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
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, 8 August 2009
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
.........................................................................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
Monday, 20 July 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, 23 May 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
linear, non-linear and multi-linear narrative in Blake
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.
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.
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.
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