------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 55 Today's Topics: Re: the hand & apple, 3fold Re: romanticists vs. romantics Eve's Reason help me Who made the Lamb? Tyger? A.L. Morton BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY Re: BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY Re: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Dangerous Enthusiasm Re: BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY discipleship of Blakeans Re: discipleship of Blakeans: US vs. UK Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Re: discipleship of Blakeans: US vs. UK Re: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 14:48:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew J Dubuque To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: the hand & apple, 3fold Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Please note that this version below corrects a few typos in the original. Please discard the previous version. Sorry... On Sat, 18 May 1996, Matthew J Dubuque wrote: To All: This is a continuation of the previous discussion of fourfold vision of my hand as it holds an apple. THREEFOLD VISION The Apple: Immanent within the structure of that fruiting dicot the apple is the quantity four and/or five. As a member of the rose family, it is similar in development, structure, and fruiting to other roses such as strawberries. In Threefold vision, Blake refers to "Beulah's sleep" so that as my simultaneous visions broaden and deepen, the forthcoming inclusions mirror semantic ambiguities approached in dreams as this apple resonates visually with chords of other roses harmonically expressed as strawberries and plums. As any student of electrical engineering knows, Fourier was a brilliant 18th century mathematician who invented the integrals which describe sine waves. Devalois then demonstrated that Area 17 of the human visual cortex uses this methodology in the spatial frequency domain, and it has been established conclusively that the basilar membrane within the middle ear also analyzes complex temporal waveforms by devolving them into their constituent harmonics. The point here however, is that Fourier always stressed that the birth and development of ideas is formally isomorphic with the birth and development of living creatures. Fourier described the birth of his integrals as flowing directly from the fact that for many years he slept with a copy of Ohm's most important work by his bedside. (Ohm was the fellow who developed the measurement of electrical resistance). The birth of an idea has three principal phases: 1. Inoculation 2. Incubation 3. Illumination First Fourier was inoculated with the brilliant ideas of Ohm about electrical impedance formulae. Then it incubated for several years as he gestated the fruits of Ohm's knowledge. Finally, Fourier was illuminated by developed the extraordinary type of integral calculus essential to understanding any periodic activity. These similarities are not trivial to, for example the development of a fruit or of a mammalian embryo. The stigma is inoculated by pollen from the anther. After fertilization, the fruiting ovary enlarges and gestates during incubation. Finally the mature fruit drops, and the fruit of the knowledge of the difference between good and evil is offered up. Human pregnancy is also formally similar to this process. As twofold vision deepens into threefold vision the fruits of our dreams (Beulah's sleep) become more apparent. For example, the legendary 13th century Japanese poet Dogen describes a dream of Buddah as follows: "When the old plum tree suddenly opens, the world of blossoming flowers arises. At the moment when the world of blossoming flowers arises, spring arrives. There is a single blossom that opens five blossoms, hundreds, thousands, myriads, billions of blossoms-countless blossoms. Blossoming is the old plum tree's offering." And, "One blossom opens five petals. The fruit matures of itself." From "Moon in a Dewdrop", Writings of Zen Master Dogen... In short, as you perceive the overriding harmony of the natural world through threefold vision, the distinctions between dreams and lingering objectivism become less arbitrary. THREEFOLD VISION: My hand: Through serial homology, my hand proposes the "hand" of a lizard climbing rocks. The fingernails are like claws, and the differentiation between the thumb and the fingers, and analogies of grasping all propose differing instrumentation in this symphony of vertebral homology. Some humans, especially Occidentals, tend to cleave the world into such nominalized fragments that they shatter the isomorphisms extant between their ideas and what those ideas describe. Dumain understands that Lenin addressed this problem, and Ralph is trying to elegantly be freed of this bondage that Lenin describes by triangulating three superficially diverse schools of thought. But it is quite possible that this Occidental propagation of Manichean insanity by single-lobed types is to some extent an artifact of a terrestial environment. My hand, and the hand of the lizard embryonically develop outward into differentiable digits (fingers). At the base of these fingers, they are connected by webbing. So if I compare my hand to the hand of a lizard