Today's Topics:
Re: Ralph's first riddle
Re: Ralph's first riddle
Re: Ralph's first riddle
Re: Ralph's first riddle
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Subject: Re: Ralph's first riddle
Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 18:34:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
I'll begin with what I most agree with in Richard's post:
At 07:06 AM 2/27/99 -0500, Richard Blumberg wrote:
>> ......... Go tell them this & overthrow their cup,
>>Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath:
>>Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration:
>That's as powerful a piece of political oratory as I know; far stronger and
>more persuasive than anything in Paine. The man who saw the world so clearly
>that he could write those lines, who saw the mingled predicaments of humankind
>-- artistic, political, sexual, religious - with such overwhelming clarity and
>detail that he could compress them all into the crystalline hardness of
>"London" -............
Richard snatched the words right out my mouth, for this was my next move, to
cite just these words from Blake and comment on them just as Richard says.
Thanks for saving me the effort.
Blake attacked existing social arrangements and the metaphysics that support
them right down to their deepest roots, an achievement equaled by few
overtly political writers of any age. I am more interested in the
assumptions from which writing takes place and the depth of the ideas put
across than what some writer did to take up arms for the revolution, which,
left to itself, is a relatively shallow question and disrespects what is
revolutionary about thought. Now whether a person is an introverted,
contemplative soul or one who turns outwards into action is an important
question--it's not nothing--but to understand the implications of being one
type or the other requires a framework from which to analyze those
implications. This framework has been lacking in Blake studies--lacking on
the left, by the way! Jack Lindsay and Jerome McGann have complained about
Blake's lack of political engagement, i.e. from the hard and the soft left
respectively, but their implicit conceptions of the so-called unity of
theory and practice reflect some inadequate and very bad intellectual habits
that go back a long ways in this century.
>>[more Blake lines about negation, abstarction, etc.]
>Clear, unrelenting, and unwaveringly political in its import. Those lines have
>helped me understand how they do their work, these pundits and pious
>politicians, this Pope, these ayatollahs and rabbis and media preachers. For
>nearly 50 years, Blake's "statements of resistance in defiance of material
>conditions" have helped me see them clearly, "Heavens & Hells conglobing in the
>Void" to devil sad humanity.
Again, excellent observations.
I dissent only with Richard's opening remarks:
>>(1) How are we to analyze Blake's statements of resistance in defiance of
>>material conditions?
>
>The answer to that, I submit, begins, "we are not", because analysis is a
>pretty pitiful tool confronted with an Innumerable
>company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty
.....
and with his concluding phrase:
>when that man points at something, I will try to see it. But I won't
>try to analyze the semiotics of the pointing finger.
Someone has missed the boat. Richard's remarks strike me as implausibly
arbitrary, a concession to senselessness. Yet I don't think Blake is
senseless, here. Why Blake sees angels and chariots instead of unicorns and
cherubs is not the question being asked; rather what does it mean for a
person to say that the outward creation is nothing to him? This is a
gesture of defiance only; no one alive with a quantum of survival instinct
can believe this. Unless Blake fed his body, warmed his house, and wiped his
ass with his visions alone could he believe such a thing. To say you
disregard the outward creation can only mean that you defy it, because in
fact you cannot disregard it.
The next step to take is to plug this scenario into some of Tim Linnell's
assertions. If Blake is suggesting a spiritual renewal in total disregard
of any bodily conditions, or that wishing them away will make them so, I
want to see some indication that Blake himself explicitly and unambiguously
makes such claims. I would suggest that all of the quotations you can
muster, and those I've mustered myself from time to time, are rather murky
in this area, and there is as much reason to believe that Blake was not a
subjectivist snake oil salesman like Deepak Chopra or whatever his name is.
Let me resurrect yet another issue I used to discuss from time to time, that
cropped up in discussions from the meaning of the introduction to the Songs
of Experience to the scenarios of apocalyptic redemption in which persons
are opened, slaves are freed, and tyrants overthrown. Many have suggested
that Blake claims that all one person has to do is to correct his defective
perception of the cosmos and then its ilks disappear. I submit that such
people are bald-faced, bare-assed liars. I insist that such people are
deliberately castrating Blake's vision to make it acceptable to moth-eaten
Jungians and other right-wing mystics. Blake's entire symbolic universe is
saturated with scenarios of oppression; the prevailing mood is overthrow,
not attitude adjustment. One person cannot obliterate an oppressive
(cosmic) order, not in Blake's imaginative world. It is a collective effort
or it is nothing.
