------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 71 Today's Topics: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Re: "Harmonious madness!" Los, His Seed, and the Poet Approaches to Blake Re: "Harmonious madness!" Re: "Harmonious madness!" Re: "Harmonious madness!" Roads of Excess e-E 407-550 now online Re: e-E 407-550 now online Re: "Harmonious madness!" ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 00:07:22 -0400 (EDT) From: "Avery F. Gaskins" To: Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: Tom, I seem to have hit a nerve in asking a question, but since there is now a gauntlet thrown, I must answer. I'm sorry that I had to truncate my original post because I hit the wrong button, but I can't let you trivialize the word "inspiration" in the way you have. "Inspiration" in Blake's day would have had obvious connotations of divine (transcendent) intervention. I'm not sure if plate 12 of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" rejects or embraces that concept. The connotations are pretty clear. Blake considers himself in the same tradi- tion as the prophets of Isreal, who, as he sees it, are poets whose convictions allow them to to envoke divine authority whether such direct intervention was felt or not. The poet/prophet connection is clear. What are we to make of this then? Are the works of Blake just exaggerated political polemics? Is he a clever manipulator? But the more vexing question is whether or not to accept the assertions that Blake saw "God at the window" or the angels in the tree. Was he even then asserting his right to exxagerate as a poet? If not, where do these assertions fit into any reasonable definition of "normal"? I still want to get back to the distorted figures in the artwork. Why do you reject them as not the same as those of Van Gogh? His trees looking like flaming torches and the almost surrealisting skies are produced by one kind of emotional strain and the distorted bodies, as well as the irrational figures of the "immortals" is produced by another. Neither means that the artist involved was "insane" just emotionally under strain. Unless, of course, one believes Blake's pre- sentations of the "immortals" was the result of direct visionary experience. It's an easy thing to say that Blake approriated the langugue of the visionary without accepting its truth, but it is another thing to prove it. Avery Gaskins ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 96 09:07:44 EDT From: Kevin Lewis To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: <9606171331.AA29607@uu6.psi.com> We gotta remember Blake's poetic-prophetic method as declared in _Jerusalem_, namely, to strive with Systems to deliver Individuals from Systems, and to give a Body to Falsehood that it may be cast off forever. When we remember this strategizing and apply it to Blake's rhetoric of inspired "madness" (God at the window, Flea-Man in the room), don't we want to acknowledge that Blake is *using* that rhetoric for his mighty purposes? "Inspiration" al la Ezekiel and Isaiah is just another System, and it's the system Blake wants to employ to pierce Apollyon with his own bow. And he did so. I continue to favor a Christian Blake. But I am under no delusion about the confessional, credal language of Christianity or any other religion. It is a symbolic language, and far from doing harm to Christianity, the acknowledgement that this is so strengthens Christianity in the post- Enlightenment world Blake has helped us to negotiate. Wouldn't Blake have understood thoroughly the John Calvin who observes that the mind is a continually idol-making factory? Blake seems to have understood it, and to have made his greatest prophetic art in part upon this hermeneutic principle. Reading Paul Tillich can help to see this dimension of Blake's negotiation with the traditional faith (and with the traditions of reflection upon that faith). Blake seems to have been well aware that this "madness" and these dictations from heaven were literary constructions, and useful ones at that. Kevin Lewis http://www.cla.sc.edu/relg/lewis.htm ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:08:43 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Los, His Seed, and the Poet Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I haven*t seen the NYT item on Blake (referred to in the >postings *Re: Book Review - Blake by Peter Ackroyd* ), but >assume that the _Milton_ plate reproduced there is either >Plate 41 or Plate 43(21). The use of sexual metaphor >is of course prominent in Blake*s work. (Can somebody >refresh my memory as to who partially erased some of the >more sexually explicit _Vala_ illustrations?) I have always >personally felt that Plate 43(21) does indeed depict >*oral sex,* in the sense of Los passing on his *seed* to >the mouth of the poet. > >Izak Bouwer Thank you, Izak, for that bit of common sense about what Los is doing with the poet in the plate from "Milton" shown in the New Yorker (not New York Times), page 127, May 27, 1996. -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:08:55 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Approaches to Blake Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >Learning about history and reading old books >to trace patterns or literary traditions can help us change our perspectives, >get past our mind-forg'd manacles, about our own lives and times. I'd rather >hear a good, solidly researched historical contextualizing of a literary >work than any merely solipsistic, personal reaction and response to a text.