for research students and interested Blake readers...............those who want Blake's The Four Zoas or Jerusalem explained in detail.......those who want to understand the structure explained and the symbolic meaning of Jerusalem and The Four Zoas analysed......those who want Blake's myth, story and characters explained and set in narrative context...........those who want to see as Blake saw.........that means in terms of Blake's four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold vision, narrative points of view, dramatic tension and use of irony and perception of tragic fall and redemption
I have re-introduced the search lines to the front of the blog. the first point i'd like to make is that the Plates can be individually called up.
blake's jerusalem textual analysis
blake's textual analysis
blake's textual analysis four zoas
four zoas
zoas
blake's vortex
william blake's plot
blake's plot
blake's major prophecies
blake's four zoas
blake's myth
blake's jerusalem
blake's symbolism
blake's four zoas meaning
blake's satan christ
blake's jerusalem meaning
blake's symbolism four zoas jerusalem
william blake's four zoas
william blake's jerusalem
william blake's four zoas jerusalem analysis
blake's jerusalem zoas time space
blake's jerusalem visionary symbolism
four zoas blake plot
jerusalem blake plot
blake vision meaning
blake's myth meaning
blake's zoas emanations meaning
blake's albion jerusalem
blake's anglo celtic christianity
Blake's soteriology
blake's golgonooza zoas
blake's golgonooza jerusalem
blake mythological personae
blake albion's fall and salvation
blake's four fold vision vortex
blake's two three four fold vision
blake's golden string jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity four zoas
blake textual analysis jerusalem
blake interpretation jerusalem
blake spirituality jerusalem
blake spirituality four zoas
blake's textual analysis
blake's two nights the seventh zoas
blake line by line analysis zoas jerusalem meaning
blake's sexuality zoas jerusalem
blake's major symbols
blake jerusalem beulah eden ulro generation
blake's mythological persona
blake psychology jerusalem
william blake's mythology
william blake's myth
blake's myth
blake's myth zoas
blake's myth jerusalem
william blake's plot
blake's narrative
william blake narrative jerusalem
blake erin jerusalem
blake's narrative jerusalem
blake's narrative the four zoas
blake's meaning
william blake's meaning
blake's golgonooza
william blake's golgonooza
blake's prophetic vision
william blake's jerusalem
blake's craftsmanship
william blake's craftsmanship
blake's visionary mythology
william blake's visionary mythology
william blake's prophetic epics meaning
blake's irony
blake line by line analysis four zoas
blake line by line analysis jerusalem
blake's two fold vision
blake's three fold vision
blake's four fold vision
blake's web veil symbolism
blake's fractal structure
william blake's theory of composition
william blake's fractal structure
blake fractal narrative
blake sexuality zoas four
blake sexuality
william blake's epics analysis
blake sexuality jerusalem
Friday, 21 December 2007
William Blake's Jerusalem Explained proof is copy edited and proof-read. the qualities of concentration, persistence, attention to detail, eye for any lumpiness of phrasing, editing out weak presentation of argument and research findings, and elevating poor English....... all talents were shown to me by my consultant copy editor. the book is noted on Amazon though not yet for sale through Amazon Books....after this proof copy is edited the process goes to e-marketing........... as it is, William Blake's Jerusalem Explained can be ordered by direct e-mail.
print on demand editing consultancy is a seriously enjoyable process with a good copy editor. colour specialist too.....layout and cover design needs a copy editor that is a fine art trained specialist colour theorist...and the IT editing skills...this time around i'll not be using colour................ but i'm thinking of a coloured plates edition with commentary sometime down the line, chiefly to produce a beautiful book............
......... for print on demand books, especially if there is colour involved, a top consultant like The William Blake Press is essential to produce a good book.....i might add my editor doesn't read my blog....too many mistakes......but I have learned a book is much harder to copy edit than a thesis....whether writing one or supervising or examining one........
.........watching the copy editor working is instructive....normally there is physical distance between writer and book or thesis......we don't tend to watch a proof-reader for a couple of hours for example. i've learned a lot from my editor while she creates a book.
print on demand editing consultancy is a seriously enjoyable process with a good copy editor. colour specialist too.....layout and cover design needs a copy editor that is a fine art trained specialist colour theorist...and the IT editing skills...this time around i'll not be using colour................ but i'm thinking of a coloured plates edition with commentary sometime down the line, chiefly to produce a beautiful book............
......... for print on demand books, especially if there is colour involved, a top consultant like The William Blake Press is essential to produce a good book.....i might add my editor doesn't read my blog....too many mistakes......but I have learned a book is much harder to copy edit than a thesis....whether writing one or supervising or examining one........
.........watching the copy editor working is instructive....normally there is physical distance between writer and book or thesis......we don't tend to watch a proof-reader for a couple of hours for example. i've learned a lot from my editor while she creates a book.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
early december............. back to thinking about Blake. print on demand and editing thoughts follow...........this is signification and the semiology of writing. the technical is interfused with the drafting and redrafting casting the elements and recasting.....editing for the book to be there...... the product. the art.
two points to this blog...
first....... William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is being printed as I write...which satisfies me after many years of analysis. To take the process through the stages up to the book on Amazon has been a long process and echoes the technological isolation William and Catherine Blake found in taking everything through to the end. and in the end we have a single work of art we call the printed coloured copy. I have always wondered why Blake did not print more copies once the plates were cut. i hear the poverty argument, he was too poor and the expense.... but i wonder still at the uniqueness of his aesthetic focus. one unique work of art is the residue of failure to communicate. who then..... even now has worked out Blake?
back to print on demand and copy edits
two points to this blog...
first....... William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is being printed as I write...which satisfies me after many years of analysis. To take the process through the stages up to the book on Amazon has been a long process and echoes the technological isolation William and Catherine Blake found in taking everything through to the end. and in the end we have a single work of art we call the printed coloured copy. I have always wondered why Blake did not print more copies once the plates were cut. i hear the poverty argument, he was too poor and the expense.... but i wonder still at the uniqueness of his aesthetic focus. one unique work of art is the residue of failure to communicate. who then..... even now has worked out Blake?
back to print on demand and copy edits
Friday, 16 November 2007
i've made revisions throughout....one area needing on-going adaptation is the self-contradictory phrase called 'pre-history'. professional scholarly understandings of the important findings of stone circles and the indigenous ante-druidic culture are evolving quickly .....i had one of many thoughts turning through the photographic records.
why aren't the rocks and engravings protected? protected from decay....
one looks at the extraordinary number of stone/wood circles/standing stones, hills, graves and chambers and the like now found and still counting across europe and the meditterean, and roughly calculate the hours of labour and the logistics of supply, food, hygene and shelter, and noting the labour that was used was that left after survival 'work', and consider the infra structure of support, there seems little depth in the stereotypical claim for a scattered small population of hunter/gatherers. all waiting for cuniform, slavery and the pyramids, rome and the world wide empire.
These romano centered/mediterreanean centered histories are flat-earth, elite god priest/king divinities......the first reformation seemed to be islam...and the absolute finish of the roman empire....add gaul and britain (occupied by the celts 600-400 bce) and that's it...........basque celts under red-haired isabella stops islam as the saxon/polis euros stopped them in north.........pontfex maximus colonised s. america for the human bbq....islam into afganistan, pakistan and india.....
there was a richly subtle international culture for millenia before the relatively recent cuniform cultures .....boats marshes corn cultivated, weaving, jewelry, medicines and drugs, permanent highly effective, complex astronomically based calandars and stellar knowledge, stone houses and long term oak buildings and food available to the skilled indigenous population including the beaker people and pottery and metals.
....the ill-cut animal skins and shapeless uncut hair of 'our ancestors' seems ludicrous parodies...how many hides did one cure to make even a few clothes? the thrown bearskin over the shoulders and waving animal taisl on the grunting straggling wanderers are like cartoons.......see rudgley at oxford
......however with cuniform, stone, not much timber and immortality-driven-tomb builders seemed to come institutionalised slavery. .....or enforced labour......in the east.... chin took out 700,000 odd workers from the whole population for a generation to build his 'magic tomb'...........immortality became limited to a human life...for everandeverandever. then the patriarchy
henges, pyramids....greece...rome...mediterranean theocracies and despotism..... all about a few lights in the sky and time deemed holy. pyschoses of holiness. the crucifixion ended god-as-time......bearing in mind the idea of a beginning is a recent idea.........no year '0' or year '1' in non-masoritic theologies......the ideas of the world starting in a year (solar/lunar and both....with intercalations and animals and people being killed to ensure the stars will turn, the eclipses will come to and end, and of course that God started it all 4-5000 years ago. Blake's represents all this at the end of Chapter 3.....for Blake, Christ breaks through all of the determined 28 heavens of serial time and utterly transforms two-fold vision and the ideas of time, ideas of power, control of procreation and human breeding stock, and ideas of economic control.....thus Blake's sociology describes two-fold perceptual being as deficient structures of priests, kings, petty officials (tax collectors), warriors, slave labour, prostituted females and sacrificed children. his vision sees with three-fold vision. Christ is four-fold vision.
the celts and saxons were not the circle builders.........there is a lot of archeology yet to come. middle east is really interesting....circle builders built right there all over jordan and israel sryia etc. evidence is stones by the thousand...2000-5000 bce...indigenous,
coming 'later' is cuniform in west.......... and hierogliphic in east........ sets indigenous humans in an 'unexamined well' or 'pre-history'....which methodologically is a self-contradiction to archeology
finishing the last tweaks to William Blake's Jerusalem Explained.....the solutions found by my copy editor at The William Blake Press: Cambridge essential. nothing done without Rhonda ........in fact she's formatted the book. huge effort.
i'm tying it to The International Society of Human Rights at the United Nations. blake a key figure in literature and art in the great tradition of enhancing our spiritual articulations in practical living and human justice.
why aren't the rocks and engravings protected? protected from decay....
one looks at the extraordinary number of stone/wood circles/standing stones, hills, graves and chambers and the like now found and still counting across europe and the meditterean, and roughly calculate the hours of labour and the logistics of supply, food, hygene and shelter, and noting the labour that was used was that left after survival 'work', and consider the infra structure of support, there seems little depth in the stereotypical claim for a scattered small population of hunter/gatherers. all waiting for cuniform, slavery and the pyramids, rome and the world wide empire.
These romano centered/mediterreanean centered histories are flat-earth, elite god priest/king divinities......the first reformation seemed to be islam...and the absolute finish of the roman empire....add gaul and britain (occupied by the celts 600-400 bce) and that's it...........basque celts under red-haired isabella stops islam as the saxon/polis euros stopped them in north.........pontfex maximus colonised s. america for the human bbq....islam into afganistan, pakistan and india.....
there was a richly subtle international culture for millenia before the relatively recent cuniform cultures .....boats marshes corn cultivated, weaving, jewelry, medicines and drugs, permanent highly effective, complex astronomically based calandars and stellar knowledge, stone houses and long term oak buildings and food available to the skilled indigenous population including the beaker people and pottery and metals.
....the ill-cut animal skins and shapeless uncut hair of 'our ancestors' seems ludicrous parodies...how many hides did one cure to make even a few clothes? the thrown bearskin over the shoulders and waving animal taisl on the grunting straggling wanderers are like cartoons.......see rudgley at oxford
......however with cuniform, stone, not much timber and immortality-driven-tomb builders seemed to come institutionalised slavery. .....or enforced labour......in the east.... chin took out 700,000 odd workers from the whole population for a generation to build his 'magic tomb'...........immortality became limited to a human life...for everandeverandever. then the patriarchy
henges, pyramids....greece...rome...mediterranean theocracies and despotism..... all about a few lights in the sky and time deemed holy. pyschoses of holiness. the crucifixion ended god-as-time......bearing in mind the idea of a beginning is a recent idea.........no year '0' or year '1' in non-masoritic theologies......the ideas of the world starting in a year (solar/lunar and both....with intercalations and animals and people being killed to ensure the stars will turn, the eclipses will come to and end, and of course that God started it all 4-5000 years ago. Blake's represents all this at the end of Chapter 3.....for Blake, Christ breaks through all of the determined 28 heavens of serial time and utterly transforms two-fold vision and the ideas of time, ideas of power, control of procreation and human breeding stock, and ideas of economic control.....thus Blake's sociology describes two-fold perceptual being as deficient structures of priests, kings, petty officials (tax collectors), warriors, slave labour, prostituted females and sacrificed children. his vision sees with three-fold vision. Christ is four-fold vision.
the celts and saxons were not the circle builders.........there is a lot of archeology yet to come. middle east is really interesting....circle builders built right there all over jordan and israel sryia etc. evidence is stones by the thousand...2000-5000 bce...indigenous,
coming 'later' is cuniform in west.......... and hierogliphic in east........ sets indigenous humans in an 'unexamined well' or 'pre-history'....which methodologically is a self-contradiction to archeology
finishing the last tweaks to William Blake's Jerusalem Explained.....the solutions found by my copy editor at The William Blake Press: Cambridge essential. nothing done without Rhonda ........in fact she's formatted the book. huge effort.
i'm tying it to The International Society of Human Rights at the United Nations. blake a key figure in literature and art in the great tradition of enhancing our spiritual articulations in practical living and human justice.
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
review of the blog oct 07
this is an evolving blog....it is continually revised and freshed, .......while detailed and scholarly at times. e-mails to me frequently let me know it is found to be very readable.
there are different sections in it....i'll review them in three main groups for ease of reading:
1...... i list over 90 search lines from Google in which this web site is listed number one or on page one. the site list as strongly in Yahoo and other search engines too.
2..... there are three sections dealing with Blake's crafted and consistant 'narrative points of view': namely his 'within' and 'without' myth; his use of finite and infinite geography; and embedded in his text, his two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision. in context these are original to the field.
3......i deal vigorously and precisely with Blake's two Night(s) the Seventh, and shown how they are reconciled....i compare this to music.....in an analogy just as two speaker give two sides of a musical arrangement, different in the instruments and musical task, that together create a third, fully harmonised, whole in the mind of the listener, so too did Blake consciously reconcile the two Night(s) the Seventh.
this hypothesis in context is original throughout the textual analysis per se, and, till this site was published seemed unknown by all scholars who have completed later full scale studies of The Four Zoas. this study is in fact the first full-scale study and remains original throughout.
4......i deal in some detail with Blake's anglo-celtic christian myth, especially Joseph of Arimathea.....in Blake's Chapter 3, To The Jews, in his Jerusalem...... this study is paleographic, historical, archeological, and theological....in it i call upon some modern research on the Dead Sea scrolls.
there are different sections in it....i'll review them in three main groups for ease of reading:
1...... i list over 90 search lines from Google in which this web site is listed number one or on page one. the site list as strongly in Yahoo and other search engines too.
2..... there are three sections dealing with Blake's crafted and consistant 'narrative points of view': namely his 'within' and 'without' myth; his use of finite and infinite geography; and embedded in his text, his two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision. in context these are original to the field.