Now I think I've contributed a great deal toward developing this discussion
and a way of conceptualizing the issues to be addressed. I'll be happy to
leave certain resident airheads to their own devices and stay out of their
discussions as long as they leave me alone. But when you're talking about
Blake and politics, that's my turf, and if I catch you in a lie, I'll kick
your ass to the curb.
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Subject: Re: Ralph's first riddle
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 12:38:55 GMT
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
>I'll begin with what I most agree with in Richard's post:
>
>At 07:06 AM 2/27/99 -0500, Richard Blumberg wrote:
>>> ......... Go tell them this & overthrow their cup,
>>>Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath:
>>>Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration:
>>That's as powerful a piece of political oratory as I know; far stronger and
>>more persuasive than anything in Paine. The man who saw the world so clearly
>>that he could write those lines, who saw the mingled predicaments of humankind
>>-- artistic, political, sexual, religious - with such overwhelming clarity and
>>detail that he could compress them all into the crystalline hardness of
>>"London" -............
>
>Richard snatched the words right out my mouth, for this was my next move, to
>cite just these words from Blake and comment on them just as Richard says.
>Thanks for saving me the effort.
And in turn these words were snatched right out the mouth of religious
dissent, for they wholly concern the apparatus of the Established Church,
which obliged the populace to submit to a form of worship dissenters
objected to as man made, and by definition political in nature: "it is
framed by human authority; its laws are founded on Acts of Parliament, and
enforced by civil sanctions; and the chief magistrate, as such, is its
supreme head" (Protestant dissenters manual, quoted in the Baptist magazine
in 1817). Dissenters objected to the fact that forms of worship and
ceremonies were imposed upon them by the state which obliged them to
participate, they objected to the baptism of children as being contrary to
the scriptures, the burial service as being fundamentally objectionable
because not distinguishing between good and evil men, and the whole
apparatus of the Church in general as being corrupt. So the quote above is
not political, except in the sense that opposition to a political entity is
a political act, and far from being far sighted and visionary is actually a
fairly common statement of dissent. The aim of the game was to obtain
freedom of worship, and since the people involved actually believed their
souls were at stake, it was taken very seriously indeed. The idea was to
cast of the man made phariseeical religion and go back to the true revealed
word of God, the Scriptures, which any man with the inclination was free to
interpret for himself.
I can only assume that the misinterpretation of a quote with a clear and
blindingly obvious religious dissenting content is based on ignorance of the
history of religious dissent, and would suggest that a basic understanding
of this is obtained before positioning Blake as a political writer against a
purely 20th Century contextual understanding of politics. The interaction
between religious and political activism in the 18th and 19th centuries is
complex, and I have never sought to deny Blake a political voice, merely to
point out a source of his statements which has been ignored by others in
this discussion. But in view of the fact he did nothing tangible to promote
or implement his views, one has to say that if he was a political writer, he
failed. His adoption in our times is not because he has anything
particularly new to say, but because he had the good fortune to have written
a few things which had resonance with post war student politics,
particularly because alongside his comments on social injustice, he appears
to advocate free love and appeals to ideas of new age hippy mysticism in
both writings and art. He seems a man ahead of his time, but really I don't
think he was, as I said.
In any case, I think the answers to Ralph's questions are simple. He raises
paradoxes based on his assumption that Blake used symbolic constructs to
frame his political ideology and in fact had no spiritual objectives. The
fact of the matter is that Blake actually believed what he said to have
literal truth. If you apply this idea to what he said, even if you don't
agree with him, the paradoxes vanish.
By the way, the statement about right wing governments and art is a red
herring and is very "20th Century centric". Fear of art is only really an
issue in societies with some sort of mass media which can use art to spread
ideas. Blake lacked anything like this, and in any case many of his target
clients were aristocratic patrons! In any case, symbolic and satiric attacks
against the establishment were fairly common in the Regency era, and broadly
tolerated. More explicit sedition was another thing altogether.
