BEYOND REASON: ALLEN GINSBERG’S CULTURAL AND COMMUNICATIVE REVIVAL OF WILLIAM BLAKE
BEYOND REASON: ALLEN GINSBERG’S CULTURAL AND COMMUNICATIVE REVIVAL OF WILLIAM BLAKE

Summary/Abstract: The present paper uses Jan Assmann’s acceptance of cultural and communicative memory, intertwining them in order to attest the cultural and communicative revival of William Blake’s spiritual vision in the context of Allen Ginsberg’s conceptualization of post-war, American hyper-rationalization and the moulding of his Beat(ific) counterculture. Just as the English bard had had visions of his poetic predecessors, Ginsberg hallucinated of “Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war” and had a life-changing auditory experience that marked his calling to be a prophet. Blake’s Ginsbergian revival is both communicative and cultural because on the one hand it is inspired by a vision, a prophetic direct connection with the English bard that verbally communicated his personal representation of the past and on the other hand, Blake’s prophecies and influential literary writings render him a specialized bearer of memory and a shaper of cultural memory. As the destructive, egocentric, single-minded use of reason travels from Urizen to Moloch and from the Age of Reason to the Cold War years, so does the need to poetically prophesize the downfall of people who let themselves bound my “mind-forged manacles” and consequently forget about their inherent and infinite divinity. Echoing William Blake, yet adapting the poet’s philosophy to the cultural context of mid twentieth century America, Allen Ginsberg denounces the sleep of reason and the destructive power of the science of despair built upon the machinery of reason, as well as the resulted proneness towards egocentrism, materialism and conformism at the detriment of visionary imagination, spontaneity and spirituality.

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