blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 83
Today's Topics:
Re: WILLIAM BLAKE & INTELLECT, REASON, SCIENCE, EMPIRICISM
Tao Te Ching and Blake
"Milton" and "Jerusalem" Plates
Re: BLAKE CONTRA EMPIRICISM, OR 'THER IS NO NATURAL RELIGION'
Representation
Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
Quest Literature, Sci-Fi, etc. -Reply
Re: Experiment Pictures -Reply
sweet Science -Reply
Book of Urizen... Before Enitharmon -Reply
"Systems of Thought" -Reply
Re: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
sweet Science -Reply
Re: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
RE: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 14:48:04 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: WILLIAM BLAKE & INTELLECT, REASON, SCIENCE, EMPIRICISM
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Ralph Dumain says:
>Blake was concerned primarily with the
>imagination and not literal, material things (the one aspect of
>Blake that Albright has got right)>>>>>>
And I say, "What?" Did you KNOW William Blake, Mr Dumain? I assume YOU have
him "right". Have you communed with him like he did with his brother,
Robert? Have you reductionistly boiled him down to his essence? What
aspects got missed when you were looking through your particular set of
stained-clear eyes? Subjectivity is something that you reject as, perhaps,
a mere spectre of Nietzsche. Perhaps it's in your "objectivist"
intoxication with Marx. Can I interest you in a little Ayn Rand? She's an
objectivist, too!
>Blake could not discriminate
>between the literal conceptual content of chemistry or Newtonian
>physics and the philosophical/ideological role that "science" was
>playing in his society. This is a flaw in Blake as a conceptual
>thinker. But what is not understood is that this flaw is much
>less of a flaw in Blake than the same flaw to be found in
>contemporary anti-scientific social studies of science, which also
>cannot distinguish between the conceptual content of science and
>the ideological and social relations in which it is embedded, but
>which _does_ operate on the literal plane to demonstrate that we
>can't know anything.>>>>>
Please be more specific in your examples. It sounds like you've shifted
tense into the present, when you say "cannot distinguish". So now you're
taking a... what? Idea that's jibberish, i.e. "we can't know anything", to
condemn the entire liberal arts establishment in colleges and universities?
The Science of Chaos can coexist with Newton. Marx can coexist with John
Stuart Mill. They don't have to be "negations" as much as contraries, which
work in some instances and are irrelevant in others. But your assertions
are too vague. Please explain more.
> Blake was not anti-intellectual nor was he
>interested in proving that nothing can be known in order to
>glorify his own alienation; his fight is on another level
>entirely. Blake's opposition to empiricism, as expressed in
>"There is no Natural Religion" and elsewhere, is not just
>opposition to the positive empiricist conception of science and
>cognition; it is equally in opposition to Humean skepticism.>>>>>>>>>
Skepticism is a way to discriminate, to evaluate. It's completely different
from inspiration, subjectivism, getting "a muse", and other methods of
thinking. Hume's place in history is as an historian, economist, and
philosopher. Blake was a visual artist and poet. Hume's influence is
incredibly large on nuts-and-bolts people like Bentham and John Stuart
Mill, but I wouldn't anticipate a utilitarian to be much of a friend to
William Blake.
Blake was not anti-intellectual, as you see him granting respect for
Shakespeare, Milton, and The Bible. But throughout his life's work, he
denigrates reason in favor of inspiration... as if the two are negations of
each other. The dreaded Newton/Locke/Bacon triad, sometimes added with
Voltaire/Rousseau.... Blake saw science feeding right into technology (and
he was right!), creating these sick wheels of industrialization
(unfortunately, it's more complicated than that!). He saw Deism as a
Satanic partner in destroying his Green England. The problem is... how do
you get out of industrialization? Particularly when people WANT it? How do
you get people back into churches when they've lost faith? How many babies
have been thrown out with the bath water, I might add? I remember the good
things of Christianity, even as I distance myself from stuff that I think
is best left behind.
-Randall Albright
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:09:32 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Tao Te Ching and Blake
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi, there. I correlated a Blake poem, "The Fly" with a poem about the Tao
(how everything flows from and goes back to it) just before this past
Memorial Day weekend. The post was called "More Words to Ponder." It met
with a smashing reaction from one member of this group, as I recall!
