------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 37 Today's Topics: Re: Golgonooza -Reply -Reply The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Re: Golgonooza -Reply Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Blake's S&M, and Marx's too... Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Re: Blake's S&M, and Marx's too... ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 10:37:45 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Golgonooza -Reply -Reply Message-Id: Dear Matthew, Thanks for sharing such delightful anecdotes with me. I met Kathleen Raine about a decade ago and had tea with her. As I arrived, she came down the street, clutching her dry cleaning, and then we chatted in the kitchen over the steam and in a wonderfully English-style room cluttered with books, damp and unobtrusive furniture. Not that Kathleen has anything to do with Bateson ... but in evoking your bear of a man, her image also came to mind, as even the grizzliest of personalities are rather appealing in asserting their freedom to be eccentric - something I think we have lost in the new countries. Well, my office now feels filled with the expansive personality of Gregory, who was prone to utter `nonsense' under his breath - if sufficiently provoked. Blake's portrait (the one with the visionary eye, and without a hat) looking down from my bookcase, seems amused at that. Please do keep in touch. It's a great pleasure talking to other Blakeans. Pam ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 10:58:27 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, albright@world.std.com Subject: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: There is an element of sado-masochism in bending another to one's own delight in The Clod & Pebble, but it is only the self-enclosed, other-resisting Pebble that represents the fallen view of love. I know that critics often insist that the Pebble's view is `meet' and that Blake approved of it, but on this point I totally disagree with them. If one places the two speakers within the entire context of Blake's myth, then we can visualise the Clod and Pebble as they once were in Eternity where ALL beings (Cloud, Lily, Worm, trees, herbs, mountains, rivers etc) once possessed the divine human form and were endowed with human eloquence (as evoked in The Book of Thel).. In the mortal world they, like the `tyger' are all `framed' in confined shapes where their once expansive senses are contracted and darkened. Even so, the Clod and Pebble still retain something of their former ability to speak as once they used to - though the Pebble now tries to out-argue the Clod who still tries to retain faith in the divine vision of selfless love which used to sustain all of Albion's children in Eternity in Innocence. So, while the poem evokes a real running river in the world of nature in which the water gives voice to whatever it runs over, this is no longer the River of Life which participated in the divine humanity. I think this poem encapsulates Blake's central themes in which he vigorously contrasts the Forgiver, Jesus, with the Accuser whose false visions of good and evil have caused many of the ugly perversions of love in the fallen world. In no way, therefore, can Blake be seen as upholding sado-masochism. Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 10:29:45 -0400 (EDT) From: "R.H. Albright" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Golgonooza -Reply Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII One thing I'll say about Gregory Bateson that applies to Blake. In STEPS TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF MIND, he talks alot about double-binds. That's what Blake is talking alot about, too. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 10:43:07 -0400 (EDT) From: "R.H. Albright" To: P Van Schaik Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Well, Pam has just done what I knew would happen. "In no way does Blake endorse sado-masochism" or something to that effect is your last line. But it's right there in the text! I mean, some can say Hamlet was crazy and some can say he was totally sane, but... "Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell's despair." So sung a little clod of clay, Trodden with the cattle's feet; But a pebble of the brook, Warbled out these meters meet: "Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite." It's all open to interpretation Pam. But my interpretation is CLEARLY there. The clod doesn't care for itself.. it gives of itself for another... makes a heaven even as it sinks in its own hell. That's masochism. Sorry. You have a problem with the stigma, the false belief that S&M is pathological and not just two poles or a rainbow. And then the pebble cruelly (sadistically) laughs, hey: I'm only out this for myself. I'll tie you up to turn me on. I get off on seeing you in weird positions ("loss of ease"), and I'll admit I'm building a hell out of my defiance, but who cares? Now the interesting thing is how you frame this all in other Blake works. But I could do the same, as indeed I did with my vision (and hey, they point is these are only INTEPRETATIONS) of God creating Adam. There's room for both of us. To me, The Clod and The Pebble is S&M in a nutshell. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 12:22:21 -0400 (EDT) From: "R.H. Albright" To: blake@albion.com, albright@world.std.com Subject: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Blake's view of Newton. You know, sometimes I think it's best to look at these things like in Plato's cave. Actually, when I took a Romantic literature course and spent two weeks solely on SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE, my professor- who happened to know ALOT on the subject- made a special point of withholding her views, which she did not want to "taint" our virgin experience of the texts and illustrations. Later, she would pick up on "that's a good point.." or "but could you also see this..." in subtly guiding ways that divulged her own views. That was helpful, too, because we were often baffled. I mean, what do you do with... some of this stuff! At any rate... I come to this view of Blake's watercolor/drawing of Newton from both my original experience, which I'll describe first, and a recent ECONOMIST magazine article, which had it as the illustration for an article basically saying, "Why Are People Dumping So Much on the Enlightenment?" 1) My initial reaction to the painting of Newton was: Yes! See how silly he is to be myopically focussing in on those drawings with those geometric calculation instruments! And yet he doesn't even acknowledge his own very handsome body (I mean, let's face it: the guy is BUILT!), or the crystalline-like rock formation on which he's sitting! So to me, this was a perfect, anti-mechanistic picture that Blake had created. Life is so much more than we can ever sum up in calculus. And so what if we can predict Halley's Comet (that wasn't Newton, but it's a Newton-like thing) coming back with such precision when the complexity of REAL life around us is so much more beautiful, enigmatic, and more. 2) Then I saw this article in the ECONOMIST (I have it cut out at home, if any of you want me to refer to the exact date and page #) in which the Newton image was used to introduce it. And they pointed out that people confuse the message of the Enlightenment often with the messenger... particularly in the case of the French Revolution. There, you had this lofty DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN which on paper far outstrips (this is MY opinion, intermingled with theirs) the USA's own BILL OR RIGHTS as far as breadth of vision. But the messenger sucked. The messenger was this elite little group in Paris with dictates DOWN to the masses. Bye-bye, democracy. Kind of like the Russian Revolution, which also promised much, but because of the delivery system: authoritarianism. But does this negate the power of Kant, whom the ECONOMIST believed is perhaps the greatest thinker of that Era (or all time)? No! Or Locke, or Hobbes, or Paine... I mean, they were all struggling, and all had flaws, but they were on the right track! And the funny thing is, Blake criticizes Newton, godfather of the Enlightenment (I believe the ECONOMIST article credits Newton for that), and yet where would Blake be WITHOUT the Enlightenment? 2a) It is the legacy of free speech and free thought that kept his works, not burned them. Yes, he was a "failure" in his time, and to me that explains alot of his bitterness. Paine was no rich guy, himself. Jefferson- barely able to hold on to Monticello. Some are better at swimming in the world of material success than others. But Blake, Paine, and Jefferson-- unbelievable legacies beyond the "success" or lack thereof in their time. As far as artists go, Van Gogh and Kafka had it rough, too. But eventually people *sometimes* get around to understanding what a visionary was doing. Amazing influence on the pre-Raphaelites, for instance. 2b) When I go to the Tate Gallery in London and see, over the course of 15 years, how they've set and re-set his works to aim for ever higher SCIENTIFIC ways to protect the art, I again smile and say: hey-- it's the legacy of great scientists like Newton that has preserved Blake's art for posterity. So who gets the last laugh? Was my interpretation #1 or #2 more "correct" or is *yours* more correct? There IS no laugh last. #1 and #2 still coexist in my mind. And for this user group to work, and not just be a clique like others I've joined and then been appalled by the insistent 2 or 3 out of 200 who talk, saying "I'm-going-to-stick-to-my-guns" instead of "Yeah, I can see your other side even if I still personally believe mine," we have to be open. We have to not be condescending. Or at least try. I mean, the first principle of an intellectual forum should be for people to feel free to ask "dumb" questions. And another principle, for me, is often "follow your instinct", even if I intentionally know it's going to shock you sometimes. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 13:23:30 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: <9604181828.AA26264@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I, too, have puzzled much over this poem, but I don't agree that the line >And builds a heaven in hell's despair." is equivalent to > makes a heaven even as it sinks in its own hell. "Hell's despair" apparently means "the despair of hell", but that despair may belong to hell itself (i.e., hell despairs because a heaven is being built) or to the subject who is in hell. Is it possible to make a heaven and sink into hell at the same time? You may say that it makes a heaven for another while making hell for itself, but that isn't quite what the poem says. Perhaps we should pay more attention not only to the parallel constructions of heaven and hell in the poem, but also to the words "despair" and "despite." Jennifer Michael ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 11:23:33 -0700 (MST) From: jmd@asu.edu