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

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

2009-05-23T17:34:00.025+01:00

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

It is the claim of non-linearity that concerns me...that's all...just the claims of this curious assertion as an aspect of literature, art and music...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, 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. 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. 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 structures that binds each unit of meaning to all the other units of meaning in structural and narrative unity. Now we can take Blake's journey with a clearer grasp and share his levels of prophetic vision...and in a literary sense they become unique, multi-linear prophetic vision of individual perception.

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

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

Linear and non-linear narrative in William Blake?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blake's axis: visualising Blake

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

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

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

Blake's major prophecies or epics can be read fluently and clearly once Blake's symbols and myth is grasped in detail and the story Blake tells is envisioned in process. Blake's concepts of society, cities, countries... such as Erin, Jerusalem, Babylon, London or Bath are hammered out by Los as 'centres' or in Blake's dynamics 'vortices' of continuously engaged consciousness. i think it can be compared with aspects of wittgenstein's families, barthe's ideas of myth or foucault's contemporary analyses of social dynamics as vertical and horizontal engagements of interacting groups and entities. So his myth is for an audience open to quantum perception on four levels.

broad sweeps to begin ........., to grasp Blake's plot, you the reader/seer become the three-fold 'eye' of the work's moving two-fold visions like an audience watching a play. We watching Caesar walking to be murdered...we know it Caesar doesn't...The book Shakespeare's Heir: William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained details this dramatic narrative clearly.

The delusion of ladders or chains of being

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

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

Blake's Satan

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

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

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

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

Blake's Mundane Shell

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

For Blake, every element of two-fold perception is based on the self-predation of Albion's auto-idolatry. like a 'bird in an '28 heaven eggshell' consuming its environment 'within' while wholly closed to all 'without'. Such is the immediate consequences of Albion's morally insane narcissism on turning from God to a claim to 'autonomous self-fertilization'.

so i think to read and envision Blake, one first has to dump conditioned social and sexual concepts/symbolism/ritual auto-idolatry of the close-to-god class of the highest (the landlords/owners of work and time/salvation sellers and our moder bankers of usury), down through the (serving/servile/education/enforcement) professions, to the (enslaved) lowest. all belted together by the 'great chain of being'.....ptolemaic, medieval and obsolete economic class systems on a taxation ladder or a capital/wage ladder as marx sees us.....or the sociologically frozen castes of the religious class system as every sectarian church or religious hierarchy of holiness sees itself.....or the evolution of consciousness in its hierarchies of capability as psychology and archaeology and genetics sees us ....or the idea of history as collingwood puts it..and so on...each is a discourse and all things exist in and as narrative too as the post-modernist and decontructralist sees it............and so on into the infinities of semiology.

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

for Blake, all elements of these hierarchy are the results of Albion turning 'within' and are the warring components systems of mutual self-predation that is the self annihilated Albion.

the inner chaos of Albion's auto-idolatry feeds upon itself, symbolised by Blake's symbol of 'druidic' nature worship. for Blake, that meant the murderous sacrifice of living things to a deficient concept of a god that needs the energies of the dead for food, to rule the living, to breed them, to feed off them in the finite future in a cycle of life, death and birth: thus in Blake, sacrificing life to feed or please or placate God is error.

Nature worship, sacrifice of humans and animals and the druids

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

Blake is partly correct archaeologically... his symbols are of human sacrifices that did actually happen in human history, but there is no trace of blood at Stonehenge or Woodhenge, any other henge, wood or stone...However, Blake's story of Vala's sacrifice of her bonded Luvah on the stems of vegetation is a significant thematic climax to Blake's story of Albion's collapse into self-predation for such human sacrifice is found (e.g. Greece, Babylon, Carthage, 'Latin' America) and animal sacrifice is commonplace globally. Indeed the volume of sacrificed animals at the second Templke is phenomenal, the smell of blood must have descended upon the senses in such centres of slaughter.

Blake depicts Luvah's energies to be a component of Albion's whole consciousness. Luvah's energies are thus finite, deficient and contingent, though Albion adores them as if Luvah and Vala are the power of infinite regeneration. Thus the sacrifice of Luvah's energies fails to resurrect finite life. It can only generate finite life, as symbolised by the iron spindles of Vala, and does not transcend death at all. This is in reciprocal inversion of Blake's story of Jesus, who takes on the suffering of Albion's auto-idolatry, and being the Divine incarnate, uniquely can reawaken Albion to regenerate unity with God.

