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.

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......

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).

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

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

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.

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