What makes you connect the Tao Te Ching with Blake?
The seen and the unseen, which developed in Japan into Zen from the Tao, is
something to consider when you read an ultra-great poem as "The Tyger".
What ISN'T Blake saying, particularly as you see the illustration of the
tyger? How is he setting this up for you to NOT believe him that the tyger
is "evil"? Same in "A Poison Tree", where the narrator is basically a
murderer without admitting it.
>From ONE, _Tao Te Ching_ by Lao Tsu, translated by Gia-FU Feng and Jane English
"The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth."
Before Urizen broke free from the other Eternals, in Blake's Bible of Hell.
Or before the Creation, as they say in the Bible.
"The named is the mother of ten thousand things."
Limits! That's what Urizen imposes on us! And when the doors of perception
are cleaned, there won't be just10,000 things OR ways to see things! We'll
see them as they really are: infinite!
>From TWO........
"Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil."
"Without contraries is no progression....." from "The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell"
-Randall Albright
>I've been listening for about 3 months to your discussions and comments.
>Thanks a bunch. I'm a biochemist working in enzyme kinetics to keep food on
>the table and a neophyte poet. (I first got interested in Blake through
>Greg Brown's _Songs of Innocence and Experience_ and have been reading the
>rest more closely for the last year.)
>
>Why hasn't anyone mentioned the _Tao Te Ching_? If they have, could someone
>direct me to the archive posting?
>
> ---MBJ
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:12:19 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: "Milton" and "Jerusalem" Plates
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
"Milton", Plate 32:
Which version of this plate sounds the best? The one pictured in Erdman's
_Illuminated Blake_, in which Blake has a hard-on as the falling star comes
into his foot? Or the non-pictured ones, perhaps like plate 37 of his
brother Robert, where Blake put a pair of shorts on the figure?
"Jerusalem", Plate 28:
Doesn't it look more like two strong men making love, rather than a guy and
a woman?
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:11:40 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE CONTRA EMPIRICISM, OR 'THER IS NO NATURAL RELIGION'
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Mr. Dumain:
If you're trying to correlate Blake's philosophy with Marx's... I do
believe that Marx used a derivation of the scientific method in his work.
But I'm fascinated by remarks such as...
>First version, proposition II: "Man by his reasoning power can
>only compare & judge of what he has already perciev'd. III. From
>a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a
>fourth or fifth." Second series, proposition II: "Reason, or the
>ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall
>be when we know more."
>Blake suggests that knowledge
>involves not just sensations but something more.>>>>>>
What he's saying is that reasoning only can deal with what has already been
known or preceived. It doesn't make sense. Reasoning is how we get from
point A to point B, say-- like using a navigational compass on a ship.
"Wherever you go, there you are!"-- bumper sticker
>Blake criticizes that
>very philosophy to show that no progress would be possible were
>the empiricist model of cognition to be true.>>>
Where does Blake use the word "empiricism," which technically is quite
different to Bacon's "rationalism" although he hated them both. Locke had
more to his thought than mere empiricism. He is recognized by Jefferson and
other forces of the US Revolution as well as Voltaire and Rousseau as an
engine of powerful social change. The idea of the U.S. Constitution can
conceivably be traced back to Locke's _Two Treatises of Government_ after
the Articles of Confederation failed to have enough of a "bite" in them.
But later Blake merely intertwines Locke with Newton and Bacon as the Evil
Triad, without even defining what about these complex people he is
rejecting... except... reason.... the scientific method... is this why
Bloom, in _Ruin the Sacred Truths_, calls Blake "the last archaic poet?"
Blake HATES nature as some sort of fallen thing, whereas Wordsworth and
other Romantics loved it. Where does Blake want us, really, Mr. Dumain? In
the 21st century, or the 12th?
>Blake is convinced
>that the human mind's capacity goes beyond the power to measure
>and compare discrete quantities, that progress in knowledge
>involves dialectical leaps that go beyond the mere accumulation of
>empirical generalizations, or, in modern terms, that theories are
>underdetermined by sense data. This notion is a commonplace in
>the philosophy of science at least since Einstein.>>>
There's nothing revolutionary about Blake here. It was also "commonplace"
with Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as Kant. Am I wrong?
