------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 29 Today's Topics: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE RE: Plato & Milton RE: R Dumain and Satan RE: Blake sighting Re: query Re: query Re: Blake and Other Romantics Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE Re: John Clare Introduction RE: R Dumain and Satan Thank you,Ralph RE: Blake sighting Re: Conflict in Online Discourse (fwd) Re: Blake's tombstone Re: Blake sighting Re: Blake sighting Blake's difficulty Re: Blake's tombstone Re: introduction pleasant lovely Shadow Milton, book II ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 22:09:05 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com, marxism2@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Subject: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE Message-Id: <199604040609.WAA21920@igc4.igc.apc.org> "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." -- Langston Hughes Gloudina Bouwer cries out in the wilderness: >Marxism, Romanticism, modernism, structuralism, >formalism, skepticism -- it is nice to play around with these >concepts and lose oneself in little universes a la Jorge Luis >Borges -- but what is Blake trying to teach us, Ralph? He felt >the need to talk about something very urgently. Gloudina, I shall spare you my thoughts on Borges. I'm not playing around with any concepts. I don't play. The urgency you mention is indeed there. There are many things I have to say about Blake to various people and audiences, and what I have been discussing in this thread is just one of them. Here I have not been so much concentrating on the content of Blake's message, but on Blake as a mode of knowledge in the historical universe of knowledge. Bear with me and we will shall see whether this is a trivial exercise or something much more profound. Perhaps the reasons for my own sense of urgency will unfold. Naturally, I am not the first person to recognize that poetic/symbolic communication is different from literal discursive communication, nor is Blake the only one who had profound truths to communicate symbolically rather than literally. Nor do I think that Blake could have written it all in plain English in expository form and he only chose to encode his ideas in mythic form for fear of state repression. There are consequences for the fact that he chose to express himself and apparently thought in the way that he did, as well as consequences for the fact that I am expressing myself in quite the opposite manner with a very different ostensible ontological commitment. Now, when Blake makes a statement, do we interpret his statement or its motive as being the exact same as someone who makes a statement, even one that reads similarly, in quite another mode of discourse based on a different way of thinking or different priorities, say in a philosophical essay? How do we relate the two different sets of statements and the ways of thinking and their motives? Do you think this is a pointless intellectual exercise? Very well, when we try to relate Blake to science, to Newton, or to Plato, or to liberation theology, or to anything else we know in our universe of knowledge -- things that may matter to us a great deal in constructing a picture of the totality of our world and the meanings of its contents -- we are up against this question. Take a statement such as "man is all imagination." Taken as a simple proposition, it's not one I would make. I imagine Blake meant what he said. Now we can just leave it as a proposition to be debated pro or con, or we can try to re-create in ourselves the psychological, cognitive experience that would lead to such a statement. What must it be like for a man of imagination, whose center of meaning comes from his own symbolic approach to the world, to look out on what according to the world of industrial capitalism is an external universe of dead objects, the land of Ulro? If I try, I can recreate something like that psychological approach to the world in my own head, and it's something I can empathize with, though I may not literally believe that to be true. Now if somebody sat down and wrote an essay trying to prove in a literal mode that the physical world is an illusion, an idea in my brain, etc., in the same way that one would argue any other issue in a logical manner, why should I assume that that person is coming from the same place Blake is, has the same motives for making the statement, or has experienced the content of this proposition in the same way? I did learn something very valuable from Allen Ginsberg, by the way. I am a linguistic rather than a visual person, so I need to be reminded what it's like. In one of his Naropa Institute lectures, not the one I cited, I don't think, Ginsberg follows the imagery step by step, questioning what is the experience of this imagery? He analyzes two poems: one is "Auguries of Innocence." The fact that he would take the literal imagination so literally, so concretely, gave me something to think about, since I don't customarily think in that manner. For all I know, Ginsberg recreated the psychological process whereby Blake created his images. My quarrel with Ginsberg lies in his discursive interpretations, which are of a different order than what I have just described. I don't have time to get into what I think is naive about Ginsberg's approach to Blake or to the world in general. Anyway, I injected this anecdote not only to give penance to Ginsberg, but to give a feel for the literal