and the human heart. Reason had attempted to usurp the powers of mind, body, heart and imagination. Fuzon, sexual fire, had rebelled against the mind’s tyranny. The mind – Urizen – had prepared a poisoned rock of moral law and thrown it back on Fuzon, and that’s where the story picks up in Chapter III.
“The Globe shook; and Urizen seated/ On black clouds his sore wound anointed;/The ointment flow’d down on the void/Mix’d with blood; here the snake gets her poison/
With difficulty & great pain; Urizen/Lifted on high the dead corse..”
Fuzon’s corse. Actually Fuzon appears only once in Blake. This particular figure of revolt who gets killed, who immediately is thwarted (or is) thwarted revolt, appears only in this particular book. Fuzon. He doesn’t come back. So it was an invention for this trial run for this chapter of Blake’s intellectual-social-moral-psychological history. His function is taken over by another character later on. For the most we have this one appearance of Fuzon. Confusion, perhaps.
“On his shoulder he bore it to where/A Tree hung over the Immensity/.It being the corpse of Fuzon./
For when Urizen had shrunk away/ From Eternals, he sat on a rock/ Barren; a rock which himself/From redounding fancies had petrified.”
So it’s the solidification of thought forms. The solidification of Urizen’s thought forms, just as the giant power plant at Rocky Flats is a solidification of, say Edward Teller, or any of the nuclear physicists’ thought forms. It’s a petrific solidification of an imaginative fancy. Redounding fancies – “a rock which himself/From redounding fancies had petrified.”
Many tears fell on the rock,/ Many sparks of vegetation;/ Soon shot the pained root /Of Mystery, under his heel:/ It grew a thick tree; he wrote/ In silence his book of iron…”
to be continued