in one direction of homologous description, then I tend to describe terrestial animals. Those with cloved hoofs, those birds with similar claws, those koalas shearing leaves from eucalyptus trees. But if I focus my triple vision instead on the webbing between the fingers, I notice the parallels between the webbing of my hand, the hand of a lizard, and the flippers of a dolphin which are almost entirely webbed. In a marine environment, all parts of the environment are connected and touch each other through the medium of water. It is integrated by virtue of its basic structure. For those who propose a link between possessing fingers and the ability to count digitally to ten, the reasonable subsequent link between the possession of fingers and digital communication becomes more defensible. Indeed these links between the shapes of serially expressed proteins folded into vertebral structures and the homologous description of ideas is not a trivial one. In his landmark book published by Cambridge University in l902 (now in its 12th printing) D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson in On Growth and Form lays out, on a Cartesian x-y grid, apparently superficial differences between crab shells of different species and jaws from different mammals. He then proves that merely by imposing simple hyberbolic and parabolic transformations upon the x-y grid describing these shapes, anyone can produce the shapes of most of the genera. A reproduction of one example from the book (various crab carapaces is reproduced in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson. Elementary evolutionary morphology. Morphing before computers.... So that really what is evolving when we classify something as a "new species" is to some extent simple algebraic transformations upon previous jawbones, hands, beaks, and carapaces. It is the parabolic and hyperbolic algebraic equations that are evolving. And surely algebraic equations are ideas, at least more so than the stone that Bishop Berkeley kicked in disgust at the solipsists... Next week, four fold vision...(or a fourfold description of it...!) Note about next week's fourfold chat: Both question marks and cat's paws occur at the end of transformational artifacts and are used to glean information about the outside world. More on that next week... Until then, may all your paw prints be fourfold! I am, respectfully yours, Matthew Dubuque virtual@leland.stanford.edu > > > > > ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 May 96 03:07:51 -0500 From: Penn Hackney To: "blake@albion.com" Subject: Re: romanticists vs. romantics Message-Id: <199605190701.DAA19787@yoda.fyi.net> -- [ From: Penn Hackney * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] -- > Let me introduce myself. My name is Ian Gordon and I have been quietly > watching and enjoying this list for quite some time from my country's capital > of Canberra, Australia. I feel a little inadequate about making much comment > because I fall very much into the amateur category when it comes to Blake .> However, I have a question that I can't let go, prompted my Jennifer Michael's > last very interesting post on romantics. Jennifer points out that for Blake, > his poetry often seems entirely a vehicle for his ideas. > > Then I recall (and I looked it up again to make sure) that A.E. Houseman, in > his 'The Name and Nature of Poetry', says that poetry seems to him more > physical than intellectual, and that 'Blake again and again...gives us poetry > neat, or adulterated with so little meaning that nothing except poetic emotion > is perceived and matters'. Houseman then quotes The Voice of the Bard, which > is for me and many others I gather, full of meaning. Can all this be > rationalized? > Sure. Houseman liked Blake (or thought he did or wanted to) but didn't understand him. And Houseman was (or thought he was or wanted to be) a "Romantic" -- the kind who like their poetry "neat". -- Penn Hackney tcdpenn@fyi.net penn@worldnet.att.net Without Unceasing Practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off, you are Lost. -- William Blake, Laocovn, c. 1820 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 23:33:18 -0700 From: "D. A. Ellison" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Eve's Reason Message-Id: <319EC0AE.214D@concentric.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Heather, Chad, & Jennifer, Thank you for responding to my questioning of the word rhetorical. After reading your three notes, I must agree that it is a rhetorical question. As it is when asked of the tyger. After all, if the poet, who happens to be the author of both poems, knows the answer in the one it only follows that he knows the answer in the other. This almost appears to be an Abraham/Kierkegaard "leap of faith". After accepting the joyful revelation of innocence, the author is confronted with the acceptance of the other side of revelation, experience. To accept the one a person is required to also accept the other. Following the line of thought that god created everything, no matter which dark concept the tyger may symbolize (god even created the fallen angels), this question is also rhetorical. Aspects and perception become a "left foot/right foot" concept rather than a questioning of creation once the "leap" is made. Once again, thank you for your responses. Good points, one and all. Cordially, R.A.E. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 09:50:01, -0500 From: VViseCrack@prodigy.com (MR PETER E LEDDY III) To: blake-request@albion.com, blake-unscribe@albion.com, blake@albion.com Subject: help me Message-Id: <199605191350.JAA03520@mime4.prodigy.com> what is this stuff you are sending me i want out. please take me off the mailling list. my name is peter leddy and my e-mail address is VViseCrack@prodigy.com or Cwtn96b@prodigy.com whichever one i told you. THANKS ALOT peter leddy VVisecrack@prodigy.com Cwtn96b@prodigy.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 16:27:27 -0400 From: grayrobe@pilot.msu.edu (Robert M. Gray, Jr.) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Message-Id: <199605212027.QAA34051@pilot10.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" In terms of the current discussion on the Lamb and Tyger, I tend to agree that the child intends the question as rhetorical, but I'm not sure that, at least in Blake's mind, the child actually knows the "correct" answer to the question. Before I go any further, I must express my concern that, while we can certainly use "The Lamb" to aid us in our reading of "The Tyger," THE MARRIAGE OF H&H, and other later works, I'm not sure to what degree we can do the reverse, as, since "The Lamb" was written years earlier, we can't be sure how much his thought and ideas changed or developed in the intervening period. With this "danger" in mind, however, I'll do this "reverse" anyway. It is obvious (to me, anyway) that the "maker" of the lamb, or at least the answer to the rhetorical question, is Jesus (the child, on the other hand, might be a different matter, but hear me out). And it seems quite clear (to me), given the "blacksmith" imagery in the poem, that the "maker" of the tyger is Los. I feel safe and historically responsible in making this claim since the BOOK OF URIZEN was "published" in the same year as the SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. My point, however, is that if we can overlook the intervening years between "The Tyger" and Blake's conception of the ending of JERUSALEM (a span that could have been as many as 25 years, but probably not that large), where Jesus ("the Divine Appearance") "was the likeness & similitude of Los" (96.7), then the maker of the lamb and tyger are the same, which would seem to lead us to a conclusion that R.A.E. called-- >the line of thought that god created everything, no matter which dark >concept the tyger may symbolize (god even created the fallen angels). However, if we remember our Blake "bible" (no, not the BLAKE DICTIONARY; but rather the MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL), we know that "All deities reside in the human breast" (11). Therefore, if we believe Erdman's suggestion that Los "is" Blake, then Jesus both resides in and "is" Blake. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Blake made the lamb or tyger, nor am I granting him messianic status (I've read my McGann!). Wouldn't it be the child, as the speaker and "consciousness" of the poem, who made the lamb? Rob ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 16:46:30 -0400 From: grayrobe@pilot.msu.edu (Robert M. Gray, Jr.) To: blake@albion.com Subject: A.L. Morton Message-Id: <199605212046.QAA59445@pilot10.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Ralph, et al-- If you want Morton's THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL as a text moreso than as a relic or commodity, it was included in his 1966 book, THE MATTER OF BRITAIN, which although likely out of print in the US, might be more available through the "out of print" search engine than EG. It might conceivably be available in the UK as well, but I doubt it. However, a book that is available in the UK is HISTORY AND THE IMAGINATION: SELECTED WRITINGS OF A.L. MORTON. I would think that any respectable "real" bookstore would be able to get ahold of it for you. That's how I got my copy. I don't remember how much I paid, but the dust jacket says 19.95 (pounds), which is better than $60. It's probably still more than you want to spend, but from what I can discern about your tastes from the list, you'd probably like it. It covers a wide range of British literature and history. Besides, if you don't want to fork over that much money, most good libraries should have it as well. I especially like his pieces on the "Negro Spiritual" and PILGRIM'S PROGESS. The collection also has a few poems, some of which seem rather Blakean. For what it's worth, Rob ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 15:50:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY Message-Id: <199605212250.PAA29771@igc2.igc.apc.org> Having just received the "Literary Studies" catalog from Oxford University Press, I was aroused by the following item: Mee, Jon. DANGEROUS ENTHUSIASM: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE CULTURE OF RADICALISM IN THE 1790S. Oxford University Press, 1994. 280 pp. paper $17.60 (sale price). It looks like I may need this book for my researches, though I have not heard of it before. Anybody here read it? Any comments? ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 08:13:20 -0500 (CDT) From: William Neal Franklin To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Tue, 21 May 1996, Ralph Dumain wrote: > Mee, Jon. DANGEROUS ENTHUSIASM: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE CULTURE OF > RADICALISM IN THE 1790S. Oxford University Press, 1994. 280 pp. > paper $17.60 (sale price). > > comments? > Please respond on-list. This sounds interesting. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 08:43:42 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Message-Id: <9605221349.AA06008@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >However, if we remember our Blake "bible" (no, not the BLAKE DICTIONARY; but >rather the MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL), we know that "All deities reside in >the human breast" (11). Therefore, if we believe Erdman's suggestion that >Los "is" Blake, then Jesus both resides in and "is" Blake. Don't get me >wrong, I'm not saying that Blake made the lamb or tyger, nor am I granting >him messianic status (I've read my McGann!). Wouldn't it be the child, as >the speaker and "consciousness" of the poem, who made the lamb? > >Rob Why not say that Blake made the lamb or tyger, since he appears to have made "The Lamb" and "The Tyger": "framing" them in both text and design? With the development of the figure of Los, the identity between human artist and divine creator becomes stronger, not weaker, even though that creator's integrity gets compromised as a result (Los "became what he beheld") before he can again become "messianic" as in _Jerusalem_. Another possibility is that the reader "makes" the lamb and the tyger, since deities can reside in any human breast. JM ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 09:05:38 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Dangerous Enthusiasm Message-Id: <9605221410.AA08198@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I found the book very interesting, Ralph, and I think you would too. It's a nice complement to Thompson's _Witness Against the Beast_, emphasizing not a single dissenting tradition but a variety of radicalisms. Don't be thrown by the theoretical language describing "bricolage" in the introduction: once he gets into the texts, there's much less mystification. There's an interesting chapter on "Northern Antiquities"--druids, bards, etc.--and the radical implications of this antiquarian nationalism. Definitely one for your library, although the "sale" price sounds a little high to me. With your connections to used bookstores, you might well locate a hardcover copy for less. Jennifer Michael ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 11:09:06 -0400 (EDT) From: "Victor N Paananen" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE AND POLITICS -- BOOK QUERY Message-Id: <199605221509.LAA110757@pilot09.cl.msu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Length: 1245 As I say in the bibliography of my recent book, "Mee places Blake within the radical politics of his time, not through Blake's references to specific events and issues but through his use of the radical rhetorical practices of enthusiastic Christianity, literary primitivism, and biblical studies." Searching for Blake's political environment, I personally preferred Iain McCalman, *Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840* Cambridge University Press, 1988, about which I said, "Although not about Blake, this book offers a necessary portrait of Blake's political milieu through an account of radical figures who often shared Blake's language and aspects of his outlook." I hope that I can send this. My e-mail editor isn't working right. Vic Paananen > > Having just received the "Literary Studies" catalog from Oxford > University Press, I was aroused by the following item: > > Mee, Jon. DANGEROUS ENTHUSIASM: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE CULTURE OF > RADICALISM IN THE 1790S. Oxford University Press, 1994. 280 pp. > paper $17.60 (sale price). > > It looks like I may need this book for my researches, though I > have not heard of it before. Anybody here read it? Any > comments? > > ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 11:26:25 -0400 (EDT) From: izak@igs.net (Izak Bouwer) To: blake@albion.com Subject: discipleship of Blakeans Message-Id: <199605221526.LAA01480@host.igs.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The conversation of Dumain/Skoblow/Axcelson/ Prather/Jennifer Michael on the "discipleship of Blakeans" I find very interesting. For over a decade we helped run what was called a "Blake Workshop" on a campus with two universities on it in Eastern Canada.I found it very significant that we attracted attendance from people from the town, from the students and academics of the liberal Catholic University on the campus, from graduate students. English professors tended to give us a wide berth (except one that was an ex-student of Northrop Frye and the life of the Blake Workshop.) Once, when Northrop Frye visited, the English department of the other University suddenly remem- bered our existence and asked whether the Blake Workshop would like to take Frye to dinner. (I got the impression that they were scared of