>Blake, of course, is not interested the relation of scientific
>theories to empirical verification, but rather in the defense of
>the faculty of poetic imagination, hence the other propositions
>about desire and infinity.... Hence, first series, proposition VI: "Conclusion.
>If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the
>Philosophical & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all
>things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same
>dull round over again."
Blake is exalting his way of viewing things-- an artist's way, while
putting down the scientific method's way. No big deal, in my opinion. Art
and science... different ways to approach things. Sometimes they get fused
well... as we see in Nam June Paik's (sp?) video art. But Blake HATED
Priestly, despite Priestly allowing him access to that printing press,
didn't he? Why? Atheist... scientist... what else?
>There's more, however. Blake recognizes the skeptical
>implications of being locked up in that which is provable by a
>priori reasoning. All of modern skepticism is based on the
>assumption that we can't really know anything objective because we
>can't prove we can, given that there is no absolute proof of any
>scientific generalization by induction, and further, that we can
>never prove that we correctly perceive the external world, but
>only know that we perceive our own perceptions.>>>>>>
Skepticism is merely a way to view things. You go to the grocery store;
some bananas look smashed and others are too green. So you look skeptically
and choose the yellow bananas. It's different from being at the ocean,
hearing the waves, and having the waves remind you of another ocean,
another time, and being transported by imagination back to that time. It's
also different from being led around, blind-folded, or with the mere
experience that you've had in the past and no empirical way to build on it.
They're all different modes of thought.
-Randall Albright
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 17:43:53 -0500 (CDT)
From: Darlene Sybert
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Representation
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Hey, why don't you guys stop vilifying each other do something
positive like help me study for my doctoral exams? Ask me some
questions about representation vis a vis Foucault and Derrida.
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~c557506/index.htl
University of Missouri at Columbia (English)
*************************************************************************
"...[in philosophy] there occur determinations quite different from those
of ordinary consciousness and so-called common-sense,--which is not
exactly sound understanding, but understanding educated up to
abstractions and the faith, or rather superstition, of abstractions."
-Hegel, _Science of Logic_
******************************************************************************
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 00:27:48 -0400
From: SuniWind@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
Message-Id: <960709002746_151722991@emout07.mail.aol.com>
THE ESCALATOR DILEMMA . . .
Sure enough, the tidal wave of industrialization, as Randall Albright calls
it, soaks many of us with utter discontent in the face of our
oh-so-mechanized and tortured earth. Yet I cannot bring myself to believe
that Blake would not have been swept away by the imaginative efforts /
achievements in our century like those that made the moon the plaything of
the child that cries "I want! I want!" in one of his pictures. The flight to
the moon is not a literal trip to Beulah; but is it not an ascent to a higher
plane of human imagination and a symbol of what the imagination is capable of
?
As I read Blake, his Romanticism does not cling to the old or traditional
ways. Is not the city one of his symbols of the imagination? Though I long
to find some "back to nature" touch in Blake (as it would add a fine touch to
my work about Romanticism and aboriginal cultures), I only see his belief in
the superiority of the "civilized" imagination which transforms nature and
abandons the Druid worship of the same. Restrain Chinese rug making! Free
"90210!"
The dilemma does not resolve around the question of how we can prevent the
guys on the other side of the globe from craving our nationalized symbols of
our limited imagination (after all, rollerblades did take some imaginative
effort), but how do we give ourselves a push and do actually share those
things with them? While we are moving on, standing on the "escalator" of
industrialization, as Randall calls it, aren't we restraining others when we
tell them to hold on to their old ways? (Interesting, however, to call it
an "escalator;" it goes up as well as down, right?)
If you have made it this far, you may want to find out a little bit about
"SuniWind," which stands, by the way, for my last name and that of the other
person with whom I'm sharing this address. . . I'm new to your discussion
group and have read some more and some less interesting things about Blake
and, alas, Nietzsche and Blake. Similar to Michael at the Universitaet of
Tuebingen, Germany, my interest in English Romanticism was sparked by a class
that went by the same name. I'm from Germany but have studied at an American
University and will continue to do so at a
British university. . . . Hoping to hear from you.