3......i deal vigorously and precisely with Blake's two Night(s) the Seventh, and shown how they are reconciled....i compare this to music.....in an analogy just as two speaker give two sides of a musical arrangement, different in the instruments and musical task, that together create a third, fully harmonised, whole in the mind of the listener, so too did Blake consciously reconcile the two Night(s) the Seventh.
this hypothesis in context is original throughout the textual analysis per se, and, till this site was published seemed unknown by all scholars who have completed later full scale studies of The Four Zoas. this study is in fact the first full-scale study and remains original throughout.
4......i deal in some detail with Blake's anglo-celtic christian myth, especially Joseph of Arimathea.....in Blake's Chapter 3, To The Jews, in his Jerusalem...... this study is paleographic, historical, archeological, and theological....in it i call upon some modern research on the Dead Sea scrolls.
Thursday, 20 September 2007
PUBLICATIONS
My book........ William Blake's Jerusalem Explained will be printed soon........print on demand.....it is important to me that this individual process completes the first full line-by-line analysis of Jerusalem....which like the line-by-line study of The Four Zoas, has no footnotes throughout the analysis per se, for as the PhD committee confirmed about The Four Zoas, it is original throughout; i have updated the standard doctoral opening of the 'survey of the field' for The Four Zoas thus the academic context is fresh. the content as peer-reviewed is as original throughout as it has been first draft 1981 and final award of PhD 1984.....taking into account i remind myself, i started 1970...... like my doctoral research, William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is original throughout the analysis per se, yet as always, embedded in the work of others.
for interest, further, the first translation of Jerusalem into brazilian portugese is currently completed and will be printed in brazil being translated by Saulo Alencastre ............ i was invited to write an introduction. i was surprised when Saulo let me know some of the existing translations of Blake into portugese:
Manuel Portela.......
Sete Livron Illuminados (Seven Illuminated Books): namely
All Religions Are One
There is No Natural Religion
The Book of Thel
America
Europe
The Book of Los
The Song of Los
Jose Antonio Arentes.........................
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Book of Thel
Saulo writes to tell me of a publishing house, Antigona:
Songs of Innocence
Island on the Moon
Pickering Manuscript
further Saulo recalls at least four translations of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, two of The Songs and two short poem selections.
His translation of Blake's massive epic Jerusalem to my mind is an extraordinary visionary journey and a significant contribution indeed.
My book........ William Blake's Jerusalem Explained will be printed soon........print on demand.....it is important to me that this individual process completes the first full line-by-line analysis of Jerusalem....which like the line-by-line study of The Four Zoas, has no footnotes throughout the analysis per se, for as the PhD committee confirmed about The Four Zoas, it is original throughout; i have updated the standard doctoral opening of the 'survey of the field' for The Four Zoas thus the academic context is fresh. the content as peer-reviewed is as original throughout as it has been first draft 1981 and final award of PhD 1984.....taking into account i remind myself, i started 1970...... like my doctoral research, William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is original throughout the analysis per se, yet as always, embedded in the work of others.
for interest, further, the first translation of Jerusalem into brazilian portugese is currently completed and will be printed in brazil being translated by Saulo Alencastre ............ i was invited to write an introduction. i was surprised when Saulo let me know some of the existing translations of Blake into portugese:
Manuel Portela.......
Sete Livron Illuminados (Seven Illuminated Books): namely
All Religions Are One
There is No Natural Religion
The Book of Thel
America
Europe
The Book of Los
The Song of Los
Jose Antonio Arentes.........................
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Book of Thel
Saulo writes to tell me of a publishing house, Antigona:
Songs of Innocence
Island on the Moon
Pickering Manuscript
further Saulo recalls at least four translations of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, two of The Songs and two short poem selections.
His translation of Blake's massive epic Jerusalem to my mind is an extraordinary visionary journey and a significant contribution indeed.
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
METATEXT 8 : search strings for fields and fields of freedom
i did say i'd provide something like this.
here are a series of possible research paths. for context, the site....thefourzoas.com....is ranked on page 1 of Google. the site is also on the first page of virtually all other search engine rankings too, it is also on page 2 or 3 on many other angles of search process that are not pointed to below. it makes sense to walk through the alternative paths and idea resources therein.
blake's jerusalem textual analysis
blake's textual analysis
blake's textual analysis four zoas
four zoas
zoas
blake's vortex
william blake's plot
blake's plot
blake's major prophecies
blake's four zoas
blake's myth
blake's jerusalem
blake's symbolism
blake's four zoas meaning
blake's satan christ
blake's jerusalem meaning
blake's symbolism four zoas jerusalem
william blake's four zoas
william blake's jerusalem
william blake's four zoas jerusalem analysis
blake's jerusalem zoas time space
blake's jerusalem visionary symbolism
four zoas blake plot
jerusalem blake plot
blake vision meaning
blake's myth meaning
blake's zoas emanations meaning
blake's albion jerusalem
blake's anglo celtic christianity
Blake's soteriology
blake's golgonooza zoas
blake's golgonooza jerusalem
blake mythological personae
blake albion's fall and salvation
blake's four fold vision vortex
blake's two three four fold vision
blake's golden string jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity four zoas
blake textual analysis jerusalem
blake interpretation jerusalem
blake spirituality jerusalem
blake spirituality four zoas
blake's textual analysis
blake's two nights the seventh zoas
blake line by line analysis zoas jerusalem meaning
blake's sexuality zoas jerusalem
blake's major symbols
blake jerusalem beulah eden ulro generation
blake's mythological persona
blake psychology jerusalem
william blake's mythology
william blake's myth
blake's myth
blake's myth zoas
blake's myth jerusalem
william blake's plot
blake's narrative
william blake narrative jerusalem
blake erin jerusalem
blake's narrative jerusalem
blake's narrative the four zoas
blake's meaning
william blake's meaning
blake's golgonooza
william blake's golgonooza
blake's prophetic vision
william blake's jerusalem
blake's craftsmanship
william blake's craftsmanship
blake's visionary mythology
william blake's visionary mythology
william blake's prophetic epics meaning
blake's irony
blake line by line analysis four zoas
blake line by line analysis jerusalem
blake's two fold vision
blake's three fold vision
blake's four fold vision
blake's web veil symbolism
blake's fractal structure
william blake's theory of composition
william blake's fractal structure
blake fractal narrative
blake sexuality zoas four
blake sexuality
william blake's epics analysis
blake sexuality jerusalem
for individual Plates, the search line is 'blake's jerusalem chapter 1 (or 2 3 4)' then the plate number. also little details...eg. adding william, or an apostrophe, or using capitals rather than lower case, such as i use frequently...... gives different search lines.
a Google identity is an electronic reality......the net and blake's electronic identity within it is one of the immediate pedogogically practical critical challenges in the field of teaching blake; and i'm not alone in finding the William Blake Archive outstanding in the scope of its contribution.....it helps liberate the field of blake's massive works of literature and art and, following barthes, to give an foundation for seeing the almost infinite critical connective possibilities.....
one 'webfact/search engine fact' is that each Plate in Jerusalem is a mini-field with its own critically identifiable tradition of and for the Plate....Plate 78 is an excellent example, it displays a man with the bird's head and currently has 90400 entries. each Plate has, say, approx 80000-120000 entries, give or take a few thousand. That is some 10,000,000 entries for the 100 Plates as a whole, give or take a few 'irrelevant' million. As noted, the site i have here....www.thefourzoas.com.....rates page 1 , often number 1, on Google on virtually every Plate search and on many varients of Blake's The Four Zoas...... or Blake's Jerusalem......search line. being a technical and scholarly site such consistent interest shows a level of literacy of which the past and present existing educators of Blake have developed.
shifting fields and interests to philosophy of religion and the dead sea scrolls, my lecturing regularly but briefly visited Blake. now my years of research can now be gathered into an electronic whole, and, 'Blake' as a expanding whole thereby visible to a very large community who appreciate blake. my site has had 1,5000,000 odd hits......800-1000 and, harmoniously, 80-100 odd daily visits from 2003-2007......my point being, despite being significant net identities, all sites are in context tiny sites within the field of Blake, which is very large; thus the search lines.
such lines help enhance their sense of finding freshness. for me it is unlike research in texts or articles.........i'm in full support of the university secular tradition of the pursuit of truth, so that managing a grasp of the field as a whole is the responsibility of the professionals who 'police' the standards of the education market (following foucault here); and i see the aim of a doctorate is to achieve sufficient mastery of the field as a whole to make a significant contribution, in order that a philosophical position is achievable. hence my view of the search lines, sites and print.
were i to be teaching/lecturing/seminars/thesis supervision et al still, i 'd offer specific search strings to help students manage research on so vast a system as that of Blake's work on the net. very soon they would be on their own and a develop a personalised collection resource unique to each and to a collective resource. the 'book, book, book' approach is the usual student journey and justly so, thus the familiar course outline with bibliography: required texts, and selected reading and sites.....(and i think also search lines) for the course.
simply put, as stated irrefutably, the changed paradigm of the book is with us now. for educators, this is especially challenging when dyslexia and the like is taken into account. many dyslexics need computer visual alternatives to serial letter/number sequences. my son suggests japan has no significant national 'dyslexic problem' perhaps because their's is a hieroglyphic interconnected totality of concept. the ideogram (rather than the serial) up-and-down-floating-side-to-side-symbols-grasp-it-as-a-whole-seeing of the 'dyslexic' conceptualises the hieroglyphic as a whole. so i don't think just adding a web sites gives enough purposeful strength to research visualisations, there should be search lines provided and explained..............
these strings to me spiral out from the normalised information transmitting-and-processing knowledge pursuit lines. the net makes it possible to lateralise the imagination in new ways. for examples, three scholars broglio, baulch and whitson, write up intersesting IT and MOOspace courses. they are three fresh 'thinkers and teachers' of Blake, and their ideas offer fresh possibilities of time space connectivities, causality logic, multiplex levels, synchronicities and the like ....and so, careers, for research students. They take some finding on the web, its the critical line that steers the research links. again, take bentley's biography, essential reading and an exemplar of formal scholarship, it seems to be in a marketing cycle outside of easy net access, which to the now retired/outsider is a pity. i offer my work free.....as well as in a book.
i find most strings give the 'bookseller deals of the justly established few' early....such as the amazon book lots....then the 'journal/article regulars', such as JSTOR . Together, that helps give the serious student the formal state of the field. for me, very much a traditionalist textual critic, bearing in mind how few pages of anything any student has the time to read, quality of what is read, and what is heard, and what is noted, is everything. the pursuit of truth...the 'is it true', as connor at birkbeck wrote, is now 'what is it worth'
'cost analysis of per hour cost of student time' is what a student now pays, and pays out every hour over the course of as a whole. so the question of how much does it cost the student per hour to follow the teacher's learning path is the cost of the journey. it has to worth the price paid by the young. the now de facto legislated debt. buy post-secondary qualifications from educational privatism, and pay interest that is universally known to be 'overseas owned' in every country tax-havened heaven, and untaxed is lent back for a double-legislated profit (see july 10th..... evidence on 'equity' before the Commons Committee)..........for, if the young don't buy qualifications, they will lack proper future employment, pensions, housing or welfare.
for me, they are like buffalos driven over a cliff, the young are thereby legislated into debt..... now the old are emptied too, and their homes will not be passed on to heirs, but legally absorbed into legislated privatised 'care' in what many think is 'economic euthanisia'. the young and the old have been disinherited by the last PM's private equity, tax-avoidance, meta-rich 'party bungs' for election advertising for Parliament...that is now de facto privatised......this seems to me to be a 21st cent primitive backwards collapse into an equivalence to some medieval 'Morton's Fork' of tax recidivism.
like the 'ancien regime' (i.e. a tribunal, the person dragged before it, answers a few questions dragged out and judgement passed). just as in the 'market forces' of the 18th cent, there seems to be an uncontrolled abuse of slave/de facto slave labour (e.g. parts of china, india, africa)..... and the gutting of nature like never before in history. these political/economic views are mine, though i find them pretty generally shared. by contrast, Blake's vision expands ever outward and ever inward....and as with all great art, it heals.
thus, i see it like this: ......thefourzoas.com......has no monetary value, it is a scholar's site and runs at a loss; there is no money, or 'employment advantages' in this site and it is a very demanding 'read'. viewed in this angle of vision, its network search strings are lines of ideas, research possibilities, self-enhancement and the willing, mutual enhancement of others. it is dogmatic fact (e.g. coffey, stanilaoe) that we live our life through others, and that the pursuit of great wealth and power alike are based on lack of faith. here we have Blake's mythic and artistic confirmation of these dogmatic absolutes.
here are a series of possible research paths. for context, the site....thefourzoas.com....is ranked on page 1 of Google. the site is also on the first page of virtually all other search engine rankings too, it is also on page 2 or 3 on many other angles of search process that are not pointed to below. it makes sense to walk through the alternative paths and idea resources therein.
blake's jerusalem textual analysis
blake's textual analysis
blake's textual analysis four zoas
four zoas
zoas
blake's vortex
william blake's plot
blake's plot
blake's major prophecies
blake's four zoas
blake's myth
blake's jerusalem
blake's symbolism
blake's four zoas meaning
blake's satan christ
blake's jerusalem meaning
blake's symbolism four zoas jerusalem
william blake's four zoas
william blake's jerusalem
william blake's four zoas jerusalem analysis
blake's jerusalem zoas time space
blake's jerusalem visionary symbolism
four zoas blake plot
jerusalem blake plot
blake vision meaning
blake's myth meaning
blake's zoas emanations meaning
blake's albion jerusalem
blake's anglo celtic christianity
Blake's soteriology
blake's golgonooza zoas
blake's golgonooza jerusalem
blake mythological personae
blake albion's fall and salvation
blake's four fold vision vortex
blake's two three four fold vision
blake's golden string jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity four zoas
blake textual analysis jerusalem
blake interpretation jerusalem
blake spirituality jerusalem
blake spirituality four zoas
blake's textual analysis
blake's two nights the seventh zoas
blake line by line analysis zoas jerusalem meaning
blake's sexuality zoas jerusalem
blake's major symbols
blake jerusalem beulah eden ulro generation
blake's mythological persona
blake psychology jerusalem
william blake's mythology
william blake's myth
blake's myth
blake's myth zoas
blake's myth jerusalem
william blake's plot
blake's narrative
william blake narrative jerusalem
blake erin jerusalem
blake's narrative jerusalem
blake's narrative the four zoas
blake's meaning
william blake's meaning
blake's golgonooza
william blake's golgonooza
blake's prophetic vision
william blake's jerusalem
blake's craftsmanship
william blake's craftsmanship
blake's visionary mythology
william blake's visionary mythology
william blake's prophetic epics meaning
blake's irony
blake line by line analysis four zoas
blake line by line analysis jerusalem
blake's two fold vision
blake's three fold vision
blake's four fold vision
blake's web veil symbolism
blake's fractal structure
william blake's theory of composition
william blake's fractal structure
blake fractal narrative
blake sexuality zoas four
blake sexuality
william blake's epics analysis
blake sexuality jerusalem
for individual Plates, the search line is 'blake's jerusalem chapter 1 (or 2 3 4)' then the plate number. also little details...eg. adding william, or an apostrophe, or using capitals rather than lower case, such as i use frequently...... gives different search lines.
