From: blake-d-request@albion.com
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 1996 4:18 AM
To: blake-d@albion.com
Subject: blake-d Digest V1996 #141
------------------------------
Content-Type: text/plain
blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 141
Today's Topics:
BLAKE, FEMINISM, STALINISM & ACADEMIA
BLAKE, SPIRITUALITY .... & MISCOMMUNICATION
Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS
file not found
Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Re: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings
Re: Howard Roark? -Reply
Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS -Reply
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 20:53:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.apc.org>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: BLAKE, FEMINISM, STALINISM & ACADEMIA
Message-Id: <199612080453.UAA19847@igc4.igc.org>
Gloudina Bouwer, you are a breath of fresh air. Re a couple of your
gems:
>I am irritated by another growing conceit in recent, especially
>"feminist" thinking: this idea of the great warm maternal
>pre-verbal instinctual Eden threatened by the restrictive
>Hierarchical (read patriarchal.) .....
And:
>From where then is this great spiel in western thought
>about the positive "maternal" and the negative "paternal"
>world? Are these trains of thought developed by men who have
>idealised womanhood, or by women who have never experienced
>the matter of fact, unsentimental day by day existence of
>being a mother, and have therefore also idealised the pheno-
>menon of motherhood?
The question of idealization cuts close to the bone. While we are at
it, let me reiterate a question I posed a while back: why is it that
among Blake and Romantic scholars, female feminist scholars are on the
average less antagonistic toward Blake than the men, who arrogate to
themselves, with the complacency of 200-year hindsight, the right to
berate Blake for his allegedly reprehensible sexism? Methinks there is
something rotten in Denmark.
And our perspicacious Suzanne V., who finds it necessary to berate male
list members for finding feminist harangues tiresome, nonetheless
herself goes on to protest academic feminist scholarship, taking Anne
Mellor as an example of a suspicious anti-visionary trend which
conforms to the politically reactionary period in which we live. What's
going on here?
Is it possible for reactionary anti-visionary thinking to coexist with
politically progressive positions within the soul of one and the same
person? If you understand how the managerial-professional class
functions, you will learn to understand the esoteric mysteries behind
this seeming contradiction. I got to the bottom of it by analyzing the
Stalinist approach to culture, the logic of which is every bit as much a
property of identity politics and postmodern posturing.
While my study of Jerome McGann's writings is still in an apprenticeship
stage, already I smell a rat. He is as progressive in his attitudes as
one could hope for, yet his political approach to literature has an
unpleasantly familiar odor to me. McGann strikes me as a person bored
to tears with his own cultural capital, and so being astute enough to
see through the pretensions of high Culture, has adopted the appropriate
cynical attitude, and born again politically, thinks the function of
literature is to Serve the People. Culture is a scam, so is the
pretension to transcendence, and the prophetic role that Blake arrogates
to himself is an illusion. Blake retreats from politics, and hence
relinquishes his opposition to the status quo. And because Blake is
unflattering to women as he is to men, he of course is a terrible sexist
who must be reprimanded at every opportunity for his blindness.
I shall not quote chapter and verse, not yet, but I will stress that
McGann's whining postulates a relation between theory and practice that
surfaces whenever the petty bourgeois intellectual begins to detect his
own uselessness. Wishing to make _himself _ useful, he thinks the
artist's worst sin is not being overtly political, in not taking sides
in practical struggle and extolling victims while excoriating oppressors
in the tales he tells. The critic's Universal becomes, not the new
society, but political activism. And the consequences for the artist of
not being able to realize himself concretely in political action (or
corresponding verbiage) are to be seen as a mere lack or absence.
Whereas any Hegelian knows that that which cannot live concretely must
become abstract.
Dear reader, don't feel bad if this preliminary sketch doesn't quite
jell for you. 99.9% of the intellectual left wouldn't understand what
I'm talking about either, which is why I always oppose them on cultural
matters.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 20:48:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.apc.org>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: BLAKE, SPIRITUALITY .... & MISCOMMUNICATION
Message-Id: <199612080448.UAA19735@igc4.igc.org>
Bert Stern clarifies:
>I bring in Scholem and Benjamin because I find in Blake the kind
>of Messianic impulse that Scholem describes: a belief in
>"transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which
>history itself perishes, transformed into ruins because it is
>struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside
>source." Isn't it to create these moments--if not THE moment--
>that Los labors on the forge?
Now that you explain it, I see the similarity. And the point about
creating those special moments -- I agree. In fact, I've written poems
myself about those Blakean moments that Satan cannot find. Whether this
comes from inside or outside history is not so important as the breakup
of assumed continuity. If this is what you meant, you confused me by
posing this tension as a struggle between historical materialism and
spiritualism, which suggests opposing metaphysical commitments and
methods rather than perspectives on hegemony and continuity. Why would
a historical materialist oppose the idea of Blakean moments? Perhaps an
Althusserian Stalinist, who denies agency and the subject. But what
dialectician would not welcome those moments?
>Do I forfeit the critic's role to suggest that Blake's poems
>come out of the tension between these two voices (aren't they
>also Innocence (organiz'd) and Experience?) And to add that the >one of them can be called--loosely, I'm sure- spiritual, in that
>it has to do with a reality that can be perceived only THROUGH
>the shell of the ordinary, and because it has to do also with a
>God whose eternity is the Human Imagination, to be approached
>only by the anhilation of the Selfhood in us. ( J5: 16-22).
Your interpretation is valid.
>You say that when we bring spiritual issues to bear (partly
>because they've become contaminated by Yeats and Jung), the
>"approach robs literary people of their specificity, ....
No, no, no, I'm not issuing any injunction against bringing in any
issues whatever that people many call spiritual. I am talking -- wasn't
I clear? -- about an approach to literature that just deals with
spirituality as an abstraction. What do I mean? If you take people
like Carl Jung, or Joseph Campbell, or perhaps Mircea Eliade, or people
like these, and see what they are doing, you find that they are all
removing mythologies from their social context and reinterpreting them
in a symbolic manner that fulfills the spiritual needs of modern-day
petty bourgeois intellectuals for a "perennial philosophy". While I do
believe that anybody may recycle any mythology and use it anyway (s)he
wishes, one should be honest enough to acknowledge that one's own
version is not the same as the original. Jung's interpretation of
Christ as a symbol of individuation is well and good, except that it
flies in the face of 2000 years of actually existing Christianity, in
which Christ is the _only_ son of God, not the rest of us. Jesus alone
is allowed to be an individual; the rest of us are just sinning
scuzbags, worshipping Him as an alienated fetish. The archetypal
approach to literature is corrupt to the core. If you really want to
understand Jung, look at his collaboration with Nazi psychology and his
admiration of Franco as the savior of Christian civilization.
>I'm not at all clear about the "ideological commitment" that you
>believe binds literary people together, ....
No, no, not together with each other, but each to his/her social
context. By literary people I meant writers.
>I'd end up with something like proper reverence for the power of
>the imagination--and while I don't know about you, in my own
>neck of the woods there isn't a helluva lot of that left in
>academic practice.
There you and I agree. My point was not to devalue imagination nor
"spiritual" concerns. Remember, academic practice has gone through
several epochs of ideological and moral corruption. Once archetypal
criticism was in; now it's postmodernism. Religious faith or cynical
irrationalism -- is one approach any less corrupt than the other?
And outside of academia, things are just as bad. I just returned from
an afternoon of listening to obnoxious ghettocentric ranting, which is
what poetry in my neck of the woods has become. I oppose all
manifestations of Stalinism in the arts, e.g. that the purpose of
literature is to bitch or reminisce about the 'hood. American culture
has become so ugly it makes me want to puke. Can't we strive for
something better? That's where imagination comes in.
>I know I don't talk your language. Maybe I've been in the
>academy too long- ....
Bert, it seems that we agree more than we disagree. Why is it that we
always talk past one another? I'm not in the academy. I can't assume
that the next person talks my language. I try to talk as plainly as I
can while still getting across sophisticated abstract concepts. I need
people on the other end who try to make sense. Name-dropping does not
impress me. Julia Kristeva is not an authority I recognize. (Yes,
Lance Massey, your profession is a pompous joke.) If someone on this
list thinks pretentious jibber-jabber is going to deflect or distract
me, such persons had better wise up fast. Anyone who wishes to impress
me had better construct a coherent argument; citation-flinging is not
legal tender in my territory. But Bert, once you explain yourself I
find myself agreeing with you.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 08 Dec 1996 01:49:32 -0800
From: Steve Perry <sperry@infogenics.com>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS
Message-Id: <32AA8F2C.2A85@infogenics.com>
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Bert said:
> Again, I don't suppose that you any more
> than I, find it in Steve Perry's notion of literature (as opposed to Steve
> Perry) concede as much as he does to the positivists in seeing literature
> (as opposed to scientific-philospphical text) as merely self-referential.
Ralph said:
>While I do
>believe that anybody may recycle any mythology and use it anyway (s)he
>wishes, one should be honest enough to acknowledge that one's own
>version is not the same as the original.
I am much more aligned with Ralph here. I have no problem with the
honest attempt at interpretation that identifies both the premises and
the presumed course of the effort. In that sense, the de-mythologizers
(forgive me), Campbell, Jung or Elliade, can only hope, at best, to
leave us with some cinders of the perennial philosophy, which is the
smoldering core of what could be meaning in the postmodern holocaust.
But let's be honest and realize that they are champions of what they
hate the most. Does it surprise you that Jung would glom on to what
ever contemporary myth-maker after he and the others have killed all the
rest of the gods?
Blake, has it oh so right, portraying Newton with his calipers
hopelessly measuring at the bottom of the ocean as all of the sea life
swims about him. Once a whale has been removed from its environment
where it swims, eats, mates, LIVES, is it a whale? Thus my point about
religous/poetical writing. It assumes an inhabitant that exists within
the way of the world that is created. Once removed from that context
the whale, the poem, the myth is so much, dead flesh and blubber.
In the meantime, the occupant of that world does play a messianic role,
playing out his/her own redemption. But this role exists outside of
history, and while it does have some ultimate role in history, Comus
Agonites as opposed to Samson Agonistes, it is the process itself, not
the dead text or even the goal that matters. Therefore, for Blake,
building Jerusalem and cleansing the senses are one in the same.
Steve Perry
Meals cooked with real religious fervor!
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 09:15:44 -0800
From: David Rollison <davidr@marin.cc.ca.us>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: file not found
Message-Id: <32AD9AC0.73E9@marin.cc.ca.us>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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Does anyone know why the URL for the Blake page--William Blake Poet
and Engraver--at jefferson village edu is not responding?
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:10:42 -0500
From: TomD3456@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Message-Id: <961210141041_1086549255@emout06.mail.aol.com>
Lance-
I've been out of commission with the flu for several days, so I haven't had
the energy to thank you for your kind and lucid response to my irritated
reaction to your one-liner summary of Kristeva's semiotics (whew!).
So now I do. Thank you very much for explaining! Your second version is
very much clearer. It still leaves me a bit irritated at her (rather than
you), because I wonder how much of what she says is new. Underneath the
difficult phrasings, she seems to be making some tried and true points:
Non-"symbolic" elements of poetry ("rhythm, sound-play, even
line-arrangement") both come from (in the poet) and induce (in the listener
or reader) access to non-rational (non-Urizenic) parts of the mind -- what
could be called the unconscious, the soul, and various other venerable names.
These elements of poetic language give us a direct, body-based experience,
somewhat as music does. In Bill Moyers's series "The Language of Life,"
Robert Hass makes that point quite simply: He recites Keats's lines "She
looked at me as she did love,/ And made sweet moan." That last line, he
says, was an erotic experience for him as a teenager [me too!], and the
experience is carried by the sound. He then has the audience recite the
lines, and then just the vowels, to see the effect of the sound alone.
When I read accounts of post-structuralist theory, they usually seem too
"symbolic" themselves, too divorced from the concrete and physical, like an
insane Urizen blackening the sky (or blinding the mind's eye) with a web of
words, abstract words. I feel like a Luddite saying this, but shouldn't
literary critics write the way we teach Freshman English students to write --
using concrete terms, avoiding jargon wherever possible...?? I have so far
failed to see what is gained in specificity to compensate for what is lost in
intelligibility, and this applies to so many of the critical books I have
seen in the past twenty years. They make my heart sink (and my choler rise).
In any case, I really do appreciate your taking the time to explain these
concepts to someone not versed in semiotics (who may still be missing the
point), and I would have thanked you sooner had I not been ill.
Thanks again,
--Tom Devine
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 13:53:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.apc.org>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Message-Id: <199612102153.NAA22135@igc6.igc.org>
Excellent, Tom. This semiotic folderol is an even more egregious
example of explication via translating one mythology into another, in
this case a vastly inferior mythology. All of this French crap is like
this. I'm surprised people tolerate it. I far prefer sincere
religious conviction to this nihilistic flatulence.
I agree that literature matters to life and is not just so much raw
material for the theory industry (talk about the logic of capital!) In
this I agree with Pam van Shaik. Incidentally, only today did I get
to read a post I downloaded around Blake's birthday, in which Pam
explains Blake's thoughts on human regeneration in a convincing way,
and then challenges me to call this mere propaganda. I found this
particular argument by Pam a compelling one.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 17:40:10 -0600 (CST)
From: brian buckman <eris@siu.edu>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply
Message-Id: <199612102340.RAA17162@saluki-mailhub.it.siu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
linearity is ancient and dead. the brain functions at a rate comparable in
course and velocity to that of a small kitten exploding from the inside out.
through irrational, unsuspected, and unexpected lineage, word choice,
rythym, and subject there lies a very distinct map to the shivering routes
of the soul. it doesn't take a fistful of blakeaphiles to realise that
blake was riding the line to the divine through destruction of rational (the
crippled urizen) thought and conventional intellect. when poetry, prose,
music, art, what have you, become removed from convention the sentient
reality of a work replaces the dull murmuring of recitation. unfortunatley
this liberation will probably also be the death of literature in the future,
opening the doors to any half wit lunatic with the ability to make
nonsensical yet charismatic phrasings. this will, no doubt erase the lines
dividing literature and madness (which under the most prodigious conditions
were already a bit shaky) and possibly open the gates of spirituality
through inner relations through writing to the entire world, leaving
literature dead, but helping to reawaken the divine in the devoid. could
this be albion, in one of his many incarnations? could blake have sniffed
out the corpse of inspiration, seeing its decayed waddle across our great
planet, as it called itself literature, and, using his writing as a weapon
created the magick (or at least recognized the magick to aid its
realization) to destroy albion, his borders of intellect and printed
snobbery, and bring about a spirituality reawakened in every man?
on the side, i am doing an articl on reconditioning through the three steps
of the cycle of revolution that blake talks about and fuller's synergetic
geometry. my problem is i need more information on his cycle of revolution.
can someone steer me in the right direction? eris@siu.edu
At 02:10 PM 12/10/96 -0500, you wrote:
>Lance-
>I've been out of commission with the flu for several days, so I haven't had
>the energy to thank you for your kind and lucid response to my irritated
>reaction to your one-liner summary of Kristeva's semiotics (whew!).
>
>So now I do. Thank you very much for explaining! Your second version is
>very much clearer. It still leaves me a bit irritated at her (rather than
>you), because I wonder how much of what she says is new. Underneath the
>difficult phrasings, she seems to be making some tried and true points:
> Non-"symbolic" elements of poetry ("rhythm, sound-play, even
>line-arrangement") both come from (in the poet) and induce (in the listener
>or reader) access to non-rational (non-Urizenic) parts of the mind -- what
>could be called the unconscious, the soul, and various other venerable names.
> These elements of poetic language give us a direct, body-based experience,
>somewhat as music does. In Bill Moyers's series "The Language of Life,"
>Robert Hass makes that point quite simply: He recites Keats's lines "She
>looked at me as she did love,/ And made sweet moan." That last line, he
>says, was an erotic experience for him as a teenager [me too!], and the
>experience is carried by the sound. He then has the audience recite the
>lines, and then just the vowels, to see the effect of the sound alone.
>
>When I read accounts of post-structuralist theory, they usually seem too
>"symbolic" themselves, too divorced from the concrete and physical, like an
>insane Urizen blackening the sky (or blinding the mind's eye) with a web of
>words, abstract words. I feel like a Luddite saying this, but shouldn't
>literary critics write the way we teach Freshman English students to write --
>using concrete terms, avoiding jargon wherever possible...?? I have so far
>failed to see what is gained in specificity to compensate for what is lost in
>intelligibility, and this applies to so many of the critical books I have
>seen in the past twenty years. They make my heart sink (and my choler rise).
>
>In any case, I really do appreciate your taking the time to explain these
>concepts to someone not versed in semiotics (who may still be missing the
>point), and I would have thanked you sooner had I not been ill.
>
>Thanks again,
>--Tom Devine
>
>
eris uber alles
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 96 03:28 EST
From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" <EEB4@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings
Message-Id: <9612110829.AA24638@uu6.psi.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 96 13:02 EST
From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" <EEB4@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings
To: blake@albion.com
This message might come up twice. . . My apologies for any incovenience!
--elisa
- - The original note follows - -
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 96 16:58 EST
From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" <EEB4@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings
To: blake@albion.com
Pam, --I know I've jumped in on this issue before and have said some
unflattering things to you about not being open to problematize your own
readings. I think, though, that I may have misjudged you, so I apologize for
my harsh words on your take on Blake last year.
I do think that everyone is entitled to individual holistic views of
Blake's corpus. So your read is as valid as mine-- and in the difference lies
a certain richness. Blake's language. his punctuation. his engraving marks
are like an Aeolian harp that resonates with possibilities of meanings. We see
in Blake what issues are important to us, and our reads reflect who we are.
I guess my approach to Blake lies in uncovering, "unforgetting" some resonances
his words may have had in the past, and in finding harmonies with resonances we
find in his writing now. But that shouldn't invalidate what you sense as
significant, important, vital in his work.
In the end, I agree with you, Pam, that it shouldn't be a crime to
find patterns and unity. Shall we deny ourselves what we find wonderful about
Blake or what we majored in English for in the first place? Maybe we just need
to learn to live with our own contrariness better. As Blake demonstrates,
2 contraries can indeed be equally true. Can we "make that so" in our own
work? What will that involve? There is no longer one true Reading, but many
fascinating possibilities. Why are these possibilities relevant to our lives
and times? Can we begin to think of why we're drawn to what we're drawn to
in literature?
PAX VOBISCUM, and may your Gods go with you,
elisa
- - The original note follows - -
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 12:39:51 +0200
From: P Van Schaik <VSCHAP@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA>
To: saleonar@cc.ysu.edu
Cc: blake@albion.com
Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings
of text
Resent-From: blake@albion.com
Reply-To: blake@albion.com
Scott, To return to the invitation to debate an issue whixh you asked to
hear more about. The example I gave re `The Clod and the Pebble' is
relevant in that I was wondering to what extent we do texts justice
when we import meanings that are certainly implied, but not primary in
any given context. I know that all readers adduce whatever for them,
personally, gives meaning to a text and in acknowledging this, literary
theory has moved beyond seeing that the text has any primacy at all. (I
am not at all adept at lit theory ,as you may have gathered, so am trying
to express my own understanding of a shift in paradigms in jargon-less
language). To my mind, feminists tend to distort Blake's meaning by
coming with a ready made propensity to find maltreatment of the feminine
characters and I do find this a very limiting model, having seen , despite
their arguments, no such thing ...( to revive an argument which seemed
satisfactorily closed by perceiving masculine-feminine in terms of
yin-yang, inter alia). I think I am trying to ask whether there can not still
be room to consider that the text is not simply a `virtual text' in the sense
of being constructed ad lib by thousands of different readers. Without
trying to define over-neatly Blake's intention at any point ( since the
coinage of `intentional fallacy' one dare not so presume), it does
nevertheless seem to me to be possible to arrive at some coherent and
unified reading of Blake, always attempting to relate the parts to the
whole. I know this is not a popular (nor tenable view in post-modernist
terms ... especially if spiritual readings - or any sense of closure - are in
the offing) but I am old enough to insist on my right to read Blake in this
way and to defy critical proscriptions. OK, I know that I'm inviting
vituperation in opening this rather unfocused corner of my mind... but ...
I'd like to hear what all of you, up to date with everything via
bibliographies and conferences and colleagues' mutual support have to
say about such issues. Are they so out of date as to be not worth
discussing? Or, through open and hopefully not insulting debate, could
we initiate a new transformative reading of Blake? Is this too messianic?
Pam
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 12:14:22 +0200
From: P Van Schaik <VSCHAP@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA>
To: blake@albion.com, sperry@infogenics.com
Subject: Re: Howard Roark? -Reply
Message-Id: <s2aea5cd.031@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA>
I'm not sure how to resolve the issues raised re spiritual reading of Blake
since I find the application of currently popular literary theory to Blake
reductionist for the same reasons that Steve Perry would find the
application of any model so - even a kabbalistic one. Moreover, most of
my work and understanding of Blake precedes any attempt to apply
another, kabbalistic, model. What excites me is the the Kabbalistic model
, which I began investigating many years after my original close
response to the contrary images of Blake's text, fitted exactly... that is, I
found that the ways in which I had interpreted Blakes' vision of the Fall
initially seemed to be perfectly corroborated by every new insight I
arrived at through becoming familiar with the symbols and ideas of an
entirely new discipline. If you are really interested, I could put up pape
by pae of my argument in my intended book ... but this would perhaps not
be in my best interests if I wish to publish the ms??? Believe, me, you
have seen the merest tip of a very deep iceberg in my postings. An
easier way would be to do a mutual discussion of Jerusalem, as I
suggested earlier, then Ralph and others could put their interpretations
side by side with my own , and students and other Blakeans can judge
for themselves which readings are reductionist. Since Blake's themes
deal with the Fall and how to regain Eden, and Jesus is a central figure in
all of his longer poems, I hardly see how a spiritual (though very
unorthodox) reading can be avoided. I prefer Minute Particulars to a
general , abstract discussion and Blake's words are always a pleasure
to contemplate again. However, as Universities here are on vacation for
the Summer, this would be an idea for next year. Meanwhile, thanks to
all for a scintillatingly happy year of mental challenge. .. warmest wishes
for Christmas.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 13:14:32 +0200
From: P Van Schaik <VSCHAP@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA>
To: blake@albion.com, sternh@WABASH.EDU
Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS -Reply
Message-Id: <s2aeb3e9.016@ALPHA.UNISA.AC.ZA>
I endorse all that Bert so eloquently says in his response to Ralph. ..
particularly his statement that Los 's incessant labours at his Forge are
intended to bring about that Messianic moment of mankind's release from
the fallen worlds of `Empire' and `Mystery' created by Urizen's false
reasonings. In that moment, as in Kabbalisitc teachings, the false visions
of god held on earth are overthrown and the balance between wrath
and mercy in all the radiances of the `Tree of Life' is restored. This
moment is also equivalent to the `Grand Jubilee' in Kabbalah when the
vibrations of the fallen worlds are raised and restored and the female
principle who was in exile in the fallen worlds is restored to her `Groom',
and the divine hierogamy (symbolic of perfect balance of contraries)
re-established. This spiritual vision of Blake is not popular with critics - is
scarcely seen and I can understand that those not used to perceiving the
true complexity of Blake may feel resentful and hence be tempted to
mock at such views as if they were reductionist. However, as in one of
BLake's poems, mockers should beware lest the wind blow the spit of
their despite (just a free variation on Blake's sand in wind imagery) back
in their own faces. Is Blake writing a type of divine comedy or not? Is
the tragedy of the fall primarily, in his view, that all eartholings are bound
in mental chains which prevent them from understanding what the true
face of God is? These may be good questions to hear answers from
others on? A good Christian theme for Christmas? And is it not rather
ironical, that Bert, coming from a Judaic, rather than Christian
perspective, should be the person defending Blake's Messianism? Pam
van Schaik
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End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #141
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