Astrid Wind
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 10:39:22 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com, WaHu@aol.com
Subject: Quest Literature, Sci-Fi, etc. -Reply
Message-Id:
Hugh, I much enjoyed your statement that BLake's characters are not
`any more developed than comic-book oafs' as I have often thought that
he saw Urizen as such - particularly in the illustrations to "Night
Thoughts". Here is Urizen with a ludicrous , almost Tin-tinesque - coif of
hair, laboriously recording the sins of his Children on metal and stone
tablets as he falls through vortex after vortex of delusion. The parody is
certainly evident in the illustrations and is borne out by statements such
as "Satan, thou art but a dunce / And dost not know the garment from
the man". However, there is nothing comic book about the `Garment' or
the true eternal `Man' which Blake concedes his `gross Tongue' cannot
rightly describe. The dark side is surely always balanced by the light in
Blake? Pam van Schaik.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 11:32:06 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com, jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu
Subject: Re: Experiment Pictures -Reply
Message-Id:
Would the departed `dark religions' not refer to all the perversions of the
divine vision of love that have come to fruition on earth? If we
understand the Free Loves of Eternity properly, (those which Oothoon
recalls and laments the loss of) then all the Religions of the world are a
distortion of the original. ~Sweet Science", I think, refers to all the
knowledge fostered from the divine seed sown in eternal fields by
Christ. He is the prototype of the 'Farmer" who sows seed in
Jerusalems's fair fields (an aspect of divine love) and from which grows
the `divine harvest'. In Kabbalah, ` Da'at' could be considered similar.
Pam van Schaik.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 11:49:18 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com, nhilton@parallel.park.uga.edu
Subject: sweet Science -Reply
Message-Id:
The `inverted brain' , quoted by Nelson Hilton from Carrol sounds like the
inverted `tree' of the kabbalah and can perhaps be related to the Tree of
Mystery in "The Human Abstract" :
The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree;
But their search was all in vain:
Ther grows one in the Human Brain.
All the golden pleasures which Nelson and others seem to associate
with this world are, I think. associated by Blake with the `golden clime' of
Eternity where all the `Palaces', gardens and Temples are filled with joys
which are erotic ( but not sensual) since all beings continually merge
identities in God's fires of love. This does not mean that he despises the
sensual loves of this earth, but that he does see love's energies as
changed and contracted by incarnation and influenced by the limitations
of the Selfhood. Pam van Schaik
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 12:23:36 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com, albright@world.std.com
Subject: Book of Urizen... Before Enitharmon -Reply
Message-Id:
You ask why Urizen can ask so-called eternals "Why wilt thou die?" -
I think he is referring to the perpetual mingling of Self with the essences
of others in Eternity - that is, that he is scorning the continual flux and
self-annihilation which sustains all in Innocence in Eternity. Here, he
professes to have a better program for all than God Himself! Follow me
and I will show you a better life - is his claim, and then, in deserting the
divine vision of love, he causes the Fall. Pam van Schaik
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 12:55:50 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: "Systems of Thought" -Reply
Message-Id:
Yes, Just to say I agree with all you say here. As Sidney said, art surely
is meant to delight as well as instruct. Pam van Schaik
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 11:52:52 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hey there, Astrid Wind. Maybe we're talking about what Freud called
_Civilization and Its Discontents_. No matter what construct or
"civilization" you have, there are bound to be discontents. And there
SHOULD be discontents, because the world is out of balance and as close as
we get to Utopia, other things get lost along the way.
>The flight to the moon is not a literal trip to Beulah; but is it not an
>ascent to a higher
>plane of human imagination and a symbol of what the imagination is capable
>of?>>>>>
This is a great Blake-to-Present analogy. We had people walking on the moon
in 1969 through the 1970s. But did it demystify the moon? Not for me. And
would Blake have approved? I highly doubt it. It did show that mathematical
formulas, the scientific method, and technology can make a dream come true.
And it did it have a positive ripple effect in some ways, like transistors,
that helped "improve" human life, as well as a downside: alot of garbage
floating around earth's atmosphere, and diverting billions of dollars from
social programs, national parks, and other ways to alleviate suffering here
in the USA.