To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com, albright@world.std.com Subject: Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT There is a good book by Donald Ault titled "Blake's Response to Newton" I believe which is relevant to this discussion. Jon Drnjevic Graduate Student Arizona State University ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 17:42:51 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jennifer Michael writes: >I, too, have puzzled much over this poem, but I don't agree that the line > >>And builds a heaven in hell's despair." > >is equivalent to > >> makes a heaven even as it sinks in its own hell. > >"Hell's despair" apparently means "the despair of hell", but that despair >may belong to hell itself (i.e., hell despairs because a heaven is being >built) or to the subject who is in hell. Is it possible to make a heaven >and sink into hell at the same time? You may say that it makes a heaven >for another while making hell for itself, but that isn't quite what the >poem says. > >Perhaps we should pay more attention not only to the parallel constructions >of heaven and hell in the poem, but also to the words "despair" and >"despite." Pay attention to... what? It's what we have, as readers, coming to a poem or any piece of art, that partly makes for different interpretations of great art. That's a truth of semiotics as well as of post-structuralism. I mean, I think it's incorrect to whimsically say things about the poem. But am I? The poem intermingles, like yin and yang, "heaven and hell" in both the clod's and pebble's worlds. I take somewhat of an issue with this "we should pay more attention not only to parallel constructions..." I don't know what you mean. Everyone knows what despair is. I'll define "despite", which is used less commonly later. But I'm trying to breathe new life into the poem by translating it into my own modern vocabulary. We should remember the source text. But how does that source text come alive if we can't play with it? If I can't try to use MY Modern Day English words, which includes MY conception of the world, wouldn't Blake himself just say these poems are dead, and worthy of nothing more than being rolled over and used as fertilizer for us, living in 1996? I studied S&M in college, using Marx's CAPITAL and Bram Stoker's DRACULA as core source texts, so I am divulging to you, my fellow readers, some of my background on the subject. I don't think it's a "sick, pathological" condition necessarily because its roots are in dominance and submission, which are all around us, all the time. Sometimes it gets out of hand, and wife beaters, for instance, should be held accountable. Slavery was, simply put, WRONG. But it doesn't negate these core feelings that I'm sure alot of you feel in bed with your loved one from time to time. Selfish? Selfless? Move between the two? YES, YES, YES. And the same with powers bigger than the bedroom. Like who gets to take the oil out of the Middle East? The rich people who can pay. Who gets to receive the money? The Sheiks who happen to be sitting on the oil. And who gets NOTHING, while this nonrenewable resource dwindles further and further? Alot of people in India, for example. It's not fair. But it's life. We can continue to work against it. But we have to know what we're dealing with, first, before we can work towards a higher ground. To give the Christian point of view of us as "fallen", life is sick. And heaven as much as hell is a human conception. So, in a way, the paradox of the clod and the pebble is never going to go away. But again, we can figure out how to make life more "heavenlike", and NOT just for the United States, which as I last recalled consumed 33% of the world's oil and had a much smaller amount of the world's population. By the way, I'm not a Marxist. I'm a libertarian. I'm not puzzled by the "Clod and the Pebble" poem. To me, it's S&M in a nutshell. The complexity comes in the illustration. But back to the poem: "And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair." Well, whose despair is it? Just ANYONE'S? It's open to interpretation, but given how selfless the clod is, I say it's the clod's. That just my interpretetation. "And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite." Despite, according to my online Merriam-Webster thesaurus, has this as its first meaning group: "a feeling of extreme disgust and dislike." For the pebble to be so cruel, "to bind another to its delight; joys in another's loss of ease"... well, I already gave my reading in the previous posting on this. You come to YOUR conclusions. Tell me about them. What adds depth to me is the picture: Sheep with their eyes closed and oxen with their eyes open... again, you build your own conclusions.... and the duck and happy frogs jumping down below... Thank you, Jennifer, for speaking up, by the way. I get overly excited sometimes, but I don't mean to put anybody else "down" by further articulating what I see. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 17:49:25 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Cc: jondrnj@general1.asu.edu Subject: Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jon Drnjevic recommends reading a book to understand the drawing/painting I mentioned about Blake's Depiction of Newton. My question is: Have you seen the drawing/painting, Jon? If so, why don't you tell the group what YOU think of the drawing? Blake would want you to rip through that "book" and try to see with your clear-stained eyes, and talk directly, don't you think? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 23:58:44 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: <96041823584476@womenscol.stephens.edu> How convenient to be teaching Carroll's _Through the Looking Glass_. In chapter 6, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, who gives her lessons in epistemology and lingustics--to wit: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you *can* make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-- that's all." Oh, that old dryasdust and pedantic Alice! Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:20:38 -0400 From: grayrobe@pilot.msu.edu (Robert M. Gray, Jr.) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake's S&M, and Marx's too... Message-Id: <199604191320.JAA95428@pilot14.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In the spirit of the recent discussion/reminiscence on Gregory Bateson, I once had a professor, of far less reknown, who, after an ambitious student offered an intriguing and inventive sexual interpretation of a poem, replied, "That's very interesting, but I'm afraid it tells us more about you than about the poem." As for "The Clod & the Pebble," I can see where you find S&M in the poem, but I must admit uncertainty in the degree to which you bring S&M into it. I have no idea how your S&M professor used CAPITAL as a core text on the subject, but as someone rather familiar with that text, I feel confident in expressing that it is *not* "about" S&M at all, social mores and prudishness aside. It is, however, about systems (or a system) of domination and submission. And if we look at Blake's myth as a whole, as Pam suggests (which is clearly a more credible critical foundation of meaning for Blake's poetry than your college class on S&M, social mores and prudishness aside), we find (especially in "London," "The Garden of Love," MILTON, and JERUSALEM, although virtually anything else will work as well) that Blake's poetry is deeply concerned with systems of domination and submission, but as it is for Marx, that system is based in the politics, economics, and religion of a fallen world (Marx would use the word "alienated," but the effects are quite similar). Neither writer (and especially Marx) would claim that sexuality is the root of the system, nor that it is prevalent in his analysis. Subsequent commentaries (or "interpretations") on, say, Marx's analysis could well claim that he is by and large correct, except that he fails to see that the root cause of the system is sexual, but you haven't said that. What I am getting at can perhaps be found in that catch phrase about sexual harrassment--it isn't about sex; it's about power. S&M is quite parallel as a structure to Marx's capitalism and whatever you want to claim Blake is talking about (love/religion/states/capitalism/etc.), but that doesn't make them the same thing (i.e., that doesn't make capitalism about S&M; if anything, it makes S&M about capitalism, but that seems more suitable for another list). Now, to address "The Clod & the Pebble" more directly, if you had condsidered all of Pam's reply, you might have taken her final line as it was meant. Given all of the elements and complexities of Blake's system (primarily, I think, the various "states"--innocence/experience as well as Ulro/Generation/Beulah/Eternity--although social institutions and ideologies enter into this as well), the poem, as you say, is indeed about the "contrary" extremes of love, but it is not an endorsement or upholding of those contraries; rather, it is a recognition of them, because ultimately, in the Blakean system, they are not dialectical contraries at all; they are "divided," more like, say, Luvah/Vala or actually Los/his Spectre, than Good/Evil or Reason/Energy, due to the fallen (or for Marx, alienated) world of time (history). Also, while it is perhaps credible to claim that there is an element of S&M in the poem, it is another to claim that the poem "screams S&M" or even that is "about" it. You can certainly say that Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" or Frost's "Birches" scream orgasm, but that doesn't make them "about" orgasm, at least not without considerable qualification. Well that's my $.06 or 7, so I'll stop now (and duck!). Rob Gray ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:28:50 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: <9604191433.AA27264@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >>Perhaps we should pay more attention not only to the parallel constructions >>of heaven and hell in the poem, but also to the words "despair" and >>"despite." > >I take somewhat of an issue with this "we should pay more attention not >only to parallel constructions..." I don't know what you mean. Everyone >knows what despair is. I'll define "despite", which is used less commonly >later. But I'm trying to breathe new life into the poem by translating it >into my own modern vocabulary. We should remember the source text. But how >does that source text come alive if we can't play with it? If I can't try >to use MY Modern Day English words, which includes MY conception of the >world, wouldn't Blake himself just say these poems are dead, and worthy of >nothing more than being rolled over and used as fertilizer for us, living >in 1996? If everyone knows what despair is, then why can I read the line in two ways, as I tried to show in my previous message: either the despair belongs to the clod or to hell? If the clod is really a masochist, would it really find "despair" in the "hell" of submission to another's desires? Furthermore, if everyone knows what despair is, why do you need to "translate it into your own modern vocabulary"? If Blake is just a "source text" for you, then write your own poems, by all means. By "pay more attention," I mean READ, just as you do when you say of S&M that "It's right there in the text!" >For the pebble to be so cruel, "to bind another to its delight; joys in >another's loss of ease"... > >well, I already gave my reading in the previous posting on this. I see two ways of reading "bind another to its delight" as well: to achieve delight through binding another, or to bind another's delight to its own. Do you see what I mean? I'm not one of those who squeamishly insists that there can't possibly be any S&M in the poem; quite the contrary. I just don't think that, having established that, we know what Blake's attitude toward sadomasochism is. This is a Song of Experience, after all, and these songs present a range of attitudes toward the "realities" they describe. I'll try to write more later, but I have to go teach a class on _Lycidas_ now. My students will insist on referring to the reading process as "decoding," as though they have to guess what the poem means, and thus lose the beauty and strangeness of the language itself. Oh, well, it's just a "dead text." Jennifer ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 07:51:44 +0100 From: sarahclayton@earthlink.net (Sarah Clayton) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's S&M, and Marx's too... Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 9:20 AM 4/19/96, Robert M. Gray, Jr. wrote: > Neither writer (and >especially Marx) would claim that sexuality is the root of the system, nor >that it is prevalent in his analysis. OH PLEASE!!!! 1. Marx is a materialist. The Body is the most primary element of Marx's System. 2. Blake's system IS COMPLETELY ROOTED IN THE BODY DIVINE, THe DIVINE BODY, THE HUMAN FORM, THE BODY BODY BODY BODY....Jesus! What is wrong with you (academic) people? ;-))))))) AND I quote: a. ..."Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast" THE HUMAN BREAST IS NOT THE "NOTION" OR "IDEA" OF THE BREAST, BUT THE BREAST ITSELF!!! Blake was NOT a Platonic idealist. for crissake. ("If Morality is christianity then socrates was saviour") b...."Energy is the only life and is from the BODY and Reason is the bound or outward circumferance of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight" ENERGY does not come from the idea (reason), from the external, (circumferance), or from Hell, (the bound), Energy comes from the body. The body is particular and everyone has one. Simple as that. Perhaps it would helpt to call it "The Great Ephemeral Skin" ? (see Lyotard) (everything is the body) c...."Man has no Body distinct from his Soul foir that calld Body is a portion of the Soul discerned by the five Senses." I believe there is a distinct difference between a dead body and a live one. One has energy, one doesn't. however, the body that MAN has....is a live one. and that live one IS Energy...NOT DISTINCT FROM THE SOUL, in other words: the same thing as the soul. not seperate. SO...If you want to say that energy is just nice and well-mannered and doesn't think about sex...well, you would be guilty of the first major sin, the sin of exteriority, in other words: you are probably a castrated acadamecian who dreams of one day reducing eerything he encounters in life to a theory, yes, a SYSTEM (not an Anti System or DIABOLICAL SYSTEM, as blake intended) so that you can ultimately be free of the troubling inconvenience Pain, or of Life itself ( a more polite, abstract way of putting it, lest you don't catch my drift). >What I am getting at can... >perhaps be found in that catch phrase about sexual harrassment--it isn't >about sex; it's about power. S&M is quite parallel as a structure to Marx's >capitalism and whatever you want to claim Blake is talking about >(love/religion/states/capitalism/etc.), but that doesn't make them the same >thing (i.e., that doesn't make capitalism about S&M; if anything, it makes >S&M about capitalism, but that seems more suitable for another list). Oh, .....oh oh oh oh oh oh ......Would it be allright if I barked here? BARK BARK BARK BARK, GRRRRRRRRRUUUUUUUUF. Thank-you. Let us just assume for a moment that thee is such a thing called the Body Politic. Let us just assume that Frye was right for once when he spoke of Blake's abhorence for the way that the Church devours and diminishes the human body, turning it into a part of the One instead of a whole unto itself, among the many like itself, and that this reduction (and subsequent opression) is entirely a political one and has nothing to do with true religion or spirtuality. Eh? Did I lose anyone there? Allright, just checking: You, my dear Mr. Gray, are tryng to tell us that Blake's Great System is about Power? Power? Like ...Like Authority? Like Capital? Like ...like Blake is talking about a Real Power like ...like what? Like POLITICS? Something ABOVE the body? SOmething GREATER than the BODY? Something ABSOLUTE? _R E A S O N_ PERHAPS? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH Is that what Blake is trying to teach us, Dear Mr. Drab, er Gray? is he trying to take us to those absolutes that the body itself just fails to produce? _N_O_T_ and that is all I have to say in response this morning... you can stop ducking now. -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #37 *************************************