a Google identity is an electronic reality......the net and blake's electronic identity within it is one of the immediate pedogogically practical critical challenges in the field of teaching blake; and i'm not alone in finding the William Blake Archive outstanding in the scope of its contribution.....it helps liberate the field of blake's massive works of literature and art and, following barthes, to give an foundation for seeing the almost infinite critical connective possibilities.....
one 'webfact/search engine fact' is that each Plate in Jerusalem is a mini-field with its own critically identifiable tradition of and for the Plate....Plate 78 is an excellent example, it displays a man with the bird's head and currently has 90400 entries. each Plate has, say, approx 80000-120000 entries, give or take a few thousand. That is some 10,000,000 entries for the 100 Plates as a whole, give or take a few 'irrelevant' million. As noted, the site i have here....www.thefourzoas.com.....rates page 1 , often number 1, on Google on virtually every Plate search and on many varients of Blake's The Four Zoas...... or Blake's Jerusalem......search line. being a technical and scholarly site such consistent interest shows a level of literacy of which the past and present existing educators of Blake have developed.
shifting fields and interests to philosophy of religion and the dead sea scrolls, my lecturing regularly but briefly visited Blake. now my years of research can now be gathered into an electronic whole, and, 'Blake' as a expanding whole thereby visible to a very large community who appreciate blake. my site has had 1,5000,000 odd hits......800-1000 and, harmoniously, 80-100 odd daily visits from 2003-2007......my point being, despite being significant net identities, all sites are in context tiny sites within the field of Blake, which is very large; thus the search lines.
such lines help enhance their sense of finding freshness. for me it is unlike research in texts or articles.........i'm in full support of the university secular tradition of the pursuit of truth, so that managing a grasp of the field as a whole is the responsibility of the professionals who 'police' the standards of the education market (following foucault here); and i see the aim of a doctorate is to achieve sufficient mastery of the field as a whole to make a significant contribution, in order that a philosophical position is achievable. hence my view of the search lines, sites and print.
were i to be teaching/lecturing/seminars/thesis supervision et al still, i 'd offer specific search strings to help students manage research on so vast a system as that of Blake's work on the net. very soon they would be on their own and a develop a personalised collection resource unique to each and to a collective resource. the 'book, book, book' approach is the usual student journey and justly so, thus the familiar course outline with bibliography: required texts, and selected reading and sites.....(and i think also search lines) for the course.
simply put, as stated irrefutably, the changed paradigm of the book is with us now. for educators, this is especially challenging when dyslexia and the like is taken into account. many dyslexics need computer visual alternatives to serial letter/number sequences. my son suggests japan has no significant national 'dyslexic problem' perhaps because their's is a hieroglyphic interconnected totality of concept. the ideogram (rather than the serial) up-and-down-floating-side-to-side-symbols-grasp-it-as-a-whole-seeing of the 'dyslexic' conceptualises the hieroglyphic as a whole. so i don't think just adding a web sites gives enough purposeful strength to research visualisations, there should be search lines provided and explained..............
these strings to me spiral out from the normalised information transmitting-and-processing knowledge pursuit lines. the net makes it possible to lateralise the imagination in new ways. for examples, three scholars broglio, baulch and whitson, write up intersesting IT and MOOspace courses. they are three fresh 'thinkers and teachers' of Blake, and their ideas offer fresh possibilities of time space connectivities, causality logic, multiplex levels, synchronicities and the like ....and so, careers, for research students. They take some finding on the web, its the critical line that steers the research links. again, take bentley's biography, essential reading and an exemplar of formal scholarship, it seems to be in a marketing cycle outside of easy net access, which to the now retired/outsider is a pity. i offer my work free.....as well as in a book.
i find most strings give the 'bookseller deals of the justly established few' early....such as the amazon book lots....then the 'journal/article regulars', such as JSTOR . Together, that helps give the serious student the formal state of the field. for me, very much a traditionalist textual critic, bearing in mind how few pages of anything any student has the time to read, quality of what is read, and what is heard, and what is noted, is everything. the pursuit of truth...the 'is it true', as connor at birkbeck wrote, is now 'what is it worth'
'cost analysis of per hour cost of student time' is what a student now pays, and pays out every hour over the course of as a whole. so the question of how much does it cost the student per hour to follow the teacher's learning path is the cost of the journey. it has to worth the price paid by the young. the now de facto legislated debt. buy post-secondary qualifications from educational privatism, and pay interest that is universally known to be 'overseas owned' in every country tax-havened heaven, and untaxed is lent back for a double-legislated profit (see july 10th..... evidence on 'equity' before the Commons Committee)..........for, if the young don't buy qualifications, they will lack proper future employment, pensions, housing or welfare.
for me, they are like buffalos driven over a cliff, the young are thereby legislated into debt..... now the old are emptied too, and their homes will not be passed on to heirs, but legally absorbed into legislated privatised 'care' in what many think is 'economic euthanisia'. the young and the old have been disinherited by the last PM's private equity, tax-avoidance, meta-rich 'party bungs' for election advertising for Parliament...that is now de facto privatised......this seems to me to be a 21st cent primitive backwards collapse into an equivalence to some medieval 'Morton's Fork' of tax recidivism.
like the 'ancien regime' (i.e. a tribunal, the person dragged before it, answers a few questions dragged out and judgement passed). just as in the 'market forces' of the 18th cent, there seems to be an uncontrolled abuse of slave/de facto slave labour (e.g. parts of china, india, africa)..... and the gutting of nature like never before in history. these political/economic views are mine, though i find them pretty generally shared. by contrast, Blake's vision expands ever outward and ever inward....and as with all great art, it heals.
thus, i see it like this: ......thefourzoas.com......has no monetary value, it is a scholar's site and runs at a loss; there is no money, or 'employment advantages' in this site and it is a very demanding 'read'. viewed in this angle of vision, its network search strings are lines of ideas, research possibilities, self-enhancement and the willing, mutual enhancement of others. it is dogmatic fact (e.g. coffey, stanilaoe) that we live our life through others, and that the pursuit of great wealth and power alike are based on lack of faith. here we have Blake's mythic and artistic confirmation of these dogmatic absolutes.
Saturday, 9 June 2007
how many points of blinkered narrative gazing .......
METATEXT 7 ..........blinkered beginnings within and without
i was revising Jerusalem, and taking my narrative from one Blake narrative 'frame dynamic' to his next: from an infinite view downwards and inwards into Albion......this is a critically unique hypotheses.....for the first time Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision is linked directly to Blake's text and the points of view defined from the text.........
i suggest seeing Blake is like first, looking inward through a closed transparent shell at the life within, and, then, second, being inside the life within and looking outwards to the closed circumference, that is now seen from within as an infinitely inwardly self-reflective 'independent' whole time/space continuum for that life within; like a bird in an eggshell consuming its own environment within. Christ breaks the shell from within outwards and without inwards; that is Blake's four-fold vision. thus, for the first time, we can envision Blake's infinite without and infinite within, and, for the first time, can envision Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision....clearly linked, and clearly based upon the text .
bound within, Blake's cosmology of time and space is grasped or otherwise envisioned as the Los/Enitharmon time/space frame dynamic as it embraces and releases the compressions and expansions of Albion's component zoas and emanations. Blake's symbol of Canaan is one such example, especially seen in the descent of Jerusalem in Plate 86, Chapter 4 (c.f. swedenborg's New Jerusalem: though nothing like Blake's major prophecies, viscomi's work on blake's MHH and swedenborg is very helpful). Los and Enitharmon thus create sun and moon, the calendars of night and day and the vision of life possible to their sons and daughters as Golgonooza is built.
serial time is two-fold and three-fold. four-fold vision is not serial time nor causal space. for the first time Blake's four dimensional states of vision are seen directly argued from Blake's poetry throughout the poem as a whole. this can be tested by the reader clearly in, for example, my analysis of the Sons of Eden and the Daughters of Beulah in situ in Blake's text.
i think the literary critical interpretative methodologies of recent biblical studies, properly applied, may help define structurally the range and focus of the several narrative voices and manifestations used by Blake. There are also important applications of speech-act theory and meaning. i'm impressed by derek tovey's structural methodology in 'narrative art and act in the fourth gospel' (sheffield academic press), in particular chaps 2, 3 and 4 and his conclusion. i will return to this writer in another blog. my studies of the fourth gospel at sydney university school of divinity helped guide me into stricter textual support than those acceptable, indeed (following barthes), necessary to literary criticism's speculative aesthetic and philosophical insights. hence my methodology focuses on the text and its demonstrable clarities of meaning.
in a critical sense the reader never 'leaves' Blake's text. the critical context illuminates that which the reader reads directly. i do not hold that a critical rosetta stone of debate stands between Blake and the reader's direct apprehension. my work should be read....once Blake's mythic logoi is grasped his themes are illuminated and his meanings multiplied.
i was revising Jerusalem, and taking my narrative from one Blake narrative 'frame dynamic' to his next: from an infinite view downwards and inwards into Albion......this is a critically unique hypotheses.....for the first time Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision is linked directly to Blake's text and the points of view defined from the text.........
i suggest seeing Blake is like first, looking inward through a closed transparent shell at the life within, and, then, second, being inside the life within and looking outwards to the closed circumference, that is now seen from within as an infinitely inwardly self-reflective 'independent' whole time/space continuum for that life within; like a bird in an eggshell consuming its own environment within. Christ breaks the shell from within outwards and without inwards; that is Blake's four-fold vision. thus, for the first time, we can envision Blake's infinite without and infinite within, and, for the first time, can envision Blake's two-fold, three-fold and four-fold vision....clearly linked, and clearly based upon the text .
bound within, Blake's cosmology of time and space is grasped or otherwise envisioned as the Los/Enitharmon time/space frame dynamic as it embraces and releases the compressions and expansions of Albion's component zoas and emanations. Blake's symbol of Canaan is one such example, especially seen in the descent of Jerusalem in Plate 86, Chapter 4 (c.f. swedenborg's New Jerusalem: though nothing like Blake's major prophecies, viscomi's work on blake's MHH and swedenborg is very helpful). Los and Enitharmon thus create sun and moon, the calendars of night and day and the vision of life possible to their sons and daughters as Golgonooza is built.
serial time is two-fold and three-fold. four-fold vision is not serial time nor causal space. for the first time Blake's four dimensional states of vision are seen directly argued from Blake's poetry throughout the poem as a whole. this can be tested by the reader clearly in, for example, my analysis of the Sons of Eden and the Daughters of Beulah in situ in Blake's text.
i think the literary critical interpretative methodologies of recent biblical studies, properly applied, may help define structurally the range and focus of the several narrative voices and manifestations used by Blake. There are also important applications of speech-act theory and meaning. i'm impressed by derek tovey's structural methodology in 'narrative art and act in the fourth gospel' (sheffield academic press), in particular chaps 2, 3 and 4 and his conclusion. i will return to this writer in another blog. my studies of the fourth gospel at sydney university school of divinity helped guide me into stricter textual support than those acceptable, indeed (following barthes), necessary to literary criticism's speculative aesthetic and philosophical insights. hence my methodology focuses on the text and its demonstrable clarities of meaning.
in a critical sense the reader never 'leaves' Blake's text. the critical context illuminates that which the reader reads directly. i do not hold that a critical rosetta stone of debate stands between Blake and the reader's direct apprehension. my work should be read....once Blake's mythic logoi is grasped his themes are illuminated and his meanings multiplied.
Wednesday, 9 May 2007
blake's infinite geography
METATEXT 6 research
i want to start by repeating a few lines from an earlier blog..................
....these few lines are aimed at dissertation committed students. you require the most advanced hypothesis as a start in order to make a scholarly contribution......................................however, these two studies offers many new careers in BA MA and PhD re-evaluations of the last twenty years of 'critical concrete'. currently set in terms of a 'fractal', 'plotless' and 'impenetrable' Blake, readers now can understand Blake as a genius of plot construction, with all that is implied therein.
In my view it is incorrect, even misleading to begin with the post-1984 (and current) critical dead-end and obsolete premise that Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem are 'plotless'. It seems to me that it is also the case that the various theories of composition in the few full-length studies of The Four Zoas that are completed need to be re-considered in the light of the research on Blake's plot available here, ironically completed but it seems entirely unconsidered, before any of them published. In short, i believe if research students write a textual analysis of Blake's myth, narrative structure, trinitarian beliefs, idea of nature or time, symbolism, one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and for-fold vision, his idea of art and the human form Divine, his characters, plots or theory of composition without benefit of these two studies, their supervisors may have wasted their fees.
.....................................................................
the next point develops Blake's multiple finite and infinite narrative perspectives, and the centre, circumference, zenith, nadir referents as in the previous comment.
Blake's angle of vision or his way of seeing is critical in explaining The Four Zoas. a major and original contribution to the field is my analysis of Blake's the two concomitant geographical sets; the finite and the infinite. therein lies Blake's idea of nature. the two sets are best outlined in the beginning of Night the Sixth, in ... thefourzoas.com, Chapter VIII .... the zoas and emanations think they move in compass directions (just as in our actual world). they move as we believe we do, north to the pole, or south through the equator to the pole, or west to go round or east to go the other way. That is Blake's two-fold vision. for Blake's two sets of finite and infinite geography to be visualised in such a configuration, the zoas and emanations are to be visualised as actually moving from the nadir to the zenith, or from circumference to the centre. That is Blake's three-fold vision and it includes two-fold vision as an easily seen, plainly visualised, contingent sub-set.
for example in Night the Sixth, Urizen thinks he moves through the compass points, in fact, he begins at the circumference and ends at the centre looking outward in all directions. then, blind to three-fold and four-fold vision, he fixes his vortices in the deep. Thus, to review, and to clearly describe Blake's visionary logic, we see Urizen's two-fold vision within this perspective of three-fold vision. Christ's descent within and the reconciliation of 'within and without' is Blake's four-fold vision and both other kinds of seeing are sub-sets and are subsumed in Christ. Blake's Jerusalem, Plates 94-100 gives Blake's poetic vision of this four-fold consciousness, that begins with the end of the circle of time/space of Albion's collapsed interiority: "Time was Finished! The Breath Divine Breathed over Albion" (4: 94; 18). Thus, Christ re-awakens Albion.
i want to start by repeating a few lines from an earlier blog..................
