David Whitmarsh: William Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem

A first: the chiastic structures of the Zoas and of Jerusalem

2010-03-06T20:57:00.005Z

The basic Chiastic form is simple to describe..... ABC CBA is an example Biblical chiastic structure is complex, and termed Davidic, but it involves reading from the first and last lines to the middle lines. Thus A then the other A, B then the other B, then C and C. Developments of this literary pattern involve parallelisms and opposites. The Songs of Innocence and Experience are noted as chiastic by Jacobson back in 1970 and the parallelism between such poems as the two poems both named Holy Thursday are helpful for the seeing of both.

However the application to Jerusalem and The Four Zoas is presented as a theory of Blake's composition. Blake's use in the major epics is explored in definitive detail in the three books. Both major epics are seen as beginning in medias res, as continuing in chaos and incoherence and as ending in an inexplicable apocalypse. By contrast, I see the chiastic structure as the core to understanding Blake's The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem.

Blake's four levels of vision, four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold are essential to always bear in mind. Blake uses the terms circumference, centre, zenith and nadir. Blake takes us from the circumference to the centre. There, Divine energy enters and reverses the vortex back to the circumference. In essence, this is the chiasmus. The chiasmus is a vortex, the energies within Albion are like a line in this vortex spiralling inwards to the centre. The spiral tightens and tightens till the energies compact and, and drained of energy, the centre condenses into one-fold death...the white dot at the centre. When Albion is so drained, Divine energy enter the centre of the compressive vortex. The intensities of infinite energy explode and the energies reverse to flow back, expanding in all direction from the chiasmus of the centre back to the circumference, where Albion enters into unity with Divine energy within, and without. Plates 94-100 in Jerusalem is the magnificent conclusion to each of the four unique chiastic vortices inerwovenn into one great four-fold Chaismus in four directions.

In the epics we see the 'finger of God' intervene at the chiastic centre. Divine intervention establishes the incarnation/crucifixion/resurrection event as infinite energy revealing and consuming finite energy. Thus the apocalypse is the revelation and movement though finitude in Divine self-sacrifice and forgiveness. After the chiastic reversal, the component energies are fed by Divine energy and find harmony and mutual unity as earlier they had collapsed into war and mutual predation till dead.

Thus the symbolism, the characterization, and the fulfillment of emanative unity in Blake's New Jerusalem follows the chiastic reversal at the centre and takes us to the circumference. It should be noted that the term back-to does not mean Albion 'returns' returns back to the earlier state before his collapse. It means Albion moves 'on to' the circumference, his divided masculine and feminine energies harmonised in Divine energy.

The Shakespeare links

2009-12-13T09:28:00.009Z

The third proof is edited, the final one. On to the master pdf and off to the printer. Ready for Xmas? Probably.

And about time...some of the post-moderns do seem to need a proverbial boot up their textual methodology so that their serious apparent contempt for Blake's poetry and their mutual conversation with their images of each other can be tested against Blake's text As as been oft been said, they now seem to have a private conversation.

..........Frye/Bloom are excellent and find limited evidence of cycles as does Raines, but for different reasons each believes Blake's mythic poetry ends in chaos. Ault/Dortort, likewise are interesting, and for reasons they share between themselves also find Blake's mythic poetry ends in chaos. The advocates of a cyclic myth seem to admire Blake, but lack deconstruction: the post-moderns seem not to give Blake the benefit of doubt, and dismiss the man-as-poet to be replaced by the critic.......

It may be that since his Yale Lectures of the early 1970's, Derrida's Freudian based methodology of discontinuity has overwhelmed postmodern Blake criticism; so ambiguity became their new meta-system.

In the research done and put forward in the web site here, and in print, namely:

Structure as a Key to Meaning in William Blake's The Four Zoas
William Blake's Jerusalem Explained
and now
Shakespeare's Heir: Blake's Doors of Perception in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem

there is no chaos of creative management by Blake...not even in syntax, grammar or rhetoric. The binary stasis, the either/or of Frye/Bloom or Ault/Dortort, has been left behind........ and a fresh canon of information is now advanced, argued from the texts more closely than has previously been accomplished.

...In a proverbial nutshell, it is shown beyond reasonable critical doubt that Blake is not a grammatical illiterate, nor in creative confusion...... let alone living in the poetic psychosis of a self-subversive-who-is-always-in-syntactical-ambiguity as demanded of us by Ault and Dortort................ A pseudo-principle seems to have been set into Urizenic stone: namely, because no plot has been found to connect every line to every other line, then it must be that there is no coherent plot at all..........After this pseudo-principle became conventional wisdom any Blakean thematic interconnections become outlawed.... no linkage was accepted, all are ambiguous and pointing out ambiguity became 'a career goal'. All of Blake's themes/characters/events are presented as non-thematic (Ault) and ultimately as self-subverting (Dortort). For example, Dortort claims that 'Luvah' and the 'Saviour' are in some sense ambiguous variants of 'one being' and who is further identified with the being of Blake's Satan....Between them, they claim that the confusions thereby generated self-subvert Blake's narrative in both the The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.

It is shown these views of Blake's epics profoundly misunderstand his texts, characters and plots.

This new book, Shakespeare's Heir: Blake's Doors of Perception in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, addresses the frozen either/or of current critical thought. In terms of the structure and the plot of the two epic poems, the book responds to the need of the field to move forward in critical confidence.

One key is to show beyond reasonable doubt that Blake wrote a specific and consistent chronology for The Four Zoas and for Jerusalem. The myth-cycle school and the post-moderns stand as one in three conclusion. namely:

(1) the epics/poems begin in medias res
(2) the myth/story is chaotic
(3) the respective works founder on their respective apocalypse

By contrast, in Shakespeare's Heir, it is shown these conclusions for different reasons have not been accurately argued from Blake's texts. In Shakespeare's Heir, a more systematic redaction methodology and hermeneutics is used and the conclusions thereby more soundly based.

Thus it is shown:

(1) The poems do NOT begin in medias res
(2) The two different myths are NOT chaotic, but are beautifully crafted and consistent and while they have elements in common, they but are not transportable from The Four Zoas to Jerusalem and vice-versa.
(3) The respective apocalypse are intricately crafted into eack epic and are proper, entirely credible poetic closures.

Ambiguity is often essential to poetry.

2009-10-29T23:14:00.003Z

PRIMUS INTER PARES

There's a thought to consider before absolute power in the zealot coup of President EU ...first among equals....

It does means some perspective on the dictator illusion of a big-daddy state. It took hundreds of years to get rid of the dictator. The Prime Minister is the first among equals. The other cabinet ministers are equals. That's why there's a constitutional monarchy. The crown holds all power and is not constitutionally empowered to use it. Thus the armed forces take an oath to the the crown not the prime minister, who is not above the law. no one was till Blair rewrote laws so that there was no law that applied to him.

by contrast, adolf hitler got the german armed forces to swear to him in the first few hours after hindenburg gave him power. the rest is history...oh, and 55,000,000 dead who didn't get to claim benefit.

The head of the EU should be first among equals. The chairperson. Bound by rules to follow in the exercise of the chair. No veto of a majority vote. Minutes are required, and right to add to minutes. No armed forces of Europe under the direct orders of the president. No right to make 'tough decisions'. No 'strong man' to lead us to China's parades and and the booted heart of the zealot right

Why do we need the term 'president'?. Why not chairman? like chairman Mao? Or Captain of EU? Think of a term?

Why do we need more sexed-up-dossiers of weapons of mass destruction, or war or pure bell-tones of selfhood called President of Spin and the First Lady of Webs on the moneyed cat walk.

1930's solutions for 2030 problems

2009-10-27T10:37:00.004Z

Dictatorships don't work, we have tried it. Or it has been imposed on us,

save for bill of rights, and magna carta, and juries, and progressive taxation and free enterprise and votes in and votes out.........A new thing is here... the tsar of all europe....UK has the legislation for a police state....and the data.

27 elected heads of state appoint from a group that have been voted out. The ex-leaders of state are the pool to elect a lord of the rings or Pontifex Maximus/ Divine Caesar/ Tsar to rule the other rings?.

And the new person can write his own rules this time around having been got rid of after 10 years of the worst financial catastrophe in history. Except for the biggest boom in China's history. And boom boom boom boom in Iraq's recent happinesses.

Crime has got the opiates and cannibis for Afgan...now the shooting starts and then all the little taliban's will go neutral and the US can go home. There's no one TALEBAN...just like there is no dissedent IRA.

Four aides for Tony. Five to rule all? We are in the banker's bunker.

Darkness. freedom fries

2009-10-20T18:28:00.004+01:00

SHAKESPEARE'S HEIR A good day today the revised proof arrived. There are minor corrections and then it will be on the market. Requests for copies thus will be OK in a week or two.

The web-site is to be re-born into a friendly face. Art work, intros, and reduced copies of the four major texts available too.......... bearing in mind that the versions on the web are not the latest edition, are largely uncorrected, I've changed my mind here and there and they are there because they is free. Something has to be kept behind to buy the books and pay for their costs I'm told.

Fair enough

2009-10-15T23:24:00.019+01:00

How much time it all takes? Blake really stayed with it. The proof is edited and sent back. The process is well worth it. From beginning to end.

The politics of democracy seem to have died in Europe.

A new dark ages seems about to have returned...the medieval days of darkness when Europe 'went inquisition' and the torches went out save for human torches. recidivism rules and the reforms of Vat II are reformed out, and as with all recidivism we do not return to the reform, but to the generation before the generation of reform. Back two generations to reform the reform out. Everything is silent save the strident shriek of the banking status quo and the shuffle of the votes of the feet. The 1930's dictators and fusions of sectarian state funding and feudal capitalism. The concordats.

The word democracy has died. Just the sound fades away.....Freedom fries....

2009-09-04T20:19:00.007+01:00

Two books now are made available. ...namely, Shakespeare's Heir and The Four Zoas...the first is about 290 pages and the other about 500 pages.

I have had several requests and can only say that orders and the books will be available very soon. The site re-designed and made user friendly too.

The first proof of Shakespeare's Heir is edited and corrected. From an introduction to the study of The Four Zoas (which needs to be put in print, not just published virtually) a new book evolved quite naturally.

A fresh canon of information to settle Blake's multi-linear narrative is offered, and it is promised...without the relentless perjoratives of Ault/Dortort and the school of post-modern ambiguities. I'm astonished at their view of how poor a poet is Blake, so here is a bit of a response...in favour of Blake the poet.
......................................

the classical model of the logical positivists and the pure grammar of the computer language and grammar models sit happily with the syntax of aspect ratio and lighting in the grammar of film...so where's the grammatical problem in Blake that so overwhelms the post-modern Blake critic?

literary response is always a unity in the mind of the reader...the idea of author is always a idea of self-reflected attitude...an attitude in process ...and not an algorithmic procession but an information quanta....there is nothing consistent about reading or imagining, or listening/watching to the 'someone else's words' of it, in self-contradiction, halts, runs, staggers, pleasure, rage, love, enlightenment and moments of silence: in short, an infinity of response...and there are other things to do all the time...like listening to music at the same time or visual silent noise...of course it is always a temporary 'withiness' of fragments/identity in dialogue...and it involves the whole person however fragmentary that wholeness seems...To engage in this wholeness of process is one reason why Blake wrote....in conventional concepts its a philosophy, a zen or a yoga or even a mythology....we use what words we can and as Bahktin put it most of our words are someone else's anyway....

You can't read Blake exclusively in the light of modern grammatical usage and help your self to much in the way of meaningfulness.

Enjoy the books, if you like Blake you will enjoy these books...Shakespeare's Heir being the most readable, and the other two books are detailed studies available for in depth clarification

Shakespear's Heir

2009-08-18T19:42:00.002+01:00

THE WILLIAM BLAKE PRESS CAMBRIDGE

The book is freshly titled and is the proof/PDF sent.

Title:

SHAKESPEARES' S HEIR: BLAKE'S DOORS OF PERCEPTION IN THE FOUR ZOAS AND JERUSALEM. 267 PAGES.

It should be available from Amazon in a few weeks now.

There's a clear description of the hyper/text/novel from i adopted to experiment with the richness within Blake...Albion is like a body, and the story of the energies within is the story of the epics...the line-by-line methodology links every line to every other...so it's 'virtually......' for the nitpickers...

De Luca described Jerusalem as a 'wall of words'...that should be dissipated, eased out of perceptual striations in a movement from any passage to any other....Blake's phrasing... his poetry surfaces out of our earlier failed perceptions...

Blake's grammar is discussed...there's work to do here in the publication of the transcription i did for Jerusalem Explained...

and i'm going to call the book on the zoas its original thesis title...Structure as a Key to Meaning in William Blake's the Four Zoas...its long, but it's the right title.

non-linear and the hypertext novel

2009-08-08T10:56:00.010+01:00

An image from Jerusalem Explained........

