June 1996 Book Proposal by Allen Ginsberg to City Lights for a Proposed Book on William Blake Edited by Randy Roark
As poet, I was influenced a lot by William Blake. I’ve known some of Blake’s books, like Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, since I was ten years old, because my father taught him at school. I know a lot of his poems by heart.
In 1948, when I was 22 years old, I was living in East Harlem on 121st Street and 1st Avenue, on the 6th floor. I’d finished with Columbia and Neal Cassady had gone west and given up on me, and Jack Kerouac was away, and William Burroughs was down south in New Orleans or Mexico. I was bereaved and alone and eating vegetables and reading St. John of the Cross and Plato and Blake, and had just jacked off. The particular poetry I was reading was Blake’s “The Sun-flower” and “The Sick Rose,” which have rhyme and rhythm. And I had an episode of what seemed to be almost psychedelic consciousness without drugs, without marijuana, without anything except vegetables and solitude. What happened was I had an audition of a very deep voice reciting three poems: “Ah! Sun-flower, then “The Sick Rose,” and then “The Little Girl Lost.” There was the sound of a voice that didn’t seem to be coming from inside my head but seemed to be a voice in the room, although nobody was there, and recognizably Blake, simply from the “Ancient of Days” feeling about it. I think I associated it with a god or some prophet.
At the same time, there was outside my window a sense of extraordinary clear light. An everyday sunlit afternoon but with extraordinary clarity, as if the light itself was some bright intelligent substance revealing all of the handiwork of the Ancient of Days or of time or of the workmen of ancient days. The first thing I noticed outside the window were the cornices of the buildings. They were from late 19th-century or early 20th-century apartments, and in those days there were quite a bit of handwork and chiseled pediments or friezes, with special metal artwork for the drains, and little roof overhangs done in slight Greek or Roman style with cornucopias or cornices, although I don’t know the exact architectural terms. It was the first time I looked at them carefully and they were silhouetted against the bright light of the sky. The sky light seemed endless and blue, and standing up in eternity—somewhat as in the paintings of Paul Klee or the magic squares when you see them in 3-D—were the giant foundations and buttresses of the building’s cornices.
I suddenly realized that an enormous amount of conscious intelligence had gone into the building. A great deal of care, a great deal of planning, a great deal of love—in the sense of people putting their bodies to work six flights up in the air, creating these sculptures—that nobody ever noticed. I knew that I had never paid any attention to them and they weren’t even really visible from the street, but I suddenly saw them as signs calling for my attention—that people were signaling to me from 1890 with intelligible comments. Thousands upon thousands of anonymous workmen from all over New York in 1890 had made intelligible comments all along the building tops of the city. Street after street was topped by all of this concretized intelligence made out of metal. Intelligence in the sense of writing for the eyes—signals that the workmen had been there and they were quite conscious and had carved these structures that they knew hardly anyone would ever see and yet they would be available in eternity for people to look at fifty or sixty years later. It had never occurred to me that people were that full of wisdom, or that there was so much transmission of consciousness in material forms throughout the civilized world, and not just in museums but all around us if we knew how to look.
And then I looked beyond them at the clouds passing over, and they too seemed to be created by some hand, or to be conscious signals like the cornices. Signals of some kind of intelligence but an intelligence much vaster and far-reaching than a workman’s hand, because there was the accumulation of energy and suffering and consciousness that included all the sentient beings who had died and their blood drying and evaporating and being drawn up into the sky and raining down into the oceans and the oceans being drawn up again into the skies and forming clouds that had drifted over New York city to drop again as rain. An enormous amount of work had gone into creating these clouds—millions and billions of years of work to make the structure of the entire planet, of the solar system that I was sitting in the middle of. I looked beyond the cornices into the sky and the sky itself seemed to be a creation of a great ancientness and much vaster than anything I had ever thought of as poetry. And I had the impression of the entire universe as one poem, filled with light and intelligence and communicating via signals. It was as if the top of my head came off and it let in the rest of the universe, directly connected into my brain.
I said to myself at the time, “Now that I have seen this heaven on earth, I will never forget it and I’ll never stop referring all things to it, and I’ll never stop considering it the center of my human existence and the center of my life, which is now forever changed—I am now flung over the boundary line into a new world, and I’ll never be able to go back, and from now I will remember that I have been chosen, that I have been blessed, that I am a sacred poet, and that this is my sunflower and this is my new mind and I’ll be faithful to this vision for the rest of my life and I’ll never forget it and I’ll never deny it and I’ll never renounce it.”