him.) So all us Blake disciples ate with Frye. At first I think he was scared of what was waiting for him: another lot of English professors who were asking all the beside-the-point questions? By the end of the meal Frye was beaming, as much as such a quiet unassuming man could beam, at the students that were sitting around him. Was it because they were asking the right questions? Gloudina Bouwer ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 14:00:20 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: discipleship of Blakeans: US vs. UK Message-Id: <9605221905.AA08357@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Are any listmembers familiar with the Blake Society based at St. James Piccadilly in London? I was on their mailing list during my two years at Oxford, but I only managed to go to one of their events: a dramatic reading of the _Marriage_ followed by Kathleen Raine reading her own poetry. From what I could gather, it was a decidedly nonacademic group: the newsletters would advertise such events as exploring Blake through yoga, and there would be annual pilgrimages to Bunhill Fields, such as would embarrass most American academics. (They also sold some great T-shirts!) On the other hand, with a few stellar exceptions, mostly of the Marxist school, it seems as though North Americans have led the way in Blake scholarship, and I can see why: when I mentioned my interest in Blake to an Oxford don (a medievalist, I must admit), he said I had "abysmal taste." Is Blake strictly an opiate for the masses as far as the English are concerned? Forgive me if I've stepped on any toes here; I'd appreciate perspectives from both sides of the water. Jennifer Michael ("The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision") ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 15:17:41, -0500 From: VViseCrack@prodigy.com (MR PETER E LEDDY III) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Message-Id: <199605221917.PAA26782@mime4.prodigy.com> im looking for anything anyone has to say about one of blake's earlier poems in his Collection (Songs of Innocence) The poem is The School Boy. please write to me with anything you have to say,or any criticism about this poem including poetic devices. I am doing a research paper any I would be glad to use you as a source. VViseCrack@prodigy.com write me directly ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 96 17:27:41 EDT From: Kevin Lewis To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: discipleship of Blakeans: US vs. UK Message-Id: <9605222151.AA29428@uu6.psi.com> Isn't it the class division, as so often is the case, that explains what Jennifer observes? Blake spoke English with the wrong accent, doubtless. One should never generalize from a couple of instances (Jennifer's medievalist don at Oxford, and mine, Kenneth Clark), but in my experience it is more than just a couple of instances. Blake could not speak the language correctly, came from shopkeepers, and possesses a genius unamenable to the conventional rational-empirical approaches of the English educational system. England's interesting philosophers have, by cultural necessity, had to be poets instead of philosophers (or theologians). Someone else has made that observation, and I think it holds some truth. So you have in Blake a woolly-headed, "inferior" poet because that elitist educational system has not been much prepared to support with the kind of intellectual sympathy needed the kind of work needed (like Frye's) to grasp Blake. Blake. Remember the film series, "Classic and Romantic Art," produced by Kenneth Clark? There are some fine moments in the individual films in that series, as in the "Civilization" series. But when he gets to Blake, Clark's nose lifts a little higher in the air to dismiss Blake's work as fundamentally derivative and a "great muddle." End-stop. Is this a difficult subject to address? I'd like to hear more comment, and not just from knee-jerk, we've-been-telling-you-so Marxists. Kevin Lewis ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 18:11:19 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Who made the Lamb? Tyger? Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Jennifer Michael says: >Why not say that Blake made the lamb or tyger, since he appears to have >made "The Lamb" and "The Tyger": "framing" them in both text and design? >>> I agree with that. So then the next question is: what did Blake mean to "signify" by these poems. And it's so complex... I've watched people trying to "tie up" the tyger lately in this group, and I can only laugh. Blake, in coloring those books a thousand ways, had so many shades to the words, too. Blake created these complex and "contrary" (even within themselves) images, and, again, looking at the context of how he basically says Man created God... he's playing God himself with these creatures in his poems, using his vivid, multi-dimensional, and in ENIGMATIC (that, to me, is why something like "The Tyger" stays dynamic) use of imagination. I'll tell you one thing... the descriptive biographies I've read on Blake make him sound alot more like a tiger than a lamb. -R.H. Albright -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #55 *************************************