.........................................................................Multi-linear symmetries are like a rope made of four strands...... you can do lots of things, make fabric, ropes, mats, sculptures, baskets, sail ships with it...its still a four stranded rope...you can even coil it in a basket and think it a snake like Buddha's maya ...think of Jerusalem as a four-fold multi-linear epic...each level of vision is like a strand in the four-fold rope........................

there is a term 'non-linear' used as a meta-form for the novel...Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl...it has structure analagous similar to that of Jerusalem Explained...

In Shelley Jackson's work, entirely on hypertext, Mary Shelley rebuilds a second monster that Frankenstein stopped making, she's female and they become lovers...the novel traces the stories of the different humans who contributed bits and pieces....each bit, eyes, hands mouth etc of the monster has its old owner's history...

That's the structure and it can be started anywhere and be followed anywhere...it is a hypertext novel

Blake is a multi-media artist, obviously not virtual, through, through the web, the new virtual Blake allows a the possibility of an hypertext approach. ...The Blake Archive allows so much more than the paucity of illumination available to earlier critics.

This edition of Jerusalem sees Albion as composed of the bits and pieces of his inner energies..Blake calls them zoas and emanations and sons and daughters etc...everything eventually has its own minute particular story and the story of them all is told in a four level multi-linear narrative....four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold.

Jerusalem Explained is designed to be read in a hyper/text/novel form ...not only is it a line by line analysis as it allows every line to be related to all other lines in an aesthetic whole...and it can and should be read as a linear narrative of four-levels of perception....BUT, also it can be read in an hyper/text/novel approach as you might read Shelley Jackson...begin anywhere and go anywhere.... it should always makes sense.... it is intended to be like a coffee/table/book...it can be read from any start, a reader can go anywhere, stop any time, flick through and start again... go virtually anywhere in any self-chosen route and the commentary will help unite the reading to the whole...and always it is Blake you are reading...closely savoring his poetry

It is the first such attempt in literary criticism I know of...and it depends entirely on the line-by-line-analysis and ten years of journeys in the 'oceans' of Blake Jerusalem and the computer as a means of liberating readers from the artificial stereotype of a-devoted-reader-who-can't-put-the-book-down....and likely don't pick it up again...or someone studying literature. This is written for real readers who start stop, start again, forget and repeat....and might takes minutes and minutes enjoying a line or two or an image...just the beauty.

The hyper/text/novel/ form is technically called a non-linear reading...but there can be no such thing literally...every reading is necessarily linear...so i call it a multi-linear reading....there is a causal narrative and clear authorial direction, and there is the always-true-reality that a reader stops whenever he or she feel likes it.

It opens Jerusalem up to personal encounters with Blake's poetry... otherwise Blake is just not so available...magnificent poetry laid over by the trowels of post-modern melancholic cynicism...

THE AMBIGUITIES OF AULT AND DORTORT ARE SHOWN AS RESOLVED...SOME EXAMPLES ....GIVEN LATER...........LATER BUT THE RESOLUTIONS ARE PRESENTED CLEARLY IN SHAKESPEARE'S HEIR

there seems to be a head on confrontation here...between Blake and the post-moderns and they are soooooooo very insulting...Ault and Dortort, ....they sound like a modern variant of that man Hunt in the 1809 exhibition who accused Blake of being mad ...only not locked up because he is harmless and it stuck with billy b...until his sanity was assured by the genius of Yeats, Ellis, Damon and Frye. ..... Hunt of course is famous only for this one 1809 attack on Blake.

There's been no significant change in terms of the poems structure since 1948...Ault and Dortort, Pierce and Otto all recapitulate Frye's three point conclusion...the poem begins in medias res, the myth is chaotic, and it founders on the apocalypse. The others just sing at the same song sheet...about both The Four Zoas and Jerusalem ...and call it ambigous...takes Derrida's continuous discontinuity and his view from Freud that the individual grammar of a dream transcends any archetypeal trace, and we have post-modernism.......the Frye Bloom brilliance and respect replaced by the failed poetic and self-subversion

???????????????................are we serious????????. did I miss a meeting???????????????????

Jerusalem Explained actually does give the work's four level multi-strand narrative and with its hyper/text/novel form, Blake poetry without fashist domination.

With the ambiguities resolved so are the criticisms resolved...there are always more...... poetry depends on ambiguity and the escape of words from the paradigmatic and syntagmatic controlling cold frenzies of semiotics......... criticism depends on the unambiguous

the up date: Shakespeare's Heir

2009-07-20T20:33:00.011+01:00

Just an update

A significant development has taken place in the last two-three months...and major additions made to its content...the result is the book is now 250 odd pages and this will be available soon...being proof read as I write this. The book includes a reconstruction of the Second Blackfriars, (and revisits the work done in The Second Blackfriars: the Globe Indoors 1973).

The web site at present is being revised professionally and in a few weeks the three books should be put in a more visually pleasant site; that is

William Blake's Jerusalem Explained

William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained (could change)

Shakespeare's Heir: Blake's Doors of Perception in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem

Time and health.

Does a stereo system play non linear music? Or not?

2009-05-23T17:34:00.026+01:00

Congratulations Dr Broglio. Your course Christ in an Orb (Night III: The Four Zoas) and its challenges seems to this retired academic to be inspiring.

It is the claim of non-linearity that concerns me...that's all...just the claims of this curious assertion as an aspect of literature, film, art and music...each are different.....To my mind, the claim needs to be placed in an 'epoche', Heidigger-style, in a closed intellectual micro-world. It can only be a metaphor, a bracket of suspended disbelief, to paraphrase Coleridge, that asks us to enter Blake's art and poetry. However, it remains the platform for some post modern literary philosophy and is presented as a serious alternative to the aesthetic coherence of a linear plot, or a causal event after event mythic flow with a beginning, a process of causality, and an ending. By contrast, what seems to be meant is a multi-linear text not a non-linear text.

Dr Broglio's discourse is worth extensively quoting/summarising to understand the pedagogy of MOO spaces and the discourse of the non-linear narrative. He seeks to present students with experiences of literature through electronic visual mediums, experiences of Blake especially, that:
1. seek to "link together disparate textual spaces together"...to "reconfigure" textuality and linear narrative.
2. In Broglio's view, Blake's presentation of "Eternity [is] marked by a deletion of knowledge, a forgetting of the non-knowing of origins in the attempt to establish a unified perceptual field".
3. He writes "Blake attempts to shatter this illusionary field through the convolution of narrative space/time in the opening of incommensurable spaces".
4. He claims the "narrative builds round the Lamb of God" and the "repeated fragmentation of Night VIII...[means] the transfer of Luvah's signs from Orc to the Lamb".
5. He asks we identify and study the "stabilization and destabilization of character" and the "construction of identity".
6. He sees the process of creative totalization as a "hallucination of desire on to the landscape"...for the "spaces resonate with their [the authors] visions"
7. He asks the students responses to show an "unrestricted engenderment of associated meanings"
8. He wants also that the "rational and linear stuctures of reading" become a "radical subjectivity capable of negociating destabilized narrative spaces" in which
9. critical understanding are seen as "shuttling between multiple discursive positions and modes of subjectivity".
10 Thus, that he writes a reader can "unbind" their "discourse" [into] "a subjectivity that recognises itself as an emanation, a spectre of the ideological forces acting upon it"

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/-Broglio/eromantic/orbimg.htlm.

that's the web site for Ruegg and Broglio.

I think the issues raised seem dealt with in the books on this site...however, without presumptive pedagogical comment, in sequence 1-10, I think it shown:
1. there are no incommensurable spaces; eternity is not a forgetting.
2. That the perceptions of infinity are three-fold and four-fold in clear narrative levels
3. and that the illusionary fields are two-fold perceptions and are shattered as the two Limits are consumed, and, the 'hallucinations' of landscapes are usually poetic passages of transition between the four levels of narrative discourse.
4. Night VIII is not fragmented, see my The Four Zoas Explained...(the first full scale study of the poem and its stages of construction)...elsewhere in this web site... a summary is in the April 2007 blog entry below.... the textual study of the linked Night VI, Night VII(a) and Night VII(b), and Night VIII are specifically united by Blake in his third major stage of revision and in the fourth stage with his penciled late additions. The relations between Orc, Luvah and the Lamb of God are presented therein.
5. Blake's characterization is consistent and developmental. Each of Blake's figures is a dramatic identity and there is no character slippage. Exits and entrances are dramatically logical and coherently follow the event causality and poetry of transition, as is clearly outlined in Shakespeare's Heir.
6. No series of associations can be unrestricted, for the meanings are necessarily limited to the medium, deconstruction is a self-cleansing interactive activity. and, is Blake's self-proclaimed prophetic task and discourse context,
7. for, every creative effort is ultimately a unity, Blake know this and claims it prophetically true of his art, poetry and myth. His claims to structural clarity and literary excellence are justified and I have found (and shown) that he should be believed.
8. Destabilized spaces are simply unperceived movements between the four levels and
9. shuttling between them is absolutely necessary to understand that every creative effort in Blake major prophecies is interwoven by a four level multi-linear narrative in consciously crafted literary unity, as shown in the (first) line-by analysis of The Four Zoas in The Four Zoas Explained and in (also the first) line-by-line analysis of Jerusalem in Jerusalem Explained
10. Finally, the subjectivity of the reader is an "emanation", a "spectre" of "ideological forces acting upon" the person"...in a sense I agree, however, each term is specifically contextualised by Blake, and his prophetic discourse 'peels the spectre off' the multi-linear narrative dynamic and, since the prophet sees what ordinary people do not see but can, he reveals the symbols that creatively inspires psychic transformation. Blake's immense psychic value lies in his symbolic presentation of mind in dynamic engagement with the process of his narratives. Blake does bring his psychic encyclopediac myth to completion. Thus he creates a perceptually transformational imaginative achievement for an audience.

Further, always in Blake, 'emanation' is feminine and both infinite and finite, while 'spectre' is entirely male and finite (with the prophetic exception of the Spectre of Urthona) so the yoking of the two involves the interpenetration of both energies and multiple levels of narrative simultaneity, for example, the figures of Enitharmon and the Spectre of Urthona in Jerusalem Chapter 2, fleeing to the Sons of Eden from the blood-flood of Albion's interior collapse into generation, is a symbolic correlation of emanation and Spectre of Urthona in terms of Eden. As Los' Spectre the three-fold vision of an opened furnace liberates The Spectre of Urthon from the enclosed space/time of the Spectre of Luvah.

To understand the correlation we need to know the finite and infinite concomitant contexts of the poem as an aesthetic whole, with a clear grasp of essentials the very least of which involve a practical grasp of the integrated four levels of vision and their corresponding levels of discourse and 'signage'; of Albion and Jerusalem; Luvah and Vala in Chapter 2; Ulro, Generation, Eden and Beulah; Jesus within and without; and the poetry of transition between the four narrative parallels.

It is simply the claim of non-linearity that concerns me. I find this shown to be based on textually deficient methodologies. Blake's epics are multi-linear. His myth is not non-linear, nor is it mono-linear nor monological... In The Four Zoas I have shown we have stereo-textuality...
In an analogy, the two Nights VII are like music from two speakers that are different in source but are united in a third, not graphically or phonetically marked or written directly edifice of sound in the listener's aural imagination...To develop the analogy of music, in Jerusalem , as I have shown, we have 'quadrophonic textuality'... There are four discourse sources in four Chapters each of which is different in narrative process but one in a dynamic imaginative whole that in turn is NOT non-linear...it IS multi-linear. It is also worth noting that the reader will find there is an extraordinary remembering...everything is remembered claims Los...all in three-fold Golgonooza in dynamic, interactive vortices in three-fold sublime unity.

Thereby the audience become interactive individual source. Impenetrable complexity, the criticism most often reached, I feel is all too often is a product of frustrated comprehension for to express something simply it must be known in depth. Comprehension is the pathway to simplicity and Blake, once read properly, is a simple man and his poetry expresses simple truths of human interiority as a multi-linear harmonic of woven intertextualites, fragmentations and self-annhiliation, perceptual renewal, psychic reconnectedness and inner mutalities reconciled all strategies of psychic survival after severe trauma.

Blake advances us to reconfigure perceptual forms of psychic collapse and fragmentation, and unity and resolution. The Albion at the end of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem is NOT the Albion of the beginning of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. Albion does not simply return to the beginning. Blake is not writing a cycle of descent and return out of and back to a state of innocent origin precisely because that signifies deterministic futility and, in his major prophecies, is the discourse universe of two-fold vision.

In the ways alleviation of ignorance alleviates suffering, great art heals and Blake heals. Simply by following the text, however fragmentary the experience initially, many people are moved into growth and self-revelation by interaction with Blake's art and poetry...and perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that retreats into assertions of Blake's madness, or as now, the madness of Blake's texts, are alike examples of intellectual frustration even academic hubris... We find in book after book how in one way or another it is all Blake's fault...Is he impenetrable? To my mind this tacit admission of failed critical acumen may be because the critic has yet to read Blake clearly enough, and deeply enough...and having failed to see, finds Blake blind.

It is the audience that experiences pre-existent fragmentation and it is the audience, in individual participation in interactive psychic discourse, that build unique personal structures of healed vision when Blake's golden thread is followed.

