“So consciousness of punctuation is one of the bardic attributes, because consciousness of punctuation is consciousness of breath, and consciousness of breath is the substrate of the poetry. In some of the poems we’ll read the breath is the whole subject, not only the substrate but the subject itself.”
Allen Ginsberg on the poetry of William Blake continues from here
AG: Ah, dammit, I’m trying to find that (particular instance).… Well, onto.. I guess we’ll go onto the “Auguries of Innocence”. What page is that in here? Pardon me? Five-five-five? – I’m digging these because generally you will have read Songs of Innocence and Experience, so, not that there’s no need to go through it but I’d rather go through something that’s not so well-trodden , and also because this here, (Naropa) is, to some extent, a contemplative school with some Gnostic pretensions, or hermetic inclinations. This really fits in with the magical mystery tour (sic) of Buddhism and the mind-training aphorisms that you might see stuck up into the walls here, or the koans we were talking about yesterday, like “What was the face you had before you were born?” or “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” So, there are certain of these couplets which are really mind-blowing and also connect parts of your mind or parts of the world together. So, let’s start.
“To see the World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour”
Now, that’s one of the most widely-quoted quatrains of Blake. You’ve all read that, I guess. Some of you have read that before? How many never read this, never read that quatrain before, never read that quatrain before, never heard of that? Okay, so have you ever figured it out, those of you, most of you have heard it. How do you figure that? “To see the World in a Grain of Sand” – how can you see the world in a grain of sand? How can you see heaven in a wildflower, or if you want to do that, see heaven in a little grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower? He says the method is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and to see, hold I guess, eternity in an hour, or as an hour. I guess actually this book, a traditional book in a traditional image by the Regent, Ösel Tendzin called Buddha in the Palm of Your Hand, which is actually probably very similar in direction of thought to this. But how do you figure it? Somebody? Interpret it. Yeah?
Student: Does it mean macrocosm and microcosm?, macrocosm and microcosm and the inter-connectedness between macrocosm and microcosm?
AG: I can’t hear the middle of your sentence. Macrocosm and microcosm?
Student: And the inter-connectness.
AG: And the interconnectedness of them. Oh-kay. That’s a classical duality like that [points to Student] – Where did you get that book? [Selected Poems, edited David Erdman New American Library, 1976]
Student: This one?
AG: Yeah.
Student: Boulder Books.
AG: Pardon me?
Student: Boulder Books.
AG: Are more copies there? Are there more copies?
Student: Ah … no.
AG: Maybe hold it up. That’s a really handy edition. It’s a little tiny edition of 95 cents originally. What did you pay?
Student: It was half price off the cover price because it’s really worn .. It says 35 cents.
AG: So what was it?
Student: A buck.
AG: That’s really cheap! I use that for travelling around when I want to have a handy little Blake text because it’s so small and it has a lot of stuff in it, all of Innocence and Experience and “Auguries of Innocence”. In fact, the “Auguries of Innocence” that you have there [Allen is referring to a xerox class hand-out here], I think, was copied from … maybe was copied from that, (I’m not sure, if it was (from the) Norton or (from) that). Yeah, I think so. What’s above it? – “I came a tyrant in his stead”?
Student: Yeah.
AG: In yours. Before “Auguries of Innocence”‘s title….
Student: “The Grey Monk”
AG: Yeah, it’s the … “And became a tyrant in his stead” is the last line?
[A brief break in the recording takes place here as the tape is turned over]
AG: It’s the Erdman. [to Student] – Oh, show people the Erdman. It’s a paperback … can you see that? That’s the Erdman text I was talking about. Big thick book, how much?
Student: $7.95.
AG: Boy, that’s a bargain. All of Blake for $7.95.
Student: That was 1970.
AG: That was the good old days. Primordial days of big bargains. You can probably get them second-hand this way now. They’re not so expensive. That’s about the best book you can buy if you’re a poet, I think.
Student: (The best?)