But was it the kind of dream come true that Blake would have wanted?
There was a song by Jefferson Airplane about the space program, in which
they bemoaned:
"American garbage dumped in space,
And no room left for brotherhood."
Earlier in the song... to show that Blake continues to have company with
romantics who either have or pretend to have visions, the song starts with:
"Have you seen the saucers?
Do you know there are people out there
who are unhappy with the way that we care
for the world around us?"
-Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane, "Have You Seen the Saucers?"
>As I read Blake, his Romanticism does not cling to the old or traditional
>ways.>>>
I see Blake clinging desperately to certain traditional ways, even as he
was also a revolutionary in other ways that he thought would free people
from oppression (complex guy!). Why does he forsake typesetting in favor of
handwriting, for example? What "modern" thing in his depiction of "London"
(_Songs of Experience_) sounds GOOD? You might say it's merely
Buddhist-like of him: that there's suffering everywhere. But doesn't "The
Shepherd" (_Songs of Innocence_) seem to have a better lot than those that
have to live in the city? He hated the Industrial Revolution with a
passion.
And cities that he talks about favorably: "Jerusalem" is "Liberty", not a
city specifically, and the emanation of Albion. She may also be the Divine
Vision in every individual or a Holy City of Peace, a "perfect society",
but these are UTOPIAN visions, not the nuts-and-bolts of London in his time
or our time, either. "Golgonooza" is a fantasy city. Yes, Blake lived in
London (in the slums, to be precise). But he enjoyed his time in Felpham,
amidst a more natural setting, didn't he? The problem was, he was beholden
to a patron there.
I believe at least one member of this group is studying "the urban Blake",
and I'll let her speak for herself on Blake and cities. But from my point
of view, it's simple: Blake happened to live in London so it became the
center of his universe. Isn't where you live the center of your universe,
too? Blake's mind was into fantasy mythologies, though... "The Mental
Traveller", for instance. Where does THAT take place?
Are you familiar with the Arts and Crafts Movement, spearheaded by William
Morris but also accompanied by Dante Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones? These
seem to me the logical extension of what Blake was trying to preserve, if
he did have a nuts-and-bolts side to him, even as he was a revolutionary.
(Morris and company were socialists.) In the USA, we had Arts and Crafts
people like Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan in architecture. Frederick Law
Olmsted's great public parks were created at a time of Victorian "cruelty",
but the ideal was for classes and races to intermingle in a place of
country-like beauty in the middle of a city. Do any of you think Olmsted
would have been looked upon favorably by Blake? I hope so.
I think Blake would be very, VERY upset by the loss of true culture around
the world, eroded by the Great American Monolith of Films, TV Junk,
McDonald's and more. But again, I wonder: what's to be done? In Indonesia,
the Shadow Puppet (wayung kulit) plays animated great Hindu epics, put to
music by Gamelon.Is that Druidism or a great tradition like Shakespeare,
which Blake claimed to admire in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"?
Yes, the escalator goes up AND down, and we're whisked away by it, even if
we try to throw something out to stop it and the wind blows it right back
in our faces. I refer to "Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau!", in which
Blake scathingly ridicules how Voltaire's and Rousseau's ideas have
"lost"... at least temporarily, and yet somehow get blown back and become
gems which, despite the mocking eye, "still in Israel's paths they shine."
To me, the best of Blake, who does not stop his "mental fight", continues
to roar his discontent along with Amnesty International, the Sierra Club,
and other organizations which fight the grinding, non-stop mechanization of
civilization without checks and balances on the human (and non-human) cost
to it all.
Napoleon once called England "a nation of shopkeepers." Sounds like "petty
bourgeois" to me. What do you think Blake thought of his nation of
shopkeepers? That's what's happening all around the world now. Blake saw
disparity between rich and poor, the way the Church of England tried to
soothe disparities as well as outright cruelties by saying, "Everything
will be fine in the after-life!" This is part of his message in both
versions of "The Chimney Sweeper" in the _Songs of Innocence and
Experience_. And you can see the same vicious cycle happening in a country
like Thailand, where girls and boys get sold into prostitution slavery, or
in India where children work in sweat shops. The dilemma is that the
children bring home at least some money for the family to eat!