Now, the spiritual journey of his prophetic multi-linear narrative can be seen NOT as incommensurable, impenetrable, plotless, destabilized, with no consistent characterization and without linear or even rational causality, BUT as brilliantly crafted epic adventures with consciously crafted plots of interlaced, multi-linear, narrative structure that binds each unit of meaning to all the other units of meaning in structural and narrative unity. Now we can take Blake's journey with a clearer grasp and share his levels of prophetic vision...and in a literary sense they become unique, multi-linear prophetic vision of individual perception.

linear, non-linear and multi-linear narrative in Blake

2009-05-20T15:00:00.016+01:00

Linear and non-linear narrative in William Blake?

Hypertext...space...the new media...and multi-dimensional possibilities... MOO spaces and controls of information speed and multi-systemic constructions in art, literature and of course music... There was a conference 2009 at Goldsmith's College, june, financially supported by the Harold Pinter bequest...the aesthetics of transformational drama tends to be the experimental cutting edge of all the arts in my judgment... 'Beyond the linear narrative' the conference is proudly entitled, giving a date and linear timetable ... so I thought, how can we really talk meaningfully about a non-linear narrative simply because a text 'folds back on itself'... without linearity there can be no folding back of events into apparent discontinuity... or into dissolution and morphic re-manifestation.

........... and, folded linearity is simply time-folded continuities, unperceived till perceived in revelatory sentience... character epiphany....the within and without experienced in the imagination of the Human Form Divine, as Blake symbolised four-fold vision... which is trans-temporal and trans-spatial in the sense of serial time....

Serial time, created by Los and Enitharmon in the sun and moon symbolism is the longditudinal of the matter geometry of height, width and depth of the forms we perceive... Albion compacts and stonifies into frozen inertia...the compression is symbolised by Urizen's Temple of generation/nature worship.

Thus Albion collapses inward...and concommitent with turning inward from God is his absolute contraction within two-fold finite perceptual being until one-fold eternal stasis becomes the end point of Albion's eternal sleep...

Blake's art and poetry invite us to envision in three-fold sublime the energies of Albion enter two-fold finite sensory revelation. Blake's prophetic revelation details the shattering mutual predation of self-authorised fragmented component energy as Albion splinters, duration-bound, into Zoa, Emanation and Spectre, Son and Daughter, inert, unmalleable material forms, generative cyclicity, sexual and economic enslavement and murderous sacrifice for 'spiritual food and nourishment'. He falls from infinite, regenerative translucence in the infinite contraction of time and space in unity with God....or Blake's dynamic of infinite creative fulfilment in Divine energy....into Ulro and Generation...

Theologically, this collapse can be thought of as a Blake's myth of the fall into separation, blindness, division and contraction into primordial, elemental, non-being. Here is where Blake's origins of finite nature begin... precisely because Albion is contingent, once self-severed from Divine energy he is self-severed from the source of all being, for Blake the living energies of God, and has only his own energies to feed off and so Albion's components self-predate. The collapse is limited by God's intervention. Albion can't save himself else he would not need God; his hubris is to think otherwise, to think he rules life, death, work and fertility, and thought.

Such is the world we live in and for Blake the education and cleansing of human perception through sublime prophetic art is to reveal the infinite in the finite through Jesus, or the Divine principle....

The limits set are called Satan and Adam...Blake's Spectre symbolises our world's ideas of life and death in Ulro and Generation. The two limits are respectively perceptual and material and are ordered by the Temple. Satan is symbolic of a moral absolute based on finitude and is organised into a negation of the Divine within and without by Urizen's Temple of negative perception. Adam is the reduced human life symbolised by Rueben, whose life energies are both limited to life and death within the five senses and are controlled by the imperative of reproduction and power over others through war, human sacrifice and enslavement.

...and Golgonooza is the rendering into linear three-fold sublime of the precise perception that serial time has rolled back into itself and past, present and future enwrap into the entry of Divinity. Jesus enters finite at the centre, and thus is infinitely within Albion's morally insane attempt to escape Divinity without, by turning away inside. Albion finds God within and God without. Thus each Chapter of Jerusalem concludes its compression and expansion narrative from circumference of Albion's 'body' inwards in dissolution to the centre, then, after Divine intervention, back through time and space to the circumference of the thereby transformed finite. Albion 'begins' as the Angel of the Presence, where all things are perceptually possible and turns from God. Each Chapter travels a different narrative continuum and each concludes with Albion in the arms of Jesus. Chapter 1, 2 and 3 conclude with Albion collapsed into eternal death/sleep, denying the Jesus in whose arms he lies. In Chapter 4, after another co-parallel multi-linear narrative of apocalyptic or visionary cleansing, Albion awakens in unity with Jesus. The End, claims Blake and rightly so. His multi-levelled narrative lives imaginatively in aesthetic unity as a narrative whole. Once properly understood in these terms and in this coherent causal logic, it is no longer critically reasonable to claim Blake is a non-linear 'exemplar' of post modern technological possibilities. His work is multi-linear and the difference is enormous.

Blake's Canaan is his symbolic birth passage that is just such a infolded and unfolded linear narrative continuum that becomes a historical present....Canaan is an formed order of events in finitude that infolds to become the womb and birth passage of the feminine energies from Jerusalem to Mary and to the incarnation of Divine principle unfolding as creative mercy as Jesus is crucified and then returns in Ulro. The birth, death and resurrection means the revelation of infinite life within finite life, and so rolls back all finitude from the centre/east in all directions simultaneously to the circumference.

This narrative is symbolised by the Harvest and Vintage in all three major prophecies. Once infinite energy is perceived by Los and Enitharmon in Night VIII the apocalypse MUST follow as infinite energy and perception must consume the lesser energies of serial generation... necessarily also, the three-fold sublimity of Golgonooza's architecture genius is consumed in Night IX, or in the four-fold unity with God we experience in Jerusalem Plates 94-100.

Can we have a non-linear dream? No we cannot...by analogy neither can we have a non-linear literary work ...it is philosophically impossible...we cannot have a dream that does not live in a theoretically totalisable seriality... philosophically, depth pyschology itself is meaningless if the dreaming or imaginative intelligence is merely random even in existential psychology (such as outlined in Binswanger's classic study)... Randomness is a misleading metaphor for Blake....ultimately nothing is random because every 'minute particular', as Blake symbolised finite and infinite materialities, is in emanative communion with all others, in different coalescent entities of a particular composite of space and a duration in time...thus Enitharmon weaves nature's forms from spiders to lambs...or Rahad, Tirzah and Vala's iron spindles, thread, molten rivers and self-predatory weaving in negation. It merely seems that randomness is intrinsic to Blake's symbolisation of time and space and so of human life times and life spans. Blake's narrative is multi-linear.

For Blake, we do live in metaphors that are sensory in origin and absolutely in union with the perceptual modes we name or experience or point toward as forms of energy and their morphology in entropy...or their changing composition as time is experienced, as a cell becomes foetus becomes child, adult ages and dies and is reduced to cells again... When Blake's prophetic art and poetry is totalised into its four levels of narrative linearity, apparent discontinuity is found to be simply a discourse engaged in one of the levels. In literary terms, there is always a multi-level linear narrative in four-fold connectedness... defined in Blake's work as the figure of Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb, and, the symmetrical, infinitely dynamic unity with God in four-fold perceptual experience of four-fold space and four-fold time, as in the multi-linear last plates of Jerusalem, Plates 94-100.

Blake shows us that even as Albion 'dies' in the fixed limits of Ulro, Urizen is beaten and forged into the restricted forms of the five senses in the furnace of Los and Golgonooza is founded. Thus, Albion's interior energies are seen by Blake as energy/matter morphologies.... interactive and dynamic.... and Los is mutually transformed with Urizen though is never Urizen or any other zoa energy...Urthona, Los, the Spectre or Urthona/Los and Enitharmon are the elemental energy forms of prophetic truth and expression... and, likewise, all other component energies of the other three zoas and the three emanations are dynamically transformed on the four levels of narrative linearity in ways beyond the individual comprehension of each form.

Thus, in The Four Zoas, Orc does not comprehend Luvah and Luvah's Spectre, nor Tharmas understand the Spectre of Tharmas. In Blake's narrative linearity, the greater embraces the lesser but the lesser cannot envision the greater. Four-fold sees all within and without, three-fold envisions two-fold but not four-fold...twofold sees no three or four-fold vision but perceives one-fold death...one-fold is Newton's sleep and sees no other life or awakening.

We, the audience, are in a two-fold world...Blake's prophetic multi-linear narrative levels of vision sees, in three-fold vision, the contraction into two-fold desolation and ruin of the four zones of east/centre, west/circumference, north/nadir and south/zenith that is Albion's interior ruin. For example, it is a two-fold ruin that Urizen, his senses forged into two-fold perceptual reduction by Los, after God sets the two Limits. That is why Urizen blindly sees and experiences only two-fold vision in Night the Sixth.

Blake's narratives are multi- linear...the non-linear methodologies of current theories do not organise the events into four planes....for example the two Nights VII of The Four Zoas, in my reading, are in linear stereo-textual unity. This is NOT non-linear. It is multi-linear. Likewise the narrative in Jerusalem...as shown, in each of the four Chapters contracts to the centre, where Divine intervention turns the vortex inwards and outwards back to the circumference in linear transformational narrative. There are thus four such linear narratives, and the four are drawn into quadrophonic-textual multi-linear unity in the last Plates 94-100.

In summary for this days blog entry, the electronic extensions such as in Broglio's exciting pedagogy of MOO space, fail to transform perception simply because the electronic mediums of experimental forms of creative discourse loosely lump event change into a balloon called non-linearity. By contrast, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem are shown beyond reasonable doubt to be linear narratives...there are three books on this web site that demonstrate that literary fact. Simply because critics following Ault claim these epics are impenetrable, plotless, non-linear and subversive of linearity, textual stability and therefore offer no character stability, does not mean these conclusions are correct...or that incommensurable 'non-linearity' is therefore methodologically correct. It is not correct. It is where we start. We finish elsewhere. We finish in multi-linear inter-connected, consciously crafted mythic coherence. We find Blake's major prophecies to be quite different multi-linear masterpieces of story telling and dramatic spiritual adventure.

What is meant by the term non-linear? What is meant by the term 'beyond the linear narrative' when linearity is philosophically hypothesised, and, then, negated like some straw dummy to be replaced by disassociated continuums.

In critical fact, we have a multi-linear presentation of character variants, fragmentations or fractals, presented to us deficiently as non-linear. Blake's multi-linear narratives are vortical in their symbolic functions. Blake's narrative intends connectedness. It seems proven beyond reasonable critical doubt that Blake should be believed. Thus, speech by speech, and action (or event) following action or event, as they do in both his art and his poetry, are connected by conscious psychic association and by the creation and entering of possibilities of artictic perception by multi-linear symbolic discourses ...or simply put, how he communicates his multi-dimensional myth.

What is new about this non-linear claim? In Shakespeare's Heir the prescient enfolding of past, possible presents and encapsulated futures are always shattered into revelatory fragments of the events that do occur...hence the chaos of fragmentation of King Lear...all of which fractured and destabilised narratives become woven into a multi-linear narrative not a non-linear narrative. It would seem to me to be the methodology of multi-linear narrative and discourse analysis, like Lear's deconstructed sanity, allows for Blake's brilliant perceptual innovation.

Well...of course the problem lies in perception of the whole...of the body as a whole and of the emanative components of non-linear response therein that, warring in disunity and embryonic consciousness, separates materialisation of events and actions from a concept of the self as an entity... e.g. Urizen's dragon form is a materialisation of his two-fold incapacity of conceptualise an infinity outside serial time and the matter geometry of height, depth and width: thus Urizen claims to be 'God from eternity to eternity' or, for the duration of Ulro, and the 8500 years of circle of destiny drawn by feminine energy (Erin in Jerusalem)

In an owned identity of awareness....i.e. as a conscious creative entity he believes is in unity in Divine inspiration, Blake symbolises the whole of time and space as body...the body of Albion and his emanation Jerusalem...

For Blake, perceptions are continuums of energy and form, or continuums of time and space, that are woven by 'looms' and 'spindles' into living forms in nature such as birds, fish, animals or even as dragon forms and trees .... After Albion's collapse within, into 'death' or 'eternal sleep', his inner elements are gathered by the net of Vala...and finite generation is temporarily energised by her sacrifice of Luvah's mundane energies. Jesus descends into the vegetable form of the deficient exhausted and tortured body of Luvah, the crufuxion cuts Luvah's dead 'clothing' of body and Jesus' return from death is revealed in 'glory'.

It is essential we know that in Blake, Vala always gives the bodies while Jerusalem always gives the souls. To Blake then, the infinite energies of all living things are passed from Jerusalem into the finite, to Vala, who gives finite form (while wrongly believing she gives life as the Goddess of Nature). The cleansing of Vala and Luvah is symbolised by the vintage; and the 'wine' of finite error fills the cup of Rahab. Blake completes this symbol in the taking and disolution of the wine of distilled sorrow by Jerusalem. Urizen's error is consumed in the bread of ages.