>>> Good for you, Elisha! There are plenty on this list to provide that for you! And there are plenty of works out there on Blake, several times more than what Blake ever produced, to help you view through THEIR stained-clear visions what he's all about! >Sure, there's no _need_ to ever read a Blake poem in the first place, but >I think we'd all agree that there we are infinitely rewarded for doing so.>>> What do you mean by that? I've been reading Blake (and alot of other stuff) for some time. And if I find some of his works more interesting than others, it's the same as lifting the needle (in the old days of record players) and putting on another song. Although, of course, some "songs" take some listening before you can fully appreciate what's happening with them. >Similarly, there's no _need_ to read Milton or the Bible or Hasidic writings >or Thomas Paine to help you read or understand Blake's work, but there are >certainly good reasons for educating yourself, eh, Mr. Albright?>>> Oh, sure. I educate myself all the time, Elisha. In case you hadn't read in my one post, I did quickly browse the Book of Revelation again. A fascinating piece, which I personally believe would have made Jesus sick to his stomach. What I'm saying is that a piece of art like Blake's "Milton" can be read as its own independent entity, although notes for words or events every once in awhile help. This is because Blake so reinvents Milton and the Bible that you might as well listen to HIS creations as well as look at the antecedents. Shakespeare reinvented HIS stories, too. A compare-and-contrast between the real Julius Ceasar and Shakespeare's play is valuable, but it doesn't change what Shakespeare is talking about, even if you have only a rudimentary understanding of the historical Caesar. > One >particularly good reason, I think, is the sheer wonder and delight of finding >out something new that you didn't know before. The more you read, the more you >realize how very little you understand, and how very much more you _want_ to >know.>>> What about... the more you SEE? The more you LIVE? >You also get a sense of how very small you and your core of certainty >are in relation to the ever-increasing unknown by which you are surrounded, >and which may end up defining you in a way you never realized it would. . . >"Engage, Mr. Sulu!" --that is, if you're up to the adventure, of course. > --elisa>>>>> I have a very vivid memory of walking around churches in England where Cromwell smashed the stained glass because "Thou Shalt Have No Graven Idols Before Me"... lovely way to react to art, don't you think? And that was PRIAM's fault? (Plate 14, line 15 of "Milton, Plate 98, line 46 of "Jerusalem".) Blame the deists, blame the Renaissance which led to the Enlightenment. Or maybe blame the Restoration, which at least kept Charles II and his heirs on a short leash so that free speech flourished in England more than any other country in Europe. What would have happened to Mr. Blake in France with his heretical ideas about the church, or his revolutionary ideas about society, Elisha? Mere speculation... I'm sure. They had burnings, later guillotines. Three cheers for intellectually "boldly going where no one has gone before," though. That indeed is what Emerson is saying, which is why people like Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, William James, and many more felt the courage of conviction within themselves to try new things. It's also why Jim Jarmusch did DEAD MAN... was that merely solipsistic, Elisha?... and Jah Wobble has, I hear, announced plans to do Blake songs. At his best, Blake boldly went where no one went before, too. "What is now proved was once only imagin'd. ---Plate 8, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 09:43:45 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: <96061709434498@womenscol.stephens.edu> The limitations of e-mail discourse become clearer at every stand. In attempting to exclude "madness" as a viable or useful diagnosis for the difficulties of understanding Blake's poetic or visual art, I am *not* excluding "inspiration" in any of its available meanings, though I am denying that poetic inspiration is a symptom of madness and I offered Milton's invocation of the divine muse and her "dictation" as evidence that Blake was not the only poet so inspired. (I could add more, but assume readers of this can fill in their