Tim
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Subject: Re: Ralph's first riddle
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 10:19:10 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
Good advice, Tim. What I take away from your remarks on the religious
dissenters doesn't have to do with the definition of politics and religion,
but with the question of Blake's originality. The next task would be to
compare the fundamental understanding of human motivation and behavior,
society, the legacy of metaphysics and religion as a legacy of class
oppression, etc., of the commonplace religious dissent of the time with
Blake's systematic understanding of these root issues and then try to
determine what's new and what's not. One can never be historically-minded
enough, and so I've got to take my medicine and do further historical
research. I must say though that I am not convinced by his assessment of
Blake's writings and their reception in the 1960s. (And then by whom? We
are not all as flatline about Blake as Allen Ginsberg.)
At 12:38 PM 2/28/99 GMT, Tim Linnell wrote:
>And in turn these words were snatched right out the mouth of religious
>dissent, for they wholly concern the apparatus of the Established Church,
>which obliged the populace to submit to a form of worship dissenters
>objected to as man made, and by definition political in nature: ......
Is Blake's conception of the overturning of baptism, marriage, etc., limited
to this?
>I can only assume that the misinterpretation of a quote with a clear and
>blindingly obvious religious dissenting content is based on ignorance of the
>history of religious dissent, and would suggest that a basic understanding
>of this is obtained before positioning Blake as a political writer against a
>purely 20th Century contextual understanding of politics.......
Good point.
> His adoption in our times is not because he has anything
>particularly new to say, but because he had the good fortune to have written
>a few things which had resonance with post war student politics,
>particularly because alongside his comments on social injustice, he appears
>to advocate free love and appeals to ideas of new age hippy mysticism in
>both writings and art. He seems a man ahead of his time, but really I don't
>think he was, as I said.
Decidedly unconvincing.
>In any case, I think the answers to Ralph's questions are simple. He raises
>paradoxes based on his assumption that Blake used symbolic constructs to
>frame his political ideology and in fact had no spiritual objectives. The
>fact of the matter is that Blake actually believed what he said to have
>literal truth. If you apply this idea to what he said, even if you don't
>agree with him, the paradoxes vanish.
One may have all the contempt for the outward creation one wishes; one must
still live in it or slit one's wrists. This attitude demands psychological
examination. Did Blake actually preach that everyone must acquiesce to
intolerable conditions? Didn't his alleged disregard for his earthly
existence become pronounced only when he got so old he already had one foot
in the grave?
>By the way, the statement about right wing governments and art is a red
>herring and is very "20th Century centric". Fear of art is only really an
>issue in societies with some sort of mass media which can use art to spread
>ideas. Blake lacked anything like this, and in any case many of his target
>clients were aristocratic patrons! In any case, symbolic and satiric attacks
>against the establishment were fairly common in the Regency era, and broadly
>tolerated. More explicit sedition was another thing altogether.
This is also an important point, goes to audience, with implications not
only for the question of overt political agitation. I would imagine Blake's
conception of himself as a prophet, who would likely not be understood until
the far future, and his extreme introversion and impracticality, resulted in
a social role for him as a prophet/agitator only in an abstract sense; the
angels would know what he was doing if nobody else. And the obscurity of
his symbolic system could be justified as a continuation of the Biblical
mode of expression, which is both esoteric yet part of popular culture.
Blake wasn't picked up by the Chartists, unlike Shelley, though somehow the
American Abolitionists got hold of Blake, at least the more obvious bits.
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Subject: Re: Ralph's first riddle
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:22:40 -0500
From: Richard Blumberg
To: blake@albion.com
Richard wrote:
>>
>>At 07:06 AM 2/27/99 -0500, Richard Blumberg wrote:
>>>> ......... Go tell them this & overthrow their cup,
>>>>Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath:
>>>>Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration:
>>>That's as powerful a piece of political oratory as I know; far stronger
and
>>>more persuasive than anything in Paine.