imagination, which should not be assumed to be the same as a literal set of propositions, though it should not also be seen as allegoric either. It might be quite a job to prove that certain of Blake's statements represent an entirely different experience and attitude from similar statements made by Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, etc., but then we just might have evidence to show that something different was going on with Blake. Perhaps Plato's God, like the other Greek gods, was just a mathematical diagram. There is already plenty of scholarship to demonstrate that Blake's contrary engagement with Newton is not simple know-nothing nostalgia for superstition and ignorance, nor is his problem Newton's physical theories per se. Blake is not even arguing on that level. The threat of Newton's naturalism to Blake's imagination is not any insipid fear that knowledge of the laws of nature would unweave a rainbow, no imbecilic nostalgic yearning for a creed outworn, no sentimental crap about how listening to the learned astronomer is a drag on just looking up at the stars. The one-dimensionality that Blake fears from the scientific imagination as embedded in the kind of society he lives in is in fact the same one-dimensionality that can be found in childish anti-scientific irrationalism or the dehumanizing ideological idiocy of turning quantum mechanics into a spiritual path. Blake is operating on an entirely different level. Had Blake been a different kind of person, he would have criticized British empiricism and mechanical materialism in a very different manner, with an analytical apparatus that could have challenged this world view in a different way. Given his background in Christian radicalism, his imaginative life, his taking his psychological experience of the world as real, etc. etc., he formulated his critique of empiricism and reductive naturalism that leaves man a grovelling little root outside of himself in a different way than I would. (What did he understand or even care about Newton's physics, literally speaking, after all?) I'm willing to respect that Blake and I are travelling in different ontological modes, but then again there might be a real kinship between the two that accounts for my capacity to relate to him. So the historical importance of Blake as a certain kind of teacher, dear Gloudina, is not only in what he has to teach, but in the fact that he can teach us things, given his social position and using _his_ methods, that Plato nor Aristotle nor Aquinas nor the whole lot of state tricksters have ever been able to teach nor could even dream of, since they would have undermined the justification for their own existence. Long before Feuerbach decided it was his mission to bring this whole tradition tumbling down, and before Marx completed the process by tying alienated consciousness to the division of labor and morally destroying forever the privileged position of the state intellectual as bearer of universal truth, Blake figured out the essentials of this whole problem, and formulated them in a peculiar language, based on symbols known and invented. Sometime I will show why Jesus as destroyer of the Moral Virtues of the heathen is so important. In real history, this fictional character of Jesus did far less for humanity's development than the invention of the flush toilet, but in the system of Blake, Jesus as the annihilator of the moral system of the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword and all like them is critical and revolutionary. These are just a few examples of what it means to situate Blake in the universe of knowledge. It is not an academic exercise at all -- it's about the question of how we make sense out of our world and the tools around us we use to do so. It's a question as deep as human subjectivity itself -- deep, deep, that's how deep it is. Living in a society where the dominant spiritual forces are the Christian Coalition and the Nation of Islam, please believe that I feel an urgency in my work you can scarcely imagine. (Ralph Dumain, 4 April 1996, 1:00 am EST, in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 00:34:46 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: Plato & Milton Message-Id: <960404003446.202a9aba@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Yes and no, Mr. Epstein. If I hazily recall my Greeks correctly, the form wasnot the "ultimate for everyone and everything," but the ideal for everyone and everything. To run a bit with your idea, this ideal is what Milton achieved by uniting with his form. This, at least, fits the image of being "suspended in Eternity." But I do appreciate the correction -- one of the greatest forms of instruction. Intended ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 00:37:35 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: R Dumain and Satan Message-Id: <960404003735.202a9aba@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Yes. Intended ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 00:45:55 -0600 (CST) From: GVTUCKER@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: Blake sighting Message-Id: <960404004555.202a9aba@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Sendak's illustrations in _Pierre_ are very reminescent of Blake: emphasis on strong lines, for example. But, if I remember me correctly, there are only two illustrations? Intended ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 00:19:12 -0800 From: sarahclayton@earthlink.net (Sarah Clayton) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: query Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >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. I don't know the specific reference, much to my discredit. But the idea is quite solidly stuck in m head, that once nature becomes IDENTIFIED, Time ceases to exist. It is my conception that Blake's noton was that once the Human imagination regains its rightful position that time no longer subverts the human unto itself, nature is no longer an exterior condition and apocalypse brings about the return of the eternal...