Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Book of Los continues from here
AG (to Student): What were you saying?
Student: Well, in blacksmiths’ shops.. or foundaries, or forges, chains are used to hold things up.
AG: Yeah.
Student: Hung from the ceiling and suspended as…
AG: Yes, right. Right. That’s right. (In) the blacksmith’s shop it’s usually hanging from the ceiling, yeah. And what do they suspend on it?
Student: Whatever (they’re working on) So whatever it is… it’s at one end of this …
AG: Yeah.
Student: (Someone gets on one end and gets hold on it), and somebody gets on the other end and they can vary that and…
AG: Uh-huh.
Student: (fix it) onto the anvil (or the) hammer (or whatever))
AG: So the thing you’re working on is hung from a chain or the chain acts as sort of a fulcrum?
Student: Yeah, it would hold it up.
AG: So you wouldn’t have to bear the weight of the heated metal in your hand, but it’s held up already and you just tip it down to bang on it.
Student: Right.
Student: (So in The Book of Los and in The Tyger) (there’s) an anvil..
AG: With a chain?
Student: Yes. I think (so)..
AG: That’s interesting. I never knew where the chain came in there. Well, so…
“The Eternal Prophet bound in a chain./ Compell’d to watch Urizens shadow/ Rag’d with curses & sparkles of fury/ Round the flames roll as Los hurls his chains/Mounting up from his fury, condens’d/ Rolling round & round, mounting on high/ Into vacuum: into non-entity/Where nothing was! dash’d wide apart.. ”
Then what happens to all these flames? I was rereading it carefully and what seems to happen is that the flames get separated from Los, or Los gets separated from his fires, or his desires – from his flames – and the flames get pushed aside in the next few lines. There’s a kind of funny cartoon movie going on with what’s happening to Los in relations to his flames.
“His feet stamp the eternal fierce-raging/ Rivers of wide flame..” – (Alicia Ostriker interprets this as Los rejecting his own desires, or Los rejecting his own energy).
“His feet stamp the eternal fierce-raging/Rivers of wide flame; they roll round/And round on all sides making their way/Into darkness and shadowy obscurity/ Wide apart stood the fires..” – (Apart from Los. Apart from imagination. So, the fires of energy stood wide apart from the poetic imagination. He’d separated completely from them)
“… Los remain’d/In the void between fire and fire..” – (So there’s fire here and fire there, but Los is in an unburning area, cooled down, so there’s no energy there).
“In trembling and horror they beheld him? – (The fires beheld him?) – “They stood wide apart, driv’n by his hands/ And his feet which the nether abyss/ Stamp’d in fury and hot indignation/ But no light from the fires all was/ Darkness round Los: heat was not..,”
So does that now make sense? If you consider the whole passage as Los putting aside his own energy, his own desire, and his own flame, rejecting his own energy? – Yes?
Student: What’s the “they” referred to? “They behold him” and then “They stood wide apart.”
AG: Well, maybe the fires themselves, or Eno the aged mother, (or the Eternals. Sometimes it’s the Eternals that are watching all this. A group called the Eternals, which we will get into later). (to Student). Do you have any idea who “they” is?
Student: It’s like he’s disassociated himself.
AG: Yeah.
Student: It’s a process of dissociation, and so the fires have an autonomous energy now..
And therefore, as an entity, “them” not “him.”….That’s why he’s getting (tormented..)
AG: Yeah.
Student: (..In Jerusalem, there’s a picture. (Los being tormented by) a bellows, in that case.
AG: Yeah.
Peter Orlovsky: Who are the Eternals?
AG: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a big chain at the end.
Well, we will get to that later. We’ll get to the Eternals later. Because it isn’t mentioned here. That was just some association that I had. Or you can look it up in the Blake Dictionary, which you’ve got on your right elbow. But later on..
to be continued…