I actually don't want to restrain anybody from wanting what "we" have.
Sometimes I think "I know better" and wish they understood things like
URBAN PLANNING. Amsterdam is a beautiful city. I doubt Blake would want it
torn down for hideous, faceless 20th century creations, even though much of
it was new in his time.
It's complicated, that's all I'm saying. Blake's cities are cities of
imagination. Show me a quote of his where he endorses commerce, for
example. He does seem to point back both at Jesus and forward to Marx in
his detest of this interchange, from what I've read. Show me a quote where
he gives a positive spin to REAL inventions, like rollerblades. Maybe Los
hammers out the prototype with his anvil. But the production line to create
them: it's like the Printing House in Hell. Although, of course, Blake went
through that printing house and left us beautiful creations.
Thoughts to ponder.
Thanks for your post!
-Randall Albright
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 96 12:34 EDT
From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914"
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: sweet Science -Reply
Message-Id: <9607091637.AA27965@uu6.psi.com>
Pam, --In addition, the shadowy daughter of Urthona describes herself as a kind
of inverted tree with roots stretching up to the heavens in the opening lines
of _Europe_! --elisa
- - The original note follows - -
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 11:49:18 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com, nhilton@parallel.park.uga.edu
Subject: sweet Science -Reply
Resent-From: blake@albion.com
Reply-To: blake@albion.com
The `inverted brain' , quoted by Nelson Hilton from Carrol sounds like the
inverted `tree' of the kabbalah and can perhaps be related to the Tree of
Mystery in "The Human Abstract" :
The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree;
But their search was all in vain:
Ther grows one in the Human Brain.
All the golden pleasures which Nelson and others seem to associate
with this world are, I think. associated by Blake with the `golden clime' of
Eternity where all the `Palaces', gardens and Temples are filled with joys
which are erotic ( but not sensual) since all beings continually merge
identities in God's fires of love. This does not mean that he despises the
sensual loves of this earth, but that he does see love's energies as
changed and contracted by incarnation and influenced by the limitations
of the Selfhood. Pam van Schaik
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:13:27 -0500
From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
Message-Id: <9607092019.AA02147@uu6.psi.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Good points, Astrid. It's all too easy to reduce Blake's complex attitude
toward industry to "old = good, new = bad." How could he have opposed the
modern innovations that eliminated the "need" for 7-year-old chimney
sweeps? --innovations that were rejected in his time because the boys were
cheaper. Most people seize on the line about "England's green & pleasant
land" and skip the part about building Jerusalem in it. Building, not
regressing. But then again, my soon-to-be-finished dissertation is on
Blake's "urban romanticism," so I have a personal ax to grind.
Welcome to the list. If boxing is the "sweet science," it certainly reigns
here!
Jennifer Michael
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 1996 16:17:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: RPYODER@ualr.edu
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: RE: Industrialization and the Escalator Dilemma
Message-Id: <960709161707.6031a95d@ualr.edu>
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Just a note on Blake's Felpham period: As much as he and Catherine looked
forward to the move, and to working with Hayley, Blake quickly became
disillusioned with life at the beach. Catherine was sick almost the whole
time they were there; Blake was sick much of the time. Moreover, it is not
at all clear that Blake enjoyed small town life. Check out the letters
surrounding the Scholfield (spellings vary) incident; he seems to have liked
his neighbors, but the whole affair had a chilling effect on the community,
and a sort of paranoia seems to have crept in. Compare this with *J* 38:
33: "The open heart is shut up in integuments of frozen silence". "Scofield"
and his key witness, "Kox," appear as the giants "let loose upon my Saxons"
(38:50-51). The Scholfield incident ended in Blake's favor, and Blake saw it
as the means by which Hayley's friendship was finally proven. But the
whole "three years slumber on the Banks of Ocean" had a lasting impact on
Blake's work and his thinking about language and about human relationships.
Nevertheless, he was only to happy to shake the sand from his feet. He found
[*too* happy] the beach cold and damp. William Blake: Town Mouse.
Paul Yoder
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End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #83
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