“Till Covet broke his locks & bars,/And slept with open doors..” – Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Book of Los continues from here
AG: You know (Hieronymus) Bosch’s painting of the miser?
Student: Yeah
AG: ..on his death..
Student: It’s in D.C.
AG: What?
Student: It’s in D.C., right?
AG: Is that in Washington?
Student: Uh-huh, in the National Gallery
AG: Has anybody ever seen that miser on his deathbed, and the skeleton is coming in and holding an hourglass to him, just as he’s “Arrgh” going out and gasping his last gasp, and his last glimpse is to see little gnomes and rats opening his little golden treasure chest and funny winged creatures flying off with his golden watches. What else happens in that? All the things that he covets at the moment of death are flying off with little bats or fairies or mice. His mind is loosening hold on everything and everything that he’s accumulated for a lifetime is being robbed by spirits just as he’s being reminded of death by a skeleton.
So actually this fits the classical picture image of the miser:
“Till Covet broke his locks & bars,/And slept with open doors:/Envy sung at the rich mans feast..” – (That’s really nice. A good way of dealing with it. Envy got up and started singing. Instead of getting mad at the rich man and wanting to steal it or ruin the feast, he got up and sang).
“Wrath was follow’d up and down/By a little ewe lamb”. – (Ewe is a female, isn’t it?)
Student: Yeah.
AG: Yeah. A little baby girl lamb.
“And Wantonness on his own true love/Begot a giant race..”
Well, I wonder if that would actually work out practically. At any rate, that’s Blake’s imaginative treatment. And that’s why it’s interesting.
So Bloom says, the four sins enter the world that has become solidified as actual and become a big problem through a failure of the imagination. It’s like the traditional idea in the ’60s was to end the Vietnam War if necessary by bombing North and South Vietnam with L.S.D.
as an imaginative solution and much cheaper than waging an actual war.
to be continued