------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 100 Today's Topics: Re: Thel -Reply -Reply -Reply -Reply+++Tom Dacre is Innocent Re: LYCA -Reply+ ====Unity in Blake blake and biblical hermeneutics -Reply Re:Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply Re: Re:Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply assistance w/ quotation Re: LYCA Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply Re: Re: Eternity and Pictures BLAKE SIGHTING: CLR JAMES Re: LYCA -Reply ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 09:35:54 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu Subject: Re: Thel -Reply -Reply -Reply -Reply+++Tom Dacre is Innocent Message-Id: >>> J. Michael 7/August/1996 03:23pm >>> Dear Pam, I heartily agree on the wider connotations of the terms "virgin" and "harlot," but wouldn't you agree that the terms themselves grow out of a Urizenic view in which the "comminglings" of delight are limited by the body and therefore must be govered by moral codes? So to refer to someone as a virgin implies mortality, though it doesn't prove it, of course. ******************* No, I don't see things quite that way. Rather, I see Urizen's major mistake is in misinterpreting the holy loves of Innocence as `unnatural consanguinities' (as implied in The Book of Urizen) and therefore deeming Jerusalem a `harlot ( for the very reason that she commingles her soft, expansive fibres with all who love her and desire unity with her in Eternity) ' and casting her out of Albion's bosom as a miscreant. He adopts a moral stance more stringent than God himself who only warns spirits to be wary of the dangers inherent in `Sleep'. **************************** >The words you quote from the end of "Visions of the Daughters of >Albion", re the worm releasing the soul from the rotting body in my >opinion suggest that the released soul can once again disport itself in >`palaces of eternity' - and so are perfectly consistent with the view >expressed in The Book of Thel in which even the lowly Worm is seen as >having a divine utility and capacity to be of service to others. Exactly. That's why I don't understand the reading of the vales of Har as a place free from death: the worm can't do its job without death. ***** Because the VAles of Har are imprinted in my imagination as not of this world, I do not see an earthly worm when the Clod of Clay speaks of protecting and nourishing the Infant Worm, but when Thel looks into the `grave' which will receive her remains after a mortal incarnation she (because she still retains sufficient Innocence to do so, perhaps?) hears its small voice declaring its utility on earth in that it has a very importatnt role to play despite its seeming insignificance. The question you raise is , however, more complex as it also impinges on whether Blake might not have seen that EVEN in the realms of Innocence of Beulah `death' exists. And here, I think that, even before spirits become incarnate, `death' does exist. The spiritual forms of the Lily of the Valley Do get eaten by spiritual cows and the `Cloud' weds the Dew so that the forms of both undergo a transformation like `Death-to Self' - but after these `Deaths', each essential Essence is renewed in God's love. At least, this is how I see Blake so that the seeming contradictions tend to vanish. ********* >I see all the children in the "Songs' as being real children. Don't quite >understand the problem here. I somehow got the impression that you were reading Innocence as a prenatal, pre-embodied state. But I don't mean to drive this issue into the ground. **** I do read Innocence as a pre-natal state and post-mortem state, but children are not necessarily born into this world lacking all innocence , nor all memory of their divine origins as the caterwauling resistance of the babe in "Infant Sorrow" indicates. It is outraged by what it has lost and the indignities of what awaits him on earth. I think Blake saw that those who believe in love, despite the hardships of their lot on earth are truly innocent - like Tom Dacre in "The Chimney Sweepery" Song of Innocence. Yet, and I find this really hurts , there are critics who think Blake is being ironic when he evokes an Angel who tells Tom to be a `good boy' as if this moral Angel is of the Urizenic sort. Yet, clearly he isn't. He is simply reassuring the child that love and faith are , indeed, virtues and that the true God (not the Urizenic travesty of this worshipped on earth) will reward spiritual beauty.+ Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 09:05:56 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, c557506@showme.missouri.edu Subject: Re: LYCA -Reply+ ====Unity in Blake Message-Id: Darlene asks whether BLake expects his poetry to be seen as a coherent whole. (If I'm misrepresenting in this paraphrase, please forgive me - I still don't know how you all quote what others say other than by repeating the whole message and then deleting what you don't want ... please help if you know better!) I wonder if the following helps, or would be more confusing: In his notes on Homer's Poetry, (Keynes 778), Blake writes: Every Poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity ..... when a work has , it is as much in a Part as in the Whole. I personally find this so true of Blake's ouevre that whenever I try to teach the smallest portion, I find I have to see the whole myth of the Fall as backdrop, properly to elucidate. It truly is as if each ` golden thread' proferred inevitably leads back to the `Gate' in `Jerusalem's wall'. However, Blake also sees the downside of too pat a unity (such as is found in neat TV Stories which have a sentimental moral neatly tagged to each episode?): He adds: "Unity is the cloke of folly....Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer " (or in anything else could be added?) "come out with a Moral like a sting in the tail". Then Blake adds: "It is the same with the Moral of a whole Poem as eith the Moral Goodness of its parts. Unity and Morality are secondary considerations, & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry, to Exception & not to Rule, to Accident & not to Substance; the Ancients call'd it eating of the tree of good & evil.' I think the word "Morality' was like a red rag to a bull to Blake and that here he is eschewing any restraint on his creative freedom and any attempt by the philosophical Greeks to prescribe what Art may or may not be. I think he also implies that he will only trust his Inspiration as this alone can reveal `Sacred Truth' as opposed to the rational truths of this world. He adds in "On Virgil": `Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome, ... so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend, were destroyers of all Art. Homer, Virgil & Ovid confirm this opinion & make us reverence The Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War'. Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 11:02:02 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, rwagner@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu Subject: blake and biblical hermeneutics -Reply Message-Id: Dear Rachel, David Worrall's email is english@smuc.demon.co.uk. and he would know of people willing to help you if he himself can't - probably. Your thesis sounds interesting and if , in researching, you come across new insights into possible sources for Blake's knowledge of kabbalistic symbols, I'd be interested. I have developed my own ideas in a book I'm writing on Blake and Kabbalah. Have thought of putting up the first chapter on-line or on a web-site, but don't know if this would be wise as am still looking for a publisher of my work. Pam ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 07:02:47 -0400 From: WaHu@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re:Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply Message-Id: <960808065834_379895737@emout14.mail.aol.com> The main "influence" or "inspiration" for Thel has got to be the fabulous prose passage in Milton (The Real Man, John M., not the Imagi-Milton) about untempted virtue not being worth a warped Lawrence Welk CD. Can the poet who wrote active evil is better than passive good and wishes he'd been a whore really be saying it is better to stay in some slapdash sheperdess' seraglio (the Thel landscape is a pretty amusing faux-Pope-Watteau stage set) than be born? Oh no, never can it be. As the frenchman said, There is another world, but it is in this one. Hugh Walthall wahu@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 09:21:20 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Re:Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply Message-Id: <96080809212058@womenscol.stephens.edu> I agree with Hugh entirely about the likely importance of Milton's rejection of "fugitive and cloistered virtue" in relation to Thel. The notion that Blake would promote a retreat into the vales of Har strikes me as dependent on a closed-in reading of _Book of Thel_, entirely ignoring its relationships with other Blake texts as well as other texts Blake knew. Of course it is never wise to ignore Blake's habit of ironic reversals,and we could argue that Thel is in the company of Eve at the tree or Dalila with her compatriots, confronted with difficult choices; we might even place her with the Jesus of _Paradise Regained_, but his serene moral heroism would certainly not serve as a friendly foil to Thel's panicky retreat. I am also startled to see "Innocence" proposed as an all-encompassing state of perfection with "Experience" depicted as a fall into an enclosed and miserable condition. This strikes me as not surprising in the context of a kabbalistic or gnostic reading of Blake, but hardly seems a Blakean reading of Blake. I don't mean to suggest that Blake typically uttered a "nihil humanum," but his ability to encompass all (lowercase) experience in his thought militates against the exclusionary notions of Innocence we are seeing here. Tom Dillingham ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 12:12:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Nelson Hilton To: blake@albion.com Subject: assistance w/ quotation Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII If anyone has to hand the author, title, and page for the assertion that WB was "England's last great religious poet" (or words nearly identical), I would be grateful for the reference. Thanks! Nelson Hilton -=- English -=- University of Georgia -=- Athens Was ist Los? "Net of Urizen" or "Jerusalem the Web"? http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 14:33:55 EDT From: joelmw@juno.com (Joel M Wasinger) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: LYCA Message-Id: <19960808.123129.1999.1.joelmw@juno.com> > There doesn't seem to be concern about the values or meanings in > individual poems as much as a concern with working it into its place in his > system. > > Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but does it > cause us to miss some of the aesthetic values and other meanings > of--at least--some of his poems? I humbly agree with Darlene, that the poems should (at least also) be taken individually and that there is perhaps an obsession with the system in Blake scholarship. Moreover, would not the blakean response to the blakean system be to satirize it, then create one's own, self-annihilating all the way? My sense is that Blake would no more condone an angelic regurgitation, stratification, calcification of his own system than of any other. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to gain insight into what is an eloquent architecture in itself, a massive poetry of a mythology worthy of it's own individual recognition. The system, the person, the act. The tension, the conflict, the intellectual battle. It seems that part of Blake's agenda is to get us to see the act as well as the system and to venture into creation oneself, in the moment and on the grand scale. It's easy to bow down to an imagination as great as Blake's, but it's a far better thing to honor and contend with it. In that interest, I think it may be necessary to yank a poem a bit out of the structure, maybe to see it in light of forces beyond Blake (god [whichever one you like] forbid), even to brazenly appropriate it violently into a new context. It's one thing to recognize the author, another to stay confined in his manacles (no matter how artfully-crafted and compelling) -- manacles perhaps loosened in that author's own epiphany of poem. This forum is generally very open and creative (indeed, in each writer's own articulation of the system and recognition of those other forces), but Darlene has highlighted a proclivity with troubling implications. I don't think that my little diatribe is directly relevant to the current discussion, but there's a certain consistency there, no? Thanks for letting me babel (which, he says hopefully, is somewhere on the road to pentecost). joel ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 00:17:05 -0400 From: WaHu@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Thel-Thel -Reply -Reply Message-Id: <960809001704_595363692@emout14.mail.aol.com> Yes Tom, I mulled it over myself whether or not Blake was doing a full frontal single Milton Flip-- but no. What cloistered virtue would Blake ever endorse? Prudence? Incapacity? But then, there is a sense in which Blake's own life vis a vis THIS WORLD is similar to Thel's Blanche DuBois schtick. Blake is afraid of life in EXACTLY the ways John Milton was not--Milton was tireless propogandist (and Secretary of State [i.e. Tongues]) for a bloody left-wing government--Blake says Parliament is something other than human life. (And in so doing elicits from Frye the only sharp rebuke I can recall him making "Really Billy, you've gone too far.") Hugh Walthall wahu@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 15:46:50 -0700 From: "Charlie K." To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Re: Eternity and Pictures Message-Id: <199608102245.PAA02367@gost1.indirect.com> Hugh Walthall wrote: > Infinity and Eternity are not important concepts anymore. They are > names of perfumes. Ever departed from your ego long enough to experience something that seems to fill a lot of time but actually doesn't take up much linear time as we conceive it? Like staring at the stars on a clear night and losing yourself a bit in the beauty of it all. Such is an experience of eternity. The things that exist independent of time. The Human ego only seems to exist within time... in fact it seems to *depend* on time and with it space. I feel that Blake's visionary/mystical/religious experiences were the sort where he experienced significant ego reduction/loss accompanied by a glimpse into eternity. Ego reduction/control is central to many religious teachings. All mentions of death are really references to the death of one's ego. The spirit & the life force exist eternally. Charlie ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 20:52:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: BLAKE SIGHTING: CLR JAMES Message-Id: <199608110352.UAA19443@igc2.igc.apc.org> SMALL WORLD: C.L.R. JAMES & WILLIAM BLAKE AGAIN Baum, Joan. MIND-FORG'D MANACLES: SLAVERY AND THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS. North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1994. Note preface, pp. ix-xi. keywords: Black Jacobins; Blake, William; slavery in literature; English literature--slavery; Romantic poets After buying this book for my background research on William Blake and Romanticism, I was stunned to read in the preface that this book was inspired by THE BLACK JACOBINS, as well as to discover that my co-author knows the author personally! Small world, indeed. One of James's contributions was to free up Baum from being intimidated by a Stalinist (my term, not hers) conception of literary criticism as agitprop: Baum's initial questions "were also misguided to the extent that I was asking defensively why the poets had not been abolitionists and more active participants in the literary drive to end slavery." Baum also claims James as a part of the Romantic tradition. [RD] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 09:52:37 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, joelmw@juno.com Subject: Re: LYCA -Reply Message-Id: Dear Joel, the points you raise re freedom to appropriate the artistic work of another as one likes are difficult to resolve , I think, since they impinge on the relationship between art and life - a subject dear to Yeats' heart . My own initial interest in Blake was fuelled by critics who had, however, very freely appropriated Blake `violently into a new context' which, in my opinion, did not at all do justice to the poet. Thus, as an interpreter, I too had to begin by reconsidering all the texts and trying to see where I thought critics had misappropriated. There are dangers, particularly with Blake, who rewrites the story of the Fall as well as proposes a whole new social contract, in simply seeing the poems as isolated units. Such an approach results in skewing meaning to suit the latest trends in literary theory or simply to suit one's own personality. I doubt whether any Blake lover, though, so completely adopts whatever it is assumed that the poet believes in as to go out and live it , without personal emedation and insight. Even Christianity is as various as its practitioners. But, you are stating, I think, what many students feel when one tries to present a coherent view of Blake -- namely, why should Blake have favoured any form of closure? Perhaps he would have encouraged the breaking of all mental chains and boxes , as implied in "No Bird soars too high if it soars with its own wings". Still, if the subject is clear interpretation of a poet or artist, one does have to try to walk in step with the creator of what we admire rather than simply blur his/her ideas. No? What do others think? Pam -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #100 **************************************