Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues from here
AG: There’s a lot of hermaphroditism (in Blake)
Student: Hermaphroditism is a parody of the joining of the male and female …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … in the ideal state.
AG: Yeah.
Student: Everything….
AG: Oh, it’s a materialist version of that all along.
Student: Yeah, it’s like all thwarted, but there’s a good and a bad of every symbol …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … in Blake. So that like he has a good …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … joining male and female and he has a bad.
AG: Yeah, the nadir for Blake, I think, is when the material universe produces a hermaphrodite – where the male and female are joined in Ulro, in the material body. And I think there’s some hermaphroditic symbol that he uses later on as one of the worst horrors.
Student: Well, it’s like male and female hid. It’s when the woman has the male inside her and doesn’t acknowledge it …… and therefore it’s like a Jungian idea — it comes out very ominous all over the place, and doesn’t integrate it …… sexually. But it isn’t against….
AG: Well, we’ll get to it. When we get to it we’ll check that out. I have that idea that he was. See, I didn’t get mad at him being anti-women, because he was anti-gay. So what the hell. I had to go check out what he meant by all that to begin with. I’m more interested in finding out what he means, because it obviously couldn’t be … or I don’t think (it) could be, anything as blatant as just simply some kind of metaphysical male chauvinism. There’s obviously some kind of psychological insight hidden in that.
And the other point, of course, is that everybody (has) got to die in order to become Albion, except like Milton willingly going into eternal death, becoming a worm, allowing the worm aspect, being willing to be regenerated by dying. In other words, the only way of immortality – the only way to become eternal – is to be willing to die over and over and over and over again and be reborn. So it’s not only the woman who has to die, but that her death to rejoin the one Albion is like every being’s death, every creature’s death, to renew itself. Or there is that angle, anyway, that everybody dies. It’s not just the girls. As sacrifices.
Well, where are we now?
to be continued