Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Book of Ahania continues from here
(from discussion on Chapter 4, part 4)
AG: So, back to Urizen‘s slumbers of abstraction:
“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”
The Eternal Prophet, Los, comes in.
“(The Eternal Prophet) beat on his anvils/Enrag’d in the desolate darkness/He forg’d nets of iron around/And Los threw them around the bones.”
So actually Los in this case is the slave of reason. Here Los has been enslaved to reason. The poetic or creative imagination has been slave to Urizen and has been working as reason’s slave here, in this case. So he’s beating on his anvils, enraged, in desolation, forging nets of iron – war – around and throwing them around the bones.
“The shapes screaming flutter’d vain/Some combin’d into muscles & glands/Some organs for craving and lust/Most remain’d on the tormented void:/ Urizens army of horrors.”
So actually he’s saying that we are Urizen’s army of horrors, with our lungs, muscles, glands, craving and lust. This is a description, in a way, of the birth of the human form, out of Urizen’s separation into male and female. Urizen separates from Ahania and so male and female are separated and not united in one, and giving place to the whole wheel of sex-birth-death. Actually to the world of birth and forms: “Urizens army of horrors.” At least this is a suggestion in here.
“Round the pale living Corse on the Tree/ Forty years flew the arrows of pestilence”
This is the same forty years as the wanderings in the Bible. It began with withdrawing from Egypt. It began with a comparison of withdrawing from Egypt, remember? I guess the book was the Book of Urizen that ended that way. When Fuzon called all together the remaining children of Urizen and they left the pendulous earth, they called it Egypt and left it. That was on page eighty-two, the very end of the Book of Urizen
So,
“Wailing and terror and woe/ Ran thro’ all his dismal world:/Forty years all his sons & daughters/Felt their skulls harden”
That’s a great phrase. Does that make sense? Having killed the revolution. Or you could say, for ten years in the ’70s, young Americans have felt their skulls harden, you might say. Or that’s one way of interpreting it. “Forty years all his sons & daughters/Felt their skulls harden;” – wandering in the wilderness.
“… then Asia…” – (Some form of revolution) . “(then Asia)/ Arose in the pendulous deep.
” They reptilize upon the Earth”. “Fuzon groand on the Tree”.
I think one interpreter said “They reptilize upon the Earth” is they fornicate – they’re copulating – but copulating with guilt, and so it seems reptilian – “They reptilize upon the Earth.”
And a version of that is, remember Blake’s version of God creating Adam? His heavy-winged, Jehovaic creature lying, floating in the air, full length above the naked body of Adam, with this sort of red serpent curled from Adam’s loins around his legs and down to his feet. It’s sort of Adam in orgasmic ecstasy turned into this worm. Which is I’m sure an emotion that everybody has felt at one time or another, themselves as sort of a meat-worm in orgasm. It’s a common trip, I’m sure. Is there anybody who’s not felt that? I just felt it the other day, for the five-hundred-thousandth time.
to be continued