Some time since we featured transcripts from Allen Ginsberg’s Naropa classes on William Blake. Blake, always worth attending to. We last left them here. We’ll pick it up again, chronologically, with the next class, Allen’s Naropa Institute lecture, delivered July 25, 1979.
AG: Where are we? I had read up to Chapter III of The Book of Los without very much explanation, which is on page 92, now. And I wonder, it may be too confusing just to read through the text and than have to go back over the text. So in a way what I’d like to do is to go back over what we read so far and what few things I have to say about it to unravel whatever it means. Is that alright?
On page 89, we had Eno, the aged mother. And by mother, Bloom in the back here, in his notes, interprets it as the generative mother – the mother of existence or mother of mortal existence. Someone suggested (Eno) was an eternal view – an eonic view. Eno as a pun on “eon”. Do you know anything about that?
Student: Also, if you take Los as backwards of “sol”, Eno is “one” backwards.See, in the method of printing involved backwards writing.
AG: Yeah. So that he would be prone to backward puns.
Student: Yeah, right.
AG: Yeah. What do you call that? A backward pun?
Student: A retrogram?
AG: Yeah, I suppose.
Student: (Palingram?)
AG: What?
Student: There’s a palinode?
AG: Palinode. Palinode is a word spelled backward meaning….
Student: Palindrome.
AG: Palindrome.
Student: Palindrome is the same word spelled backward as forward.
Student: Yeah, that’s right.
AG: Yeah – “Who the chariot of Leutha guides.” – How many of you have the Blake Dictionary? I really do suggest you get ahold of it at the Naropa Bookstore or at the Boulder Bookstore, because it really is a helpful key for fast reading of these texts. If you stumble and just want to check it out, any detail. Almost everything’s covered by Foster Damon.
“Leutha” – if you’ll look back to page 44 in this book, of Visions of the Daughters of Albion – “I loved Theotormon..” – “I loved Theotormon/And I was not ashamed/ I trembled in my virgin fears/And I hid in Leutha’s vale!”
That’s the beginning of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. So Leutha first occurs there, and in that context is a valley of delight, the female genitals. Leutha’s vale or valley or the female genitals. “I plucked Leutha’s flower.” In that context it was activity in that area but connected with sin and guilt. It was a guilty or tormented sexual delight, and Leutha’s flower is female orgasm, or was there, at any rate. Some sort of hidden desire, or heavy-handed mortal desire. Like that image of Adam with a serpent wrapped around him as some kind of orgasmic birth, so Leutha’s vale would be the material worm-like equivalent for ladies.
The aged eternal mother, or the eonic or eternal mother, who guided the chariot of mortal birth, whose Leutha’s chariot guides “Since the day of thunders in old time.” I don’t know what the “day of thunders in old time” would be. (to Student) Do you have any idea?
Student: (No, not really)
AG: It’ll come out. – “Sitting beneath the eternal Oak” – Damon points out that this oak may be the oak of weeping, that is to say, in the beginning in Blake – “Old John with white hair/Does laugh away care,/Sitting under the oak,/Among the old folk.” – (That’s from Songs of Innocence. The old oak in the center of the village is early in Blake, family, village, security, stability, oaken buckets, household oak, and later becomes a Druid oak for him, a place for human sacrifices done by the Druids. He thought that the Druids had a ceremony of punishment and sacrifice and killing – human sacrifice – and so he got to symbolize the Druids later in his books as being the priests of the horrible religion and the oak, the tree of religion – a tree of horror or weeping.
to be continued