thoughts on blake and ginsberg

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

Prophecy, Blake, and the Divine Will

"We have such good lives!" -Gina

In our last conversation, Gina brought how we are a text oriented world, how everything is somehow a receptacle for virtual reality, an imagined space. We know from Blake that there is another, non-spatial world, one that is knowable, and in fact, we all know whether we know it or not. Fuck!  

But what of this located, spatial way of being? This is particularly our way of living.  For example, the location of what we call "consciousness," not thinking, but awareness of being, is typically in the cranium. Creating mind-spaces for what we think about is something we do self-consciously. The ancient Greeks (of Homer's ilk, not sure when) had a word that is close to "consciousness," but they located it in the chest, below the lungs, and called it a "thumos." A "thumos" was a will towards action, a receptacle for impetus and desire. When Achilles gets pissed off, for example, his thumos gets filled with rage by a God.  An ocean also has a "thumos," though, and so the term is broad and is a location of a natural consciousness.

So, for the Greeks, this thing called "awareness" is located in terms of desire and will towards action. This divine will is very similar to Blake's conception of "Poetic Genius," in "All Religions are One," of which the introductory text stipulates is "using 'poetic' in the original Greek sense of 'making' and 'Genius' in the Latin sense of 'guiding spirit.'" The literal mashing of "Making Guiding Spirit" leads logically to the "Spirit of Prophecy" which accounts for divisions in viewpoint. 

 

Blake says that this Genius was called an "Angel, Spirit, and Demon," and so the voice of a God is implicated, if not some variety of divine experience, to manifest the Genius. For the Greeks, a God was needed to fill the thumos. 

This relates to a fascinating theory by a fellow named Julian Jaynes, who wrote about the "Bicameral Mind" of ancient peoples, who, he argues, did not in fact have self-aware consciousness (thus, no 'self' as we think of it) and instead literally heard the voices of Gods in their heads, telling them what to do. As the idea of "self" as we know it emerged with complex civilizations and the rise of the individual, the voices disappeared. I would recommend his book highly, and you can read the first few pages on Amazon if you're interested. Check out the link.

We discussed in class the question of whether or not every person writes without self, or, instead, writes with a divine or prophetic hand. This is to say that Blake clearly writes in a way that is self-aware (that is, bodily, corporeal) and in contact with the divine (spiritual food, prophecy).

 Gina brought up bad, lust-driven devotional poems as evidence of someone working only in terms of the self, and not being in contact with the divine or with eternity. (I must beg pardon if I have misunderstood you, Gina.) My response to that idea is 'Principle 3d':

   "No man can think

   write or speak from his

heart but he must intend

truth. Thus all sects of

Philosophy are from the

Poetic Genius adapted 

to the weaknesses of 

every individual."

So, a bad love poem is still a poem that intends truth, if it speaks from the heart (or even if it doesn't, because the poet knows the truth. It is merely whether or not he decides to reveal it.) and it is thus also a product of Poetic Genius, the divine. No poem, person, place, thing, or *insert anything here* is exempt from divine status under Blake's cosmology, if I have read it right. Just because it does not address the divine conceptually does not exempt it from divine status. We discussed how in Genesis, God is given a voice, a way of acting, a desire, an impetus that is trumpeted by "Let there be light." This voice is like Blake's voice (one crying in the wilderness, too), emerging from chaos or void with a weakness, a philosophy perceived through longing. A world is built upon longing, grasping. A thumos filled with the divine can create nothing less. It also can't create anything, which is why Blake's conversation about the issue is so hard to interrogate.  

I will stop now, because I feel I risk abusing the class. Ginsberg puts it best I think when he describes his experience in the bookstore: Everybody gets it, everyone is divine, perfect (with a capital and lower case P, in all times and world systems), and made of the same substance. We just hide it for some reason, wearing masks. It struck me that Blake wrote: "On every face I see, I meet/ Marks of wearyness, marks of woe."

It's a good thing that wearyness and woe is also Poetic Genius, a full thumos, corporeal and spiritual food.

Thanks for reading, I hope I have been clear. 

-Willi  

  

the voice of one crying in the wilderness

"The Argument. As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of."


Marginalia:

What looms in the background? What robed figure behind the hands, which the hands might nearly touch? It is like a shrouded corpse propped against the frame. Faceless, it swells at the belly, pregnant, parting those two hard lines (of the robe) that flow from the prophet's palms into the lines that forge the river. An infant is about to birth from the corpse, to be plunged, crying out, into the river and drowned--but never arrives. Will never cry out.

