Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cezanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

Abstract

In 1948 Allen Ginsberg was completing his last year as a student of literature at Columbia University. The previous summer he had experienced several visionary illuminations under the spiritual guidance of what he perceived as the poet William Blake's raised-fromthe-dead, spectral voice. Ginsberg had heard a God-like, cosmic voice; his body had become suffused with supernatural light; and he had, willingly or not, undergone extraordinary, irreversible changes in his personality and his powers of understanding. One of the many vows he had taken that fateful summer (the mystical experiences were interspersed over several vision-haunted weeks) was the dedication of himself to the investigation of unusual modalities of consciousness. In particular, he wanted to explore states of mind that helped alter one's mundane perception and habits of thought. He began then, at twenty-two, a pursuit of mind-altering experiences that would come to have profound impact-not only on his own psychology, but also on his poetry and poetics.2 This was Ginsberg's state of mind when he enrolled in Professor