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

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

Fair enough

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

The politics of democracy seem to have died in Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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


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

Shakespear's Heir

THE WILLIAM BLAKE PRESS CAMBRIDGE

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

Title:

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

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

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

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

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

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

non-linear and the hypertext novel

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the up date: Shakespeare's Heir

Just an update

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

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

William Blake's Jerusalem Explained

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

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

Time and health.

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

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

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

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

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

that's the web site for Ruegg and Broglio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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