(oh dear, that sounds vaguely neitzchean) ;-) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 07:28:14 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: query Message-Id: <3163C05E.4D57@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit "Los is by mortals nam'd Time; Enitharmon is nam'd Space" When Los reunites with his emanation Enitharmon, there will be no more Los, no more Enitharmon, no more Space or Time. Only what?, the eternal Great Humanity divine? LOS (not that one) (http://www.wmblake.com/los/home.html) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 07:39:10 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake and Other Romantics Message-Id: <3163C2EE.1E82@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In his post of March 3, Jamison Oughton asks: > Does he ever say in his letters or anywhere else? > Jamison, you could read all of Blake's letters, and all of his critical prose (the Prospectus, Descriptive Catalog, etc.), and all of his marginalia, with enough time between the best parts to think about it a little and maybe even take a note or two, in one longish rainy afternoon. It would probably be a trip worth your time. LOS (http://www.wmblake.com/los/home.html) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 07:53:04 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE Message-Id: <3163C630.5D8A@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > when Blake > makes a statement, do we interpret his statement or its motive as > being the exact same as someone who makes a statement, even one > that reads similarly, in quite another mode of discourse based on > a different way of thinking or different priorities, say in a > philosophical essay? How do we relate the two different sets of > statements and the ways of thinking and their motives? > First, that is a superbly important question, and I do, with no play in the words at all, admire Ralph for tackling it and for the rigor he brings to it. Second, at the risk of provoking Ralph's ire, I would recommend the Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of 'Don Quixote'", for what I found to be a captivating & totally unforgettable & probably fictional treatment of the question. Borges, of course, supplies no answer, but we can expect that from Ralph. For those of us who do play, Borges is great fun to play with. LOS (http://www.wmblake.com/los/home.html) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 08:01:33 -0500 From: "Leslie O. Segar" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE Message-Id: <3163C82D.2D48@wmblake.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Despite my earlier pokes, Ralph, that was perhaps the single best essay I have ever received from a mail list. I am awed and delighted by it. And I am surprised, and even more delighted, to find that I agree with your approach at every point, and with most of your judgments. Thank you. LOS (http://www.wmblake.com/los/home.html) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:40:05 -0600 From: cerackowitz@mail.utexas.edu (Chad E. Rackowitz) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: John Clare Message-Id: <199604041440.IAA12175@mail.utexas.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > If I am not supposed to keep bringing up poets other than Blake, then >just tell me and I will quit. > Does anyone know where the unpublished poems of John Clare are? I was >told that there are possibly a thousand that have not been published. > Jamison Oughton Jamison, The bulk of Clare manuscripts can be found at the Northhampton Public Library, the Peterborough Museum, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. There are, of course, a number of Clare manuscripts scattered all over the place; for instance, at the University of Texas we have a very small number of Clare manuscripts. Many Clare poems that were not published in his lifetime have since been collected and published in books like _Poems of John Clare's Madness_ and _The Midsummer Cushion_. Clare was prolific! So I'm sure there's much of his poetry that remains to be devoured and published. Cheers, Chad E. Rackowitz University of Texas at Austin cerackowitz@mail.utexas.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 09:13:50 -0600 From: Jennifer Wenska To: blake@albion.com Subject: Introduction Message-Id: <2.2.32.19960404151350.006c5a9c@mail.utexas.