Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas continues from here
AG (to Student SC): Okay. Go on.
Student (SC) (reads): “They said The Spectre is in every man insane & most/Deformd Thro the three heavens descending in fury & fire/ We meet it with our Songs & loving blandishments & give/To it a form of vegetation But this Spectre of Tharmas/Is Eternal Death What shall we do O God pity & help/So spoke they & closd the Gate of the Tongue in trembling fear”
AG: Well, apparently, Tharmas‘s problem is a very heavy one. They’re really worried about what’s happening to him. The problem with the body, in this case separated from its erotic sexual desire or from its Emanation, whatever the nature of Emanation, has really got the Daughters of Beulah scared. “They said The Spectre is in every man insane & most/Deformd” – but they can do something about it.
Student (SC): “We meet it with our Songs & loving blandishments & give/To it a form of vegetation But this Spectre of Tharmas/Is Eternal Death”
AG: So that’s a very difficult situation for Tharmas. Go on. – Let’s see. So they close the gate of the tongue, which is speech itself, an extreme strategy here.
Student: It’s also (the body)
AG: Yeah.
Student: Tharmas is the closing of (physical) sensation.
AG: Yeah.
Student: So it’s like both language and immediate sensation.
AG: Yeah, tongue and loins, I seem to remember, as the body – tongue and loins.
Student: Yeah.
AG: So they close the gate of the tongue. What does that mean? What would that mean in terms of the body?
Peter Orlovsky: No talk.
Student: Making someone speechless.
Student (2): It says in the book that the closing (is the closing to the entrance) to the gates of paradise.
PO: To the what?
AG: Well, that’s Bloom, saying that this means that they’re closing him off from returning to paradise, or what?
Student: Well, all the inlets of sense are gateways to paradise…
AG: Ah. Okay. In fear they closed it.
Student: (I think it’s) confusing to say that “this Spectre of Tharmas/Is Eternal Death”. “Eternal death” means…usually means…death in eternity and can mean coming into life (meaning this life, or the life of (the body)… So that the fact that it’s a sexual episode means that.. that “Eternal death” means he comes into life, maybe biologically.. (I read it that way) and then I read it on the basis of my own adolescence …
AG: You mean dying into life?
Student: … of having been (early on initiated) and then you can’t talk to anybody. Then you can’t talk to anybody.
Student (2): Well, the gate is a symbol of the hymen in other places so….
AG: In other places in Blake?
Student: Yeah. It’s this kind of fear and frigidity coming in … to the female..
to be continued