In Blake's narrative everything is energy and form... either finite or infinite...and as energy is perceived so the perceiver is self-perceived ....for as perception is, so the energy relations within and without become material woven form in a vortex of interaction...for example, Blake symbolises the universe as a 'universal tent' that can be raised or lowered in the perceptional will of emanative energy as a theatre curtain. Thus, after the cleansing 'doors of perception' as so self-perception, Jesus allows Albion to enter infinite life in love in the unity of God. Divine revelation awakens Albion, cleansed by the vortex of apocalypse of the Limit Of Satan and the Limit of Adam, or, in other terms, cleansed of the eternal sleep of self-annhilation, mere sentience and finite-hood.

the narrative in Blake traces the linear process of these self-predating component energies in Albion's 'body'. The morphology of these component materialities gyrate in vortices of interacting dimensions of multi-linear form and energy folding in, out, and between four planes of discourse and four levels or quanta of information: namely, one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold.

I will be back to this...a critical system claimed to be non-linear in Blake's major prophecies fails entirely to reveals connectedness. It fails to establish the synchronic and diachronic folds that embraces the unity of the whole body of the work as, actually, multi-linear narration simply moves from one level of perception to another through the poetry of transition between these four levels of vision.

The one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold narrative linearities are quantum fields of information in Blake's conscious linear crafting.

I'll return to this...but read the three books on The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, and on Blake's dramatic narrative.

Blake's axis: visualising Blake

2009-04-28T14:15:00.017+01:00

Blake's axis: visualising Blake's poetry? I've brought this back from earlier thoughts..

the poem is the thing .........how to look at Blake's logoi in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem....that is the focus for this blog and web site.

Blake's major prophecies or epics can be read fluently and clearly once Blake's symbols and 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. So his myth is for an audience open to quantum perception on four levels.

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 like an audience watching a play. We watching Caesar walking to be murdered...we know it Caesar doesn't...The book Shakespeare's Heir: William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained details this dramatic narrative clearly.

The delusion of ladders or chains of being

envisioning Blake's art/poetry, especially in his major prophecies, means a suspension of ingrained habits of logocentric-laddered hierarchies, such as our Medieval enclosures of vertical concepts of mind that are expressed in god/priest, god/king and god/leader (know your place on the ladder of success spin-quanta foamstuff), alpha males and females we celebrate and project into, the old Gnostic speculation about live spirit enclosed by lifeless matter, of higher and lower consciousness, orders of ladders of being to step upon and climb, ladders of promotion and ladders of rank, ladders to inform us of our place in what is, in truth, just the rubbish of a flat-earth order of things from the highest to the lowest from Satan at the centre of earth in the fires of hell (as in the late medieval ptolemaic and astrological cosmos), through the planetary heavens of the rings of astrology and the primum mobile egg-shelled about us.

For Blake, there are no ladders in nature. All of is human-made (actually man made, the women are lesser as in Urizen's world order). And it is the product of limited perceptual intelligence. Urizen's Temple of order and perception is structured/laddered upon a two-fold delusion of the other's lesser worth, and their sacrificed energies to satiate appetite for sex or greed or pleasure or the psychosis of sacrificing another for the self. This is symbolised by the remaking of Urizen by Los with the senses limited to the form of Adam and morphologised into the human person of Rueben.

Blake's Satan

In Blake's myth the 'hell' of the centre is not his Satan. Here is Blake's creation of Orc and the explosive destruction of the two-fold militarist/predatory/sacrificial two-fold order. At the centre of being itself is the but the creative power of the furnace of Los/Orc...The furnace, as well-known in Blakean commentary, symbolises the irriducible core of creative encounter with life and death at the centre of individual life in psychological terms. The furnace 'melts' the forms of two-fold life, and inspired by three-fold sublime vision, Los re-forges the two-fold orders of perception and its realities symbolised by Urizen's Temple. Los and Enitharmon re-form two-form life and generation into sublime three-fold vision/time and form/space, and the city of spiritual architecture, or city of sublime material and perceptual creativity, in which this inspired work continually happens is Golgonooza. Golgonooza is given 5000 years out of the 8500 that is the period of Ulro and Generation. (Blake's dating is entirely consistent as shown in William Blake's Jerusalem Explained

It is also useful to see the individual in the most minute energy/space continuum, today we think of the nano world of a unique life form and its boundary conditions where it seems everthing is seen as energy. Blake seems to consider each constituent element, form or state in finitude a Minute Particular and each collation of particle and cemistry and energy a life-time in a universe in which 'everything that lives is holy'. Blake called the outer shell of Albion's 'finite body', his 'skin-organ, so to speak, the circumference (west) the Mundane Shell, and he gave the fires of core being and creative rage at the centre (east) of Albion's materiality to the furnaces of Los (and to Orc in The Four Zoas).

Blake's Satan is another state altogether. It is not a state of creative energy at all. it is negation. As negation it has a being in finitude but, wholly finite, Satan has no infinite life. It is being without liufe and so is consumed as Albion re-awakens to infinte modes of being and perception as in Plates 94-100 of Jerusalem

In such a cosmological system, time is believed to be Divine, the planets are believed to be predictive and astrology is believed to be prophecy. This for Blake is Urizen's two-fold blindness and leads to nature worship, and so is seen as a form of insanity by those in four-fold vision in creative unity with God.

Blake's Mundane Shell

Albion's interiority is composed of the eight energies and their forms they create in self-predation for Albion turned away Divine energy to his own energy, and self-predates until he is self consumed and 'dead'. Blake symbolises these layered interiors of Albion the '27 'rings' or heavens of Ulro'. Then, Blake encloses these 27 rings with Erin's circle of destiny/time/space of 8500 years and this outer ring, the 28th, encloses the 27 and it is called is the Mundane Shell.

For Blake, every element of two-fold perception 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 and our moder bankers of usury), 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 on a taxation ladder or a capital/wage ladder as marx sees us.....or the sociologically frozen castes of the religious class system as every sectarian church or religious hierarchy of holiness sees itself.....or the evolution of consciousness in its hierarchies of capability as psychology and archaeology and genetics sees us ....or the idea of history as collingwood puts it..and so on...each is a discourse and all things exist in and as narrative too as the post-modernist and decontructralist sees it............and so on into the infinities of semiology.

In this context, Blake created a uniquely expressed synthesis or myth to grasp his understanding of the purpose of being....and it is this synthesis that is analysed and presented in this web site, as independent aesthetic wholes, in two of Blake's major epic myths; namely The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. (Blake's Milton is to come, however, it follows Milton is also a crafted story available as a narrative). I have analysed Milton and will trace its dramatic narrative in the next year or so. Two of the three giant, major, prophecies epics are explained. The third, Milton, is also free from chaos.

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 annihilated 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, to rule the living, to breed them, to feed off them in the finite future in a cycle of life, death and birth: thus in Blake, sacrificing life to feed or please or placate God is error.

Nature worship, sacrifice of humans and animals and the druids

We know now as archeological certain that it was not the druids who built the henges but the indigenous religion of the proto-celts,...and we also know that the circle people were widespread throughout europe and the mediterranean, for example there are thousands of such neolithic stones in modern Jordan.

Blake is partly correct archaeologically... his symbols are of human sacrifices that did actually happen in human history, but there is no trace of blood at Stonehenge or Woodhenge, any other henge, wood or stone...However, 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 for such human sacrifice is found (e.g. Greece, Babylon, Carthage, 'Latin' America) and animal sacrifice is commonplace globally. Indeed the volume of sacrificed animals at the second Templke is phenomenal, the smell of blood must have descended upon the senses in such centres of slaughter.

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, as symbolised by the iron spindles of Vala, and does not transcend death at all. This is in reciprocal inversion of Blake's story of Jesus, who takes on the suffering of Albion's auto-idolatry, and being the Divine incarnate, uniquely 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 an 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 kill each other off, feeding off each other until they are all dead or collapsed into primordial chaos. 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 their independent vortices, in two-fold vision.

The only energies available for sustenance within Albion are the energies of life taken by feeding off death. The energies become like vampires. This is the life of finitude, or nature as symbolised by Vala's web or net or veil. In Blake's myth, Jerusalem always gives the souls and Vala always gives the bodies or material form. In Vala's finite nature, the components seek power over all other components for sustenance and for breeding future sustenance. Hence the children are sacrificed, for they serve to give the remainder of their life to those that drain the energies.

Jesus saves Albion by entering finitude from the centre exploding outward, as must be, the revelation of infinite life in finite life necessararily consumes finitude. In Blake's vision of Divine energy, Jesus assumes all the error in the Divine kenosis or sacrifice. Error, or the Limits Of Adam and Satan, is thereby revealed as finite being without infinite life, which in turn thereby is cast off. The the hardened finite spectre of the two Limits or the State of Satan and Adam are consumed entirely.

Albion's perceptions are infinitely cleansed of the Limit or State of Satan and of Adam and he is re-awakened in the bosom of Jesus....... in three-fold vision 'all eternity' has always seen Albion as 'dead' in the sleep of death, in the arms of Jesus ....in Jerusalem for example, as is symbolised by Jesus' architecture of Albion's Tomb. ....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 all directions contracting 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. At the boundaries are Blake's limits, for examples, the Limits of expansion and contraction, the Limits of translucence and opacity and the Limits of Adam and Satan, and the casting out of limits in the apocalypse leads to purification.

Albion's Hubris is cleansed and Albion is restored in forgiveness to unity in creative regeneration.

To the secular reader such as Youngquist, Webster and so many other fine scholars, this journey is seen as the descent onto madness and return to unity through creative effort by Blake. A school of Blakean psychology with be valuable indeed.

Urizen's journey in Night the Sixth

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 (William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained, Chapter VIII) clearly proves Blake's conscious narrative control. To go from the zenith to nadir is thus seen as a concomitant 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. We see Urizen enter all quadrants from the circumference where he meets his daughters, through zenith, centre (sets vortices), and nadir, and returns to the circumference. He however, sees his voyage only in two-fold compass points north, south east and west.

The two versions of Night the Seventh follow the journey of Night the Sixth. They are stereo-textual. Like stereophonic music there is a unique 'sound' in each speaker that is different, uses different instrements for example, and there is another 'sound', a third 'sound' in the privilidged auditory imagination of the audience that is not 'in' either speaker. There are different notations too existing as different 'scores'. We see in Blake's emendations and additions that his textual changes integrates Ninght the Sixth with the two Nights the Seventh and Night the Eight. (see William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained).

From the infinite, Albion's vortical energy sweeps rotate outward and inward about an axis through the centre of Albion's consciousness from zenith to nadir. the seven furnaces, and the seven eyes of god are complementary symbols of the vortical within and without bonding of Albion's four-fold personhood in the finite to its infinite expression, in the teleology of God's 'economy' or plan of salvation. Though, as must be so, once turned from the face of Divine energy Albion is blind to Divine life and also to salvic mercy. Thus the axis is an omnisicent act of unconditional Divine love and sacrifice.

It takes the incarnation, the physical birth, death and resurrection of Jesus actually experienced and perceived by two-fold perception to awaken Albion from 'eternal death'. Closed within, Albion cannot perceive eternal life, but saw only nature and a finite birth/life/death continuum. In Blake's myth, the finger of God followed by the incarnation reveals divinity and so infinitely transcends death. this is Blake's three-fold-vision. then, then in Jesus' second coming, Albion enters unity with God. this unity of the 'within' and 'without' is Blake's four-fold vision as in plates 94-100 of Jerusalem.

Thus as shown in the three books in. www.thefourzoas.com, it is impossible to perceive the vortices of Blake's two, three and four-fold vision without understanding that his poetic vehicle is his geography of time and space as outlined above as in the three books....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 about the axis, not unlike the torus rotating about gravity in time predominent vortices and space predominent reciprocal toriodal vortices.

In summary, in The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, and implicitly everywhere, 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.

Further, the four realms are the psycho-physical finite expressions of Blake's four zoas and four emanations. With our three-fold vision as audience, we see their collapse into two-fold vision and self-predatory chaos. We can envision the sacrifice of the incarnate Divine principle as Jesus born within Albion, and we see Blake's apocalyptic cleansing of the second coming and see Albion re-awaken in unity in the love of God, a love that Blake has presented as always within and without.

Thus we see in Blake's plots in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, how Los and Enitharmon build a divinely inspired three-fold analogy of the city of God/the Human Form Divine, and Blake calls that Golgonooza. The prophetic vision of this sublime analogy, organises from the furnaces of creative power, the spiritual architecture of Golgonooza out of the interior of Albion's energy from the centre/east outward to the circumference/west.

In finitude (as in the stereo-textual Night the Seventh (a) and Night the Seventh (b) Urizen builds a Temple dynamic counterpoint to Golgonooza. The predatory energies of Albion seek in two-fold blindness to build this Temple of quasi-holiness to ritualise the murder of life to feed the self-predating component energies, and so to enslave sexuality for vampirism and for breeding, and for slave labour and war.