And look at our prophet: his child's face, his delicate adolescent torso, his massive grown-up legs calves crossed in front of him--almost the centaur, though pawed, not hoofed--like his pair of sacrificial animals, his shepherd's herd, his open book, his set of engraved tablets. His golden calves!

And the source of the river? The water breaks like a voice from the seat of the prophet, a laboring font of pre-birth: water, excrement, blood. A river of waste. Much might be made of how this pre-birth wasteland is also the location of ritual cleansing--is also the baptism of the reader drowning in experience and trying her knowledge toward/against the real thing about to reveal itself beyond the frame. Revelation, too, about to arrive, never arrives. All is impending, and looms.

Here I am, reader, attempting to speak, a voice crying out, but the cry cannot sustain the cry. The cry is immediately more water, shit, and blood. More wilderness. So it is: I am the infant in the womb-tomb. As is the prophet. Who is also me.

The voice, the cry, the wilderness. A series of linear progressions, though not quite--for the sequence dissolves, one into another. A series of concentric womb-tomb frames, let us say: wilderness within cry, cry within voice, voice within the Poetic Genius, within me, within the Man-God on the cross, who is within the Baptist, who is within the Prophet Isaiah, who is within Ishmael the child, who is within the Genesis God: let there be, and there was. And back again.

All easily dismissed as the nettle of signification. Yet there is too much body in it to call it mere textual play. This is the problem with Lockean empiricism. It should point me toward the concentric likeness between body and symbol--which in Blake might even be the same thing--but instead it points me towards linearity. In Blake: less metonymy, more metaphor.

Metonymy: this --> that
Metaphor: this = that

***

fear founded the gods

Much of the critical world--about 200 overlapping years worth--has assumed William Blake's work is primarily (or straightforwardly) Christian; the other part--the 5 secular decades closer to us--argues that the only God Blake identifies in his writing is the one in the human imagination. These are not mutually exclusive positions in Blake. In fact, Blake reconciles religious communion to secular projection all over the place. Then there are those critics who decide to leave the question of gods and monsters behind entirely to write of the unprecedented strength of Blake's heroines or--alternatively--to write of Blake's misogyny and the limitations of his female allegories. Or they write histories, biographies, contexts, about Blake's politics, about Blake's revolutions, or they write about Blake's everyday lack of interest in politics, about his fear of sedition, or his fear of more bloodletting. Or they write about Blake's textual erasures, Blake's dissolving systems of signification, or about his textual "walls," or about his signs of negation, of annihilation. Or they write about his printing process, about his artistry, about his money. About his wife. Funny thing, too: since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the critical world has taken a reactionary turn towards a renewed interest in ethics and religion, and guess what? Blake is being claimed as a Christian poet again.

A couple of you have pulled me aside now, as though in secret. As though you and I share a confidence: "but what does Blake really believe?" This is a good question, a productive question, yes, if you're not too quick to grasp at what you see, given that the first thing you generally see in Blake is nothing more than yourself. What you believe Blake must believe. I wonder (genuinely): until I've identified what I believe Blake must believe because I believe it myself, can I do more than grasp at my own reflection in these texts? Is my mistaking myself for Blake an act of possession Blake would choose to expose? Am I feeding the finite Ratio?

***

Here is a slice from Geoffrey Hartman’s article, “‘Was it for this...?’ Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods,” a really gorgeous example of critical lore that summons the atheist from Blake without squelching the believer:

An old dictum runs that fear founded the gods. The eighteenth century produced a number of sophisticated genealogies expounding the idea. "It was fear,” Vico remarks, “which created gods in the world, not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves.” That fear, interpreted as self-astonishment, is then connected with figurative language, or with the idiom of our ancestors the giants. Blake also linked fear to figuration, though of a distorted kind. His visionary poems show a continual theogony whose ‘big bang’ is the self-astonishment of an imagination that shrinks from its own power and then abdicates it to the priests. By this recession it also produces the void described in the first lines of Genesis, and a God who has to create something from that nothing. Our present religiously reduced imagination continues to exnihilate creation, that is, to understand created nature as the product of a creator who has raised it from nothing (ex nihilo). The result is a flawed image of power that has inscribed itself in domestic, political, and religious institutions--it has become a second nature, and frozen the hierarchy of human and divine. (emphasis mine, 15-6)

***