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.
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Blake's axis: visualising Blake
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.
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.
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Two-fold war
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 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?
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Blake made easy
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.
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.
Friday, 23 January 2009
thought for these days
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)
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)
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Poetry drama and art
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.
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.
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
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
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
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