Allen Ginsberg Naropa lecture on William Blake’s The Book of Ahania continues from here
AG: (reading Blake) – “The sweat poured down thy temples…” – He’s a farmer.
Student: Right.
AG: “The sweat poured down thy temples/ To Ahania return’d in evening/The moisture awoke to birth/ My mothers-joys, sleeping in bliss.”
“But now alone over rocks, mountains/ Cast out from thy lovely bosom:/ Cruel jealousy! selfish fear!/ Self-destroying: how can delight,/ Renew in these chains of darkness/ Where bones of beasts are strown./ On the bleak and snowy mountains/Where bones from the birth are buried/Before they see the light.”
So there’s a whole bunch of interesting poems that relate to that.
The “lap full of seed” is interesting – (That’s line twenty-nine – On page four-six-one there’s a curious note.
“Thou hast a lap full of seed/And this is a fine country/ Why dost thou not cast thy seed/And live in it merrily”
Answer:
“Shall I cast it on the sand/ And turn it into fruitful land/ Shall I cast it on this desert and turn it into fruitful land?/ For on no other ground/ Can I sow my seed/ Without tearing up/ Some stinking weed.”
Student: What does that mean?
AG: Well.
Student: It’s a lot of trouble to (figure out)
AG: It’s a funny thing. I’ve been trying to figure that out for years.
Student (2) : I think it means that he doesn’t want to screw a lady, because that’s (wasting his sperm..)
AG: Well, that’s one possibility.
Student (2): (..but then, it’s an option.)
AG: Well, “this is a fine country.” But then he answers, “Shall I cast it on the sand”? He’s saying that he’ll have to do that because every other ground, when I sow my seed, I have to tear up the weeds.
Student You can’t do that, according to the New Testament. If the seed is thrown it withers and dies.
AG: Yeah, he’s just playing on that.
Student : (He’s what?)
AG: Yeah, he’s playing on it. But he’s also….
Student : (But in the Bible, it’s) not that…one seed fell on the rock, and one seed fell on the sand, and one the ground (“good ground”). They’re different.
AG: He’s saying here…
Student (3): This reminds me….
AG: .. here, in this particular place, in this particular land, every time I sow my seed I’d have to tear up a “stinking weed”.
Student (3): This reminds me of making a system out… (of) Theotormon and Bromion …. and instead of using a pre-existing scheme of… (Christian morality)…
AG: Yeah. That’s interesting, right, he can’t use the Christian system, because it’s already a “stinking weed”. But then he says, “Shall I cast it on the sand/And turn it into fruitful land.” So it’s a very despairing poem. See, he’s saying, “Why don’t you produce a system? , or why don’t you produce a baby, actually, (he didn’t have a baby with his wife). “”Why don’t you get down where there’s earth here, and why don’t you come down off this prophet shot and be a human being like all of us folks and get a baby and …
Student (3): In some sense…
AG: … go to church.
Student (3): (In some sense, this is a) sort of a working-through. The poems that you’re quoting from are..from notebooks..
AG: Yeah.
Student(3): … where he’s working-through his problems about relationships with women …
AG: Yes.
Student(3): … and so there’s some sense that every relationship he gets into is like a “stinking weed”, because it arises (from) the weed of jealousy.
AG: Right.
Student: So he’s looking for a place. I think it fits in well exactly with what you’re saying, too.
AG: Yeah.
Student: That the…
AG: I think that was really good, though..What you said was good, that, as a reason for not really working with the old myth, the old system of the Christian system, or.. – even Swedenborg is a “stinking weed”. It’s interesting in the context of what we were just talking about.
So that’s that seed then. “Then thou with thy lap full of seed/ With thy hand full of generous fire/Walked forth” – so that was a description of an Edenic (or) ideal state of reason, actually. When reason was working with sweet wisdom science.
to be continued