Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence continued from here
AG: It’s nice to see these aphoristic couplet rhymes of Blake moving visibly in our world, applicable and relevant and indicating the right way to think – how to see relationships.
“He who mocks the Infant’s Faith/ Shall be mock’d in Age & Death/ He who shall teach the child to doubt/the rotting grave shall ne’er get out”
In other words, you know, you doubt, you tell some kid that “Ah, you’re a shit,” you’ll doubt yourself, and then you go to your grave and you’ll get scared before you die.
“He who respects the Infant’s faith/ Triumphs over Hell & Death”.
Just a good nature and generosity of respecting the infant’s faith, is the good nature and generosity that’ll bring you to the grave in good state, triumphing over hell and death. What is hell and death? Hell is a projection of your own feelings, projection of your own animosity. Anger, faithlessness, diss, disrespect. Hell is a projection of your own disrespect for yourself, and the phenomenal world.
Student: (Doesn’t he mean the infant is subjected to hell?)
AG: Pardon me?
Student: The infant’s life would become hell and death if his faith wasn’t respected?
AG: No. No, the infant’s faith triumphs over hell and death, and respect for the infant’s faith triumphs over that self-doubt, lack of self-empowerment, that would lead you on your death bed to get scared and be afraid of hell, rather than focus your consciousness and your attentions on that quality of openness and faith that led you to relate to the kid in a very nice way, instead of saying, “Fuck you, you kid with your little baby squalling about ‘you want, you want, you want.’ Fuck you! I’m not going to cuddle you!”
“The Child’s Toys and the Old Man’s Reasons/Are the fruits of the two Seasons”.
Two different seasons. “The Child’s Toys and the Old Man’s Reasons/Are the fruits of the two Seasons.” Well, you know, like the old man, the old guys in the club, what is it? The old Skull.. Anybody reading about the Skull, the Skull & Bones Society in Yale? It’s the secret CIA society. Apparently they get the male-bonding into the CIA by telling all their sex lives to each other in great detail. It’s coming out in the New York Times, and they don’t want to admit women because they’d have to tell all these stories with women around, so, so, so the younger generation has decided they’re gonna admit women to the Skull & Bones Society which is the big secret society at Yale that John Foster Dulles belonged to, that George Bush belongs to. It’s the CIA nesting ground. So, the old guys, the old alumni, have taken the key away from these younger kids that are running it that wanna admit women and have closed down lest they find out the secrets. So these are the “Old Man’s Reasons”. “(“The Child’s Toys & the Old Man’s Reasons…”). . those were the old … the old Skull & Bones reasons, are “the fruits of the two seasons”.
Now here’s one that I always liked. Some friend of Burroughs and Kerouac and mine always liked that:
“The Questioner who sits so sly/Shall never know how to Reply.”
That’s an indication of a psychological archetype – that questioner that sits so sly. You know, he’s sitting there, sneering all the time, with a … trying to confound you with some sly question, “Well, I heard, what, you don’t know what he’s talking about. I know more than you do about that. You really think you’re in love, huh?” “The questioner who sits so sly/Shall never know how to reply.”
“He who replies to words of doubt/ Doth put the light of Knowledge out”
Now, what’s that? You get into a big argument about, “But it’s spring, I tell ya, it’s spring.” “Ahh, I don’t like spring.” “But it’s spring, I’m telling you.” When you get.. when you have to transfer your enthusiasm to some hyper-rationalization to win an argument, it ain’t worth it – “Doth put the light of Knowledge out.”
“The strongest poison ever known/Came from Caesar’s laurel crown”
That is, the authoritarian – tyranny.
“Nought can deform….” Now, this is a great one! And this is immediately visible and
applicable in the 20th Century in the military. “Nought can deform the Human Race/Like to the Armour’s iron brace.” Just think what the armours, the brace, you know, on the body, what, (I imagine that, suit of armor, bracing, just deforming the body), just think how the military industrial has deformed the face of America, and deformed the world. Not, “Nought can deform the Human Race” – whole race now he’s got in it, deformed by war. “Nought can deform the Human Race/Like to the Armours iron brace/When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow…”
“When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow/To peaceful Arts shall Envy bow”
In other words, if all that money was put in, put into the family farms and it was considered honorable and artistic and honorific and you had beautiful plows, like you have beautiful shoeshine boxes in, where was that?, Turkey? .(you ever see the shoeshine boxes in Turkey? – exquisite little tiny cathedrals that you put your foot on, made of hammered metal and gold, and wrought with all sorts of beautiful.. (it) looks like some sort of little altar box, and they’re shoeshine boxes, and they take beauty in it, actually). But if we, if we paid attention to ecology and put all our gold and gems into reconstructing our earth..envy.. other people wanting to be big macho power-heads would bow then to that, would get interested in that, if all our psychological honorific attention were laid on honest labor, then the more distorted-minded or perverse among us might be induced to envy work, instead of destruction.
to be continued