own blanks. I might add that soon after the vogue for the right brain/left brain nonsense began, there was an article in, I think, _Kenyon Review_, that used Milton's invocations of the muse as "evidence" that poets had superior lines of communication between right and left and that the "voice" dictating his poetry was really his right lobe speaking to his left--now please *don"t* misunderstand this reference and assume I am endorsing this idiocy.) I think again that Avery and I are talking on two entirely different pages. To suggest that Blake employed (I said adopted and *adapted*) a known rhetoric is not to suggest that he was a cynical manipulator (as a teacher and student of rhetoric, I know that there is far more art in it than the popular usage of the term to bash politicians would suggest, and I attribute its use honorably) nor that he did not believe in his visions, though the character of that "belief" is not simple-minded. Ackroyd points out that Blake distinguished between "seeing" a "ghost" and experiencing visions, and that distinction in itself argues a sound, sane, and sensible understanding of his experience. I do not care to get into an argument over whether Blake's visions were prompted by a divine power external to himself, though I doubt it. That they were transcendent visions would be arguable, depending on the meaning of "transcendent" in the phrase. I think Blake's understanding did, indeed, transcend both the conventional religious cant and the political mystifications of his time, as well as the intellectual rationalistic and scientistic views associated (simplistically) with the Enlightenment, and his efforts to convey that transcendence through his poems (which did not, obviously, come to him as freely as leaves to the trees--just look at his notebook or the stages of _Vala_) either allowed or required him (take your pick) to explore the possibilities of symbolic language and led him in an entirely different direction from, for example, Wordsworth, since Blake was quite obviously (and consciously) not using the language of common men (though he appreciated what Wordsworth was attempting in that way, if his annotations are good evidence). As for any comparisons of "distortions" in Blake's and Van Gogh's art, I would need specific examples from Blake. I assume we are not talking about grotesque or disturbing images (such as many of those found in the Dante illustrations or in the Vala ms.); if not, what kinds of distortions can we mean and can we be sure that they are not consistent with the characteristic styles of representation of the time. After all, Fuseli "distorted" and so did Gillray, for entirely different reasons and to create entirely different artistic effects. While no one suggests that Flaxman's chaste illustrations are "distorted," neither would anyone suggest they are "realistic," so what are we talking about here? (Surely the art historians on the list could help with this?) I don't think anyone has seriously questioned the clinical disturbances suffered during Van Gogh's life, though I suppose there are legitimate questions about what connection there might have been between his artistic style and those disturbances. Let us assume there was a connection. Are we then saying that we see comparable connections in Blake's art? If so, which works and how are they connected? I am not denying "inspiration" here--I think I am affirming its real power and denying reductive explanations for it. Tom Dillingham ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:10:23 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I suggest again that if *we* as readers feel >disoriented or "muddled," that is not evidence that Blake was so.>>> >Tom Dillingham Dear Mr. Dillingham: I take it you think Blake was just as clear as a day when the clouds of reason had fled? Is that why there are so many ambiguities in his verbal and visual art. For example: 1) My Pretty Rose Tree... why does it give him nothing but thorns to enjoy after he's turned down that loveliest rose he ever seen? I mean, the poor guy had been faithful (or had he?). Or was the tree just a "bad" thing? 2) In "Jerusalem" at one point (Plate 91, line 13), Los "answer'd swift as the shuttle of gold: 'Sexes must vanish & cease", yet in another place (Plate 88, lines 3-7) he acknolwedges that Emanations would still have a role in Eternity. 3) If we are to take "The Good and Evil Angels" watercolour as Los against a burnt-out Orc, who is REALLY the "good" angel? The father, Los, who chained his son to a rock? The son, Orc, who at least TRIED to liberate both America and Europe? 