Blake's Jesus and sacrifice

The two opposing spiritual architectures, namely, the Temple and Golgonooza, energise time and space in inverse vortices of power. One vortex is in Night the Seventh (a) and the other is in Night the Seventh (b). they operate in stereo-textual unity. The vortical centres together focus upon the finger of God, the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection in Night the Eighth.

The Divine sacrifice in human life becomes a universal event-vortex that leads 'naturally to the apocalypse or the consumption of limited finite energy and form in the intensities of Divine energies and infinite regenerative forms to the cleansing and unification of each zoa/emanation reciprocal and so to the re-awakening of Albion in unity within and without in unity with Divine energy.

As is shown beyond reasonable critical doubt in my books, in Jerusalem there is a very different mythic logoi to that in The Four Zoas. There are four chapters each of which is a different world. In the four worlds there are four narrative sets of serial action. The four become one from Plate 94 to Plate 100 or the end.

However in both epics, 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 Jesus. thus the four zoas and emanations and the worlds in which they exist become one and Albion is awakened in regenerative unity with God.

Blake's final vision

Blake's final vision is symbolised in the last lines of The Four Zoas and most powerfully in the extraordinary visionary accomplishment of Plates 94-100 of Jerusalem.

Two-fold war

2009-04-14T17:43:00.007+01:00

What a lovely two-fold war...Blake didn't know about train crashes. We do. Leaders mean liars is a Urizenic consequence. He claimed to be God from eternity to eternity...he compresses inwards through the discourse of concentrations impacting in vortices to torus rings of linguistic briefness... the slogans are one torus that's easy and tight?...E=MC2 ... proves relativity... cries the absolutist... didn''t break the rules....cries the rule maker...value for money.... gobbles the pork barrel ...prohibition of pot and opiates...cry the pot capones ...tax avoidance call it ...'tax evadance'.... in the tax h(e)avens) ...cries the bankers.

Blake did write of child sacrifice. Men and Women in economic and sexual slavery... sacrificial ecstasy of Vala made mad, Like the WW I catastrophe with Field Marshall Haig sending hundreds of thousands into machine guns for months at the Somme. Didn't think of a new idea at all. Not one. Tanks were a problem. Didn't make sense. Like bankers and the lobby liars at the house of lords. And their sly ones about them. Blake's Babylon.

Killing to get energy... and the 20% of labour in India that are children.... make some 'entrepreneurs catastrophically slave energy addicted.

Can we see it? Looking through the three-fold lens at the two fold discourse?

Blake made easy

2009-03-10T17:49:00.024Z

Some news...I have written a 'Blake made easy' book. It is short, simple and very practical. It is about 100 pages long and its title is

SHAKESPEARE'S HEIR: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE FOUR ZOAS EXPLAINED

It is published by The William Blake Press; Cambridge; 2009.

At this moment its printing is delayed.... unavoidable glitches ....but the book can be ordered and will be delivered in 8 weeks or so. In the meantime I have put it on this web-site.

In this book is:

1. A reconstruction of the Second Blackfriars Theatre. My first principle is to work from the actual architecture and that allows...... second

2. A reconstruction of Elizabethan and Jacobean staging... at present this is lost or hidden... which is why Shakespeare usually fails to make visual sense. Placing Shakespeare and Blake in the same narrative dramatic tradition, using like dramatic conventions, thereby allows Blake's dramatic narrative to be outlined clearly, and, so, locates Blake in mainstream dramatic narrative thought and thus

3. I apply Shakespeare's conventions to Blake's The Four Zoas which consequently falls easily into coherence and unity. This allows Shakespeare's narrative drama to help reveal Blake's dramatic narrative and myths.

In so far as current consensus opinions are concerned there are three sets of fresh knowledge and fresh scholarly conclusions in all three books.

It is short and simple and very practical, and at the end of this, namely,

SHAKESPEARE'S HEIR: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE FOUR ZOAS EXPLAINED,

There are three fresh sets of creative vision:

1. an accurate re-construction of Shakespeare's the Second Blackfriars Theatre (bought 1596, 1608 first opening as playhouse) : this is probably the most accurate reconstruction of this contemporary theatre available and settles many architectural mysteries. This serves as a spiritual crucible for the multi-spacial and prescient conventions of time and space.

2. the stagecraft of Shakespeare's plays:
this resolves the issues of staging, exits and entries, props and the controlled staging of time and space in Shakespeare's contemporary theatre with no Act or Scene division and no Intervals. We examine the hidden conventions of dramatic narrative.

3. the dramatic mythology of The Four Zoas:
By examining the like conventions of time and space in a multi-linear dramatic narrative, Blake's epic is opened up into a powerful dramatic continuum and the hidden conventions of its mythic drama and logic revealed. This allows Blake's mythology to unfold in clear causal process.

In addition to this book, on the site is the first full-scale line-by-line analysis of The Four Zoas with all additions, deletions and emendments and the stages of the manuscript's growth and, in context, its completion: namely:

WILLIAM BLAKE'S THE FOUR ZOAS EXPLAINED

Further, also on the site is the first full-scale line-by-line analysis of Blake's Jerusalem: namely,

WILLIAM BLAKE'S JERUSALEM EXPLAINED.

ALL THREE CLEARLY AND SIMPLY HELP EXPLAIN BLAKE'S MYTHOLOGY.

thought for these days

2009-01-23T10:21:00.023Z

Thought for Today
while discussing Blake's illustrations. the critic Morton Paley quoted some lines from Young's Night Thoughts

We have been drinking with a rioteous thirst
Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth,
A selfish, lewd effeminate race
(55-7)

Poetry drama and art

2009-01-20T05:46:00.022Z

It seems every collapsed company needs criminal investigation with mandatory jail for tax evaders or mis-sellers

BACK to poetry drama and art... I thought

Here is an structure for a very short play/dance of about 30 minutes. Genet/Artaud style. no plot no authorial presence discontinuous narrative discordant music chants ....the use of surprise/shock....The Theatre and Its Double...The theatre as plague...as put by Artaud...

OPENING

huge aqueduct in rear of the stage over which lights and pictures are shone

first line of five national anthems. badly played and sung

ENTER

Running in knees up style all holding part of rope

THE EXECUTIVE.......

ENTER PARODIES
COSTUME TO SYMBOLISE

CEO (crooked for profit and wage slavery) and Chairman (crooked for power and easy money) Accountant (crooked to serve for avoidance and money) Lawyer (crooked for legalistic causistry and money) and Personnel (hitman and money)......
.
A motto for the set is put up by them above the aqueduct reads:
THE HIGHER THE RANK THE EASIER THE JOB

Dress and costume can't resemble any specific individual ....USE OF CRUTCHES, MONEY PINNED ON AND SO ON LIKE BATMAN COSTUMING....else they lose their immediacy...They start to lie the second time they speak.... these are spontaneous and should be original too and comic... with one line each.... heavily mimed (all good lies have an element of truth woven into perversion) the 'second' time they open their mouths..... spontaneous lies interact into verbal meaninglessness, laughter, anger...more cast comes on stage creative dancing...examples of stageing should be multicoloured, luminous...and masks. darkness and light strobe effect and zebra/lepoard/tiger stripes. break up human form, human/animal masks too snake bull pig rabbit SUDDEN TRUMPET...motionless silence
.....Backdrop film of a school on huge aqueduct in rear of the stage SUDDEN TRUMPET
cast become like children in school assembly
...MIME CEREMONY OF GIVING

written signs passed like giant playing cards over heads. heavy metal music soft and slowly getting louder

the ceo is given 'baron' like power... draped
rope about his neck drags him to his knees

huge £ sign and as many zeros as possible...reverse of card ... land playing fields buildings

each of the other four are awarded cards and rope drags to knees on the sides of the cards is written

30 peasants/ called teachers...
students/ £700o per head.
power/ is the goal.
its a/ lottery.

EACH line is on a huge card in ceremonial mime handed over like degree giving

BETWEEN each award

analogous to Genet's The Balcony masks of e.g. Judge General Police Fireman etc .....some genitals flash luminous colours...the cast is added ....climb about the aquaduct... all at times put on animal masks take them off ...engaged in chimp like screeching chasing ...putting on and taking off suits/masks and miming changes.... simulated random sex male and female...some one is painting.... someone else conducting the air.... another dancing slow motion...another covering bandages on another like a 'mummy'.... the works are torn up ritually and so on.... the actions are spontaneous too.... women here... NO children BUT some actions need to be human and loving....movement and stillness in action after action

each set about one minute of mime and two minutes of verbal action

while ceremony takes place onstage audience divided into five groups without regard for stage action....each group to be led by cheer leaders each with different sheet of paper with chants written and are cheer-led to chant a line at each other ... goal of cheer leaders is to allow a single chant per group clap cheer and the like as in a sports crowd. .....sample lines are.....

alpha males alpha female ....
Yahoos.... dignity
human rights
Dog eats dog ...
We wrecked the weather....
Wind before wave ....
greed is good.
sex is better
love is best..
more money
Tax-Haven Heaven.
why bonus

A Chimp masked character is in the corner of the set close to the audience with a unique agenda...building a heap of beans till expedential growth collapses..................................................threatening snarls lunges shouts.... throws paper at them actor independent timing

Another chimp in other corner beating drums softly and sublimely....angel mask and wings on a pair of lovers who sit in front of the drums bongos ...mime of love ....

CHORUS in full surround sound.................choir of children... startwith one lovely voice then two...three and so on till full throated and beautiful.... Rolling Stones number 'we can't always get what we want' but if you try somehow you get what you need and...

rhythmic chorus CLAW IT BACK is the new end game.

Scene shifts suddenly to silent huge backdrop film of leisure/wealth cast dancing

Suddenly the voices singing and films subordinated by thunder lightening flashes wind effects crashings and sounds sounds of pain and grief despair howling................. dance on stage to sound surrounds inside the theatre.

SUDDEN SILENCE

Prospero's speech from the Tempest

difference between stage and audience is dissolved stage characters sit in scattered seats in audience applaud and applaud

Think of the aqueduct ..... The major feature of the stage water drains down effect shimmering

all slowly exit leaving one choir person on aquaduct singing ....DRUMS SOFTLY PLAYING.....love will see us through...

light fade

THE END.
TIME TAKEN FOR PLAY 15/20 minutes

National anthem cast in audience stand up and salute each other boy scout salute each cast member pulls out toy pistol fires caps into air retreats onto stage and exit.

2009-01-06T20:28:00.012Z

the post-modern pulse?...everything is discourse.

Look again at the images of war in Blake's Jerusalem, the intellectual encounters of Eden and Beulah, and in contrast... down into the twofold time and space called Ulro and Generation ... in Eden ... or the enlightened life of reason...there is no classical glorification of death in war...come back with your shield or on it is the famous saying of the spartan mother....Vala could be her name. In Ulro the feminine real such as mothers... have children to be killed or sacrificed. Phallocentricism is twofold in Blake.

in fourfold life the feminine, Jerusalem, is a divinised form of living energy of love and of unity with all material realities.

it is a fair criticism, made by feminists critics, to see all god-the-father religions as phallocentric. in mystical theology all sexuality is transcended. the triune god is transexual else god limited to generation and that is impossible.....pure Blake there too .. who follows .. just dogmatic fact

2008-12-10T18:15:00.006Z

the prophet? Blake sees prophecy as speaking out

10 years of stagnant median wages while profits pork barrel their chairman/ceo bonused way to today. there it is oh battered brothers and sisters...the wealthiest group of economic midwives in history have delivered poverty.

Blake's a man who sees this. He makes art out of this. Gives us a discourse not cranked out by greed.

I have done some further thinking on Blake's art. Gave a truly pleasurable lecture for the Blake Society ....the subject was the plot of Blake's Jerusalem.... and I gave another a week later in the City.... on the 'new' Jerusalem and London. The Blake enthusiasts at the Society were such a joy to meet. Not that the conference in the City was less enjoyable, I focused on Blake's art for the different audience.

That takes me on to the next phase in my work on Blake. The Four Zoas is currently being edited. The main body of the study finished and peer-reviewed...I am writing the final verision of the introduction now. It should be published in a month or three.

Blake's art must follow I think. I have not included the art in my two studies. First, the studies are massive enough already....and the art cannot be properly understood without the two very different myths and the two very different plots known. My study of Blake's art follows my understanding of his myths.

2008-06-01T10:50:00.020+01:00

This blog looks at Blake's use of spinning and weaving the strings of finitude

Urizen/Temple, Vala and the iron spindles. That is the brief focus here.

opening reasonably......what 'type' or ideology of knowledge is signified here?

Blake’s two-fold compass points: north/ south/ east/ west…It is also true, given the significance of Ahania in The Four Zoas, that Blake enters a fresh dimension of zoa/emanative myth in Jerusalem for Ahania, Tharmas and Enion and Orc are far less evident. Tracing the plots of these epics in Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained show why.