Ralph approved:
>>
>>Richard snatched the words right out my mouth,
And Tim objected:
>
>And in turn these words were snatched right out the mouth of religious
>dissent, for they wholly concern the apparatus of the Established Church,
> So the quote above is
>not political,
>I can only assume that the misinterpretation of a quote with a clear and
>blindingly obvious religious dissenting content is based on ignorance of
the
>history of religious dissent,
That's not a bad assumption, and mostly correct; I've read lots and found
most of it as boring and irrelevant to what I sought from Blake as Blake
himself found the guinea sun boring and irrelevant to what he sought from
his stay on this earth, around which the guinea sun had, by his time, ceased
to revolve. Tom seems to want to see Blake only as an historical figure,
trapped in quaint historical quarrels, and he assumes (with infuriating
blitheness, I might add) that any understanding of Blake that does not start
from the central importance of that historical context is a
"misinterpretation ... based on ignorance".
That is as arid and uninspiring a bit of reductionism as I've seen in a
while.
To me, the best thing about Blake, and about all great artists, is that they
continue to speak convincingly to generations removed from the generation in
which they found themselves. So Yeats speaks convincingly to me, still
reeling from the morning's dose of massacres and cruelties and lies, without
any conscious regard on my part of the troubles that kindled his vision:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
(http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5379/IHaveMetThem.html)
So the stories in the Mahabharata maintain their resonance through millennia
of separation from the Treta Yuga in which they occured and within which
their tropes held different meanings.
(http://www.wmblake.com/stories/mahabharata).
So Blake speaks to me, about our recent era-ending battles:
I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I care
Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness
And put on Intellect
and...
A truth thats told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent
But, Tim, Blake doesn't just speak to me as a prophet or an aphorist. Over a
long time now, since we were introduced by a subtle and generous man named
Tom Whitaker in a seminar at Oberlin college, I have held a steady dialog
with Blake. I'm still confused by much of what he saw, but his vision of
politics - the pretentious arts of government, the manner of the Sons of
Albion in their strength - that vision has substantially formed my vision,
and it is on the basis of that vision that I act, when I do so act, as a
political being. I conceive it as a radical vision - threatening the roots,
attacking the foundation of the structure of power and lies that we must
endure in Ulro. It's a radically anti-authoritarian vision, opposed to
priesthoods and academies and courts, opposed to the Lord God Almighty
himself (and doesn't _that_ put the innumerable heavenly host in an
interesting perspective). The vision I derive from Blake is determinedly
antireductionist; immersed in that vision, I see your insistence on a single
historically accurate interpretation of the text to be the single vision of
a fool, trapped in a stony construct of historical fact and the materials of
demonstration. The earth in its spinning way left that section of the cosmos
centuries ago, yet the artist is with us now and here and speaks to us most
immediately.
Note, Tim, that I am not saying, "do not see that." I am saying, "see this
too." And that, Ralph, is what I suppose Blake to be saying when he reveals
his anti-consensual visions; it is not that the "Globe rolling thro
Voidness" is un_real_. It is that its appearance, to the reasoner, as the
only reality is un_true_. That is the "delusion of Ulro", the notion that
reality can be reduced to what is visible through the Telescope or the
Microscope.
I am with Ralph wholeheartedly in his continuing plea that we not abandon
the notion of objective reality in our quest to understand and absorb the
truth in Blake's visions, and I suspect that we would be together in an
admiration of the enterprise of science and its accomplished understandings.
But I would submit that works of Imagination, including Blake's visions,
belong to Popper's Third World of reality, between the First World of
Objective Reality and the Second World of pure Subjectivism - the world of
reality that humanity creates with its consciousness and will and
imagination. Popper demonstrates convincingly that the constructs of the
Third World affect the First, and that, I would submit, is the most
productive model for analyzing the puzzle that preoccupies Ralph - how a
shrewd and probably mostly sane craftsman could assert so forcefully the
reality of such non-Objective visions. They are real, and their reality is
of the nature of Popper's Third World, and their relationship with Objective
Reality is mediated through the understandings of people to whom the
artist's visions are enlightening and who work on the Objectve World in that
light. (The Popper Web - http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/).
The Sky is an immortal tent built by the Sons of Los
And every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place:
Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount
Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe;
And on its verge the Sun rises & sets. the Clouds bow
To meet the flat Earth & the Sea in such an orderd Space:
The Starry heavens reach no further but here bend and set
On all sides & the two Poles turn on their valves of gold:
And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move.
Wher'eer he goes & all his neighbourhood bewail his loss:
That, too.
Richard
Imagination is one of the Great Gods: http://wmblake.com/ohc/imagination.htm
Richard Blumberg, Proprietor
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