....these few lines are aimed at dissertation committed students. you require the most advanced hypothesis as a start in order to make a scholarly contribution......................................however, these two studies offers many new careers in BA MA and PhD re-evaluations of the last twenty years of 'critical concrete'. currently set in terms of a 'fractal', 'plotless' and 'impenetrable' Blake, readers now can understand Blake as a genius of plot construction, with all that is implied therein.
In my view it is incorrect, even misleading to begin with the post-1984 (and current) critical dead-end and obsolete premise that Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem are 'plotless'. It seems to me that it is also the case that the various theories of composition in the few full-length studies of The Four Zoas that are completed need to be re-considered in the light of the research on Blake's plot available here, ironically completed but it seems entirely unconsidered, before any of them published. In short, i believe if research students write a textual analysis of Blake's myth, narrative structure, trinitarian beliefs, idea of nature or time, symbolism, one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and for-fold vision, his idea of art and the human form Divine, his characters, plots or theory of composition without benefit of these two studies, their supervisors may have wasted their fees.
.....................................................................
the next point develops Blake's multiple finite and infinite narrative perspectives, and the centre, circumference, zenith, nadir referents as in the previous comment.
Blake's angle of vision or his way of seeing is critical in explaining The Four Zoas. a major and original contribution to the field is my analysis of Blake's the two concomitant geographical sets; the finite and the infinite. therein lies Blake's idea of nature. the two sets are best outlined in the beginning of Night the Sixth, in ... thefourzoas.com, Chapter VIII .... the zoas and emanations think they move in compass directions (just as in our actual world). they move as we believe we do, north to the pole, or south through the equator to the pole, or west to go round or east to go the other way. That is Blake's two-fold vision. for Blake's two sets of finite and infinite geography to be visualised in such a configuration, the zoas and emanations are to be visualised as actually moving from the nadir to the zenith, or from circumference to the centre. That is Blake's three-fold vision and it includes two-fold vision as an easily seen, plainly visualised, contingent sub-set.
for example in Night the Sixth, Urizen thinks he moves through the compass points, in fact, he begins at the circumference and ends at the centre looking outward in all directions. then, blind to three-fold and four-fold vision, he fixes his vortices in the deep. Thus, to review, and to clearly describe Blake's visionary logic, we see Urizen's two-fold vision within this perspective of three-fold vision. Christ's descent within and the reconciliation of 'within and without' is Blake's four-fold vision and both other kinds of seeing are sub-sets and are subsumed in Christ. Blake's Jerusalem, Plates 94-100 gives Blake's poetic vision of this four-fold consciousness, that begins with the end of the circle of time/space of Albion's collapsed interiority: "Time was Finished! The Breath Divine Breathed over Albion" (4: 94; 18). Thus, Christ re-awakens Albion.
Sunday, 6 May 2007
seeing blake
METATEXT 5 Blake's axis: visualising Blake's poetry.
the poem is the thing .........how to look at Blake's logoi inThe Four Zoas and Jerusalem....that is the focus for this blog and web site.
Blake's epics can be read fluently and clearly once Blake's myth is grasped in detail and the story Blake tells is envisioned in process. Blake's concepts of society, cities, countries... such as Erin, Jerusalem, Babylon, London or Bath are hammered out by Los as 'centres' or in Blake's dynamics 'vortices' of continuously engaged consciousness. i think it can be compared with aspects of wittgenstein's families, barthe's ideas of myth or foucault's contemporary analyses of social dynamics as vertical and horizontal engagements of interacting groups and entities.
broad sweeps to begin ........., to grasp Blake's plot, you the reader/seer become the three-fold 'eye' of the work's moving two-fold visions. envisioning Blake's art/poetry means a suspension of ingrained habits of logocentric-laddered hierarchies, such as vertical concepts of mind, priest, god and king and god (know your place on the ladder of success stuff), alpha males and females, live spirit over lifeless matter, higher and lower consciousness, ladders of being to step upon and climb, ladders of promotion and ladders of rank to inform us of our place in the flat-earth order of things from the highest to the lowest, from Satan at the centre of earth as in Dante's ptolemaic cosmos, through the planetary heavens of astrology and the primum mobile egg-shelled about us. in such a system, time is Divine, the planets are predictive and astrology is prophecy. all this is symbolised by the 27 heavens of Ulro to Blake, with Erin's circle the 28th enclosing the 27.
for Blake every element of it is based on the self-predation of Albion's auto-idolatry. like a 'bird in an 28 heaven eggshell consuming its environment 'within' while wholly closed to all 'without'. such is the immediate consequences of Albion's morally insane narcissism on turning from God to a claim to 'autonomous self-fertilization'.
so i think to read and envision Blake, one first has to dump conditioned social and sexual concepts/symbolism/ritual auto-idolatry of the close-to-god class of the highest (the landlords/owners of work and time/salvation sellers), down through the (serving/servile/education/enforcement) professions, to the (enslaved) lowest. all belted together by the 'great chain of being'.....ptolemaic, medieval and obsolete economic class systems as marx sees.....or the sociologically frozen castes of the religious class system as every sectarian church or religious hierarchy of holiness sees.....or the evolution of consciousness in its hierarchies of capability in psychology.....or the idea of history as collingwood puts it....
by contrast, Blake created a uniquely expressed synthesis to grasp his understanding of the purpose of being....and it is this synthesis that analysed and presented, as independent aesthetic wholes in two Blake's two completed major epic myths; namely The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
for Blake, all elements of these hierarchy are the results of Albion turning 'within' and are the warring components systems of mutual self-predation that is the self annnihilated Albion.
the inner chaos of Albion's auto-idolatry feeds upon itself, symbolised by Blake's symbol of 'druidic' nature worship. for Blake, that meant the murderous sacrifice of living things to a deficient concept of a god that needs the energies of the dead for food.
(we know now that was not the druids who built the henges but the indigenous religion of the pre-celts,...and we also know that the circle people were widespread, there are thousands of such stones in modern Jordan.
Blake is partly correct archaeologically... his symbols are of human sacrifice that did happen, but not at Stonehenge or any other henge, wood or stone...Thus Blake's story of Vala's sacrifice of her bonded Luvah on the stems of vegetation is a significant thematic climax to Blake's story of Albion's collapse into self-predation. Such human sacrifice is found (e.g. Greece, Babylon, Carthage) and animal sacrifice is commnplace globally). Blake depicts Luvah's energies to be a component of Albion's whole consciousness. Luvah's energies are thus finite, deficient and contingent, though Albion adores them as if Luvah and Vala are the power of infinite regeneration. Thus the sacrifice of Luvah's energies fails to resurrect finite life. It can only generate finite life and does not transcend death at all. This leads to Blake's story of the infinite energies of Jesus, who takes on the suffering of Albion's auto-idolatry, and being Divine can reawaken Albion to regenerate unity with God.
Blake envisions his angel of God's presence, symbolised by Albion, as collapsed inward into a catatonic state of inwardness and self-severance from the infinite source of all life, the creative love of God. Seen from without in three-fold vision, the self-severed Albion coils within from circumference to centre, 'snapping' within, with appalling energy, inward through Blake's dimensional 'gates' like the Gate of Los or Oorthoon, into the mirrored negations of this primordial collapse into finitude, division and splinterered moral blindness. it is inward collapse and disintegration into madness. Self-seduced, Albion's inner components sexually compete as quasi-autonomous, self-predating components, and so consume each other until they suicide. They kill each other off, feeding off each other until they are all dead. In Blake's myth, these components operate as vortical identities mutually overlapping and interacting; all life within Albion is composed of Minute Particulars as Blake symbolised it. We the audience seeing from three-fold vision understand they operate within Albion in vortices, in two-fold vision.
the only energies available for for sustenance are the energies of life taken by feeding off death. this is the life of finitude. in nature, the components seek power over all other components for sustenance and for breeding future sustenance. Christ saves Albion by assuming all the error and it is cast off as the hardened finite spectre of the Limit or State of Satan and Albion, his perceptions infinitely cleansed of the Limit or State of Satan is re-awakened in the bosom of Christ....... in three-fold vision 'all eternity' has always seen Albion in the arms of Christ...in Jerusalem for example, symbolised by Christ's architecture of Albion's Tomb, as eternal truth. ....................only Albion cannot see himself....and that blindness is envisioned as two-fold vision by the reader.
to visualise Blake then, imagine consciousness as expanding and contracting from your deepest concentration centre to the furthest limits or circumference of your evolving mental and visual energies. that is to see this as an expansion and contraction in all directions outward and inward. For Blake, that is described as moving from east to west. it also means we envision axis from zenith to nadir as symbolised by the Seven Eyes of God or the Seven Furnaces of Los. in Blake's two-fold vision this means moving from north to south.
for Blake, three-fold vision begins by seeing Albion's mental energies 'within' from the infinite perspective 'without'. Urizen's journey of Night the Sixth (see Chapter VIII) clearly proves Blake's conscious narrative control. To go from the zenith to nadir is thus concomitantly seen as a two-dimensional journey from south to north or, for Blake, from the axis of the zenith at the south pole to the nadir at the north pole.
from the infinite, that creates an axis through the centre of Albion's consciousness. the seven furnaces/eyes of god/ thereby symbolise the bonding of Albion's personhood in infinite wholeness in God's 'economy' or plan of salvation, though Albion is utterly blind to God's salvic mercy. it takes the incarnation, the physical birth, death and resurrection of Christ actually within two-fold perception to awaken Albion from 'eternal death'. albion could not perceive eternal life, but saw only nature and life/death. the incarnation reveals divinity infinitely transcending death. this is three-fold-vision. then there in unity with God. this unity of the 'within' and 'without' is Blake's four-fold vision as in plates 94-100.
Thus as shown in...... www.thefourzoas.com........ it is impossible to perceive the vortices of Blake's two, three and four-fold vision without understanding his poetic vehicle is his geography of time and space...it is through Blake's geography the reader visualises the concommitant dimensions that Blake envisions.
The four energy identities of zenith and nadir and centre and circumference are four vortices of psycho-physical energies and are whirl out 'within' as eight personae. In The Four Zoas, Urizen and Ahania are the zenith/south; Los and Enitharmon are the nadir/north; Luvah and Vala are the centre/east; and Tharmas and Enion are the circumference/west. thus each 'vortex realm' is a duality of energy and form.....togther they are Albion.
in review, the four realms are the psycho-physical finite expressions of Blake's four zoas and four emanations. with our three-fold vision we see their collapse into two-fold vision and self-predatory chaos, we can envision the sacrifice of the incarnate Christ within Albion, and we see Blake's apocalyptic cleansing of Albion to re-awaken in unity in the love of God, a love always within and without. thus we see in Blake's plot in The Four Zoas how Los and Enitharmon build a divinely inspired three-fold analogy of the city of God and the Human Form Divine, and Blake calls that Golgonooza. The prophetic vision of the sublime analogy, organises the spiritual architecture of Albion's energy from the inside out. The predatory energies of Albion seek in two-fold blindness to build a Temple of quasi-holiness to ritualise the murder of life to feed the murderers, and so to enslave sexuality for breeding. the two, the Temple and Golgonooza energise time and space in inverse vortices of power.
in Jerusalem there is another mythic logoi. there are four worlds and four sets of serial action. the four become one from Plate 94 to the end. each world is one whole vortex that whorls within, each is reversed by Divine intervention as the Finger of God in the Seventh Furnace, each describe a unique vision of the two limits or states and the incarnation, and each whorls outward to the limits of finitude. This boundary is symbolised by Albion's death in the arms of Christ. thus the four become one in the living Christ in Blake's final vision..... given in Plates 94-100 Jerusalem.
the poem is the thing .........how to look at Blake's logoi inThe Four Zoas and Jerusalem....that is the focus for this blog and web site.
Blake's epics can be read fluently and clearly once Blake's myth is grasped in detail and the story Blake tells is envisioned in process. Blake's concepts of society, cities, countries... such as Erin, Jerusalem, Babylon, London or Bath are hammered out by Los as 'centres' or in Blake's dynamics 'vortices' of continuously engaged consciousness. i think it can be compared with aspects of wittgenstein's families, barthe's ideas of myth or foucault's contemporary analyses of social dynamics as vertical and horizontal engagements of interacting groups and entities.
broad sweeps to begin ........., to grasp Blake's plot, you the reader/seer become the three-fold 'eye' of the work's moving two-fold visions. envisioning Blake's art/poetry means a suspension of ingrained habits of logocentric-laddered hierarchies, such as vertical concepts of mind, priest, god and king and god (know your place on the ladder of success stuff), alpha males and females, live spirit over lifeless matter, higher and lower consciousness, ladders of being to step upon and climb, ladders of promotion and ladders of rank to inform us of our place in the flat-earth order of things from the highest to the lowest, from Satan at the centre of earth as in Dante's ptolemaic cosmos, through the planetary heavens of astrology and the primum mobile egg-shelled about us. in such a system, time is Divine, the planets are predictive and astrology is prophecy. all this is symbolised by the 27 heavens of Ulro to Blake, with Erin's circle the 28th enclosing the 27.
for Blake every element of it is based on the self-predation of Albion's auto-idolatry. like a 'bird in an 28 heaven eggshell consuming its environment 'within' while wholly closed to all 'without'. such is the immediate consequences of Albion's morally insane narcissism on turning from God to a claim to 'autonomous self-fertilization'.
so i think to read and envision Blake, one first has to dump conditioned social and sexual concepts/symbolism/ritual auto-idolatry of the close-to-god class of the highest (the landlords/owners of work and time/salvation sellers), down through the (serving/servile/education/enforcement) professions, to the (enslaved) lowest. all belted together by the 'great chain of being'.....ptolemaic, medieval and obsolete economic class systems as marx sees.....or the sociologically frozen castes of the religious class system as every sectarian church or religious hierarchy of holiness sees.....or the evolution of consciousness in its hierarchies of capability in psychology.....or the idea of history as collingwood puts it....
by contrast, Blake created a uniquely expressed synthesis to grasp his understanding of the purpose of being....and it is this synthesis that analysed and presented, as independent aesthetic wholes in two Blake's two completed major epic myths; namely The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
for Blake, all elements of these hierarchy are the results of Albion turning 'within' and are the warring components systems of mutual self-predation that is the self annnihilated Albion.
the inner chaos of Albion's auto-idolatry feeds upon itself, symbolised by Blake's symbol of 'druidic' nature worship. for Blake, that meant the murderous sacrifice of living things to a deficient concept of a god that needs the energies of the dead for food.
(we know now that was not the druids who built the henges but the indigenous religion of the pre-celts,...and we also know that the circle people were widespread, there are thousands of such stones in modern Jordan.