Blake envisions his Angel of God's Presence, symbolised by Albion, as collapsed inward into a catatonic state of inwardness and self-severance from the infinite source of all life, the creative love of God. Seen from without in three-fold vision, the self-severed Albion coils within from circumference to centre, 'snapping' within, with appalling energy, inward through Blake's dimensional 'gates' like the Gate of Los or Oorthoon, into the mirrored negations of this primordial collapse into finitude, division and splinterered moral blindness. it is an inward collapse and disintegration into madness.

Self-seduced, Albion's inner components sexually compete as quasi-autonomous, self-predating components, and so consume each other until they kill each other off, feeding off each other until they are all dead or collapsed into primordial chaos. In Blake's myth, these components operate as vortical identities mutually overlapping and interacting; all life within Albion is composed of Minute Particulars as Blake symbolised it. We the audience, seeing from three-fold vision, understand they operate within Albion in their independent vortices, in two-fold vision.

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

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

Albion's perceptions are infinitely cleansed of the Limit or State of Satan and of Adam and he is re-awakened in the bosom of Jesus....... in three-fold vision 'all eternity' has always seen Albion as 'dead' in the sleep of death, in the arms of Jesus ....in Jerusalem for example, as is symbolised by Jesus' architecture of Albion's Tomb. ....only Albion cannot see himself....and that blindness is envisioned as two-fold vision by the reader.

To visualise Blake then, imagine consciousness as expanding and contracting from your deepest concentration centre to the furthest limits or circumference of your evolving mental and visual energies. that is, to see this as an expansion and contraction in all directions outward and all directions contracting inward. For Blake, that is described as moving from east to west. It also means we envision axis from zenith to nadir as symbolised by the Seven Eyes of God or the Seven Furnaces of Los. In Blake's two-fold vision this means moving from north to south. At the boundaries are Blake's limits, for examples, the Limits of expansion and contraction, the Limits of translucence and opacity and the Limits of Adam and Satan, and the casting out of limits in the apocalypse leads to purification.

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

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

Urizen's journey in Night the Sixth

For Blake, three-fold vision begins by seeing Albion's mental energies 'within' from the infinite perspective 'without'. Urizen's journey of Night the Sixth (William Blake's The Four Zoas Explained, Chapter VIII) clearly proves Blake's conscious narrative control. To go from the zenith to nadir is thus seen as a concomitant two-dimensional journey from south to north or, for Blake, from the axis of the zenith at the south pole to the nadir at the north pole. We see Urizen enter all quadrants from the circumference where he meets his daughters, through zenith, centre (sets vortices), and nadir, and returns to the circumference. He however, sees his voyage only in two-fold compass points north, south east and west.

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

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

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

Thus as shown in the three books in. www.thefourzoas.com, it is impossible to perceive the vortices of Blake's two, three and four-fold vision without understanding that his poetic vehicle is his geography of time and space as outlined above as in the three books....it is through Blake's geography the reader visualises the concommitant dimensions that Blake envisions.

The four energy identities of zenith and nadir and centre and circumference are four vortices of psycho-physical energies and are whirl out 'within' as eight personae about the axis, not unlike the torus rotating about gravity in time predominent vortices and space predominent reciprocal toriodal vortices.

In summary, in The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, and implicitly everywhere, Urizen and Ahania are the zenith/south; Los and Enitharmon are the nadir/north; Luvah and Vala are the centre/east; and Tharmas and Enion are the circumference/west. thus each 'vortex realm' is a duality of energy and form.....togther they are Albion.

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

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

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

Blake's Jesus and sacrifice

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

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

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

However in both epics, each world is one whole vortex that whorls within, each is reversed by Divine intervention as the Finger of God in the Seventh Furnace, each describe a unique vision of the two limits or states and the incarnation, and each whorls outward to the limits of finitude. This boundary is symbolised by Albion's death in the arms of Jesus. thus the four zoas and emanations and the worlds in which they exist become one and Albion is awakened in regenerative unity with God.

Blake's final vision

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

Two-fold war

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

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

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

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

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

Blake made easy

2009-03-10T17:49:00.024Z

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

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

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

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

In this book is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three fresh sets of creative vision:

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

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

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

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

WILLIAM BLAKE'S THE FOUR ZOAS EXPLAINED

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

WILLIAM BLAKE'S JERUSALEM EXPLAINED.