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hi -- My name is Jennifer Wenska, and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Right now I'm finishing my masters report on Blake and hypertext -- I've been thinking about how Blake's prophecies have been "realized" in today's computer culture, either through their visionary precepts or through our reinscription of his texts. It's the old "Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems" sort of thing. I've been reading this list for a while now, and I'm impressed with the diversity of interests in this group. I myself am often prone to emotional, "personal" readings of Blake, but I will try to keep it down. Thanks --j ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 09:45:25 -0600 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: R Dumain and Satan Message-Id: <9604041550.AA03210@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > Yes. > Intended I'm all for brevity in posts, but was it really worth the effort to send the above? And why does this person sign all his/her posts "Intended"? Jennifer Michael ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:15:55 -0500 (EST) From: izak@igs.net (Izak Bouwer) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Thank you,Ralph Message-Id: <199604041615.LAA11647@host.igs.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" There Ralph, I knew you could do it. I am filled with gratitude. No, what you are doing is not a pointless intellectual exercise. It is one of the best things that has happened on this list group. Please continue to think out loud. I fear that I have sounded condescending towards Jorge Luis Borges in my last post. He is another good thing in the human breast. A great help for divergent thinking (like Hubert Benoit said of the koan and other techniques),a technique that Blake himself used too, I believe. "..the heresiarch..formulated a very daring hypothesis.. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity." (Tlon, Uqbar,Orbis Tertius) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:23:36 -0500 (EST) From: Jonathan J Winsor To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: Blake sighting Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Thu, 4 Apr 1996 GVTUCKER@ualr.edu wrote: > Sendak's illustrations in _Pierre_ are very reminescent of Blake: emphasis > on strong lines, for example. But, if I remember me correctly, there are only > two illustrations? > Intended I'm not sure of the exact number but I think it's more on the order of fifteen or twenty. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 12:26:40 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Agar To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Conflict in Online Discourse (fwd) Message-Id: <199604041726.MAA15598@uhura.cc.rochester.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Great article and very apropos for what's been going on in the Blake group lately. I wonder on the issue of register, how it is possible to create a given register in this written/verbal medium. Some people seem to have a knack for it, presenting clear speach registers, maybe using asterix or underlines for emphasis, while others write in monotone. In communicating with friends, I've found that subtle sarcasm sometimes comes across as biting abuse.. a mere case of reading in the wrong register. I think some such problems are inherent in the medium. I use a pleasant, happy speech register as I communicate my thanks for passing on that article, "Thank you"... and add a ridiculous smiley face in ascii to put more humanity on the net :) Charlie ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:43:39 -0600 (CST) From: Greg Sturgeon To: blake@albion.com Cc: James Zahradka , blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's tombstone Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Jonathan Epstein wrote: > Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 23:24:03 -0500 (EST) > From: Jonathan Epstein > To: James Zahradka > Cc: blake@albion.com > Subject: Re: Blake's tombstone > > Actually, would there be any way to scan the photo, and send it to the > list? This way, we can all see (after appropriately getting the image off > the message). Also, please tell me (us) about the homeless man... > > Thank you. > Jon Epstein > > Actually, if the person with the photo has a web site, she could scan it in and put it there, and we could all partake... Greg Sturgeon c647679@showme.missouri.edu enggreg@showme.missouri.edu http://www.missouri.edu/~c647679/ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 11:46:16 -0600 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake sighting Message-Id: <96040411461653@womenscol.stephens.edu> Actually there are quite a few illustrations by Sendak scattered all through Herschel Parker's interesting edition of _Pierre_. Since Parker's editorial decisions represent a major revision of the text and our understanding of it, it is interesting to speculate about the kind of re-vision Sendak has undertaken by developing the highly erotic imagery (especially homoerotic imagery) that he presents at frequent intervals in the text. I agree with Jon that there is a Blake-like quality to some of Sendak's illustrations, and Sendak has certainly testified to Blake's influence, but I think that many readers are going to have a very different (though related) influence in mind when they see the illustrations--specifically, Blake's friend Fuseli. The women in Sendak's illustrations, especially, are far more Fuseli-esque than Blakean, and many of the men, especially with their prominent genital displays, will suggest Fuseli's erotic imagery more than Blake's more visionary versions of the human form divine. Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 13:16:01 -0500 (EST) From: Jonathan J Winsor To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake sighting Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Just to clarify what I meant by "sophisticated" in my post about Cech's book on Sendak-- I meant that his book isn't just something in the pop-psychology genre or a novelty book for Sendak enthusiasts. For the record I have nothing against dialectical materialism, although I think Blake thought that a revolution in perception was far more important than any mere change in who holds political power. Personally, I prefer Vico to any of the German idealists. I have a hard time buying into either Hegel or Marx's 19th century sense of teleology, even if Marx's indictment of capitalism is sound, and chairman Mao is my candidate for the most evil, arrogant, single-visioned man of the twentieth century, and Lenin is not far behind. (Probably, though, I grumble over baddies like Ronald Reagan and Margeret Thatcher more often because they are more real to me.) As for the sophistication of Blake studies, I agree with what Mr. Dumain is implying, that often the tendency is to impose our own "sophisticated" pet ideas on Blake, making him march to some sort of unified field theory of theories that we have, without appreciating his texts, which I think deliberately subvert this kind of effort. Cheers again, Jon Winsor. jjwinsor@christa.unh.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 96 14:19:02 CST From: Mark Trevor Smith To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake's difficulty Message-Id: <9604042028.AA07132@uu6.psi.com> Why is Blake so difficult to read? some have asked recently. Let me offer one of my answers. In the first place, many people are struck with Blake's abrupt and generalizing declarations. They find him rather simple. Those pronouncements I would like to compare to the human body. When we look at a human body, we can see the shape, a few of the features, and the overall impression quickly. Look at Blake's "Glad Day" and you receive an immediate and vivid impression of unity, harmony and simplicity. This aspect of Blake is a crucial one. At the other extreme Blake analyzes ruthlessly the details of the human body. Just as the anatomist of the physical body can list thousands of particular nerves, muscles, and blood vessels, staggering us with their complexity, so Blake delves into human existence, anatomizing its particularities. Could one possibly study the human body in any detail without staggering complications? Could Blake possibly investigate human existence thoroughly without staggering us with its complexities, inch by baffling inch? Albion is a clear, definite being, but he is also a tangle of incredibly organized complexities. How can we ever appreciate, much less understand, humanity without fronting the complexities? mts231f@vma.smsu.edu Mark Trevor Smith ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 15:43:05 -0600 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's tombstone Message-Id: <9604042147.AA17308@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Actually, if the person with the photo has a web site, she could scan it >in and put it there, and we could all partake... I'm afraid I don't have a web site, but we do have a scanner here, which I'll use as soon as I find the photo and have time to go over to the lab. Since I haven't ever dealt with an image pasted into an email message, would that pose problems for the list or with the different email programs that members use? If so, perhaps it would be best to send it only to those who request it. I'll wait for advice before proceeding. Jennifer Michael ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 18:55:58 -0600 (CST) From: HXNEWSAM@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: introduction Message-Id: <960404185558.202b22f6@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 22:14:19 -0600 From: enghhh@showme.missouri.edu (Howard Hinkel) To: blake@albion.com Subject: pleasant lovely Shadow Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Having lurked too long in the moony shadows where no dispute can come, I've been moved by the bardic voices in the posts on this list as well as by similar voices from unusually good graduate students in a Blake seminar this semester--moved to enter the frays of generation and get active. I appreciate the energetic building of the sons and daughters on the list and look forward to the daily efforts to build Golgonooza. Speaking of which, our seminar is going to try to get there next week by way of Milton II in preparation for a later approach on the wings of Jerusalem. I, though, need to get past the ninefold polypus of administrative duties which has resulted in losing touch with the latest thinking about Golgonooza. Some thoughts about Golgonooza? some suggestions about helpful reading? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 00:11:04 -0500 (EST) From: Jonathan Epstein To: blake@albion.com Subject: Milton, book II Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Re: looking at Milton II via Jerusalem, I have an idea which may help. It is what I have been spending 2 semesters reasearching at the undergrad level (and it is duw in 3 weeks!). I looked at Milton as a means to explore the definition and meaning of the Self. I also used Mary SHelley's "Frankenstein" as a backup source -- using it to support Blake's (and mine). The similarities are there. Please e-mail me personally, and I'll tell more. For now, I must put my tired fingers to bed, as it would take a lot of writing to explain where I'm coming from. Jonathan Epstein epstein@dickinson.edu -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #29 *************************************