AG: Yeah. It’s even got pictures? So, well “macrocosm and microcosm”, but how will you apply that, sort of? Yeah, “as above, so below.”, I was saying too, before, or I’ve said, or Swedenborg said, but what does that mean? That … I guess there is a new mathematics that says that if you take any part of an object you can reconstruct the object from the DNA or something. There’s a formula for it.
Student: (It’s reducing it to the) essence, isn’t it? If there’s an essence then (all) parts of it contain that essence.
AG: That’s a kind of mystical way of looking at it. That if … that there’s some essence that’s both … but, yeah. You could say the DNA essence, or something. Okay, in any case, even the essence is simply the fact that it exists in a way, or its suchness, as they say in Buddhism – the fact that it has a certain kind of a substance, it is a substance; you know, the grain of sand is a substance and so you could be … you could predicate or you could predict the whole world by noticing, by examining the substance of quartz crystal that makes up a grain of sand. You can then infer a whole chemistry and then a whole world coming out of it. But it … I don’t think it means it in quite that scientific rational way. I think it means … or heaven in a wildflower, it’s a wild flower, too, by the way, not just a cultivated flower. So the second part is more abstract: “Infinity in the palm of your hand … Eternity in an hour.” Okay, he’s saying maybe, if you want to know eternity, you have to examine this hour – this here hour here. So this hour that we’re sitting in right now, 4:02 p.m., is already in eternity, or is a portion of eternity, ’cause where else could this hour be but situated in eternity? Otherwise you’d say, you’d have to say eternity, which is endless and infinite, is outside of this space, outside of this room, outside of this time. So you’d have to have a totally schizophrenic universe in which this was this, but eternity was somewhere else. But if eternity was somewhere else it couldn’t be eternity because it didn’t include this. So eternity, in order to be eternity, has got to include this. So, therefore, we’re a portion of eternity. So this is already in … we’re already in eternity. So then the question is how do you see this hour as the eternity. What kind of eyes, what kind of mind, what kind of thinking process or what kind of attitude, it’s mostly attitude, basically; you know, attitude? The latest fashion. Attitude? What kind of attitude you gotta got to see this period as eternity?
Student: It looks like a view from small to large and back again, having the ability to float.
AG: Okay. But how do you have the ability … okay, you can see eternity: We look out the window; that’s eternity, right? Big. Endless sky. Infinite. So you can say that definitely is it; it’s got all the qualities that we think of as eternal that goes beyond the mountains to the end of the universe. Just look out the window. You got it. This is the room. A room floating in that endlessness. But on the other side there’s endlessness over there, too. So we’re in the middle of endlessness. And there’s eternity back, I mean, there’s infinity back that way, and if you go to the other side of the building it’s infinitely that way and if you go up it’s infinitely up and I guess you go down through the earth and go through the other side it’s endless that way in that direction, too. And we’re floating right in the middle of it. So definitely in terms of space this is right in the middle of eternity. In terms of time you’ve got the same thing – there’s a past and there’s a future and we’re right in the middle of those. In terms of abolishing past and future and just being in the eternal present, well we certainly are in the eternal present, ’cause we’re present. But could we call it eternal? Well, nobody stopped it in the last two minutes so it must be, ’cause it’s ongoing. Therefore, it’s not going to stop until you maybe kick the bucket or something. So this must be, as far as space, this is eternity. But eternity means something to do with time? So how do we find one hour, we got an hour here, how do we find this as eternity? Well maybe I’m boring you all to death, so we could bore you to, so you feel that this is an endless hour that we can, that we’re never going to get out of, that’s hung up on eternity. On the other hand, there is a way of simultaneously seeing this certainly as the hour and it’s 4:03 now, or 4:04, but on the other hand this is the only hour of its kind that exists in all the universe right now, so this hour is the final hour in the sense that it’s the only one of its kind, and it has all the qualities of infinite-ness and vastness and spaciousness -so this must be it right now, or that’s why Ram Dass is always saying “Be here now.”