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

thought for these days

2009-01-23T10:21:00.023Z

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

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

Poetry drama and art

2009-01-20T05:46:00.022Z

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

BACK to poetry drama and art... I thought

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

OPENING

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

first line of five national anthems. badly played and sung

ENTER

Running in knees up style all holding part of rope

THE EXECUTIVE.......

ENTER PARODIES
COSTUME TO SYMBOLISE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BETWEEN each award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rhythmic chorus CLAW IT BACK is the new end game.

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

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

SUDDEN SILENCE

Prospero's speech from the Tempest

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

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

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

light fade

THE END.
TIME TAKEN FOR PLAY 15/20 minutes

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

2009-01-06T20:28:00.012Z

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

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

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

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

2008-12-10T18:15:00.006Z

the prophet? Blake sees prophecy as speaking out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SO TO MOVE TO THREE FOLD AND FOUR FOLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structurally supporting this reading,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blake's jerusalem textual analysis
blake's textual analysis
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william blake's theory of composition
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blake fractal narrative
blake sexuality zoas four
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william blake's epics analysis
blake sexuality jerusalem

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

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

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

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

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

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

no flower once picked grows back however strong the stem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

psychic clay not to be mined or thrown on a wheel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BANNED

HERE'S ONE FOR BEAUTY
and all brides

Helen

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

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

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

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

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

FOR JERUSALEM THE SINGING BRIDE OF SOUTHWARK

no truth merit or grace for salvation army sally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN MEMORY OF A BLAKELESS SOUTHWARK WEDDING

life plan for believing fishes

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

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

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

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

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

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

where numbers measure the holiness of manna on the monitor

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

where is jerusalem here?

the elephant in the cathedral is the voice of recidivism.

Jonathan's English Chess

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

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

2008-03-09T18:59:00.005Z

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

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

ISBN 978-1434821010

2008-02-21T17:57:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-02-20T08:04:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-02-16T17:20:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-02-13T21:34:00.001Z

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

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

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

2008-01-19T16:57:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

2007-12-23T20:09:00.000Z

for research students and interested Blake readers...............those who want Blake's The Four Zoas or Jerusalem explained in detail.......those who want to understand the structure explained and the symbolic meaning of Jerusalem and The Four Zoas analysed......those who want Blake's myth, story and characters explained and set in narrative context...........those who want to see as Blake saw.........that means in terms of Blake's four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold vision, narrative points of view, dramatic tension and use of irony and perception of tragic fall and redemption

I have re-introduced the search lines to the front of the blog. the first point i'd like to make is that the Plates can be individually called up.

blake's jerusalem textual analysis
blake's textual analysis
blake's textual analysis four zoas
four zoas
zoas
blake's vortex
william blake's plot
blake's plot
blake's major prophecies
blake's four zoas
blake's myth
blake's jerusalem
blake's symbolism
blake's four zoas meaning
blake's satan christ
blake's jerusalem meaning
blake's symbolism four zoas jerusalem
william blake's four zoas
william blake's jerusalem
william blake's four zoas jerusalem analysis
blake's jerusalem zoas time space
blake's jerusalem visionary symbolism
four zoas blake plot
jerusalem blake plot
blake vision meaning
blake's myth meaning
blake's zoas emanations meaning
blake's albion jerusalem
blake's anglo celtic christianity
Blake's soteriology
blake's golgonooza zoas
blake's golgonooza jerusalem
blake mythological personae
blake albion's fall and salvation
blake's four fold vision vortex
blake's two three four fold vision
blake's golden string jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity jerusalem
blake aesthetic unity four zoas
blake textual analysis jerusalem
blake interpretation jerusalem
blake spirituality jerusalem
blake spirituality four zoas
blake's textual analysis
blake's two nights the seventh zoas
blake line by line analysis zoas jerusalem meaning
blake's sexuality zoas jerusalem
blake's major symbols
blake jerusalem beulah eden ulro generation
blake's mythological persona
blake psychology jerusalem
william blake's mythology
william blake's myth
blake's myth
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william blake's golgonooza
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william blake's craftsmanship
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william blake's visionary mythology
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blake sexuality
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