4) As far as "disoriented", I believe that is your own word reading into others... however, Blake does love to DISORIENT. This is apparent throughout the body of his work. It is clearly shown in Plate 2 of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", where you have a just man who was once meek... one might ask "Why was he meek? What made him change?" but Blake doesn't answer... we just follow along this perilous path... and are given no indication of how the perilous path was "planted"-- usually paths are well-trodden, don't you think, by the time criminals can use them? What does he mean by "planted"? Again, no time for an answer... why doesn't the just man fight the villain. No comment. Just go up into the perilous barren climes. And then the Proverbs of Hell (particularly plate 7-10) sound great. How much is Satan talking, how much is Blake talking through Satan? Blake leaves it to us to decide. I would argue that "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is a rollercoaster ride, and once you get off, the feeling of disorientation, at least for a viewer (and I suspect for an artist that delved into it as deeply as the words and imagery appear), is bound to appear. -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:10:51 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Avery Gaskins asks some good questions, among which are: >"Inspiration" in Blake's day would have had >obvious connotations of divine (transcendent) intervention. I'm not sure if >plate 12 of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" rejects or embraces that concept. >The connotations are pretty clear. Blake considers himself in the same tradi- >tion as the prophets of Isreal, who, as he sees it, are poets whose convictions >allow them to to envoke divine authority whether such direct intervention was >felt or not. The poet/prophet connection is clear. What are we to make of this >then?>>> I think we are to believe that Blake thought he was "inspired" even if his inspirations are complex, contradictory, throwbacks to Christ when the metaphor is inappropriate (Enitharmon waking her son Orc 1700 years after Christ... as if Christ, a man known for "giving Caesar those things due to Caesar" and "turning the other cheek" is anything like Orc), continuing to his last days to mock Newton, Locke... Like this, from "The Everlasting Gospel", lines 39-41 and 49-50 (they're Erdman's line numberings, Keynes's plate numberings; does that make sense?): "He had soon been bloody Caesar's Elf, And at last he would have been Caesar himself, Like Dr Priestly & Bacon & Newton... "To teach Doubt & Experiment Certainly was not what Christ meant." The first part conveniently blurs Priestly, Bacon and Newton into conniving with Caesar. But the second part is the dead giveaway. Christ was talking about relationships between people, how we could form a better society, in ways. I don't think he ever would have scoffed at the scientific method, which in and of itself is NOTHING... it's how you use it. But Blake, under the cover of saying "that's not what Christ meant" tries to undermine once again these people were doing. Christ's CHURCH, which was beyond his control (I personally believe if Christ ever saw the Book of Revelations, it would have appalled him), threw the Western World back into what is called the DARK AGES, Mr. Blake, when cats were killed because they were considered agents of Satan, only to then have no natural counter-effect to the rats, which caused bubonic plague. But in being "romantic", Blake is allowed... excesses. And in recognizing his excesses, I can mitigate his claims to prophecy. >Are the works of Blake just exaggerated political polemics? Is he a >clever manipulator? But the more vexing question is whether or not to accept >the assertions that Blake saw "God at the window" or the angels in the tree. >Was he even then asserting his right to exxagerate as a poet? If not, where do >these assertions fit into any reasonable definition of "normal"? I still want >to get back to the distorted figures in the artwork. Why do you reject them >as not the same as those of Van Gogh? His trees looking like flaming torches >and the almost surrealistic skies are produced by one kind of emotional strain >and the distorted bodies, as well as the irrational figures of the "immortals" >is produced by another. Neither means that the artist involved was "insane" >just emotionally under strain. Unless, of course, one believes Blake's pre- >sentations of the "immortals" was the result of direct visionary experience. >It's an easy thing to say that Blake approriated the langugue of the visionary >without accepting its truth, but it is another thing to prove it. Good stuff. -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 11:11:09 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Roads of Excess Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." ---plate 7, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" A very over-utilized quote, don't you think? And how much is this the Devil speaking, not Blake? But the illustration chosen for the New Yorker review (May 27) of Ackroyd's _Blake_ accurately reflects one part of Blake's legacy: free imagination and free love. It's no accident that the Kennedy Fraser mentions Blake's invitation to Mary Wollstonecraft to form a menage-a-trois