There is no ONE plot and often there is no ONE text. the Dirridean monotone of no beginning and no end to any text turns mono-textuality into a straw dummy. Tzara in the Dadist Manifesto Cafe Voltaire is where Derrida sits. Two generations earlier. Leotard? The same.

There is a logical self-contradiction here...think of a university...i live in cambridge so the university here will do...there is no such THING as the University of Cambridge....there is this college or that college or the library or the grad-pad but no single thing that is a distinct object that can be shown as THE University of Cambridge. The University is a mental abstract too...it exists as a coherence differently in the mind of every person who thinks of it and may not exist in other minds at all. It has a reality that is entirely linguistic too. It is also legal entity ... and so forth.

Likewise a text. ..the alledged meaning depends on the idealogy of the poet as seen, heard, spoken of, shown or written about by critic... and its value lies in its coherence, even if like Ault et al, the only coherence is its incoherence... which is paradoxically the coherent argument made about an apparently constructed incoherence. each post modernist has THE plan his/her limited response of the moment. because, there must be one even if.... as Derrida echoed... it is improvisation. Else Freud has no merit at all. The unity of each intelligence is infinitely existent.

i do not conform to the recent 'post' modern school of, for examples, ault, pierce, dortort rothenberg, lincoln, otto and others. while all are studies full of insights, i show to my mind, that none understand the coherence of Blake's levels of vision language and visualisation outside of two-fold life....indeed they claim Blake is without coherent narrative structure, is fractal, self-subversive, weirdly self-destructive and randomly unsystematic.

SO let us look........................................

Los/Golgonooza, Enitharmon, furnace and looms and labours of love are of Blake’s three-fold centre/ circumference/ zenith/ nadir vortices…

four-fold love is the infinite within and the infinite without…. 94-96...

the 'New' Jerusalem' descends in Chapter 4, or Beulah, in three-fold unity of head, heart and loins...the restoration of Jerusalem's infinite physicality prepares Albion's interiority for Christ's second coming.

For Blake,| Swedenborg is two fold vision and symbolism. Blake's use of Swedenborg should be interpreted as 'cleansing two-fold vision. otto gives a fine study of The Four Zoas and swedenborg. but his reading is self-confined to a seeing of Blake's two-fold seeing as 'all seeing'.

One essential difference between one two three and fourfold seeing in Blake, is Blake's 'theology of atonement'...

based on the dogmatic fact of unconditional forgiveness as expression of Christ as the law, and the fulfillment of all law…for Blake, Christ is 'the why' of the commandment to love…love god and love the other... in fourfold unity

For Blake, suffering is real.... it must be... and death too is real; else there is no real love or real faith or real (i.e. infite) life.

As Tim Heath (Blake Society) put it, through Blake's art we are in the 'company of Blake'...and in his 'company' of language and art we are always self-transcending in the otherness within and without....to my mind Blake wrote for years to give a visual discourse the purpose of which is a finger pointing outside of itself in compassion for the other, and his art and epic myth an adumbration of the second coming of Christ....striving with systems to dissolve systems.…

the systems are signified by Blake’s geometry for it manifests vision and form

… it’s a not simply an abstraction or a metaphor. He symbolizes architectures of feeling and physicality...he signifies a two fold Ulro and Generation, and, a three fold Eden and Beulah….we see two fold rocks and temples, and, threefold, we see Golgonooza…(onefold is death and fourfold is unity with God.…

and, we have a spectre to measure the first, and, we have a threefold prophetic forge of spirituality of Los for three fold life...the furnaces re-forge the twofold into threefold life energy, that is then given sublime forms in the emanative looms of Enitharmon and their daughters in Cathedron, which is a portion of Golgonooza …in Cathedron, nature or life is woven into an emanative unity in ‘fibres’ of beauty and love beneath the thresholds of human perception…

the sublime world thus formed is that into which we see the descent of the New Jerusalem, and she is the cleansed finite for the second coming. three-fold Jerusalem...and two-fold Vala; always the one gives souls, the other bodies that are born live and die.

Thus, in the two worlds that Blake makes female, the first, Chapter 3, is finite and Blake gives us Generation in which world Blake gives us the incarnation. In the second female world, Chapter 4, Beulah, we have the cleansed generative female energies, that allows the descent of the New Jerusalem that, in turn, immediately prepares and cleanses Beulah for the second coming and, in turn, Albion's re-awakening in Beulah in Plates 94-100.

There is a beautiful structural balance between the female worlds...as there is a beautiful structural balance between the male worlds. This structure is not possible to the two fold limits of the post-modern Blake school of Ault et al.

SO TO MOVE TO THREE FOLD AND FOUR FOLD

Blake and possibility. the quantuum fields of information in Blake.

An example in modern philosophy of science follows. I can’t and do not need to follow the maths/geometry of it, but the geography is essential…I was thinking about reason and science. Freedom from systems.

I was reading Wheeler, the 96 year old physicist who died last week. Writes of four Levels and the physics of sentience. In 1998 he had a brief paper/correspondence in his book Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam. (Norton 1998) He and his colleagues write of the philosophy of science of it….in their language, it means sentience is a Level 3 and property of non-material ‘reality’ or quantum information field… and in Level 3 everything is information…love, commitment, creativity and imagination, intentionality, sense of humour, self-transcendence and appreciation of beauty of creation are ‘physical guiding fields of quantum information outside of Level 1’. Material quantum field of Level 1 ties in here with Newton and Urizen. Wheeler quotes Libet …‘the mind chooses backward in time while, simultaneously experiencing its conscious choice forward in time’

THEN ……he moves into Merkebah mysticisism, Ezekiel’s chariot and quotes Blake extensively. This takes us straight into the work of Rowland, kabbalah of Spector and Van Kleeck and the related exploration of beauty by Sklar, and her view beauty is salvic...that takes courage and love.

to read Blake in a post quantum world, we need appreciation of the non-material quantum of Level 3 ...and Level 3 is sentient indefinable and experiential and implies Blake's perceptions of both art and the human form divine as he named it.

Not unlike Polkinghorne and the god's eye view of the 'block universe'. This modern post-quantuum philosophy is two-hundred +++ years after Blake…it's essential for Blake's levels of inspiration and mythic credibility. Blake is not limited to Ptolemaic or Newtonian or Einsteinian paradgyms...

it makes sense to read and see Blake as a quantum mythologist: myth before maths.

Wheeler finds 4 levels of the real. Not unlike Blake’s four-fold genius in a modern metaphoric parallel. (Wikapedia a helpful source here …Hypercube and hypersphere). Illuminating Blake’s real though indefinable and eternal renewal in four-fold splendour.

The hypercube/sphere allows an image like Golgonooza, Blake has such a grasp of perception, in fr coffey’s words, ‘universal though concrete passing beyond the level of psychological description’

I look at it very early on for a few like paragraphs only in Jerusalem Explained. I’d like to read more studies, but it’s not a major focus. By and large Ault is limited to Newton. He sees two-fold and its limits. Then, detailing bit and pieces, asserts his accumulated notes and seems to assert his notes as the literary and visual boundaries of Blake's craftsmanship. .... these limits are his limits.

i think it shown in Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained that Blake is a far better poet than Ault's methodology allows.

Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained help today's readers and scholars working in Blake's narrative levels and plot. For a concluding example for this note: I suggest an entirely fresh/new reading in which there is envisioned a three-fold Golgonooza...and, a two-fold Canaan and Urizen's Temple that is a two-fold prophetic history/myth.

the history/myth both symbolises and narratively allows the virgin birth and the crucifixion and second coming ...

Structurally supporting this reading,

1. Golgonooza is the major city/building in Chapter 1 (male and finite;

2. and the major building in Chapter 2 is the Christ built Tomb of Albion (male and infinite);

3. Urizen's Temple and stone of sacrifice is the great structure of Chapter 3 (female and finite)

and 4. in Chapter 4 it is the New Jerusalem (female and infinite).

The importance of these four architectures/buildings are structurally vital and unexplored critically out side of Jerusalem Explained. I'm writing an article now however,it seems critically true to claim Blake crafts a coherent and thematically inter-connected and integrated dialogue of non material and material being in the four-fold 'web' of his story.

For Blake the sexual dynamics of male and female compose the physicality of both infinite and finite being.

in post-modern terms, Blake's vertical and horizontal structures (synchronic and diachronic) integrate his epic.

The book moves to the 2nd edition and I’m glad it’s available.

2008-04-30T14:28:00.002+01:00

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The search lines are here for research students and interested Blake readers..............or those who want Blake's The Four Zoas 'explained' or Jerusalem 'explained' in detail... or want to understand Blake's art more profoundly. Blake's art is embedded in his myths and thus his myth, symbol and story not understood, Blake's art is also poorly understood. My studies are about making sense of Blake's mythology. his myth, also thought of as his sublime allegory, (wittreich) has to be realised in the perceptions of readers and viewers....in a like manner, myth and symbol is necessary to realise the iconic, typological and allegorical meanings of classical or renaissance art. likewise the geometry of composition is typically sacred such as in the theology of the ikon in bizantine art, its sacred geometry of internal symmetries and colours, and from the earliest, sacred architecture...and that means the indigenous circle builders and their clarity of astronomical alignments and so time.

an essential methodological principle is that there are many swirls of myths in Blake's mythology of Albion's fall and redemption... dynamic 'vortices' involved in multi inter engagements in multi complexities... foucault like vortices of them all as a whole in unity...such are the torus-like vortices of Albion's inner collapse... and there is no final definition until Plates 94-100.

Blake's depictions of mental energies are profound. It is a commonplace amongst Blake's audiences and analytic thinkers that he develops a causal cosmology of mental energies, events and materiality that is of extraordinary value to to our understanding of human consciousness itself. his value is enhanced by his universality...though he is christian, his readers need not be.

Though he sees a four-fold unity with Christ, others may see that Blake symbolises a 'god's eye' concept of time and space such outlined by polkinghorne(I discuss this in the opening chapters to Jerusalem Explained). Jungian and Freudian critics have long seen Blake's work as revealing that which otherwise is unrevealed even unconscious... his impact upon art is formidable. Blake's remarkable poetic re-creations of mind and processes of dream and waking self-revelation are known as very valuable... god or no god so to speak.

2008-04-26T23:11:00.004+01:00

To the Southwark of The Globe, The Swan and The Fortune, the bear pit and the taverns and happyhouses and the the Blakeless Bride. The genius of Southwark? The cleric failed to see the chances are few for the pounding heartbeat of self kenosis in art and love and life in Southwark, and the jewel of Blake's hymn, Jerusalem.

no flower once picked grows back however strong the stem

her got done too, sent back
failed to meet the something ...
Off the list now
Breath-bated and clogged-ears in the charity camps

Banjos in the tunnels by the air blasts
cloth caps tin cups coins
and a wild-eyed child with a dummy
in a crowd of kneecaps and pounding feet.

Airless hairless and eyeless
and groaning in Gaza the lot of us
Not a temple to think on
nor jaw-bone to recall.

There's an asteroid on its way as big as Gibraltar
Galileo's under house arrest
Crime pays, rules tax
ans superheated lava fills the caverns left by gas wells

the round glass circles of the cathedral roses
and grounded mazes give hope
there's rumours of oxygen outside the windows of the world
stars do last longer than poverty, says the vatican, Infallibly.

But eternity's an idea that experiences nothing
Nothing of the bone-cold concrete dirt
of a rough shaveless life
in the midst of surplus waste

2008-04-19T19:49:00.005+01:00

this a fourth verse about the cleric of Southwark who banned Blake's Jerusalem, Blake saw Jerusalem as the bride of Christ which is a reasonable model for any one... methinks.
Now the disappointment is honey mooned into the future life of the bride i pen a further poem
lives about the young and the struggle of it ...

psychic clay not to be mined or thrown on a wheel

it's hard to keep faith
in the coffee-grind and sweaty hair of cappuccino time,
for a hard-breathing-clear eyed idealist
with firm thighs and a pert blouse that bounces

a teacher who like her and a third world feeling
for eye treatment radio and a well for village life
prey to the faith-in-loving lyrics
the truly lazy offer

two bedrooms more and a larger lawn
habits like parking in front lead lined windows
eyes reddening in shadows and swirl of curtain, and
well-fed waiting crying poor-mouth to make taste rich

the pretty girl
fingers straight as a check out key
blinks back the long grimed day
and the longer struggle of a loving heart

she knows how long it really takes
to dig a veggie patch on a wet spring day
and the Kremlin tower of a leek flower
working to give a kitchen the smell of heaven

and granny's old mahogany bed
the thump of life they all said she loved

2008-04-15T09:43:00.003+01:00

FOR BLAKE ...JERUSALEM IS THE BRIDE OF CHRIST.....

BANNED

HERE'S ONE FOR BEAUTY
and all brides

Helen

She never saw beauty she was put away
folded like linen with skins of iron
magicked memories celibate ideals
and angels dancing up and down ladders
massaging the conscience of the world

The older we are the closer to timelessness,
Helen's lovely legs have yet to reach full stretch
not yet closed in the mercy of an unseeing eye.