Blake is partly correct archaeologically... his symbols are of human sacrifice that did happen, but not at Stonehenge or any other henge, wood or stone...Thus Blake's story of Vala's sacrifice of her bonded Luvah on the stems of vegetation is a significant thematic climax to Blake's story of Albion's collapse into self-predation. Such human sacrifice is found (e.g. Greece, Babylon, Carthage) and animal sacrifice is commnplace globally). Blake depicts Luvah's energies to be a component of Albion's whole consciousness. Luvah's energies are thus finite, deficient and contingent, though Albion adores them as if Luvah and Vala are the power of infinite regeneration. Thus the sacrifice of Luvah's energies fails to resurrect finite life. It can only generate finite life and does not transcend death at all. This leads to Blake's story of the infinite energies of Jesus, who takes on the suffering of Albion's auto-idolatry, and being Divine can reawaken Albion to regenerate unity with God.
Blake envisions his angel of God's presence, symbolised by Albion, as collapsed inward into a catatonic state of inwardness and self-severance from the infinite source of all life, the creative love of God. Seen from without in three-fold vision, the self-severed Albion coils within from circumference to centre, 'snapping' within, with appalling energy, inward through Blake's dimensional 'gates' like the Gate of Los or Oorthoon, into the mirrored negations of this primordial collapse into finitude, division and splinterered moral blindness. it is inward collapse and disintegration into madness. Self-seduced, Albion's inner components sexually compete as quasi-autonomous, self-predating components, and so consume each other until they suicide. They kill each other off, feeding off each other until they are all dead. In Blake's myth, these components operate as vortical identities mutually overlapping and interacting; all life within Albion is composed of Minute Particulars as Blake symbolised it. We the audience seeing from three-fold vision understand they operate within Albion in vortices, in two-fold vision.
the only energies available for for sustenance are the energies of life taken by feeding off death. this is the life of finitude. in nature, the components seek power over all other components for sustenance and for breeding future sustenance. Christ saves Albion by assuming all the error and it is cast off as the hardened finite spectre of the Limit or State of Satan and Albion, his perceptions infinitely cleansed of the Limit or State of Satan is re-awakened in the bosom of Christ....... in three-fold vision 'all eternity' has always seen Albion in the arms of Christ...in Jerusalem for example, symbolised by Christ's architecture of Albion's Tomb, as eternal truth. ....................only Albion cannot see himself....and that blindness is envisioned as two-fold vision by the reader.
to visualise Blake then, imagine consciousness as expanding and contracting from your deepest concentration centre to the furthest limits or circumference of your evolving mental and visual energies. that is to see this as an expansion and contraction in all directions outward and inward. For Blake, that is described as moving from east to west. it also means we envision axis from zenith to nadir as symbolised by the Seven Eyes of God or the Seven Furnaces of Los. in Blake's two-fold vision this means moving from north to south.
for Blake, three-fold vision begins by seeing Albion's mental energies 'within' from the infinite perspective 'without'. Urizen's journey of Night the Sixth (see Chapter VIII) clearly proves Blake's conscious narrative control. To go from the zenith to nadir is thus concomitantly seen as a two-dimensional journey from south to north or, for Blake, from the axis of the zenith at the south pole to the nadir at the north pole.
from the infinite, that creates an axis through the centre of Albion's consciousness. the seven furnaces/eyes of god/ thereby symbolise the bonding of Albion's personhood in infinite wholeness in God's 'economy' or plan of salvation, though Albion is utterly blind to God's salvic mercy. it takes the incarnation, the physical birth, death and resurrection of Christ actually within two-fold perception to awaken Albion from 'eternal death'. albion could not perceive eternal life, but saw only nature and life/death. the incarnation reveals divinity infinitely transcending death. this is three-fold-vision. then there in unity with God. this unity of the 'within' and 'without' is Blake's four-fold vision as in plates 94-100.
Thus as shown in...... www.thefourzoas.com........ it is impossible to perceive the vortices of Blake's two, three and four-fold vision without understanding his poetic vehicle is his geography of time and space...it is through Blake's geography the reader visualises the concommitant dimensions that Blake envisions.
The four energy identities of zenith and nadir and centre and circumference are four vortices of psycho-physical energies and are whirl out 'within' as eight personae. In The Four Zoas, Urizen and Ahania are the zenith/south; Los and Enitharmon are the nadir/north; Luvah and Vala are the centre/east; and Tharmas and Enion are the circumference/west. thus each 'vortex realm' is a duality of energy and form.....togther they are Albion.
in review, the four realms are the psycho-physical finite expressions of Blake's four zoas and four emanations. with our three-fold vision we see their collapse into two-fold vision and self-predatory chaos, we can envision the sacrifice of the incarnate Christ within Albion, and we see Blake's apocalyptic cleansing of Albion to re-awaken in unity in the love of God, a love always within and without. thus we see in Blake's plot in The Four Zoas how Los and Enitharmon build a divinely inspired three-fold analogy of the city of God and the Human Form Divine, and Blake calls that Golgonooza. The prophetic vision of the sublime analogy, organises the spiritual architecture of Albion's energy from the inside out. The predatory energies of Albion seek in two-fold blindness to build a Temple of quasi-holiness to ritualise the murder of life to feed the murderers, and so to enslave sexuality for breeding. the two, the Temple and Golgonooza energise time and space in inverse vortices of power.
in Jerusalem there is another mythic logoi. there are four worlds and four sets of serial action. the four become one from Plate 94 to the end. each world is one whole vortex that whorls within, each is reversed by Divine intervention as the Finger of God in the Seventh Furnace, each describe a unique vision of the two limits or states and the incarnation, and each whorls outward to the limits of finitude. This boundary is symbolised by Albion's death in the arms of Christ. thus the four become one in the living Christ in Blake's final vision..... given in Plates 94-100 Jerusalem.
Friday, 27 April 2007
Night VII(a) and Night VII(b) and their stereo-textual unity
THE TWO NIGHT(S) THE SEVENTH RECONCILED IN STEREO-TEXTUAL AESTHETIC UNITY.
in this post or the next i feel there needs to be a detailing of the alternative Nights the Seventh. AND the first analysis of Blake's concept of a double fall in The Four Zoas (the double fall is examined in detail in Chapter VIII of The Four Zoas Explained). it's a matter of time and physical strength. i have very short 'windows of health' in which to work.
please note, all my comments below on The Four Zoas, refer to other critics strictly in terms of Blake's plots in The Four Zoas, for examples, my textual points are made before erdman's and lincoln's infra red studies and other wide-ranging developments in biography and text (bentley) too numerous to mention... clearly, each of the full scale studies (though in fact after mine) are uniquely significant in each scholar's contributions. none are or can be 'replaced' in any sense.......it is the paradigmatic failure to trace Blake's plots or linear narratives that has persuaded me to put my analysis of The Four Zoas forward, updated in its survey of the field, but otherwise and i think rightly so, unedited...its conclusions are fresh to the field
my analysis of Jerusalem, the first full-scale line by analysis is entirely fresh to the field.
METATEXT 4: survey of the field, Blake's text, and his three compositional stages April 07
summaries of the various positions of the two Night the Seventh are needed, for example lincoln finds The Four Zoas plot-less, thinks the manuscript to have been written in four stages, not unlike the two major stages, a final interlocking stage to complete the plot with, as shown in my research a decade or so earlier, a completion sequence of late penciled additions. the existential truth of it is that reading the details of the Blake's textual architecture in The Four Zoas is a highly specialised interest indeed. and i do respect the persistence in attempts to work out what a 250 year old dead poet, the most incomprehensible genius in the english literature, means. Blake's prophecies are up there on the pinnacle of critical literary challenges.
however, in particular to dissertation committed students, i summarise below the pages that textually demonstrate Blake's intentional, structural, stereo-textual plot. ... the summary helps because it cherry picks the key texts...so that there are not all that many pages to study or trace to short cut to blake's literary intentions... and its almost literally a matter of running the finger along a line, turning to other lines, and pages and running the finger... backwards and forwards tracing emendations, seeing characters clarify, thematic unities contrast, narrative shifts emerge, dimensional frames of events settle into linear meanings, and the envisioning of developments in the growth of Blake's aesthetic achievments, the logic of textual science, and his unmatched success at completing a 'then unpublishable' epic poem.
here are the sections....trawled out of William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained. The pages that follow below define Blake's compositional stages, namely two major stages and a third stage (including late penciled additions). this final stage reconciles the two earlier stages and establishes the simultaneity of the two versions of Night the Seventh. it should be taken into account that much more textual analysis is embedded in the analysis (such as the additional fragments and the opening lines):
Nights I-VI: 33-36; 53; 73-4; 80-86; 139-141 (3 stages clearly laid out); 160-1; 171-177; 197
Nights VIIa and VIIb: 209-11; 223-4; 241-2; 250-1; 260; 267; 270-3; 279-80; 284-5; 294-9; 314; 316; 320-8.
Night VIII 343-366 (Sons of Eden/crucifixion); 382-386.
Night IX 390-1; 404- 419; 432; 432-435.
i think lincoln's study contextually valuable, and several e-mails from others to me quite independently, both welcoming line-by-line my analysis, and interestingly, spontaneously commenting on the value of his contextual scholarship.
having said that, for readers of my earlier and by him unread analysis, it seems to me he fails (along with with the field as a whole) to grasp the fundamental unity offered by the plot. thus i conclude his analysis lacks a plot that empowers a grasp of the The Four Zoas as an aesthetic crafted whole...this aesthetic unity is a critical keystone for all else for me. thus for me he has little methodological certainty to attach the, as he calls it, "archaeology" of The Four Zoas text. i think in terms of the plot, the result is another paradigmatic field failure that for me renders his theory of composition textually deficient. the term archaeology is uncomfortable to me, recalling layers of residuals and remains and the abstracts of reconstruction.
by contrast, as is critically shown in my ('now updated' review of the state of the field) analysis The Four Zoas is no layered 'pit of decayed remnants'; the text is a completed masterpiece..... an epic, a whole.
erdman, lincoln, pierce and rosso place V11a between the two portions of V11b. pierce sees the poem as “opposed to the notion of a time-bound narrative and literary form controlled by sequential verisimilitude”. By contrast my thesis 1984, seemingly unread by them, had detailed this plot before any of these later theorists failed to find one . lefebre and kilgore place V11b in Viia’s two portions. by contrast, i earlier had shown Blake's literary vision, conscious craftsmanship, textual interlacements and plot and narrative 'stereo-textual' purpose in the two nights. The Four Zoas is read as a beautifully crafted epic once the plot is grasped, which in turn depends on the two version of Night the Seventh to be envisioned as being re-written by Blake into simultaneous morphologies, two sides of one 'plot-coin', and Blake's concept of a double fall.
The existence of Blake's logoi....that which connects all the parts into a whole..... is dismissed in donald ault's methodology, published1986, the second full-scale study, that seems built on his hypothesis that the search for Blake's plot is two-dimensional, and newtonian…perhaps he, more than any, could just claim to set the current methodological paradigm of a plot-less and fractal Blake. however, my study, in fact the first full-scale study, is seen to demonstrate quite other conclusions before he published.
from my retired, down-under perspective, ault seem to me in a sense to have 'replaced' frye as the paradigmatic scholar of his generation. he finds the fall has “no structure or content”, and his study 'incommensurate' with all previous Blake scholarship. I think him wrong on both counts. Blake's cosmology of the fall is shown in this site as highly structured, philosophically rational and rich with spiritual, mythic and poetic content. as shown 1984, there is clear plot, structure and content, peer-reviewed by experts, and judged beyond reasonable doubt to be methodologically unequaled, and critically sound throughout.
otto speculates the two nights are “parallel and contemporaneous' and "entangled with one another”, but, i think (my major study unread by him) he seems unable to see a consciously crafted and organised cosmology or plot, as i do; nor does he seem to provide significant textual support for an unentanglement…..i showed earlier that they are not entangled.
by contrast my 1984 textual analysis of the two Nights gave the textual detail that shows the two Nights were clearly distinct and operated in a dynamic 'stereo-textual' simultaneity, before harmonised in Night the Eighth. it shows Blake's plot reveals a vision of a double fall, a profoundly coherent, serially controlled and rational cosmology, and, what Blake textually defines as his two-fold, three-fold and four-fourfold vision
as significant as the first reconciliation of the Night(s) the Seventh is my analysis and depiction of Blake's asethetic use of the myth of a double fall in The Four Zoas (e.g. boehme). Thus, presented to the field in my analysis, is a first fall into a pythagorean universe ordered and ruled by Urizen and Ahania. this is unsustainable, as lamented by Ahania, and by Enion in her famous speech lamenting the destruction of the second fall. it fell a second time into what is our ruined world (see The Four Zoas Explained Ch VIII). God intervenes to set the two limits, Adam and Satan (for the Finger of God, and negation, see Luke). Los reshapes Urizen in seven days of inverse reduction. this is the world of displaced energies that the twice-fallen and contracted Urizen explores in Night the Sixth.
it is essential to understand Urizen's senses are twice fallen, and twice removed from a true knowledge or intellectual vision of eternity. It is the poetic basis for Blake's two-fold and three-fold geographies and his final four-fold vision. Urizen's perceptions are two dimensional. He travel through the compass points. In fact he travels through the three dimensional co-ordinates of circumference, zenith, nadir and centre, and that three dimensional vision is completed in the four-fold vision of unity with God within and without, through Christ's incarnation.
as described in the closing line of the epic, "sweet science reigns" are the last words in The Four Zoas, for a true intellectual understanding of salvic life in unity with God is attained.
the third phase of Blake's three compositional stages, in particular, are shown to interlace the two Night(s) the Seventh into a single thematic theme prior to the harvest and vintage of Night the Ninth. see Chapter XIII, The Four Zoas, and the detailed analysis of Night the Eight in Chapter XIV; the setting of the Limit of Opacity and Limit of Contraction and the crucifixion and resurrection. The vintage of Luvah and harvest 'Bread of Ages' of Urizen in Night the Ninth are thematically traced thereby to the two Nights the Seventh in Blake's plot.
the restoration of Albion through Christ is enabled through the Divine sacrifice: and 'sweet science reigns'. These hermeneutics are shown to be directly embedded in Blake's three stages of composition, and so reliable, repeatable and valid according to the science of paleographical analysis.
