Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lecture on William Blake’s The Book of Los continues from here
So, “Incessant the falling Mind labour’d.. – (this is page 92) – “Organizing itself: till the Vacuum/ Became element, pliant to rise,/Or to fall, or to swim, or to fly:/With ease searching the dire vacuity”
Now, “the Vacuum/Became element, pliant to rise,” (like fire), fall (like earth), swim, (as in water), or fly, (like air). So it’s the four elements separating out from the vacuum. “With ease searching the dire vacuity.”
“The Lungs heave incessant, dull and heavy”/For as yet were all other parts formless Shiv’ring…” – (I guess lungs to take in the spirit – breath, for breathing) –
“For as yet were all other parts formless/Shiv’ring: clinging around like a cloud/Dim & glutinous as the white Polypus/Driv’n by waves & englob’d on the tide.”
(It’s a big jellyfish being described there. The first creation was a big jellyfish – colonial organization of individuals, according to (S) Foster Damon. That is, a lot of separate cells forming into a large colony)
Student: So that Polypus is that thing between vegetation…and animal form.
AG: Yes.
Student: Just like a thing….
AG: Yes. So, according to Bloom, the Polypus would be the first creation of the imagination – something neither vegetable nor sentient being, somewhere half in between with lungs of a kind, and driven (and) at the mercy of waves and englobed. A really horrible thing. And on waking, Los wakes up and he finds himself to be growing into an immense fibrous form. Well, what would you do in that case? A horrible thing to do.
“And the unformed part crav’d repose..” (and wanted to go to sleep, couldn’t stand it) –
“the Lungs heave on the wave/ Weary overweigh’d, sinking beneath/ In a stifling black fluid he woke..”
(Of course you could also read this as the beginnings or the formation of a human embryo in a womb. And this’ll seem more and more like that. It’ll seem more the formation. Actually a description, like the Tibetan Book of the Dead , of the birth of the spirit, or the spirit taking form and sending out nerves and going through various “phylogeny recapitulates ontology”.. (to Student) What is it?
Student (2): Don’t you mean “ontology recapitulates phylogeny”
AG: Okay. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, they said in high school, meaning the growth of the fetus recapitulates the entire history of evolution from polypus to Einstein.
Student: (Charles Darwin was around) at this time, too.
AG: Uh-huh.
Student: (but he..)
AG: Whose idea was it? Darwin?
Student: Well, Blake knew Darwin’s grandfather.
AG: Yeah. Erasmus.
Student: Erasmus Darwin, but I don’t remember whose it was.
AG: He illustrated things by Erasmus Darwin.
Student: Yeah.
AG: Actually he….
Student: He wrote The Loves of the Plants
AG: Yeah, that’s right. And he also did some medical illustrations, didn’t he?
Student: Yeah, the description sounds to me something like Donald Sutherland waking up in Invasion of the Body Snatchers
AG: Yes
Student: Turning into….
AG: Yeah. This would make a very interesting movie. Actually it begins at the end of “2001”, with that black solified Urizenic God. Have you ever seen that movie?
Peter Orlovsky: You’re thinking of “Star Wars”, aren’t you?
Student: No.
AG: So where is he (Los) now?
“He arose on the water, but soon/Heavy falling his organs like roots/Shooting out from the seed, shot beneath,/And a vast world of waters around him/In furious torrents began./ Then he sunk, & around his spent Lungs/Began intricate pipes that drew in/The spawn of the water. Outbranching/An immense Fibrous form, stretching out/Thro’ the bottoms of immensity raging.”
He rose on the floods…” – (The Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. – “Genesis I: 2. And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters”. “He rose on the floods.” – But he got disgusted by this giant fibrous Polypus).
… then he smote/The wild deep with his terrible wrath,Seperating the heavy and thin./Down the heavy sunk; cleaving around/To the fragments of solid: up rose/The thin, flowing round the fierce fires/That glow’d furious in the expanse.”
I really do wonder what he means by all this. He does have a detailed (account). Here the heavy and the fierce fires. There is obviously some kind of well worked-out intellectual vision involved in it. It’s also some kind of visionary cosmos – (a) visionary physiological cosmology coming up. There are hints here, actually. There are commentaries which give you more and more.
to be continued