Surprising where the last ditch stands are
where certain people are that's where
who simply fight until they simply die.

I don't wish to pass through any of your doors
she told each keeper of the keys in turn passing out the gates
by the smell of food tables and cowls bent forward
around her the temple keepers
crouched like stone lions waiting for Alexander.

2008-04-13T14:40:00.004+01:00

FOR JERUSALEM THE SINGING BRIDE OF SOUTHWARK

no truth merit or grace for salvation army sally

surrogate sister of mercy shapely as a saint
cruises down the sinning streets singing songs of patience
waiting for a second flood

burned with the spaces and absence of blessing
she smiled back behind the blindfold, I'm supple
beneath the bandage she told us lifting cloth

stone circles of divines in seas of verbal nonsense
scream lay-lines of faith
each at the other's compass

blind priest blind church blind church blind vision
what we need are priests that see
and priests who save each other

Then she said I am so sad this is not how I meant to be
this happiness came over me
while they were facing quite another way, see,

see, in the patchy grass wild flowers white and gold
a child is laughing voice and limbs
rise and play small things are stirring, washed

all things are shining
words beating like wings in the heart
sing ancient rights hard won

2008-04-12T15:46:00.008+01:00

IN MEMORY OF A BLAKELESS SOUTHWARK WEDDING

life plan for believing fishes

Buzz buzz the see-saw
back and thrust slip-slide-slip-slide
rock-a-billy trombone call
to the glittering fantasia of young flesh and belly bouncers of dance
in the bumble stumble of the gene circus

Do you really want the fast food job that's every job?
want to sell and sell and chime the hour for a clocked amount?
while higher and higher the bonus for the boss
in the crime regulated
tick-tock number flash of taxation legislation

Do you really need this crap as the pretty girl's toothpaste
larger than a bill board's faithlessness
gives you the weather?
Without god sex or money there is only the weather
and the melting of the icecaps

Up jumped the archetype
in the ying yanking ad nonsense
whispering waves
that cook into yolk
brain dead pictures of prosperity

The higher the rank the easier
the sun-tanned cock-a-doodle-doo of glad stock tidings
paddling down the morning rivers of laundered plenty
crowing excellence is the greatest threat to
the survival of the richest

So my bonused beauties
bubbling in banquets and stemmed glasses
check out the inside run of long crossed legs
in the snake and ladder cocktails
of the davy jones casino

where numbers measure the holiness of manna on the monitor

2008-04-10T20:03:00.033+01:00

where is jerusalem here?

the elephant in the cathedral is the voice of recidivism.

Jonathan's English Chess

2008-03-30T05:58:00.001+01:00

Part1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbdPHowV5g
Part2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TdOo2JicsY
Part3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9y7i8pm3u8

2008-03-09T18:59:00.005Z

Dr David Whitmarsh-Knight. William Blake's Jerusalem Explained The William Blake Press: Cambridge; 2007. 612 pages.

... is now available on Amazon $45...after discounts currently approx $33...it is found on Amazon.com ...or on... Amazon.USA

ISBN 978-1434821010

2008-02-21T17:57:00.002Z

In William Blake's Jerusalem Explained you will be reading Blake's vision of a anglo-celtic, north European (and its diaspara) vision of Christianity.

He deconstructs the mediterranean centered prejudices of history once thought true now now seen as recidivism........for example 'flat-earth' histories, pre-darwinian concepts of time, evolution and science, set chronologies of creation, economic abuse and the sexual repression of women and their sexual abuse, as in prostitution and mere pleasure, the abuse of innocence in child labour and slavery and sacrifice of the human form Divine, of the god within, for power and money.

Likewise Blake saw war as the consequence of closed shells of consciousness... he symbolised these closed 'prisons' of perception, giving twenty-seven of them, which with the final boundaries of finitude make twenty-eight 'churches' of perception. Blake' s shapings of mental entities and core energies engages his audience in a remarkably practical engagement with real suffering and real collapse and renewal. Blake's commitment to his idea of christian prophecy was profound; it was the mission of art to bear witness in a manner not unlike the ikon and its theology of witness inwhich Christ breaks through the self-created inner shells of human perception. Blake's myth bears witness of Christ infinitely transcending within and without.

.........Blake's visionary spirituality is anglo-celtic. it is essential to see he consciously crafts a vision inspired by prophetic origins antecedent to the invited-to-britain-and-soon sent home augustine.

late millenium papal christianity, post roman, came together with indigenous anglo-celtic christianity. Of course there was inter-communion... throughout east, centre, west, north and southern (egyptian christianity c.f. beatty/bodmer fragments of NT c.200 c.e.).

heresies were not not part of anglo-celtic practice...c.f. Gildas the Wise and his hatred of the 'arian poison' as he calls it ...or marcion. The normans completed the accommodation of anglo-celtic christianity with papal religious and secular authority. the weight of church support for william is typically understated in 1066 and all that...Blake's myth is northern and western european, and its origins shared by augustine though its expression fully contemporary.

on the other hand, it is equally essential to know reading Blake means we do see rome as the centre, not as the east... and not as the west... for 'all roads lead to rome'.......further, clearly when they left Jerusalem after the crucifixion..... Peter and Paul did not 'go west... there's gold in them thar seven hills' as i put it elsewhere. .....they went to the centre called rome....(and yes... there was and is gold in those seven hills..... unimagined wealth)....it is beyond philosophical doubt and archaeological dispute that the west was the tin isles of thucidites, ... eventually called england, ireland, scotland and wales. (see below, 2007)...DNA studies and studies of 'saxon' burial sites show the western isles were a genetically homogenous indigenous civilisation that remained reasonably intact before the romans came and after the romans left... including 'migrations' from europe. modern archaeology proves 'England' did not collapse into a dark ages in which the celts were driven into cornwall and wales, for example kent was not conquered by a pagan saxon invasion. genes show kent to be as anglo-celtic as cornwall or wales or scotland, and strontium/oxygen levels in teeth of 24 skeletons from 5th - 7th cent a.c.e...confirm the genetic studies... (Sykes, Goldstein, Oxford 2002, 2005; Budd, Durham, Antiquity 2008; BBC Seven Ages of Britain TV series). it seems small-scale immigration that adopted and adapted. It does seem there were movements within england but that 'less than half of paternal input' was diue to 'anglo-saxon migration' concludes Goldstein. The pagan dark ages is now seen as replacement history and as such fails the criteria of truth necessary for revelation theology, which must always reform itself in the light of historical facticity to avoid heresy.

we need begin the literary journey of Blake's 'golden thread' knowing we read of Blake's religious understandings of the new Jerusalem....that Blake draws immediately from Swedenborg's 'New Jerusalem' as is well known and researched (see viscomi, Marriage of Heaven and Hell). He also drew from the earliest discourses of spirituality, symbolism, vision and prophetic inspiration (frye bloom percival bentley bloom percival lincoln rowland et al)... the meta summary of these scholars conclusions begins with Blake's tradition as a necessary critical departure point.

I discuss Blake's poetic story and his spiritual realities of a new Jerusalem in Chapter 4, especially Plate 86, of Jerusalem Explained. I have found is not possible to expand our critical perception of Blake's new Jerusalem without the philosophical pre-condition of knowing it in as exact a mythic context as is possible. I analyse Blake's religious moral and economic symbolism in Jerusalem.... and conclude we clearly see a fully developed and articulated myth in Blake's 'jeweled' setting for the new Jerusalem.

I have put these search line below for elements of my research...... and for those those who want to understand Blake's story as an aesthetic whole, 'simply' explained in terms of Blake's fundamentally symbolic meaning of Jerusalem and the new Jerusalem.....and for those who want Blake's plots, myth, story and characters re-presented as developed and set in exquisitely precise narrative context...........and those who want to see in ways similar to Blake when writing...that means in terms of Blake's one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold states of perception.

There is a need to be very specific here...looking outward..one-fold cannot see two-fold...which cannot see three-fold'... which cannot see four-fold...looked at again but going inwards...four-fold can see three-fold... which can see two-fold... which can see one-fold which cannot see anything but it self. Seeing with Blake is the journey of his descent into himself and the transformation in time to a renewal into unity...a unity purged of that which thought it self divine. it is not strictly a return, not a cycle that is back to where it began...

I trace Blake's four organising vortices of being... enter Blake's clearly defined narrative levels or points of view... engage the reader in his dramatic tension and use of irony... and present as a critical whole Blake's literary perception of humanity's tragic fall, cleansing and and redemption...

.... again none of Blake's states of vision are properly grasped without a grasp of the work as a whole, and in turn that needs a proper textual analysis according to the science of textual criticism. that is make much more possible by my two books.

2008-02-20T08:04:00.001Z

Flash page: William Blake's Jerusalem Explained: The William Blake Press: Cambridge 2007 --611 pages

When i lectured in an institute of education/teachers college (as head of school: liberal arts and sciences) we ensured we taught future educatrs that children must physically turn their heads one side right, and, the other side left when they cross a road, because the child has not developed peripheral, perceptual, vision and literally cannot perceive the cars coming from either side. So they walk out, suddenly, for if there is no car immediately in front of them they cross. This is an example of ‘restricted field articulation’....the child’s ability to scan is perceptually restricted, and their behaviour thereby modified, sometimes fatally. Moral scanning is concomitant.

Universally we experience restricted scanning. Without it we could not be an evolving identity, grow or age. Simply put, in love we transform our perceptions to scan in beauty and hope and joy within and without around us. By contrast, in fear, poverty, pain, confinement and depression, fear and anxiety are perceived, threat is universal and the spin or ‘vortex’ of such scanning leads to inwardness, paranoia and self-harm or harm to others. We say we can ‘turn things around’ by scanning more and more positive events and realities in our individual ‘vortex’. Blake calls the ‘spin’ about us a vortex. The vortex expands and contracts within and without us. His epics symbolise how his continuum of improved practical scanning of all he perceive is possible. His work helps show how his understandings led to his self-realisations in art and life.

Now we turn to Blake’s Jerusalem. He seeks to enhance our perceptual field articulations, and as with all great art, he succeeds. In Blake’s aesthetics art enhances individual perceptions. He is perfectly clear; to him the purpose of being is unity with God. We survive and improve our lives through love and hate, food and shelter, justice, art, science, feeling and thought, and above all through others, living in the image of God, which Blake called the human form Divine, best expressed in Plates 94-100

Blake’s genius in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas engages us in the movements of mind and perceptual scanning of consciousness within and without to a degree of comprehensiveness and insight not found in others. while he is profoundly christian his work explores human consciousness in ways comprehensive and universal.... for brief examples, we learn from Blake of the intricate mechanisms and articulations of the mind in process of birth, love, death, time and being ...we see his depiction of the multi-levelled action and reaction of act... and we perceive his unequaled symbolising of the fragmentation of consciousness, its levels of psychosis and healing ,and its integrations into reconciled unities

William Blake’s Jerusalem is a long and brilliant epic. Here is my conclusion: it will probably take a year or so to read Jerusalem; a reading target of one plate a day is racing through the work. How many books offer that kind of self-enhancement…in order that we might perceive more deeply and further? That is Blake’s gift to us all and his art expands our personal perceptual scanning. IIt's taken me a decade or so to decipher and then write Blake’s Jerusalem Explained and likewise, earlier, Blake's The Four Zoas Explained. It has taken that kind of determined effort to outline his story clearly. He is not impenetrable. These two epic books on Blake's christian myth will transform your perceptions of Blake's mastery of his mediums; Blake’s art and his poetry. It should help clarify Blake's explicit trinitarian christianity and his implicit and explicit visionary grasp of spiritual truths of human existence, nature, time and eternity

Once a reader has been through Blake’s myth from beginning to end then Blake reads swiftly and brilliantly, and we share great poetry, philosophy, drama and participate in a spiritual vision that spans, scans and re-engages us with the internal landscapes of our consciousness. As I write elsewhere, the reader is liberated into the practical act of reading an excellent story. Blake is well worth the effort needed to come to terms with his remarkably contemporary picture of humanity.