Clearly, I do not think lincoln's view of four plotless stages accurately replaces my research; still the 'plotless' Blake is the critical paradigm that has been out of date since 1984 dominates. like all of the scholars of full-scale studies, he did not seem to know of and so did not take into account the earlier more accurate study of the architecture of Blake's plot. His studies in 1978 are example. He sees no plot. My work was completed then and submitted as draft. The years till the formal granting of the doctorate a few years later were taken up by other factors. my studies, johnson and wilkie, erdman, and lincoln all seemed contemporary.
i think this leaves all efforts on Blake's narrative and plot since 1984 at least, obsolete before published. ault otto pierce rosso and so on.....all share what seems to be the same methodological deficency, namely that there is no plot, and i think all have found unempowered methodological alternatives to support their shared 'plotless' hypothesis.
it is time to put my research before the student, reader and scholar. time for Blake's plots to be known and things to change.
this means now there are many brand new BA, MA and PhD research concepts and fresh hypotheses waiting for a new inspirational generation of seekers of excellence in fresh critical pastures. In terms of Blake's intentional plots in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, the field needs to be largely re-written....i gave the example of irony....much of Blake's irony here is necessarily largely unseen if the reader/viewer does not know his plot, c.f. sophocle's oedipus rex. if you don't know, see, or can't follow Blake's plot in The Four Zoas or Jerusalem, his intended irony in these two epics, likewise can't be be properly perceived.
my analysis, now in ...www.thefourzoas.com....., is described by my doctorate committee. they wrote the thesis "challenges the greats in the field", and was a "major breakthrough". that is because i traced the plot, till 1984 believed impossible to trace, or follow, and thought to be entirely absent from Blake's implicit and explicit theories of composition. it was also thought to be "eminently worthy of publication". i shifted fields... now i can publish. because it was unread by all further studies (after 1984), the research is the most modern and sophisticated analysis before the reading public
By contrast to the paradigmatic plotless Blake, i show the plots are very quickly absorbed, and can read as one might read homer or virgil, dante, spenser or milton. Blake's plots are wonderful, clear, challenging and precise, ......beautifully precise. The Four Zoas, in particular, i show can be read as clearly as an Agatha Christie plot.
I intend to put in a list of search strings for Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The search lines 70-80 or so should open up an expansion in research and career possibilities. It is part of the benefits of the web. These search strings bring much to the necessary 'printed press Blake industry'. to me, students need liberation from the obsolete and misleading fractal, plotless Blake.
further, i think it reasonable to suppose the future field as a whole will be clearer and more textually penetrating and accurate now it can reason from textual proof that Blake’s cosmology, in particular Nights I to VI or Blake’s myth of creation, is not arbitrary but philosophically rational and systematic: namely, as shown for the first time, created in rational sequence are Blake's energy forms for 'being and generation' (Tharmas and Enion), 'time and space' (Los and Enitharmon), 'motion and attraction' (Luvah and Vala), and 'order and (Urizen and Ahania). then there is a second fall. This second fall is into this world and discussed as noted in Chapter VIII, The Four Zoas Explained.
if known earlier, this means, for example, freeman who sees Night the Ninth as the centre of the poem would have been helped by seeing the connected aesthetic whole of the process by which Blake's end is in his beginning, and by Blake's poetic soteriology as revealed by his cosmology, double fall and blake's two, three and four-fold vision. i showed 1984, how Blake created in his conscious, highly crafted. plot through his finite and infinite geography. my analysis, thereby, demonstrates Blake's intentional plot, delineates his myth, reveals his grasp of time and space, unites the Night(s) the Seventh, and embeds his states of vision in the spiritual geography consequent on his vision of a double fall. these structural points are vital to a grasp of his brilliant plot and so to a grasp of the The Four Zoas as a whole.
thus, to review, one of the significant contributions to an understanding of The Four Zoas, first outlined in my 1984 thesis but unread by all further full-scale studies, is Blake's concept of a double fall. his first fall is into a pythogorean/arcadian universe. This is a finite illusion and collapses once more. this time into our universe, bound by the two limits, namely, the Limit or State of Satan and the Limit of State of Adam, and, the two chains, namely the Chain of Time and the Chain of Sorrow. Los reshapes Urizen's perception (into those symbolically of Rueben), in seven days of labour into a perceptually limited twice fallen space/time continuum of our world of the two limits and the two chains. Christ descends into the crucified Luvah, whose energies of finitiude are insufficient to save Albion, there is no self-salvation in Blake....Christ, incarnate, receives the impacted cruelties of the States of Adam and the State of Satan in the crucifixion. Blake christian vision holds an unshakable faith in Christ's sacrifice that redeems Albion from the two limits, the two chains of serial time and finite death.
in review, the vortex of The Four Zoas turns from the fall, Blake's brilliant christian cosmology of division and death, the cessation of the fall by Divine intervention and the Finger of God, the incarnation resurrection, and the consequent purgation and restoration of Albion. Blake traces clearly the re-intergration and cleansing of each zoa and emanation pair in turn and finally, Blake's plot carries us to the harvest and vintage that purge and cleanse life, time and space. Ultimately, the universal man, Albion is re-born into unity with God, and Blake's epic ends for 'sweet science reigns'.
Thus, Albion's interiority is bound by the Limit of Opacity, called the State of Satan, and the Limit of Contraction, called the State of Adam. in the twice-fallen earth of two-fold vision.
we are, for Blake, all bound by two corresponding chains, called the Chain of Time (serial and satanic) and the Chain of Sorrow (generative suffering, sacrifice and death). both chains are shattered when Christ frees Albion from his interior collapse into auto-idolatry, self-predation and death, and so in Blake's plot, all events lead directly to the purgation of the apocalypse, the harvest and vintage and the purging of the two limits, states and chains; the State of Satan is cast out and the State of Adam is infinitely restored.
Blake's vision of unity is given in the final few lines. the last words of The Four Zoas, again, are "sweet science reigns". thus my original findings demonstrate that Blake's intended plot places Night the Ninth as the apocalyptic culmination of his intricately worked out vision of the creation, fall and salvation into unity that is his anglo-celtic prophetic myth of christianity.
also, my detailing of Blake's cosmology of fall division and salvation into unity has helped van kleeck's analysis of the kabbala and the 'psychological cube of space', but, not noted in spector’s detailed but for me often textually speculative perceptions of the kabbala as if it were Blake's consciously chosen 'mystical spine' for the logoi of The Four Zoas. it is as if it were her plot, offered as the narrative solution of the otherwise 'plotless' Blake... the traditions of an Adamic fall into warring division and restoration to unity is common to early christian patristic tradition too. my research 1984, seemingly not known to her on publication, means my completely different line-by-line analysis of Blake's plot and cosmology may not be taken into account. for me the precision and clarity of Blake's consciously unique myth of the cosmic Adam's division into unity and restoration allows mutual enhancements of perception into the kabbala and Blake'... for all myths founded on the Bible will echo and show parallels even if as inversions or parodies, and Blake is capable of brilliant satire and parody.
his vision is of the risen Christ and his poetry written to help illuminate salvic insight into the Bible, thus into New Testament Revelation. the New Testament resurrected messiah is not accomodated as such by later jewish kabbalism. however, Blake was immersed in the tradition of jewish visionary prophecy as shown by rowland's studies of merkabah mysticism in Ezekiel's chariot and Blake's states of vision.
Blake's vision is universal. following bentley's biography, by default at least, Blake was not learned in latin...there are few clear allusions to the kabbalistic tree in his The Four Zoas or Jerusalem, no sinificant biographical mentions in his letters, no known meetings with rabbi for the mystical understandings and training, no kabbalistic patrons and no convincing direct textual support. There is no hollingshed source to a shakespeare's wonderful speech of cleopatra and her 'barge'. this is not to say there are no mutually revealing patterns, nor does it mean Blake did not know of Adam Kadman or the kabbala. Our understanding of Blake's spirituality is significantly enhanced by the insights and parallels in jewish mysticism
rather, i think the logoi for The Four Zoas and Jerusalem is Blake's own myth and plot, not a 'coded' myth or plot typically for elite educated initiates of a highly developed, mystical system such as the kabbala. Blake's psychology and jungian thought are not unlike this; jung saw myth and archetype without knowing Blake's myth but in a manner that is shown now to be mutually illuminating. modern research on buddism likewise finds mutually enhancing parallels and motifs of consciousness; and the bahagavad gita was also translated in Blake's lifetime who knew moor's famous hindu myths.
increasingly, the evidence for the essene sect's vital significance for the messianic, calandar based (Enoch), essene/jewish sect that became the world 'jewish' religion of christianity is that some of its followers were alive and well in anglo-celtic christianity several hundred years well before augustine was invited to britain. Again, it is the case 'chi rho constantine' (the symbol is his badge/emblem/heraldic device) ruled from york for a decade and declared york to be the cradle of christianity...and marched to rome under the banner of english christianity... built a church there too ... obviously there were christian churches in england ...and his (forged) will leaving the roman civil 'throne' to the centre of christianity, rome, was proclaimed as legally valid. It seemed british christianity seriously helped shape the early roman church.
the now 'flat-earth' and distorted historical methodology that christianity 'sprang out fully formed' from the 'forehead' of revelation history is no longer seen as factually supported. there are better ideas (such as fr david coffey's view that the Father became Father when the Son became incarnate as Son and the Holy Spirit released on his death and concommittant resurrection) that are theologically argued in a fully developed pnuematology such as he presents (Grace: the Gift of the Holy Spirit: manley theological press; Sydney 1978).
ault, as noted, sees no structure or content (thus no rational cosmology); to me this was proven critically unacceptable (1984) two years prior to his famous and brilliant post-modernist position on The Four Zoas, (1986) ... as evident in a brief correspondence, his work on the zoas was concurrent and so without knowledge of my earlier, and so in scholarly fact, 'first full-scale study'.
METATEXT 3 the critical state of the field of Jerusalem's plot.
to turn to Jerusalem, yoder's review of the consensus view of a 'plot-less' Jerusalem serves to summarise how he grasps the field in terms of Blake’s Jerusalem…I agree and simply follow him here, thus “Readings of William Blake’s Jerusalem” he writes “have reached a consensus…Critics ranging from Joanne Witke to Morton Paley to to V.A. de Luca to W.J.T. Mitchell all agree that Blake’s last great epic poem has no coherent narrative spanning its 100 plates…….however they explain the structure of the poem, the majority of critics today read the poem with the assumption that its parts do not cohere linearly or chronologically, and that its is 'a fool’s errand' to search for a narrative in Jerusalem”.
dortort's examination, the closest study of parts of the text text to date shares this consensus. in his opening statements of methodology (p 43-44, Contrary Reading) he writes of Jerusalem that “efforts…to unravel the plot in a systematic manner consistently prove unfruitful”...or he writes of... "Jerusalem's contradictory jumble of events" ...or the... "modal interferences in which the minutely detailed setting engulfs any straightforward plot structure" and specifically focuses of what he calls "perspective frames"..."rather than a concern with plot events, characters or themes". Likewise minna doskow insights do not point to Blake's plot. van lieshout and pierce likewise...discontinuity is thought essential to Blake's meaning.
By contrast, the study of Jerusalem in my web-site and now revised in print, is the first full scale virtually line-by-line analysis. I outline the plot, line-by-line and event-by-event in its definitive linear causal unity. To my mind, given the paradigmatic consensus traced above, a detailed revelation of the plot is required to textually prove there is a plot. All future studies of Jerusalem can properly organise a methodology and literary philosophy in which the many aspects of the field are founded on the methodological principle of a consciously crafted plot, narrative completeness, completed and fully developed myth and an inter-locked aesthetic whole.
It is no 'fool's errand' to understand the linear causal narrative, rather it is now a necessary effort. It is important to re-visit frye, bloom, percival and others of the earlier school ...
this is a 'new' Blake for research scholars: Blake the brilliant creator of plot; irony; character; drama; tension; multiple narrative positions and angles of vision organised into unity. this should mean the field now needs be be revised in favour of a considerable methodological enhancement of the analysis of Blake's plots in his two of his major prophecies; namely The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
critically, I have concluded that this means I must show and detail according to the science of textual criticism the poem's logoi, 'deconstructed' as it were from any pre-conceived critical presumption of an external system other than those he assumed. in order that the analytic methodology i used can demonstrate Blake's desire to construct his own system, i have set out in detail how Blake's linear narrative is integrated throughout his work, just as he claimed. in other words, both of the studies on this site thereby help set Blake within his own syntagmatic, paradigmatic and pragmatic dynamic genius. I concluded therefore, it follows that Blake's logoi must be shown in scholarly detail so that it is critically shown to relate each part to each other part and to the whole. else the field of Blake's plot or linear narrative, myth, and therefore aesthetic unity stays unimpowered in critical fractal concrete.
Blake's anglo-celtic christian system, famously his own, has always needed such a comprehensive critical detailing....'incomprehensible' or 'impenetrable' or 'non linear' and the like are conclusions i believe is shown to be textually deficient in both Blake's The Four Zoas and in Jerusalem.
though i have not written a third book called Milton Explained, i have analysed it and know Blake's Milton, likewise has a precise consciously crafted plot that is the logoi, or aesthetic whole of his third prophecy.... i find no existing study is convincing. ....reading Blake's linear narrative is not like moving from the illiad to the odesseus to virgil to dante to milton and the like.... each of Blake's prophecies is uniquely self contained and the game-rules change more radically than in the epic tradition as a whole (the term meta-narrative or meta-text can be introduced here. as a post-modern critical tool term it is appropriate to my use of logoi).
METATEXT 2
BLAKE'S ANGLO-CELTIC CHRISTIANITY, HIS MYTH AND THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS 07
BLAK'ES JERUSALEM CHAPTER 3......To The Jews.
I would like to address Blake's chapter To The Jews a little more. the kabbalistic inner play of energies and balances explored by rowland, spector, van kleeck and others have enriched the field, in particular, because recent archaeology has proven the historical influences of the british metal trade centuries prior before NT events. this raises the possibilities of messianic, essene judaism via tin trading prior to the crucifixion through at least joseph of arimathea. there is extensive documentation of this and several hypotheses. to begin with joseph of arimathea was a disciple of Christ (matt 27:5; john 19:38), and that means a great deal in in terms of apostolic continuity; implications of this are beyond the remit of my analysis of Blake's Jerusalem. however it is essential to know that it does not matter if Joseph did not bring christianity with him to britain...that christianity WAS in britain and florished... is shown to be beyond question. It was not a slave though...the british christians included royalty from the beginning. and constantine was one of the most famous of british 'christians' though not born in britain.
