Allen Ginsberg commentary on William Blake’s Book of Ahania continues from here
AG: “Forth flew the arrows of pestilence/Round the pale living Corse on the tree/ For in Urizens slumbers of abstraction/ In the infinite ages of Eternity:/When his Nerves of Joy melted & flow’d/ A white Lake on the dark blue air/ In perturb’d pain and dismal torment/Now stretching out, now swift conglobing…” – (So he’s forming it into some kind of a nerve-globe) – “Effluvia vapor’d above/In noxious clouds; these hover’d thick/ Over the disorganiz’d Immortal,/Till petrific pain scurfd o’er the Lakes/ As the bones of man, solid & dark” – ( So he’s forming bones now, because he’s conglobing with nerves and he’s forming bones.”The clouds of disease hover’d wide/Around the Immortal in torment/Perching around the hurtling bones/ Disease on disease, shape on shape,/ Winged screaming in blood & torment.”
Well, pestilence is rising out of the corpse on the tree. What would that be? If it is repression of sex on the part of the man, repression of sexual energy and revolutionary fire on the part of man with a capital “M” – of Urizen – and the castration of Urizen also, because that ball of fire had hit him in the loins and split him up in two, split him from his soft feeling, which is Ahania, his projection- split him from his wife or split him from his erotic or his element, his feeling – what is the result? Pestilence of some sort – Illness, pestilence, pimples, backaches, cancer, nervous diseases, hernias, perhaps nervous, broken legs …
Peter Orlovsky: Arthritis.
AG: … anger leading to broken legs — not watching where you’re going. All sorts of pestilences.
Peter Orlovsky: Rotten teeth.
AG: Rotten teeth. Too busy thinking to brush his teeth. Much too rushed and there’s too many butterflies in his stomach, he’s got ulcers, he doesn’t have a chance to use dental floss – he’s got to rush out there and beat down more thoughts and answer letters!
So “Effluvia vapor’d above/In noxious clouds; these hover’d thick/Over the disorganiz’d Immortal.” – The funny part is who’s the disorganized Immortal here? Is that Fuzon or Urizen?
Student: Urizen.
AG: Urizen, I suppose. But he’s the principle of order. Urizen is the principle of order but now he’s the disorganized Immortal. That’s like (President Jimmy) Carter in the White House trying to keep everything in order.
Well, “Till petrific pain” finally “… Winged screaming in blood & torment” – diseases.
“The Eternal Prophet beat on his anvils…” – Now the Eternal Prophet is the Eternal Prophet – which is to say, human imagination. Los. We mentioned before, I don’t know if you still connect with the buzzwords of (the) last (class), but there were Four Zoas, as you remember – four directions, four basic principles that Blake was proposing for man – One was reason – (Urizen). one was the body – Tharmas, one was the heart, emotions – Luvah, and one was imagination – Urthona, whose material manifestation is Los – the poetic imagination (or) poetic genius or, here, the Eternal Prophet. And Los’s symbols are anvils and hammering instruments and fires for remolding matter. Or for creating forms.
to be continued