2008-02-16T17:20:00.000Z

Looking through blogs.... it has been William Blake's Jerusalem Explained published by The William Blake Press and nothing else since last october.............so ignore the last several posts to read about extensions of the literary philosophy and methodology of analysis of Blake's Jerusalem. go back to april 07 in the blog

deconstructionism has been my focus....namely the connection between word and word, i've recalled the word logia...........avoiding imposition of preconceived system on Blake's system. the emergent meanings structured on architectures of possible meanings......kabbala.....classical....paracelsus... ossian and the gothic.... longinius and the sublime...moor and his hindu pantheon....bacon hobbes newton locke hume....the french enlightenment and the humanists....dante....swedenborg....boehme ..... the great chain of being as in 'the bard'......deism.....astrology......the industrial revolution and Blake's london, the french and american revolution ....the influences of paine, godwin and early feminism wollstonecraft....slavery, child labour and abuse, mercantalism, mendel and the prisons and (c.f.1797-1834, essay on population and the workfare/workhouse discourse ending in the poor act, 1834)...marxism...jung/freud/lacan...barthes ...derrida...linguistic analysis...foucauld... gramsci... structuralism, modernism and post-modernism....semiotics and the philosophy of the sign and grammatical studies.... even, i read, Blake's autodidacticism (an unconvincing theory holding that Blake was basically self-taught, which Bentley shows incorrect, that seems to suggest that Blake's poetry was 'automatic writing') and discourse and meta-analysis..... and every approach is full of insight. I replace none....I add Blake's plot or logia, the structure he consciously created and the myth he wrote, worked out in all its symmetrical beauty.

instead of conventional mediteranean mythic sources (as in homer, virgil, dante and more immediately, milton's Paradise Lost, Regained or Comus and the cambridge platonists) the weight of meaning Blake shaped into inter-related concepts and sounds was 'key-stoned' or set in a unique semiotic/semantic units like Alla....Ulro....Adan-Udan....the gate of the heart....the cup of Rahab....Entuthon Benethon....Bowlahoola.....Golgonooza.........and personality after personality....Tharmas......Enitharmon.....Palamabron....Bromion....the daughters of Beulah... all empty of pre-determined meaning save for the diachronic and sychronic meanings that are strictly contextual in Blake's myth and confined in its meaning to his linguistic seriality.....concepts like shadow.....shade....spectre....are a third micro family of sign....Blake's geography is yet another...Bath... London... Jerusalem... Babylon... Shiloh... England. These form vortices of resemblances and energy identities. In Blake's poetic method each 'minute particular' is always self-transcending in the ongoing expansion of Blake's articulated perceptions of existential-being-unto death.....and the logically unexpressed interplay of feeling for meaning.....Plates 94-100 symbolises this best........Blake's extraordinary expansion of language units to render meaningful his experiences of four-fold perceptual realities is possibly unequaled in English....concepts like sytagmatic, paradigmatic and pragmatic discourse....all help....but none are sufficient unto themselves.

Indeed, central to Blake's mythic unity is that all aspects of creation.... rocks, hills, rivers, mountains, oceans, cities, counties and countries, zoas, emanations, sons and daughters are conscious entities in Blake's vision of life. .....this means, for example, that the traditional literary distinction between humanity as 'soul-invested' or as locke holds, 'intelligence' invested conscious and moral being, and environment as existentially alienated though aesthetically recaptured being, is dissolved by Blake.....how, in un-deconstructed critical methodologies does one distinguish between the 'character' of Urizen, Los, Jerusalem or Vala and the 'character' of Bath? or the 'character' of the Atlantic?......typically, critical methodologies are corralled by 'plotlessness' and impenetrability pre-suppositions as to be unable to interpret the developed characters of Blake...

.....the commonplace current critical position position is denial (see blog april 07)....Blake's figures and their characters are thought NOT to be dramatically 'fully developed' is based, I find, on a paradigmatic failure in the field to perceive the plot and therefore the detailed and intricate relations between the each figure's being and actions, and, the continuum of such acts after such acts to become and form a linear whole.....what i show is that there is the gamut of emotion feeling act, blindness and moral and spiritual epiphanic and insight in each figure in Blake's plot as a whole......

I read of Blake's figures as NOT being 'fully developed' characters.....and i think, 'compared to whom'?...... Homer's 'Ajax'.......Chaucer's 'wife of Bath'....Lear and the 'fool'?

the modernist and post-modern methodologies exhaust sensibility, and empties language and perception of all but sound and grammatical relations......the semiotics of marks of sound, the repetitions lifted into phonetics and into alphanumonic language of discourse........... all are replayed in Blake's deconstructed poetics.... for language is re-expressed....even re-invented...by Blake to shape the momentums of meanings that culminate in the almost impossible simplicities of his prophetic clarities.....

.....there is something wonderful in Blake's ideas of English 'the rough structure'...........he re-expresses the nature of sound 3000 odd years after its first mesopotanian cuniform sounds-before-consonants were lifted out from the hieroglyph into a written form......

so.....go to april 2007 in the blog and walk backwards into blog-time. when you want to read about the movement from thought into print in William Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem Explained......

2008-02-13T21:34:00.001Z

saw some marketing facts. Cambridge University Press prints some 12500 books p.a. of that some 8000 sells less than 100......5000 less than 50........3000 less than 10.

so here we go ...out for the 10....... a few weeks and it should be out in Amazon's list of books on Blake and Jerusalem.

David Whitmarsh. William Blake's Jerusalem Explained. William Blake Press: Cambridge; 2007, (611 pages).

2008-01-19T16:57:00.002Z

Just a bit of print news......the final proof copy of William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is being printed now. There were lots of small errors my copy editor pointed to....typically, inter-textual references....so those were fixed.

I've contacted The Blake Society and joined.....the chairman Tim Heath, a very welcoming person, has helped make a youtube filmed celebration over Blake's grave....the location of which has been identified precisely....and is under the footpath!........this is very well-done, the church records were studied and the co-ordinates identified.......

it does little credit to see how this magnificent visionary 250 year anniversary remained so unrecognised.........not even a stamp.

However, the symbolic meaning and explanation of Jerusalem was finished to coincide with Blake's birthday, .........and is now available.......The William Blake Press: Cambridge is the publisher

2007-12-23T20:09:00.000Z

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

2007-12-21T19:27:00.002Z

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.

2007-12-05T10:28:00.002Z

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

2007-11-16T21:28:00.003Z

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.

review of the blog oct 07

2007-10-16T13:00:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-09-20T18:21:00.002+01:00

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.

METATEXT 8 : search strings for fields and fields of freedom

2007-07-17T20:26:00.001+01:00

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.

how many points of blinkered narrative gazing .......

2007-06-09T20:24:00.000+01:00

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.

blake's infinite geography

2007-05-09T14:22:00.001+01:00

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.

seeing blake

2007-05-06T00:11:00.006+01:00

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.

Night VII(a) and Night VII(b) and their stereo-textual unity

2007-04-27T22:00:00.008+01:00

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.

The purpose of www.thefourzoas.com

2007-04-24T16:22:00.001+01:00

METATEXT 1 Intro
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the focus of this blog is Blake's vision. it is personal but educated ongoing component of the web site..... www.thefourzoas.com...... and so is part of its content. somewhat like appendices or footnotes unfrozen by print and interactive. it is thus under copyright and no portion or whole can be re-produced by any medium without specific specific reference to www.thefourzoas.com....and the author.

i'm a little disappointed in the current 'Blake industry' disconnect with Blake's mythology and its 'ring barking' of the poet who made his own system, by a paradigmatic bonding of critics who freely agree that all have failed to find a plot.

Blake's clear, coherent system is worked out in precise detail and argued directly from the text, is explained clearly in the web site. though tiny because the field is so specialised, the site usually ranks on page one Google from many search lines, and at this point the site recieves 80-100 odd visitors per day.......... to these site visitors and to research committed students looking for dissertation contributions in particular, then, this is my major aim: namely; to watershed the last 20 odd years of the 'plotless/fractal/de-mythologized Blake' and revise as unacceptable his 'sublime incomprehensibility'.

By contrast to paradigmatic consensus on there being no plot, my site in fact traces the plots of both The Four Zoas and of Jerusalem, both for the first time. it is no longer critically plausible to deny the genius of Blake's epic completed masterpieces of plot, narrative coherence, mythological completion and consciously crafted aesthetic unity.

the rules of the Blake's myth are analogous to those of a good computer game; as complex but also as accessible and universally readable....there are no short cuts; the names, powers, icons of impact, rules of movement, dimensional and non-dimensional forces universes all have to be learned, and though it takes work its not hard.

with such learning comes the immersion into Blake's imaginative multi-dimensional 'mythic game' universe and finally the work can be grasped as an aesthetic whole . in its entirety it is a giant of a read, but if you at times like homer, vergil, eliot, shakespeare and and their few kin it is well worth learning the myth and the rules. The Four Zoas I like most because of dramatic poetry, that's personal taste. Jerusalem too has the poetry, and it is the case that both are shown to have beautifully constructed plots. they are dynamic....Blake worked them out over years. my analysis shows the architecture of Blake's editing, for examples, i show how his additions, deletions, structural organistions and mythic clarifications are textually expressed. all are thereby shown to be grounded rationally in an internally consistent and fully developed myth.

Blake's cosmic 'game' is profoundly spiritual. Its component energies, agents and dramatic persona are created and interlaced into clearly visualised vortices. infused by divine energy, that is creation to Blake for he believed that his art is inspired by divine consciousness. Blake's self-belief in his prophetic genius meant for him that the reader's imaginative possibilities for receiving prophetic revelation are thereby empowered. so, he believed as his prophetic myth becomes more clear, and more understood, some reader/viewers will ultimately, enter and be expanded and involved in enhanced salvic, intellectual and spiritually profound aesthetic experiences. he called this aesthetic, universal potentiality the Poetic Genius, and its spiritual archetecture created the city of Golgonooza. the whole of the myth is all its multi-dimensional unity of consciousness is his mythic insight into the revelation of the Bible.

in this site, it is shown that Blake's genius with plot and myth construction is such that he is able to give us a original mythic insight into prophetic aesthetics. linked into clarity by causal coherence and plot, his epics are densely filled with powerful dramatic presences, wonderful passages of dialogue and circumstance, and the morphologies of life and death and re-birth in the arms of Christ. for Blake, genius is prophetic. inspired to envision that which others cannot, he believed his prophetic expression and inspired art to be transformational. seen through the genius of his plot, Blake can be grasped as an aesthetic whole. his anglo-celtic mythic detail re-considers duration, time and space, and salvation from its finitude and its life of generation, mutual predation and individual certainty of suffering and death in the light of the risen Christ.

There have been less than a dozen full-on attempts to work out The Four Zoas. they are all huge efforts and called 'labours of love'. there is truth in the term for the work is like the 'everest' of textual criticism. however, no attempt other than my thesis has successfully outlined Blake's plot. In collective contrast to my critical position, all other critics agree between themselves that because they could not find a plot, therefore there is no plot. and as the reviews of the field here demonstrate, there is now paradigmatic consensus bonding. (Meta-text 4)

By contrast, my thesis research DOES give a successful virtually line by line analysis, and therefore in methodologically exacting detail, proves the conscious craftsmanship of Blake's plot with relentless accuracy and detail.

This line-by-line detail i think is necessary to outline beyond reasonable doubt the plots of Blake's works. The reader can make their own mind up. Once Blake's myth is understood, his epics reads fluently and easily. My doctoral committee questioned whether it was possible to write a PhD thesis on a major figure without footnotes throughout the analysis per se. they agreed the thesis was original throughout. The Professors Emeritus Frederick Cogswell (d) the leading Canadian poet and critic and Professor Emeritus David Galloway (d), the leading Shakespearian textual critic, for example he was chairman of the 450 yr Shakespeare conference at UBC, helped supervise. In recommendating publication, they agreed the thesis 'challenged the views of greats in the field' and described it as 'brilliant', a 'remarkable contribution to Blake scholarship' and a 'major breakthrough in Blake scholarship eminently deserving of publication'.

so it is worth reading, whatever the individual scholar's resting place for plotless fractal critical laurels. Jerusalem is 20 odd years of scholarship further down the line, and is that much richer because of it. I am disappointed that in twenty years it seems none checked the Canadian national library, Ottawa, where the doctoral thesis sat waiting, like the rest, for research scholars, and professional scholars, to check completed doctorates ...... before having a go themselves. in terms of Blake's plot and aesthetic unity inThe Four Zoas, they could have saved themselves and most of all their students, years of unsuccessful conclusions when the solutions were right there.

Brilliant in many other ways, in terms of the blake's plot, i think the 'textual field' as a whole has failed our students; the 'plotless fractal Blake' for me leaves the students performing agilely in textually deficent and obselete cul-de-sac, critically unempowered to grasp The Four Zoas and Jerusalem epics as aesthetic wholes.

As it is therefore, in the context of the current state of the field, the research in the site on The Four Zoas and Jerusalem is entirely contemporary...especially to an entirely fresh generation of current and future dissertation committed research students.

In my view it is incorrect, even misleading to begin with the current critical dead-end and obselete premise that blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem are 'plotless'. It seems to me that it is also the case that the theories of 'compositional plotlessness' hypothesised by all other completed full-length studies need to be re-considered in the light of the research here. In short, i believe if current and future research students write of Blake's plots in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, without benefit of these two studies, to that extent their research will fail to make a significant contribution.

in review, the analysis of The Four Zoas is now contemporary and obviously is peer reviewed. the analysis of Jerusalem (2005) is the first full length line by line analysis of the epic's plot; in this context it stands alone. to my mind the two two studies represent the 'deconstructed' myths of the two works and display the critical value of textual focus. in context, i i suggest bentley's edition...it was not available to me when i wrote much of its early draft 1970, and stayed with keynes, though reconciled with bentley and erdman, on to its completed first draft 82, and to the formal acceptance of the bound book and the award of the doctor of philosophy. 1984. the early draft was handwritten, the the electric, then the golfball and now the internet, word and individual publication. i intend on making a visual.