However, it is important to raise a point here. If tacitus and gildius are to be reasoned from historically then, joseph or no joseph (and Guildas does NOT mention joseph)... it may be the case that the denial of jewish christianity in Britain immediately after the crucifixion events echoes the anti-semitic denial of the jews by european christianity. That means that early jewish christianity in britain preceded the roman invasion. if this is historical truth and known as such (tacitus knew it) to deny it seems anti-semetic, not 'just' anglo-phobic, though the two seemed yoked together. This is not to claim rome is not the centre of a single christian church. On the contrary it is to assert precisely that. Rome replaced Jerusalem as the centre...not as the west...it was then and remains so, even with what many see as the apparent current 'demonisation' of Vatican II by recidivist medievalism.
thus, there is continuous exciting research enriching our knowledge on the jewish/celtic archaeology of the pre-roman britain and ireland, and, the early post-conquest development of messianic essene christianity on the celtic west. for example, tacitus (Annales, xiii. 32) famously mentions the "foreign superstition" of christianity... which therefore must have been in britain before 47 AD, because the native christian british wife of the general left with him, before 47 AD, after he conquered southern britain.......gildas (see below) directly asserts that christianity came in the rule of Tiberius. No need for joseph...Augustine wrote of a visit by Jesus and the church built here, convincingly in term of the indigenous architecture of oak, wattle and thatch. such building last for centuries. the town called ONGAR in essex has the oldest wooden church in europe...built a couple of centuries before the norman/roman conquest, around 800 ce, and the post-norman elimination of most saxon 'christian' or baptised names. the earliest known irish church was around 740 ce...hundreds of years after 'england's' early churches.
tacitus mentions the trial of a woman called pomponia graecina, wife of the general aulus plautius, conquerer of southern britain 43-47 A.D. and who was granted a senate ovation. in rome, however, she was "handed over to her husband for trial" for this "foreign superstition" . he found her innocent and she 'retired'. i think it unlikely that roman soldiers were prosletizing christian jews in 43 A.D. ... membership of this excluded essene/jewish sect by 'christian jewish' legionaries may likely have been persecuted, for as later, some 'christian jews' were killed for roman spectacle...
For Blake any form of human sacrifice/cleansing is pseudo-faith...whether, for examples, in 'pagan' rome or 'pagan' carthage, or post-resurrection recividistic sacrifice/purification 'theologies'. .following fr coffey, blood and gold are not acceptable substitutes for the eucharistic substance of bread and wine, but is recidivism.
Blake's certainly conflates druidism and the mediterranean sacrifice cults. in his myth these cults are nature worship and exemplars of the perversion of child and adult sacrifice he symbolises as following Albion's fall. Now we know the druids did not sacrifice humanity in the indigenous stone circles as Blake and his contemporaries thought.
Historically, the druids they came later than the circle builders....some 1500-2000 or so years after the circle/indigenous faiths... however, the principle of sacrificial perversion for Blake remains historically true, as are his views of all religious and economic killing.
Christ's sacrifice is for Blake unsurpassed, unique, and perfectly exhausts all sacrifice. Blake is completely committed to believing our life and death as always and infinitely in the arms of Christ without and Christ within (c.f. John of the Cross and the 'descending Christ, coffey, stanilaoe, kuhn, rahner, barth, schliemacher, mayendorff et al). Blake's self-belief in his aesthetic vision inspires his symbol of Christ awakening Albion from his sleep of eternal death. The magnificant Plates 94-100 of Jerusalem 'chant out' Blake's poetic soteriology and his aesthetics of prophecy. As prophet he believes he sees what others do not and reveals through art that which is profoundly salvic. Restorative of faith in the human form Divine Blake sees his art as healing.
BLAKE'S ANGLO-CELTIC CHRISTIANITY
It is essential to consider the archaeology of Blake's anglo-celtic mythology. I make ten points below.
First...archeologically, it seems for at least two millenia before the Roman conquest, much of the estimated 30 million tons of tin mined and exported (with copper, gold, lead and bronze) from cornwall, wales, ireland, and the east coast (kent and norfolk and the humber) was exported, along with serious exports of bronze weaponry, in an extensive very profitable trade with the continent and mediterranean. From britain sailed ocean going flat-bottomed sewn boats dated circa 4500 years ago (dover with reconstruction, humber, scotland).
Second... this steady continental trade should be linked with the likely later arrival of phoenicians circa 1000-1800 bc, the celts from the basque and breton lands 800-600 bc. The Dover reconstruction and shows the actual technology for the known paddled flat-bottomed boats and trade routes, 'without sail or oars'. by contrast, mediterranean tideless oar/sail boat designs could not easily cope with the atlantic swells, thus leaving the phoenicians with a transport competitive advantage for marine metal imports from britain over the channel to the continent. the thousands of apparent 'sea-offerings' items found in gibraltar testifiy sewn boats and were used as noted by the romans as trading in the indian oceans to the fears of the open swells. the sewn boats are noted in india, and, by roman history.... in particular because they were NOT made with 'iron nails'.... and so the iron nailed roman boats were a new post-neolithic, metal, marine naval archetectural development. the mass production of iron-pinned ships replaced sewn marine bindings.
Third... techology has revolutionised history, and fresh archaeology and recent DNA studies (sykes, goldstein 2003, 2005) has re-written british and irish history ….it is shown that 21st century britain and ireland are genetically homogenous with well over 50% of the population celtic, then saxon, viking some norman french and with very little roman (Sykes lists the Oisin, Wodan, Sigurd, Eshu, Re as the several immigrant tribes, till the norman invasion, or western crusade) .......... Thus, for archeological and genetic science, the myth of the anglo-saxon destruction of celtic 'proto-papal britain' in a 'pagan dark ages' is being archeologically 'buried' in post-roman britain. romanocentric history fails the tests of archaeology without deconstruction.
Fourth...contemporary archeology clear evidences that it seems, in context, a highly literate, largely prosperous, peaceful and substantially christianised britain (namely, today, what is called england, wales and scotland and much of ireland, c.f. Gildas the Wise c.505-570, though some date him a generation earlier, c.425-512), welcomed augustine.
Fifth... obviously concurrent saxon nature worship was likewise extensive. the welcome both by the celtic christian and the saxons soon ended even in augustine's lifetime, for in contemporary documentation, he seemed too autocratic to the british bishops, especially in the need to consult congregations. however, he wrote well to gregory of the existing christian community and the early church in the then port of glastonbury connecting it with Jesus. It is also significant to note genetic research reveals Kent NOT to be largely saxon at all.
Sixth... thus, centuries of direct contact with main land europe, rome and byzantium after the fall of rome 410, seems to have infused the bishops of britain, who it seems at first decided to accept/convert augustine's position, or gregory's papal claims. These were accommodated rather than the post-resurrection collegiate model of first-amongst-equals bishops as in orthodox christianity... and by and large i think in much post-reformation protestant/anglican christianity. thus, it seems those who contend there is a continuum between christian pre-augustinian britain, and, post-reformation britain, of the first-among-equals autocephalous theology of the Vicar of Christ, Vicar of Peter and Bishop of Rome may not be accurate........ for anglo-celtic and catholic christianity was well developed in britain....
Seventh...the mediterranean roman empire was conquered by islam...perhaps the first reformation. thus, after centuries of pre-augustinian jewish/anglo-celtic christianity in britain (it seems constantine ruled from york for a decade or so, declaring also york to be the cradle of christianity), the idea of the rule of the pope became british, extending to absorb the already partly christianised ireland, until the reformation.
the famous history of Gildas the Wise (sapiens) incontestably shows a detailed and sociologically comprehensive and highly structured christianisation of the british islands including non-roman scotland and ireland...he also shows a profound knowledge of messianic prophecy and both Old and New Testaments, the geography and global trade of the post-roman germanic world including india, the arian heresy, the world as 'round', he even had a water clock.
Gildas the Wise writes from strathclyde, as noted, he lived circa 507-570, perhaps decades earlier....the roman legions never reached strathclyde yet he writes of arabia, india and is deeply literate in Old and New Testaments, is well informed of the jewish histories of israel and judea, and their symbolic, spiritual interpretations.
such geographical and theological literacy is inconsistant with any 'dark ages' theory of the times, and incompatible with the theory gregory knew not of britain when he met two self-named 'anglo' children in a roman slave market. the term 'angles' is also interesting...it seems there was literally no country of 'angles'....bede's word....for gildas the wise they were saxons.....so ......angles are clearly identified as long ago as early last century...( by scholars such as w.f. skene Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland) as being Fresian and in Northumberland.
Eighth.....it seems to many therefore that it is no longer theologically (in terms of revelation history) or archeologically reasonable to claim there was no organised and developed christian church in britain till augustine. scholars in the field have agreed the venerable bede is not always an accurate observer of the tale of early anglo-celtic christianity. why should he be? i found many sources detailing early anglo-celtic christian britain before augustine, in clear and easily accessible testaments like Gildas the Wise (as noted),.... and neninus and bede note king lucius and the edict of winchester 156 a.d. ...declaring christianity to be the british religion.
hippolytus notes simon zelotes as bishop of britain..... then there is constantine..... and in the 8th Cent i return to the anglo-saxon chronicles and the interesting Neninus.....who clearly can't be dismissed nor, with his wonderfully fluent legendary tales such as st patrick's myth...raising nine from the dead, or writing 364 books and founding 364 religious centres, all seen as literally 'true'... as with gildas and bede...(or for that matter, homer the greek tragedians and vergil and so on) the implicit and explicit sociology, urbanisation and cemtres of learning are embedded in their text is vital. they write what is seen as a mythic shadow across our visions of history.
as i see it, it is impossible in the 21st cent that these, and other statements of pre-augustinian britain as a developed christian country, are not known to the other christian sects or churches. it seems to me theologically speaking, such evidence should be welcomed by all sects of the christian church... western christianity literally meant the west...always the tin islands ....rome was not symbolically the 'west' ...it was the centre....at least of the mediterranean world. rome is not a one-legged or even two-legged stool...all 'roads led to rome' at the centre of the known world, not to the the far distant wealthy tin islands of the west...
thus the jewish/christians were drawn to rome at the centre, .....there was also the north, south, east and the west.... there was byzantium in the east, egypt in the south and eventually romania and russia in the north, but rome was always the centre, and confirmed as such 380 a.d. by constantinople........ironically one might ask where is there a tradition of 'go west young jewish christian man?...go to rome' ?......did peter or paul set out west for rome?...'go west young man there's gold in them there seven hills' is not a proverbial saying...'all roads lead to rome', by contrast, is.
Ninth...early in western christianity, St Cadval of western/british christianity founded the monastic Tatentum church in France 170 a.d.; Simon Zelotes, the martyr, is reconised by orthodox christianity (May 10th a.d. 44); then there are the english and welsh saints; Bede notes King Lucius and the edict of winchester (150 a.d.) ; St Patrick; the four councils of Pisa (1409), Constance (1417), Sienna,(1424) and Basle (1434) recognised the british christian church as senior (as did Cardinal Pole in Queen Mary's reign), and the Bishops of London, York and Colchester attended the Council of Churches 314 a.d.
archeological discoveries seem to be about 350 a.d. onwards. we have known about some for years and so i introduce EARLY archaeology to show how long the denial has been current. it is 30 or 40 years of lobotomised history.
....one ruin found 2007 is dated 200-250 a.d. the buildings include a church at Colchester, 350-400 a.d; at Silchester there is a baptismal font same age, likewise in Richborough there are two christian buildings, one of timber the other of stone; Icklingham c.350 a.d., has a bapistry and christian symbols that define its christian purpose; Hinton St Mary possibly the oldest mosiac face of Christ, and, Halcock; Smith 1964, Toynbee 1968, 1976 discussed and mapped, 1953 with Frend 1955, Thomas 1971, Radford 1971, Mann 1961, Green 1977, Rahtz 1977,78, Thomas 1980, Walter& Phillips 1979, Jenkins 1973 1976, Thomas 1980, West & Plovier 1976, Prigg 1901, Green 1977, and Britannia 8 1977, Brown 1971 all deal with romano christian buildings..... thereby these scholars have hugely suplemented the small corpus of written references to bishops/sees, travels of church-folks, sites of martydoms, and to controversies like the arian heresy ) , Hinton St Mary has mosaics with the Chi Rho criptogram, as has the 3rd cent ruins at Cirencester. precious objects include the Hoxne treasure hoard in Suffolk about 15,000 coins (gold, mostly silver and copper), with date stamps on the coins from 390-405 a.d. in addition to the dated coins, the treasure has several objects with the Chi Rho criptogram and a spoon with 'vivas in deo' inscribed on it; in Water Newton there is the oldest set of church plates yet found anywhere, a Chi Rho chalice, a wine carafe, and a bowl with 'O Lord, I, Publianus relying on you, honour your holy sanctuary', the objects date from the early 4th century; the Middenhaul treasure c. 400 a.d. has three Chi Rho spoons and Lullingstone in Kent has a large Chi Rho image. that is some of the evidence....only one has to be christian fact. I also note these are amongst the very oldest ruins of architecturally specific christian churches in the 'mediterranean east' or in greece or in imperial italy. there are many sites in roman ruins though not proved to be site specific christian churches: i list some of these sites excavated decades ago to make the point; namely, Barton Farm, Brading, Caerwent, Chedworth, Fifehead, Flaxenhead, , Framtom, Halstock, Hinton St Mary, Hawkstow, Keysham, Littlecote Park, Neville, Newton St Loe, Northchurch, Pitney, Stonesfield, Verulanium, Wellow, Witherston, Woodchester all with Christian or potentially crypto-Christian art at roman villas.
Tenth...it is argued the title 'pope' is informal…..in terms of titles, some collegiate christians see the title of Vicar of Peter as theologically correct, and it seems to that theology the Vicar of Peter/Bishop of Rome is the most profoundly possible human relation to Christ (for example see john meyendorff 's discussion of a.d. autocephaly in 'the primacy of peter' vladimirs press 92). Vatican II sees him as the Vicar of Christ, in the context of the Vicar of Peter in Christ, to thereby properly avoid implications of a re-incarnated human 'ensouled' during a person's already existent life. following fr david coffey's trinitarian dogma, (sydney , school of divinity) it is impossible that the Trinity be reduced to a human reincarnated quasi-god, 'entering/shoehorned' sometime after birth into another person. .........rather, it is this recidivist/shamanistic nature-spirit 'deficient' idea of god that is recognised as some form of possession in major world religions, e.g. judaism, islam, and, in the re-incarnation theologies of hinduism and buddhism. ..................the pontif, pontifex maximus is simply a pagan title. babylonian/roman in pre-christian origins....ceasar was number one pontiff....nero...caligula are examples of other holders of the title......and the huge income from controlling all roman religions and their ceremonies...
......islam conquered out the financial and civil absolute power of mediterranean christianity and the powers of the pontifex maximus ....it was the basque celts/saxons of iberia and the saxon celts of north west europe that held on....we have the germanic translation of the gospels noted about 400-500 ce by Ufilas.......
it is also written that peter was married and lay. for theiring, the 'rock' (aramaic cephas; latin petra) can be read as the rock of the 'stones', the 'stones' and 'wall' are known to be pesharim (written comments in the dead sea scrolls that are essene interpretations of quoted prophetic texts) for the lay members of the congregation; 'bread' being livites. thus the famous 'stones and bread' passage in the gospels is illuminated. for her, the 'rock' that is the appointed 'head' of Christ's 'church' of the 'stones' is intentionally lay and married (4QpIsa 'd', 4Q 164). theiring reads Isa: 11-12, as:
"on the precious stones of the temple, on terms of its leaders. All priests, levites and celibates were precious stones, as if in some sense they were priestly. . . John said that "stones" could be made into sons of Abraham . . . .as ordinary "stones" they formed a "wall" around the New Jerusalem, and those . . . members were called "Wall-builders" (bone hahayis, CD 4:12, 8:12)". (theiring's paleography and hermeneutics are found in 'the gospels and qumran', australian and new zealand studies in theology and religion, 1981).