Student: So you’re just saying that by simply by defining this hour as eternity, that’s the sense of the (first part of the poem)?
AG: Well, once you define it as a eternity and take that stance and assume that posture, so to speak, then it, you look around a little bit and it looks like it, too. You know, with your visible eyes. Once you get the idea, once you get the idea and once get a clear idea how it could be that the word “eternity” applies to this ongoing continuum that you’re in the middle of right now, then, and you actually look around visually, you begin to look in people’s faces and see a kind of eternal stamp or mark on them, because they couldn’t be any other way than they are right now, so they’re final or absolute. So it has the qualities of finality, absoluteness … I mean, I don’t know if these … these are home-made eternity – you know, what is eternity? It’s absolute, it’s final, it’s ultimate, it’s … a secret place, sort of, but the secret is … somebody knows the secret. We all know the secret of eternity, I guess. Blake is saying we really know the secret of eternity and in order to recognize it face-to-face, hold eternity in an hour and infinity in the palm of your hand, is that convincing enough? I don’t know. I have delivered you a visionary moment, an epiphany. You’ll never forget this moment of being in eternity now. Don’t ever forget that at 4:08 p.m. on the 19th of April, 1991, we were all sitting here in this one room in eternity. And it will never happen again, until next week. Yes?
Student: Is there a possibility of looking at the hour as one complete cycle of (existence) that it (could be read as suggesting.. you might read it as..) many different cycles of eternity, but, like (this one hour) would be…
AG: I guess so. If you were high on acid you might. Or if you were thinking a lot. But I would settle for just this one. I’d settle for one at a time, one eternity is enough for me. Ordinary mind eternity. I mean, I’d settle for what you can get. Then, if, you know, it occurs to you that there might be cycles of hours, well, sure, I guess so. Besides, you don’t maintain this awareness all the time, anyway. It’s something that you return to. It’s sort of like a reference point or a home base that you go in and out of your daydream, then you come back to it. And part of the aspect of eternity is when you look at things under the aspect of eternity. You’re not necessarily thinking thoughts, you’re just observing the space and the pictures and the forms in space as they appear. As they appear now, before us, in our faces, so that it’s a question of attitude but then that attitude, beginning as a catalyst, but the attitude leads to appreciation, to actual appreciation.
Student (1): So what would you call the attitude (that allows you to) call this hour eternity?
AG: Simple-mindedness. Simple-minded.. [to Student (2)] What?
Student (2): (Isn’t it a perennial feeling?)
AG: Yeah. Well you can get this perennial feeling all the time. You know, there’s a certain feeling you get when you’re a kid and that’s recurrent throughout lifetime; like in that, there’s that great (William Carlos) Williams poem that I always loved, (“Thursday” “I have had my dream like other men but it has come to nothing, so that now I stand here, feet planted on the ground, looking up at the sky, feeling the weight of my body in my shoes, coat over my back, hat … passing … a hat … brim of my hat before my face, air passing in and out at my nose, and resolve to dream no more.”
[“I have had my dream – like others –/and it has come to nothing, so that/I remain now carelessly/with feet planted on the ground/ and look up at the sky –/ feeling my clothes about me,/the weight of my body in my shoes,/ the rim of my hat,/air passing in and out at my nose/– and decide to dream no more.”]
So he came back to himself. So, in a sense, you come … one comes back to oneself. We come back to ourself in this space, which is always the same. Another quality of eternity is spaciousness, space, space of spaciousness, vastness, in the mid.., we wake up in the … deep vast space and find we’re in the middle of the vast.. Shakespeare has a line: “In the dread vast and middle of the night.” That’s … in “Hamlet”. The ghost appears on the castle “in the dread vast and middle.” So we wake up in the vast and middle of space and realize, almost thoughtlessly, that here we are. And where else would we be but in this place and … well, that’s enough about eternity. That’s enough eternity.
to be continued