Allen Ginsberg in 1979 on William Blake’s The Book of Los continues from here
AG: So there’s an interesting spot now:
“Darkness round Los: heat was not; for bound up/ Into fiery spheres from his fury/The gigantic flames trembled and hid/ Coldness, darkness, obstruction, a Solid Without fluctuation..”
This begins to remind me of the great black slab in (the movie) 2001: (A Space Odyssey), actually. It’s human energy solidified and bound up by rejection into some rationalized form, which makes it like a black hole or something. Anyway, something totally solidified, dark, rectangular,
“Black as marble of Egypt; impenetrable/Bound in the fierce raging Immortal./ And the separated fires froze in/ A vast solid without fluctuation..’ – (So that the energy itself freezes around them into this stony prison. The skull, maybe.
The pictures, now. The Book of Los is accompanied by pictures. Does anybody here have this illustrated Blake? Well, the second of the plates shows a human naked figure bound in a cave or rock – impenetrable rock on all sides. I’ll just pass it around. It’s the second figure there.
“A vast solid without fluctuation,/ Bound in his expanding clear senses”
So he’s stuck. Stuck in a rock. Stuck in a solidification of all of the energy stopped flowing, rejected, congealed, condensed, forming an obstruction in every direction. Very similar to completely claustrophobic thought. Somebody whose thought goes into some kind of infinite regress, or negative anger in every direction, or rejection in every direction. So it’s almost like it’d lead to catatonia; that kind of psychological state. So that’s where he is.
“..The Immortal stood frozen amidst/The vast rock of eternity; times/And times; a night of vast durance..”
However, he’s impatient, it says – “Impatient, stifled, stiffend, hardend” – “Till Los’s impatience could no longer bear” – (This is till the impatience of the poetic imagination no longer could bear the hard bondage).
“The hard bondage rent: rent, the vast solid/With a crash from immense to immense..”
So imagination explodes the solidification of rational thought forms. It just gets so condensed and so thick and so hard that it’s finally unbearable and unendurable and explodes, as perhaps Ira Einhorn exploded and killed his mistress in Philadelphia. Or some madman might suddenly try to break through the wall of his own thoughts by some violent gesture.
Student: It’s sort of like Dante‘s (descent with Virgil into the center of) to Hell, where the final point is ice….
AG: Yeah.
Student: (Then they start…)
AG: They start what?
Student: They start their journey upward…
AG: Yeah, after they go through that solidification. Well, this is actually (a) similar and parallel scheme.
Student: Yeah.
AG: But Ostriker notices here that the difficulty so forth has been that Los, or the poetic imagination, has lacked a direction, or a scheme or a goal, but anyway lacked a direction, so when it breaks out of the solidification (it) falls into a void. When it breaks through the solid stony impenetrable dictatorship, tyranny of thought form, then where does it go? Well, then there is no direction. If you break through that reason, that solified reason, if that has been your prison all along, then where do you go next? Well, you don’t know where to go. So everybody says, “Well, if I don’t obey the law, what’ll happen? Won’t everybody start killing each other, if we don’t obey the law?” Do you know that sophomoric [rationale]? We’ve got to stay within the bounds that are set to us by our parents, by the State, by tradition, because if we don’t, we’ll all turn into mad murders and monsters, or we won’t have anything to do – we’ll just sit there and shit in our pants and not eat. There has to be a reason for existence – there has to be a reason for existence! Otherwise, why would we move to eat, why would we do anything! Why wouldn’t we just sit here and stifle?
So this is the psychological situation that Blake is setting up, the same thing that we all have actually experienced. It may sound, perhaps, off in eternity here, but actually it’s a thought form similar to that which many American sophomores have broken through when they’ve first taken acid, or first gotten laid, or first read Clarence Darrow on the Bible, or something like that.
So
“… impatience could no longer bear/ The hard bondage, rent: rent, the vast solid/ With a crash from immense to immense..”
So let’s play chicken, so jump in your automobile and race down the road and smash into the first wall. It’s actually what’s happening on East 12th Street in New York right now….
to be continued…