As the vision faded, or the actuality of it faded, there was nothing left but the memory, and I kept trying to go back into my memory and reconstitute the vision by staring at cornices or at trees or by thinking that I could somehow recatalyze it or take drugs to catalyze it. And L.S.D. did approximate that sensation of eternity.
So I revolved around the corpse of that vision for years, but it came to an abrupt end within a week. And me to the conclusion within ten minutes of the original visionary experiences that any rationcination or thinking about them would automatically interpose a screen between my own consciousness and open reality and fill it with thought, and I would be substituting memory of the vision for the vision itself.
Then there were several other episodes, which I won’t describe, and a final breakthrough n which I was walking around the Columbia College campus at night trying to re-experience my vision with the text of “The Sick Rose” in my head: “Oh rose thou art sick.” And I had a distinct impression that the vast conscious sky that I had glimpsed earlier in the week had now turned on me and was going to eat me up and that I was going to be devoured by this—that the enormous power of consciousness spread throughout the universe had taken a dislike to me, so to speak; or that now that it had noticed me, it was going to call me into it so that I , as Allen Gisnberg, was going to disappear and be absorbed into this giant octopus of consciousness. That’s a pretty common experience in acid trips, and it’s a common visionary experience as well, and it’s completely real—you realize that your individual eyeball consciousness is going to die and be absorbed into a much larger over-intelligence. But at the time I thought I was going crazy and repeating some pattern my mother had gone through. So I decided not to invoke any powers that I couldn’t deal with.
Then to jump ahead to 1973 in London—I was with William Burroughs on St. Jams Street and he said, “Anybody who makes an impression on you is a vampire.” And in a dream later that night I was looking out of a mullioned pub window in London, and I had an uncanny feeling of some vampire walking down the street and approaching me and as I looked out of the window there was this long-haired, balding, rounded moon face figure with black circles under his eyes, fanged but with human teeth and a malevolent expression on his face and it was William Blake, come to get me again. So I said, “Ah, at last!” And then thought that I’d go out and get that bastard and check him out. “Vampire, eh? He’s been feeding on my consciousness long enough.” And when I went out to confront him, he got scared and ran away and didn’t want to be revealed. And that was the end of my dream.
The interesting thing to me is that the voice I heard as Blake’s voice was very deep and basso, and my voice at the time was much higher. And much later the voice that I heard was something that I actually approximated when I sang my own “Father Death Blues”—that very deep quiet heart voice, relatively tender. I think all the mantra chanting I did through the Sixties deepened my voice so that it sank deeper and deeper into my body and down from my throat into my heart area.
I think what I experienced in 1948 was some auditory premonition of my own latent physiology. But at the time I was never able to figure out whether I was having a religious experience or an hallucinatory experience or exactly what I was experiencing. I knew it was the deepest experience I had ever had in my life, and I also knew that it determined my karma as a poet. It’s the pivotal experience in my existence on earth.
And that’s why I was so hung up on trying to set Blake to music. That was the inspiration, because Blake was the catalytic poet who turned me on to the fact that poetry could actually waken people’s consciousness because it completely changed my attitude toward poetry. I realized it was possible to reproduce in a poem some body rhythm which, if inserted in another person’s body, would catalyze a similar experience, because that’s what happened to me. And that sometimes seems to be the effect of my own poetry other people, to waken some awareness of a vastness or a feeling of the depth of space.
But I also wound up in the bughouse for about eight months a year later, so I wouldn’t trust my authority on this. My relationship to this vision has been quite intimate in that way and traumatic. One the whole, as far as I’m concerned, it’s been a shot in the arm since I was young—no matter what else. Whether it was an auditory hallucination or a real vision or whatever it was, it was, in any case, an event.
