Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa class on William Blake’s Book of Ahania continues from here
AG: (to Student) You were going to say something?
Student: I wonder why he left his iron book (“Book of iron”) in there?
AG: Well, maybe it was too heavy to carry, I guess. See, I was just wondering that, too. He got stuck in his own tree. Urizen got stuck in his own tree, incidentally. That’s clear? The modern parallel would be as the energy problem gets more and more complicated and as the scientists work overtime trying to figure it out, it becomes more and more complicated, and there is no end to it, actually, because it’s up a dead end to begin with. So that there is no way of completely rationalizing a nuclear plant in the sense of completely controlling every single element of a nuclear plant forever and ever and ever. It’s just simply impossible. So finally the reasoner, beginning with some smart-aleck rationalistic high school sophomoric notion of getting cheap free energy from nuclear, winds up getting more and more entangled in his projection and creation, and gets more and more involved in the whole feedback creation. Feedback of complications that rises from his attempt to oversimplify to begin with, and so finally it turns out the uranium costs too much, and you don’t know what to do with the plant for the rest of eternity, and so you’ve got to have a watchman, and the watchman’s uniforms will cost more for the next two hundred and forty thousand years than the original uranium, or it develops a crack in the foot pedal somewhere so it doesn’t work. So, in other words, no system of reason can replace or compete with the complication of event. Event is more complicated than reason, even if you got a computer to do it. In other words, the universe itself is more complicated than any explanation of it, because an explanation of the universe is only part of the universe, so a system of control of, say, absolute power, like nuclear, is only part of the absolute power or near-absolute power and could not possibly control every element within it.
So – “Amaz’d started Urizen! when/He beheld himself compassed round/And high roofed over with trees/He arose but the stems stood so thick/ He with difficult and great pain/Brought his Books, all but the Book/Of iron, from the dismal shade..” – I don’t know what that would mean. Does anybody got any good idea?
Student: I just … it seems like the “Book of iron” and that war image, it’s just that … so the military mentality is really comfortable in place where there’s dismal shade . … where there’s abstract confusion.
AG: Well, it makes sense. “Its growth is described in The Book of Ahania, according to Damon – “Shrunk away from the Eternals, Urizen sits on a rock of his own petrifying, where he sheds his tears.” And then it quotes him. “With difficulty Urizen escaped from the labyrinth. On this Tree of Mystery he crucified Fuzon, his rebellious son of fire.”
Well, I don’t know what can be said. What I’m doing is what I do when I’m reading at home. I’m checking it out.
Here’s a little point. What does Ostriker say about this particular little old “Book of iron” caught in the tree? Maybe she might say something – She says (it’s) the first appearance in Blake’s prophetic books of the “Tree of Mystery”. “Book of iron” – a Code of War – (that’s where I got that). But she doesn’t have any explanation.
(And then if you don’t know how to use this book – the big book – check commentary for page 86-87, in the back – (page) 822. If you haven’t (already), look through this book, the Erdman (and) Bloom. On (pages) 821-822 (it) has a little commentary on The Book of Ahania by this guy, (Harold) Bloom. Actually he gives his own interpretation for Ahania’s name and interprets that that beam of fire of Fuzon as phallic and has an explanation for the black bow and the rock, the crucifixion of Fuzon in the “Tree of Mystery”, but no explanation of the “Book of iron”. So (to Student) I suppose yours is about as good as any.
to be continued