SOME CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion...thus, now archaeology has opened out the 4500 years or so in which the british isles seemed to have been the manufacturing centre for metals for the mediterranean/european civilisations (bury st edmunds has thousands of bronze age items, with significant weaponry circa 1500 bc, and kent was a manufacturing bronze centre). It seems that well before jerusalem, athens or rome were customers, britain was a main metals manufacturer for mainland/medditerranean europe.... even egypt. a shipwreck with tons of tin ingots on the way to egypt is a current marine archeological find. the source of the tin ingots would be interesting. operating during OT times, large forges within a many roomed complex (90 or so) has been found in jordan. the source of the metal for that regional industry again opens out very significant research possibilities of bronze and iron age contact with britain. likewise the manufacturing sources of the copper weaponry of troy.
also there are the thousands of archaeological items, such as wine amphora's, that evidence a continuous mutual trade between byzantium and britain throughout the alledged but not so 'dark' ages. to add to the evidence in another example, land deeds in britain were written in latin (earliest surviving manuscript around 650 AD, papyrus decays in britain's dampness). it follows from this the antecedent legal/religious profession thus continued to teach and learn classical latin in a british culture in which academic institutions for the formal study of latin were across the legal landscape had operated for centuries....... land-deeds and property rights in latin were self-accepted by the people........ in latin, which means legal arguments in courts, christian churches, legal property judgements, a system of enforced laws of inheritance observed and recorded across britain's anglo/saxon/celtic culture. laws in latin that were enforced in latin by a graduand group of highly literate and logic trained specialists and so on....by comparison roman culture was reduced to 12-20000 people and little evidence of a florishing written culture as in britain (beowulf, the ulster cycle, the welsh poets and histories).
so, the departure of the legions did not plunge britain into darkness and savagery. for further proof we have the saxon/latin word games recently revealed by the professor of latin at oxford on the History Channel, in which the saxon reads one way, and is a latin epigraph/witticism when the letters are written out and read backwards. examples of such carved linguistic brilliance are up and down the country. he points out anglo-celtic britain preserved classical latin after rome collapsed. julius caesar (the first pontif/pontifex maximus...it being a pagan babylonian god-priest nature/power human/divine) notes the high state of civilisation, tacitus, josephus all write of the many cities in britain with centres of learning too as does Gildas.
further, there is no archaeological evidence for the alledged 'dark age' centuries of barbarism, anarchy, civil war, invasions, battleground graveyards, battle-sites burnings and the like in britain ....on the contrary, archeological finds in yorkshire prove throughout the centuries that architecture with oak and with thatch roofs continued to be built, with extended villages stretching for miles and miles along rich transport roads. It takes 4-8 acres of cultivated land-reed to roof a thatched building. no string of thatched cottages and necessary agriculture would survive long in a dangerous civil war culture....we lived in a ancient thatched cottage in essex for many years (oak lasts for centuries, so, in a land of oak why bother much with stone?) and i can't imagine defending it against a kid with a zippo let alone plundering/rapist/barbaric venerable bede type anglo/saxon/vikings..... burning the miles of cottages is the first thing that raider or even a vengeful neighbour would do. this society was not so lawless as sectarian recidivism seems to hold as true. it had the best most efficient tax system in europe....a rich prize for the western crusade of the norman french, that de facto established the absoluteism of the papacy upon the anglo/saxon/celtic bishops. the doomday book notes the tax-free thousand year old holding of 'hides' of land in cornwall. myth has it this the land was given by King Aviragus to the post-crucifixion, jewish/christian landing of joseph and his '12 followers'..... glastonbury was a port in those days. the idea of a thousand years of legal continuites in the holding of land is extremely significant. there are few such millenium long historical continuites of legality anywhere else. it is impossible that there be a dark ages that preserved such legally literate continuities.
by contrast, following archeological findings, the roman villas depended on a slavery complex of ruled and absolute ruler….which pretty much ended in roman form for lack of enforcement when the roman army went home, and the anglo-celtic political system of the ruler ruling with the consent of the ruled re-emerged. which, perhaps, is why the villa's were abandoned, for the slaves maintaining the villas need guards and all need food and their are other ways to wash. The numerous excavations of villas do not have a burned layer ending occupation. they are abandoned, rather than being looted and burned.
this is not to say there were no wars, raids, vendatta's, or surfs, or hengist, horsa or saxon/viking pagan nature worship...... but slaves had rights in the viking cultures, such as children who were free and accountability for cruelty or murder. It is to agree with the archeologists evidence that there was no 'dark ages' either in the millenia of indigenous religions, or in early anglo-celtic british christianity. the defensive social landscapes of fortress dwellings, hilltop towns and the like seem not to have been so necessary as in italy, greece and so on. the myth of british christianity commencing with henry's divorce is well known to be proven, theologically and historically, as invalid. indeed it is distortion....divorces for reasons of state is common place...for examples the house of monaco.
Blake's vision of Canaan in Jerusalem is vital to understanding his myth of Jerusalem. in context of Blake's chapter To the Jews, the necessary critical basis is that the story of joseph of arimathea, supplier of tin to the roman army and so vastly rich, is essential to the context of Blake’s vision of the new jerusalem.
THE ARIMATHEA MYTH AND BLAKE
joseph was wealthy, in fact, in legendary context he was up there with the ' meta-rich' of the age. of course he sailed to britain, vital commercial interests required it.......over and again....for him it would be like bill gates 'commuting to visit silicon valley'. in this vein, the dead sea scrolls has much to reveal giving contemporary context to modern theories of the essene messianic christian origins, especially by contributing to the history of essene/messianic culture. i feel it seems reasonable to consider the messianic/essene/judaism antecedent contacts preceding the crucifixion. and the money of the tin trade, helped accomodate christian revelation very quickly (c.f. tacitus) before the roman invasion) and, of course long before augustine, who only came because he was invited.
Consider tacitus and the christian queen...and augustine and the christian queen...it seems the christian jews in anglo-celtic britain were amongst the ruling class... appropriately given joseph's wealth...rather than the slave/unfree class of customary roman conversion appeal. the paleo-christian congregation of the catacombs may not be all of the story.joseph of arimathea is mentioned in Blake's anglo-celtic revelation myth ..he is a well known example of the ancient tradition of trading tin... from well before the crucifixion in Gildas...in the reign of Tiberius...Theiring suggests Joseph of Arimithea was a title and like an modern styled ambassador that represents the ruler of any given nation...so n'someone' was THE Joseph and t6he emissary to the tin was also a Joseph.
also intricately woven into the extradinary tale of joseph wis that he wa member of the sanhedrin and so learned in all aspects of the torah...and recipient of the passing on by hand of the ancient jewish priestood...and hugely huge wealth.
and there is pilate's bribe...suddenly available...so joseph had huge liquid resources...here is a striking thought ...i think perhaps the pecher of the spices is that it is the famous bribe itself...in other terms, the bribe was the great weight of precious spices named in the New Testament...of massive value far more valuable than gold...and about the weight of a man...(that's a thought if it was the 'weight' of the crucified victim)...after such bribing by joseph, i would think a speedy escape to safety by him from herod, 'anti-jesus-jerusalem' or 'anti-jesus-essene qumran priests, or the fragmented zealot cultism of the 'figtree' ....in short escape from revenge by any or all the political enemies of Christ, is very reasonable.......
for joseph...and for some of Christ's circle, aside from the sea, continuing to travel to britain via gaul or iberian peninsula would mean simply following the overland tin route...well documented as a donkey train (...and continuing to supply the roman army with its tin as Nobilis Decurion (c.f. St Jerome).
...Joseph seems was Pilate's well known aquaintance, and even at that time it seems he need not fear Rome. Trade as soon as possible after the crucifixion seems to me financially and politically realistic. The famous doomday book record of land grants is not inconsistent, nor are the later roman records of british/roman senate dialogue.
THE PALEOGRAPHY OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS...SOME THOUGHTS ON QUMRAN AND JEWISH MESSIANIC INFLUENCES
i was fortunate to study the scrolls while studying at sydney university's school of divinity.....barbara theiring taught me hebrew there and the paleography of the scrolls and the pesher tradition of readings of hebrew. it seems to me the details of her paleographic studies have been somewhat overlooked, in particular, her detailed paleographical study of the field structured largely by the brilliant f.w. cross.
in her book 'Re-dating of the Teacher of Rightousness' (australian and new zealand studies in theology and religion 1979) especially Chapters 1-4, her detailed paleographic examination suggests re-dating. a clear example is on p. 42..... 'the evolution of the medial mem': fig 2; in IQS, IQH, 4QQoh(a) and her study of late herodian semi-cursives, and palmyrene and hasmonian script in other letters....here nun, samekh, 'ayn, pe, sade, qof, shin, taw, tet and then (a few pages earlier and later, back through the hebrew alphabet), is convincing and it seems NOT picked up by other paleographers.
the pesher of Hab 2:15 found in IQpHab is especially important as it deals with the "Wicked Priest" and the "Teacher of Righteousness" in the "Period of the Feast of Rest, the Day of Atonement", and the wicked priest "manifested himself" (heb. 'hopia' or 'shone forth' as the light of the "Day of Atonement" or claimed holiness.
theiring's paleography examines hasmonean herodian and palmyrene forms; the semi-cursive script in relation to hasmonean, herodian and the palmyrene forms means for her "that there is no unshakeable paleographical evidence that the Teacher of Righteousness was in the Hasmonean period", (theiring; 'redating the teacher of righteousness; p.47 see also chapter 1 for paleographical dating). In other terms the dating may be much later, up to 50 c.e. as is shown by a stone script of that date. This finding seems to have been missed. Its implications are paleologically profound.
she argues the textual hermaneutics of this re-dating must thereby NOT exclude the possibility of the two figures living in the first half of the first century c.e. ...the opening up of history here seems to me not sufficiently explored or even answered by other paleographers, for the palmyrene script is found in jerusalem AD 50.
There must therefore be a renewed search for the identities of these two spiritual giants called the Messiah of Aaron and the Messiah of Israel?.... both were somehow 'entitled' to enter the qumran holy of holies on Atonement Day. qumran was a 'New Jerusalem' for the essenes, and these two religious giants were contemporary figures. they were not prior to the community. To the essene 'plant root' of qumran should be added the religious communities of mar sada and in the now ruins of ain feshka on the Dead Sea.
THE ESSENE CALENDAR
I have read no better analysis of the essene calandar than theiring exhaustive evaluation of the solar, lunar and solar-lunar calandars of the north and the south of judea and israel. the history of intercalations she traces is exceptional and it seems overlooked. From these astronomical details we see the linear concepts of the divinity of time. Christ then is the fulfilment of time. Her work on the contemporary calandar is a major contribution.
qumran i think is brilliantly conceptualised by theiring to be a clock with human movements...as shown in the scrolls, they are called watches, with 30 representatives of each of the twelve tribes (again, the 30 pieces of silver being seen by her as the pesher for 'temple tributes'...with variations, one tribute for each day from each 'tribe', in monthly succession staying at qumran). as shown in the scrolls these individuals acted out the sacred movements of the divine expression of God. time is holy, the knowledge of it sacred and predictive, and movement expressing it also sacred. It would seem the movement is one cubit per unit time. Knowledge of time and place then seems to be the basis for teaching and learning. amongst other things, and for many reasons, the crucifixion change the idea of god as time.
some of the contemporary historical politics are more clearly linked by her to involve the treasury as usurped by judas and the 'thieves' (pesher=zealots) and the 'figtree' (pesher=zealot organisation as opposed to the peace movement , pesher= the vine) hence Christ cursed the 'figtree' (Mathew)...he was to be betrayed by the figtree and its thieves.
the wealth of qumran is everywhere in the story of Christ's betrayal by the 'thieves' of the 'figtree'......... the copper scroll lists at least 18 points where treasure was buried in and around qumran by the zealot 'monks' there, control of which seemed to be his goal. in modern weights some 25 tons of gold and silver are mentioned. The wealth of the herodian renovated temple in Jerusalem is noted by the destruction, looting and enslavement by Rome.
TIME AND BRITAIN
archeology shows for millenia the 'indigenous' henge people (the beaker people, and later the druid pre-roman culture and finally the celtic/anglo/saxon inheritors) had developed a traditon of of measurement of time that was profound. guildas even mentions a water clock, aside from mentioning the chair of peter, eucharist, trinity, bishops, priests, pastors clerks 'living in the houses of the church' , 'arian treason' and pseudo-priests, extensive understandings of Biblical prophecy and an in context extra-ordinary theological profound apocalyptic grasp of both Old and New Testaments....which is consistent with essene messianic christianity....but he does not mention the 'angles'.
the henges are shown to be cosmic clocks.....(e.g. see rudgely 'lost civilisations of the stone age; dames, 'the silbury theasure: wood sun, moon and standing stones). I think the mutuality of respect between cultures who understand the heavens and time and the oceans, and most of all share profit navigation and through sea-trade, helps eliminate ideas of barbarism fairly quickly.
in the east over time, vespasian's slaughter of jews, the 'figtree' of masada (essene scripts on masada), and the taking of jerusalem's temple, gold, and jewish slaves is well-documented. in the west, in britain, the impact of roman enslavement was such the word welsh itself meant 'slave' in saxon. the great earthen forts of britain were death traps before the roman catapult and the fire-balls lobbed in to burn the timber structure, and the roman tacticians had learned from caesar's strategies in gaul how to defeat the northern european massed charge. eventually, 3-4 centuries later, this was reversed and rome was defeated.
BLAKE'S MYTH
Blake looked prior to the Roman invasion as best he could. Many elements are woven into the fabric of his myth. I have found The Four Zoas and Jerusalem to be beautifully constructed aesthetic wholes. Once the myth, including blake's ideas of anglo-celtic christianity, is understood the epics read easily and fluently. Blake's challenge is also of course to the visual imagination. that is outside my remit of the plot ....in contrast to my critical conclusions on blake's plot and myth, i do not deal with Blake's visual expression. i recommend others for examples, ault, bentley, erdman, viscomi, are part of a tradition of work on blake's 'visual signification' and textual findings that is outstanding. bentley's textual studies seem to me to be invaluable and his biography essential.
thereby, brought up to date in terms of the state of the field, the analysis of Blake's plot in The Four Zoas, the first full-scale study of the poem, remains as original and fresh to the field as in 1984. It will be published in print next year by The William Blake Press: Cambridge.
the analysis of Jerusalem's plot, 2005, is the first full-scale line-by-line analysis and likewise is entirely fresh to the field.it is published in print in William Blake's Jerusalem Explained: The William Blake Press: Cambridge; 2007. Amazon. USA and Amazon.com list it for the Blake reader.
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