Then in 1968, I went down from San Francisco to visit Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos. There’s a poem of mine called “On Neal’s Ashes” which is a record of that visit, of opening the wooden container from Mexico City which had a silken bag full of his ashes. I opened the box and touched my finger inside and then looked in and there was all this black and white cinder with a little rough stuff in it, pieces of bone that were burnt and blackened. So I said, “Oh, so that’s what happened to Neal Cassady.” It seemed magical that he’d disappeared and transformed into this tiny pound of gritty ashes. But it was definitive as his death. I realized it had all come to that. I hadn’t seen him for a number of years and his disappearance was no big deal until I actually saw the remains of his body.
And then later on the bus ride up the Bay Shore Highway going back to San Francisco, I kept hearing a strange angelic voice in my inner ear reciting Blake’s poem on the French Revolution:
Fayette, Fayette, thou art bought & sold
And sold as the happy morrow
Thou givest the tears of pity away
In exchange for the tears of sorrow
And I couldn’t figure out whether that was coming from my unconscious as a signal to myself—that I had been bought and sold—or if it was about Cassady for having died too early so to speak, or that had copped out too early or gone underground too early. Or if it was about myself for having survived.
Later, when I got to San Francisco, I went looking for the poem and found Blake’s poem “The Grey Monk” and I heard a tiny, piping, sweet, innocent, adolescent, angelic voice singing:
… vain the Sword & vain the Bow
They never can work Wars overthrow
And that began the first bit of Blake that I set to music. I was on my way to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and I arrived with that tune in my head. When I got there I ran into the folksinger Phil Ochs and I sang it to him under a tree and he said, “Go ahead and sing it as your speech.” So I sang it in Lincoln Park and later I saw my FBI file on it which said “Allen Ginsberg got up and read some gibberish and incomprehensible poetry.”
After the Democratic Convention, I went back to my farm in Cherry Valley, New York, in a state of shock from seeing the bare skull of the Police State enforced to preserve the war. After the teargas police riot, the only thing I could think of that made any sense was to transcend all the war horror and snakepit of politics with Blake’s lyric, “Vain the Sword and vain the Bow.”
So I began setting Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” to music. The first one I tried was “Introduction” from “Songs of Experience.” Then I set “The Sick Rose” and “The Lamb.” This farm had no electricity, but I had an old church pump organ and I stayed up three nights in a row, inspired, setting Blake’s tunes to the one chord I knew. In the middle of the process I discovered that there was a second chord—that was a big breakthrough for me. I had been doing monochordal mantras for years to the point where I was really good at it. I’d sung mantras in the mid-Sixties at Charlie Mingus’s wedding, at a time when a lot of jazz musicians were picking up on Indian music and exploring all the varieties within a limited series of notes. And in one night I wrote, sketched out, and recorded on an old Uher tape recorder almost all of the tunes that I would work out and notate over the next year. I think I set about 30 of the 45 songs. Someday, if somebody will fund it, I want to record the entirety of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” and a few other of Blake’s lyrics—to get the whole thing recorded as a project for teaching Blake in high schools and grammar schools.
Then in 1969, I first recorded Blake’s songs with a lot of good musicians. I learned how to play harmonium in order to do this. It has a bellows and pedal like a field organ or pump organ or a non-electric church organ. By 1971, I’d recorded a lot of them with Bob Dylan and friends and musicians such as Charlie Mingus, Don Cherry, and Elvin Jones—jazz musicians and folk musicians. The Blake album was issued by MGM in 1969. It’s long out-of-print, but some of those were anthologized in “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” box-set released by Rhino Records in 1994.
By 1978, I had had a lot of experience with Blake’s songs but had never read his prophetic books, so I went off with a friend and spent several weeks doing nothing but reading Blake for two weeks, eight hours a day. I carefully read through the entire The Poetry and Prose of William Blake and annotated it by S. Foster Damn’s A Blake Dictionary and Erdman’s Prophet Against Empire. Then I taught Blake at Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, which is a Buddhist school. My idea was to teach Blake line-by-line from beginning to end in a series of terms. I got through five terms until everyone had graduated and there was nobody left who understood what we were talking about anymore. The new people who came in hadn’t had the experience of the early explanations and figuring things out. So I got as far as his next-to-last big work, “Vala, The Seventh Night,” or “Vala, or the Four Zoas” as it’s more commonly referred to. Since then I’ve taught Blake at different places and at different times, including at Hebei Baoding China in 1984, and at Brooklyn College. These lectures have now been collected and transcribed by Randy Roark, and I hope to publish them as a book someday.
Please Leave a Comment: