------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 26 Today's Topics: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) R Dumain and Satan RE: "pre-existence" RE: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) RE: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE Off-topic quip Re: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE The Doors RE: "pre-existence" Plato & Milton query Re: R Dumain and Satan Re: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE Re: Blake's tombstone Re: "pre-existence" TO VIC PAANANEN: BLAKE, MARX, LENIN, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY Re: Plato & Milton Re: DUMAIN & SATAN ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 17:03:23 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew J Dubuque To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1): SENSE VS PSYCHE Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 31 Mar 1996, hmm wrote: > On Sun, 31 Mar 1996, William Neal Franklin wrote: > > > I've heard this more than once, this bashing of critics who go beyond the > > boundaries of the empirically provable domain of facts. I think I perceive > > two camps in this discussion. One group wants no part of anything not > > demonstrable in the records and in the orthodoxy surrounding their > > reading; the other group wants the freedom to explore the possibilities > > implicit in the poems themselves, without the constraints put on the > > project by strict adherence to rules of evidence. > > If it's worth anything, I think there's a little more going on than > simply going 'beyond the boundaries of the empirically provable'. I've > been caught in the middle of these arguments before (occasionally because > of my work), and I've found two types of critics who stretch these > boundaries. They both make (sometimes) educated guesses, speculate, > deduce, but cannot prove their points. The difference is that some are > more than willing to admit that their explorations are simply > explorations; others try to create new laws with their speculations. > These, who are probably in the minority (as is usual in this sort of > thing), tend to give the others a bad name, giving rise to the urge to > bash all critics who take certain liberties with unprovable theories. > > At least, this is the problem from my standpoint. I don't really care > that much about what an artist meant, except as a point off curiosity. I > read literature for what it can give me, not what it gave readers 200 > years ago. If I wanted that, I'd read history. And I have no problem > with critics taking certain liberties with works (hell, you should see > some of the things I've done with Blake in my personal interpretations). > But I do have a problem with those who take those liberties without > allowing the rest of us to take ours. > > sorry if this is scattered... > > m > c647749@showme.missouri.edu > > I think maybe there are two types of people in the world. Those that think there are two types and everybody else.... Matthew Dubuque virtual@leland.stanford.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 19:11:12 -0600 From: rahul@hagar.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan) To: marxism2@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Mattie, I haven't seen what you said about QM, but I thought I'd offer a clarification. Heisenberg did not get a Nobel Prize for his "view" of quantum mechanics. First, he got it for creating quantum mechanics, i.e., he was the first to set up (a part of) the formalism and the framework in which the problems at hand could be solved. Second, you may not be aware that the uncertainty principle is a trivial mathematical consequence of the formalism of QM. Physicists don't always have to speculate about epistemology; sometimes they can derive it. Also, mentioning the Nobel Prize to show Heisenberg's importance is like saying Newton was a great man because he was knighted. Rahul ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 21:56:50 -0500 From: TomD3456@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: R Dumain and Satan Message-Id: <960401215647_182905891@emout04.mail.aol.com> I really appreciate Ralph Dumain's ideas and his reports on the Blake literature, despite the vitriol of his posts. His passion in opposing any attempt to separate art from life, or psychology from action, is a good reminder and warning against some traps that are too easy to fall into. But still I hate your arrogance, Ralph. Flames hurt and destroy as well as (sometimes) reveal. I don't believe that Blake was a Jacobin, but that's how you're portraying yourself, in your tone if not in any specific statement. I'm frightened of Jacobins (and Marxists) because, in pursuit of their theoretically correct ideas, they execute a lot of flesh-and-blood people, those minute particulars (and I think you hit the bullseye in the distinction you draw on that point between Blake and the philosophers). "A Sarajevo of the mind," as Gloudina Bouwer wrote, is what your posts often feel like to me. I think arrogance is what Blake was describing in the character of Satan in "Milton": By setting yourself above the people you criticize, dismissing them as idiots, airheads, etc., you're turning your contrary position into a Negation. The atheist-Marxist position is limited, as any position is, though it's a source of great insight too. I have no doubt you'll be up there with Newton and Locke at the Apocalypse. But in the meantime, you may be mistaking Satan's position for Rintrah's. And as I don't expect any argument of ours will turn you from your course, I hope to see many more of your posts, flames and all. -TD ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 1996 01:29:53 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: "pre-existence" Message-Id: <960402012953.2029bae1@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT For all you neoPlatonists there, I've run across another pretty Greek idea. In "Milton" chap. 2, plate 32, line 38, "their Forms Eternal Exist. . . " If this doesn't scream "PLATO!" I don't know what does. -Intended ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 1996 01:42:39 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: <960402014239.2029bae1@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Doesn't this remind some of you Sunday-school participants of another, often-misappropriated text? Intended. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 1996 01:37:57 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: BLAKE & THE MODERNS (1) Message-Id: <960402013757.2029bae1@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT I can't claim to have studied the criticism, but Satan's rhetoric, in the first few books, is explicitly socialistic and democratic. I think it's relatively easy to turn Satan into a leftist ideologue when he asks for an open govern- mental forum (II.11-42), and rebels against "Throne and Monarchy of God" (I.42). Intended. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 00:17:39 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com, marxism2@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Subject: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE Message-Id: <199604020817.AAA00820@igc4.igc.apc.org> Tom Dillingham, I'm so flattered to be put in the company of Satan, but shouldn't you have titled your post "R. Dumain and J.V. Stalin"? Or "From Urizen to Stalin to -- Dumain"? Or "Opposition is True Friendship -- NOT!" You tremble over my soul day and night. Could there be a there a danger that in my self-righteous militancy, I will crash the Blake session at the next MLA meeting and mow everybody down with my AK-47? Am I the Chairman Gonzalo of amateur Blake Studies? Are such fantasies the stuff your dreams are made on? How rich your imaginative life! OK, let me tell you about my day, while you were biting your nails over my Satanism/Stalinism. Having been repeatedly annoyed by the butt-headed questions put to me by Maoists, CP-types, and various free-lance Reds over the years, like: why wasn't Blake a political activist, or he doesn't seem to have a political program in his prophecies, (Jack Lindsay whines about Blake's aloofness from political action in his bio as well), I decided to sit down and do some thinking about the relation between theory and practice (should one do this sitting down?), rather than to dismiss this silliness as I usually do. I asked myself: how would Marx, as a man of action, have addressed these questions? This is not the forum to recapitulate my study over the past two years of Marx's emergence from the Young Hegelians, but I did learn to ask certain questions that I don't think anyone has asked before, because I don't think anyone has properly understood the implications of Marx's early work for the future of cultural and intellectual work. Once people read the "Theses on Feuerbach", they think they have understood something, when they have understood nothing. What have they missed? The trail has faded away, and they don't know where to go. This is what I mean: Marx breaks with people that have influenced him up to a certain point, writes but does not publish in his own lifetime key works of his transition period, and then spends the rest of his life as a revolutionary and scientific investigator of political economy and the capitalist social formation, with little hobbies on the side involving mathematics, ethnography, literature, etc. People simply assume without thinking: well, if Marx wrote (but never published) that the point is to change the world (but he did not write: the point _of philosophy_ is to change the world), and that he underwent a transition from philosopher to revolutionary, then, by George, Marx would have wanted all composers, writers, playwrights, poets, choreographers, chess masters, stamp collectors, and what not, from here on in to marshal their various skills as instruments in the service of the Revolution and to join the cause; and, by gum, if they don't put their bodies on the line, their works are good for nothing. People assume this, because they are not using their brains. In fact, the implications of Marx's method for this issue have not begun to be studied. The only one I know who picked up the trail is C.L.R. James. Where I pick up the trail is with Marx's dealing with the Young Hegelians, from the positive incorporation of Feuerbach in the 1844 mss to the disposal of Bauer in THE HOLY FAMILY and the whole lot in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. And I note some very important things. That in every case, he does not merely criticize his fellow intellectuals for their personal political inaction, but for the sterility of their ideas. In fact, Marx diagnoses the sterility of their thinking in terms of the immobility and sterility of German society. This says something about theory and practice that nobody has bothered to analyze. It is so basic and simple, it has been entirely overlooked. Could it be otherwise? The complex is easy; the simple is hard and nobody pays attention. So I says to myself, we can see where the stasis in society and in society's intellectuals results in the stasis and eventual decay of their thinking. There are many examples among the German ideologists. So I asks myself: now how would this apply to the English? What does the political degeneration of Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do with the deterioration or ideologization of their imaginative vision later in life? And what are the consequences, if any, for Blake, who was a man of contemplation rather than of engagement with society on any terms other than doing commissioned artwork? I don't know if Thompson ever did any bellyaching, but Lindsay certainly did, showing once again the ruinous effects the Communist Party has on the human mind. But the proper way to approach this issue of theory and practice is not at all the way Lindsay approached it, but rather using the Hegelian method (loosely speaking) that Marx himself used. So far it seems to me Blake comes out looking pretty good. He does change later in life to some degree -- loses his enthusiasm for Paine, makes some quip to his younger acolytes that Jesus should never have got himself mixed up in politics -- but Blake's vision continues to mature; it does not deteriorate. Blake does not become Poet Laureate; his final station in life is not lichen tukhus of the State. And that is what a writer is supposed to provide -- no matter what else he do -- vision; drop science, however you want to put it: give people something with enough range and depth they can draw on for centuries. So I jotted down my notes on these ideas at my local, and then I worked out an analysis of "I asked a thief to steal me a peach." This evening I have been continuing my reading of a book that is just blowing me away: THE ROMANTIC IDEOLOGY: A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION by Jerome J. McGann (University of Chicago Press, 1983). So far McGann has not had much to say about Blake -- how could he? -- Blake is so far above the rest -- but he's kicking the ideological stuffings out of Coleridge and Wordsworth and many others, and making me want to rush out to get something by Heine. I'm so overwhelmed by all this stimulation, I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. PS: Yes, I've got a severe, chronic case of PMS, but irritation motivates me to work. I am hot to give error a definite form so that it may be cast off. Oy, be permanent, O State, so that I may deliver individuals evermore, amen. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 1996 07:31:01 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Off-topic quip Message-Id: <31611E05.6716@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Monday, 4/1, Matthew Dubuque (virtual@leland.stanford.edu) wrote: > I think maybe there are two types of people in the world. > Those that think there are two types and everybody else.... There are two sides to every issue. (Or maybe only one....) LOS ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 96 08:56:00 EST From: Kevin Lewis To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE Message-Id: <9604021405.AA28927@uu6.psi.com> Ralph, You are an excited guy! If you like McGann, I suggest you read his essay in that volume edited by Curran and Wittreich in the seventies--is it titled something like _The Allegorical Sublime_? McGann as a teacher at Chicago presided over my earliest serious endeavors with Blake, and I cherish respect for him: he continues to grow in *ideas*. May we all. Kevin ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Apr 1996 09:59:56 -0400 (AST) From: Chantell L MacPhee To: blake@albion.com Subject: The Doors Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT I, first of all, would like to apologize for changing the course of the recent discussions, but I saw a post a few weeks ago regarding Blake and Jim Morrison. I currently have a student who is interested in comparing the two, particularly the lyrics of Morrison's songs. Could anyone please fill me in on that inforamtion? Do I have the right group? Thank you Chantelle ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 08:18:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Marcus Smith To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: "pre-existence" Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII UNUSUBSCRIBE BLAKE-L ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 09:27:46 -0500 (EST) From: Jonathan Epstein To: blake@albion.com Subject: Plato & Milton Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 2 Apr 1996 GVTUCKER@ualr.edu wrote: > For all you neoPlatonists there, I've run across another pretty Greek idea. > In "Milton" chap. 2, plate 32, line 38, "their Forms Eternal Exist. . . " > If this doesn't scream "PLATO!" I don't know what does. > -Intended I do not think this is what Blake had in mind in _Milton_. The forms he is talking about are the divisions of the self: in this case, Milton's. The forms are: the humanity, the shadow, the spectre and the emanation. These forms are eternal, and keep Milton in a state of Eternity. They all add up to the "four-fold man" (20:16) -- one complete person. The forms, for Plato, are ultimate for everyone and everything. I do not think Blake would think this to be true, as he cherished the individual too much. Maybe what Milton achieved was uniting with the Form of his Self, and thereby is suspended in Eternity. Please let me know what you think. Jon Epstein epstein@dickinson.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 9:48:11 -0500 (EST) From: "Robert D. Denham, English Department, Roanoke College" To: blake@albion.com Cc: DENHAM@ACC.ROANOKE.EDU Subject: query Message-Id: <960402094811.2894@ACC.ROANOKE.EDU> In one of his unpublished notebooks, Northrop Frye has this entry: "I've been ducking the question [about Word and Spirit] because of the clock ticking and cuckooing, but if the Spirit IS given greater knowledge among men thereby--never mind how little--the time will be made non-existent, as Blake said." Does anyone know where Blake said that the time will be made non-existent? I don't find anything in Erdman's concordance that quite fits. Robert Denham Roanoke College denham@acc.roanoke.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 10:04:49 -0500 From: grayrobe@pilot.msu.edu (Robert M. Gray, Jr.) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: R Dumain and Satan Message-Id: <199604021504.KAA158356@pilot05.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I don't want to get too deeply into to this, but on Mon. 4/1, Tom wrote: > I'm frightened of Jacobins (and Marxists) because, in pursuit of their >theoretically correct ideas, they execute a lot of flesh-and-blood people, >those minute particulars (and I think you hit the bullseye in the distinction >you draw on that point between Blake and the philosophers). "A Sarajevo of >the mind," as Gloudina Bouwer wrote, is what your posts often feel like to >me. This is a good point and a valid historical criticism of the Jacobin/Marxists/etc., but it strikes me that the Christians, to a large degree, have a similar history (e.g., crusades, inquisitions, holocausts, countless wars, etc.). It strikes me that the "Capitalists" aren't so innocent or bloodless either. Is it not the zeal of the zealots of any ideology that lead to the execution of flesh-and-blood people rather than the ideology itself? Just a thought, Rob ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 09:15:02 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE Message-Id: <96040209150190@womenscol.stephens.edu> Ralph Dumain has made an error I feared would occur. I, Tom Dillingham, do not have an America Online account, nor am I in any way associated with the TOMD who posted the comparison between Ralph Dumain and Satan. It is not my line of thinking on this subject, and though I do agree that Ralph Duman often undercuts the effectiveness of his arguments with unnecessary vituperation, I made that case to him off the list and did not post the lengthy discussion on list. Sorry, Ralph--I am not both a contrary and a negation. Tom Dillingham ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 96 09:45 CST From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's tombstone Message-Id: <199604021553.JAA17154@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> He doesn't have a tombstone! His grave in Bunhill Fields, London, is unmarked: "25 feet from the north wall N 80" (according to his friend George Cumberland). It's known as a Dissenters' burying ground, but according to J.T. Smith, when Catherine Blake asked her husband on his deathbed "where he should like to be buried, and whether he would have the Dissenting Minister, or the Clergyman of the Church of England, to read the service: his answers were, that as far as his own feelings were concerned, they might buy him where she pleased, adding, that as his father, mother, aunt, and brother, were buried in Bunhill-row, perhaps it would be better to lie there, but as to service, he should wish for that of the Church of Egland." Among the few mourners were his wife, his friends Tatham and the artists Calvert and Richmond, and his brother James. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 16:59:29 +0100 (BST) From: Mae Tang To: blake@albion.com Cc: Mae Tang Subject: Re: "pre-existence" Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Greetings, On Mon, 1 Apr 1996 HXNEWSAM@ualr.edu wrote: > Exactly, I did work with Intimations Ode in connection to Urizen and you qouted > my favorite line. I also addressed Neo-platonism in my paper. These two > systems of belief were what came up primarily when I searched for pre-existance. > If you have any other suggestions on other sources, please, please send them > on, as I said I'm still working on this topic in Blake. Where 7 days is concerned, there's always a possible Kabbalistic reading, I guess, where the 7 could refer to the lower 7 Sephiroth, below Da'ath. That goes very well with the theme of creation, and should go nicely with a Neo-platonic reading as well. Regards, Mae ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 09:35:17 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com, marxism2@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Cc: jschwart@freenet.columbus.oh.us Subject: TO VIC PAANANEN: BLAKE, MARX, LENIN, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY Message-Id: <199604021735.JAA08911@igc4.igc.apc.org> Vic Paananen, thanks for the helpful information. I shall have to look up your book on my next library trip, which won't be for awhile, alas. In fact, my ranting here will have to go on hiatus after a couple of days, because I have other pressing obligations. Perhaps that will be a blessing, regardless of the overheated enthusiasm with which I pusruse my endeavors, as no list should become dominated by one overbearing online personality. I imagine your book would be a bibliographic overview of Blake scholarship, with one section on Marxist intperatations. Could I be right? I will have to put your book on my list, but if you care to upload the Breines reference here, that would be welcome. I can't say I'm heartbroken about Thompson not turning his Pantheonic stars Blake and Marx into a constellation, though I too am curious as to the possible outcome. The obvious parallels are sweet, but the covert ones are even sweeter, and the differences sweetest of all. I've avoided any overview of Marxist literature on Blake for a number of reasons, though I've been through a few willy-nilly. I suffered through Sabri-Tabrizi's awful book many years ago. I liked Fred Whitehaed's appraoch to the subject, which was mine also, though I sense that Blake scholarship has since advanced beyond the dichotomies of mystical and political criticism. (I read a lot of stuff up through the early 1980s, and then I dropped the subject for ten years, so I have much to catch up on.) I can't even remember Jack Lindsay's bio, except that he annoyed the hell out of me by wringing his hands over Blake's political inaction. Lucky for us Thompson got out of the Communist Party when he did, though Lindsay was always a cultural dissident long before Thompson. I hope that Lukacs proves to be helpful in relation to Blake. I don't know how this might be, but I'll hope for the best. I would imagine a theoretical framework for analyzing Romanticism would help, but I'm somewhat skeptical that a treatment of "Romanticism" will tell us enough about Blake, who stands head and shoulders above all the other Romantics put together, including Shelley. And I am congenitally suspicious of continental philosophers. We shall see how they deal with English Blake. >but maybe the Lenin will be almost as helpful although there is >only one piece of his that I draw on. (Like Shelley, Lenin >started as a crude materialist but came to see that too is >"metaphysics.") Lenin? What exactly do you mean? I forced myself to read through the entire PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS as winter approached a few months back, mainly to see how Lenin responded to Hegel. I find the summation of the cognitive insight Lenin gained in the concluding three paragraphs of his 1915 manuscript "On the question of dialectics" (COLLECTED WORKS, vol. 38, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1981, pp. 357-361): "Dialectics as _living_, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade) -- here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with "metaphysical" materialism, the fundamental _misfortune_ of which is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie, to the process and development of knowledge. "Philosophical idealism is _only_ nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of _dialectical_ materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a __one-sided_, exaggerated uberschwengliches (Dietzgen) development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute, _divorced_ from matter, from nature, apotheosized. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. But philosophical idealism is ("_more correctly_" and "_in addition_") a _road_ to clerical obscurantism _through_ _one of the shades_ of the infinitely complex __knowledge_ (dialectical) of man. "Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is _anchored_ by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness -- voila the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (=philosophical idealism), of course, has _epistemological_ roots, it is not groundless; it is a _sterile flower_ undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge." This is the closest Lenin ever got to poetry, and poetical it is, though expressed in raw, unedited form. And it doesn't even begin to touch -- though it could -- what is to be learned from symbolic poetical communication, which involves subtleties going far beyond the genre where you find the discursive expositions of idealist philosophers. To focus merely on the bric-a-brac in Blake's symbolic universe -- a little Plato here, a little Berkeley there, some Kabbalah up yonder -- is to miss what is special and unique in Blake, what puts him far and above not only traditional religion and mysticism but above "philosophy" as well. Being a "philosopher" is a very small thing, smaller now than ever. Since childhood when I had this crap rammed down my throat by alcoholic McCarthyite old biddies in public school, I've had nothing but contempt for the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid and the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword. Plato filled me with abhorrence. They create allegorical riches. I insist that one has to dig beneath surface appearances to grasp the nature of Blake's engagement with science or to make any possible comparisons to anybody else's ontology. One will get nowhere if one thinks Blake has engaged science in a way comparable to Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, or, least of all, the infantile mystification of quantum mechanics. It would be a mistake to think of Blake as just another philosopher. As secular critics, we cannot express our views of the world in symbolic terms only; we cannot be content to translate one mythology into another mythology. In the process of translating Blake's "sacred" into "secular" language (for want of better terms right now), we establish the commonality, while respecting the difference, by analyzing the motivational logic in Blake's conceptual universe, which is not the conceptual universe of traditional "philosophy" or what most people get through formal education. (Whoever thought I was interested in turning Blake into a cog in the croaking machine of Western philosophy was not paying attention.) Becuase Blake was so radically other to what "philosophy" was doing, he is invisible in its discursive world. To translate him into the discursive terms of our conceptual universe requires a level of depth and subtlety which has been barely scratched. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 11:46:19 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Plato & Milton Message-Id: <96040211461949@womenscol.stephens.edu> Those who want to pursue the possible platonism of Blake need to look at the work of the much-maligned Kathleen Raine, and especially at the edition of the works of Thomas Taylor the Platonist, which includes her effort to develop platonst themes in Blake. Her large work, _Blake and Tradition_ also develops her thoughts on this. (Why am I saying this to this list? Who doesn't know it? Well--Raine is certainly maligned, and there are good reasons for questioning her methodology, but the simple fact it that she is "the one to ask" if that is what you want to know.) Tom Dillingham (not the other TomD) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 13:26:43 -0500 From: TomD3456@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: DUMAIN & SATAN Message-Id: <960402132642_183281793@emout04.mail.aol.com> Tom Dillingham, I apologize for not signing my full name to my post. I won't make that mistake again. As for being both a Contrary and a Negation, I confess. Thanks for the hint. Ralph Dumain, Thanks for your response, sorry you aimed it at the wrong target. Great ends, great intellect, great energy -- go on and deliver us. Maybe I'm the one mistaking Rintrah for Satan. So THIS is mental war! No wonder Blake is confusing! But I'm glad my irritation at your irritability caused you to post another pearl. Oink! -Tom Devine -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #26 *************************************