with Mr. and Mrs. Blake on page 129 (which Ackroyd doesn't discuss) or Blake's "erotic drawings involving hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and children engaged in voyeurism." The fact is, eternal prophet (NOT) and great artist (YES), the road of excess can often lead to sickness and sometimes death. "What is no proved was once only imagin'd." ---plate 8, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" How much did Blake's complaint that strait roads are marked for improvement but the crooked roads are marked for genius talk in metaphor? How much did they anticipate, truly prophetically, the bulldozing of cities to make way for a more modern world? Some criticize my connection with Rimbaud's brilliant "Cities" poem to the strait/crooked roads. To me, they are etched together in my mind and in that way Blake becomes a TRUE prophet against the problems of modernity. To look THROUGH a corporeal eye, not merely WITH it, is to make connections between seemingly disparate images. I doubt that Tom Dillingham or other "traditionalist" Blakeians on this list, for example, would like art museums that dare to put modern art next to something 200 years old to sese what one makes of the juxtaposition. I personally find such comparisons refreshing, whereas rooms of pure "Blake" or "Romanticism" can stifle one's view. Or reading merely Blake and Blake criticism instead of seeing Blake in other verbal or musical art expands the horizon of Blake. Sorry, we disagree, but there's room for a multitude of approaches in this group. More complications in Blake: no doubt along the road of excess. In "The Garden of Love", _Songs of Experience_ and in Orc's breaking free of the tenfold chains in the "Preludium" of "America", we see a complaint against the 10 Commandments... those stifling, Elohim/Jehovah, laws. But an active reader can put in the contrary and see that this is an unbalanced contrariness being presented by the poet. I see Orc's revolutionary energies only in the passion of the American Revolution, where Washington's armies merely backed up powerful THOUGHT generated by Jefferson and Paine. No mention of those ideas in "America", of course... Meanwhile, the more Rousseau-like, dangerous revolution to nowheresville that Orc provides in "Europe", when he was awakenned by his temptress mother, is to me a more muddled experience, like the Khmer Rouge's experiment that turned into the Killing Fields (Pol Pot had been studying in Paris, linked his to the French Revolution, even doing a new version of Year Zero). The smoldering fires that continue in Cambodia with mines being floated in rice paddies 20 years after that utter disaster show what Blake himself calls the difference between Jesus, Plato, and Cicero: forgiveness ("The Everlasting Gospel", (j)). That he was not aware of the "forgiveness" doctrine in Buddhism is irrelevant. It is there, and is disregarded even today in some of Cambodia. What Blake couldn't understand, by turning his back time and time again on the Newton/Locke/Bacon axis, is that they and their descendents held the keys to making a revolution WORK. Drive past the burnt-out hospitals and schools of Phnom Penh... and it makes you wonder about the roads of excess, indeed. -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 13:40:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Nelson Hilton To: blake@albion.com Subject: e-E 407-550 now online Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Added today to the Blake Digital Text Project http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake are pages 407 to 550 of the Erdman 1988 text. This includes "Poetical Sketches," "An Island in the Moon," "Songs and Ballads," "Satiric Verses and Epigrams," "The Everlasting Gospel," and (thanks to Sandy Gourlay!) "Blake's Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809". Nelson Hilton -=- English -=- University of Georgia -=- Athens Was ist Los? "Net of Urizen" or "Jerusalem the Web"? http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 15:38:13 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: e-E 407-550 now online Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Thank you Mr. Hilton! Great project! -R.H. Albright >Added today to the Blake Digital Text Project >http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake >are pages 407 to 550 of the Erdman 1988 text. This includes >"Poetical Sketches," "An Island in the Moon," "Songs and Ballads," >"Satiric Verses and Epigrams," "The Everlasting Gospel," and >(thanks to Sandy Gourlay!) "Blake's Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809". > > Nelson Hilton -=- English -=- University of Georgia -=- Athens > Was ist Los? "Net of Urizen" or "Jerusalem the Web"? > http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 15:36:01 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: "Harmonious madness!" Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Kevin Lewis wrote some good stuff: >We gotta remember Blake's poetic-prophetic method as declared in >_Jerusalem_, namely, to strive with Systems to deliver Individuals from >Systems, and to give a Body to Falsehood that it may be cast off forever. > >When we remember this strategizing and apply it to Blake's rhetoric of >inspired "madness" (God at the window, Flea-Man in the room), don't we >want to acknowledge that Blake is *using* that rhetoric for his mighty >purposes? "Inspiration" al la Ezekiel and Isaiah is just another System, >and it's the system Blake wants to employ to pierce Apollyon with his >own bow. And he did so.>>> So, writing in the 18th-early 19th century, having had friends of the Enlightenment that included Wollstonecraft and Paine, we have Blake himself turning away from his earlier radical visions that challenged Christianity and into his own revised, fused-Biblical and his-own-mythological "systems" (which were changeable). Why did he move from the _Songs_ to MHH to _Book of Urizen_ and then into these prophecies which get increasingly Christian and mystical as their revolutionary power drops off? Explanations include: a) disillusionment with the French Revolution; b) disgust with the Industrial Revolution; c) watching cynically as the British and other Empires chopped up the world; d) getting scared about his own mortality; e) recognizing that he lived in a society of predominately Christians and trying to please as well as converse with his (few) clients. This is partly why I like to both view and read Blake. The times he lived in, how he reacted to them, are fascinating. Blake read the Bible day and night. But where we see Black, he saw White. How does that stain your vision, in the light of the phenomenal advances in philosophy, science, and other matters that were happening in Blake's England? How does that make you "turn away" as the Introduction to _Songs of Experience_ begs the reader NOT to do, even as he is trying to OPEN doors of perception? Here was a friend of Wollstonecraft, and the best he could do on his own for a manifesto of the rights of women is "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"? Meanwhile, women are mere "emanations" or "shadows" (Plate 42, line 28 description of Blake's wife) of men? Enitharmon is a tyrant, while her husband Los turns out to be an eternal prophet. Pity's creation parodies the Biblical Eve being taken out of a rib of Adam all too well. Here was a friend of the author of "The Age of Reason", who writes on Plate 29 of "Milton", line 15: "As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner, As of a Globe rolling thro' Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro." >I continue to favor a Christian Blake. But I am under no delusion about the >confessional, credal language of Christianity or any other religion. It >is a symbolic language, and far from doing harm to Christianity, the >acknowledgement that this is so strengthens Christianity in the post- >Enlightenment world Blake has helped us to negotiate. Wouldn't Blake have >understood thoroughly the John Calvin who observes that the mind is a >continually idol-making factory?>>> Good point. Catholics, too, always have often been open to idol-making factories. Many of the fountains of Rome were designed to tempt people back into the faith during the Baroque era, to show that sensuality could be enjoyed within Christianity's "true" church. >particularly for Blake seems to have understood it, and to >have made his greatest prophetic art in part upon this hermeneutic >principle. Reading Paul Tillich can help to see this dimension of Blake's >negotiation with the traditional faith (and with the traditions of >reflection upon that faith). Blake seems to have been well aware that >this "madness" and these dictations from heaven were literary constructions, >and useful ones at that.>>>>>> You talk only of his literary constructions. What about his visual ones? Same thing, I assume. You seem to be implying that Blake had distance between these "dictations", which Tom Dillingham rightfully says took time to get down onto paper (I mean, all of "Milton" took place in a pulse beat, didn't it?). But there is evidence in a visual piece of art like "The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child" that this is a man who feels quite passionately about these visions... that if the composition is well thought out, he still puts so much energy into the imagery that you wonder: what's going on here? Desperation that reflects the times of the French Terror? A nightmare that steps out of time? He was following his own "path" or constructions, and he had limited ability to change those "constructions"... so how much were they merely "constructions" and how much were they the way he saw/felt/designed himself to draw and write? If you continue to "favor a Christian Blake", Mr. Lewis, I prefer to favor a revolutionary Blake. -R.H. Albright -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #71 *************************************