Blake might be the lion in The Little Lost Girl. I’m afraid he is laying under my bed with a knife. I’m afraid of him like the boys who are honking their horns in the loading dock outside and throwing their shoes the windows where they see shadowed shapes of women. I’m afraid of Blake’s capacity to disrupt me. To disturb me, to break glass with a hard heel. To push up his knife through the mattress and make me face a reality that hums under all words and in all silence but never speaks outright, to make me feel or refeel wonderterrors I’ve known in life or dreaming. Blake is the lion with his teeth against the innocent, unseeing about to make me (us) further, bloody with the woes of a deep and expanding universe. I wonder if blake had a wife. I think no, a monk of a man. What if Blake’s visits me in my sleep? What if Allen Ginsberg does? Maybe everyone isn’t asking for this revelation, boys. And even if I am, does it have to be with ruby tears on necks? Does the wisdom have to destroy us? Maybe its good to be destroyed by it. Break the windows. Maybe Blake says to see (And we want to see and constantly crave seeing and long and long and long and when we are alone with ourselves we feel a profound empty without it) we have to put everything on the table or that there wouldn’t even be a table if everything wasn’t already on it. Stab up through the mattress. Make a new space unconstructed, equal parts wonder and terror where we can see everyone as one or as a “pleading cousin in the universe.” Or angels. Or hands that built the gargoyles and are the gargoyles. A new space not lost in the “other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds.” Or, heaven forbid, Allen Ginsberg worlds, Zen Buddhism worlds or Blake worlds. Sorry to geek out but its cool to listen to Ginsberg's The Sunflower Sutra or Footnote to Howl now and see all the Blake there. at moments in those poems it seems like a direct conversation with blake.
Thanks Emily
ps. i'm bad at the internet. i don't know if this will work
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2 comments:
So, wow. I'm probably going to stray away from some of this, but you've got so much going on in this post I don't know where to start.
On Lyca and waking and knives through the mattress: Ginsberg says that while reading Little Girl Lost he realized "Lyca was me, or Lyca was the self; father, mother seeking Lyca, was God seeking, Father the Creator." And even though he frames this realization as a visionary epiphany, I think a lot of it is there in the poem.
There was at least a mention of Lyca's self being fragmented in class, I think. But there's a weird sort of appearing act that a narrator does that makes her seem fragmented in a specific way, a way similar to what Ginsberg seems to be talking about.
There are three I's, (or two I's and a Me,) in Little Girl Lost. There's the one at the start that we talked about. Then, when the poem goes on, Lyca's mother and the narrator's mother become merged and confused "How can Lyca sleep/If her mother weep[...]If my mother sleep/Lyca shall not weep." The narrator becomes Lyca and acts with her just a few minutes later "I close my eyes/Sleeping Lyca lay." There's also the fragmenting of Lyca at the end, as lioness and maid.
So, with the Little Girl's identity so divided, she might be the narrator, the subject, the reader, Blake, Ginsberg or a lioness at any time. Or she might be existing at the intersection of all of those.
To end with a question: If this is true what does it mean for us as readers when we got through this experience with her? Is she reflecting something on us, or vice versa, or both?
Blake did have a wife. she helped him with engravings I think.
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