Internal Eternity: Self Becomes
Other
Like Coleridge, Blake will settle for
nothing less than all.
David
Erdman reports in the preface to his Concordance to Blake's
writings,
that "all" is the most frequent word in Blake's
writings,
more than twice as frequent as the next word (except
for the
commonest English words such as "and," "the,"
"he," etc.)
<1>
The similarity between Blake and Coleridge was so striking to
some
observers that the London University
Magazine reported:
A witness to a meeting of the two reported
that 'Blake and
Coleridge, when in company, seemed like
congenial beings of
another sphere, breathing for a while on
our earth: which may
be perceived from the similarity of thought
pervading their
works.'<2>
Even
Coleridge recognized the similarity, but gave pride of place
to
Blake in the realm of the other world:
You perhaps smile at {my} calling another
poet a {Mystic};
but verily I am in the very mire of
common-place common-sense
compared with Mr. Blake, apo- or
rather--anacalyptic Poet,
and Painter! <3>
Without
mentioning Blake, Richard Holmes describes Coleridge in
very
Blakean terms:
Coleridge's own imagination belongs to a
distinct literary
tradition: it is deeply English, rural, and
with a strong
idealising or neo-Platonic strain. . .
. Everywhere it seeks
the 'radiance' of the eternal in the
particular.<4>
Yet,
while Blake and Coleridge may work from very much the same
presumptions
and predilections, predilections which help them
lean
toward the coincidence of opposites, Coleridge eventually
becomes
a conservative, using the coincidence of opposites to
support
the status quo. Blake, however, uses the
coincidence of
opposites
to burst bounds, to redefine all of existence.
After
the
disastrous, inescapable cycles of "The Mental Traveller," his
epics,
especially
coincidence
of opposites to achieve a more imaginative plane of
existence:
For Blake . . . Jesus the Imagination, rather than taking
part in a Coleridgean unification and
idealization, is an
iconoclast . . .<5>
That
iconoclasm exhibits itself early in
states
the purpose of his work:
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the
immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought:
into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the
Human Imagination.
(5:18-20; E147)
The
movement into Eternity is both interior and exterior,
penetrating
into depths and expanding into heights.
Like the
writers
already discussed, Blake sets up circles of expansion and
contraction,
but instead of presenting them as contrary forces in
balance
or reconciliation or oscillation, he boldly assumes that
they
are identical. The centripetal, inward
force that
2
penetrates
into "the Worlds of Thought" enables the poet to "open
the
Eternal Worlds," juxtaposed in Blake's syntax to an
identical,
centrifugal force, which is "expanding in the Bosom of
God." Instead of the philosophical arguments of a
Cusanus or a
Pope or
a Coleridge, instead of the agnonized tensions of a Mary
Shelley
or a Percy Shelley or the Blake of "The Mental
Traveller,"
the Blake of Jerusalem simply states his outrageous
coincidence
of opposites in the most declarative terms.
Furthermore,
he conflates God and Man without any of the
geometrical
inventiveness of Cusanus or any of the soul searching
of
Coleridge. In simple geometrical terms,
the expanding
circumference
of God equals the focussing center of humanity.
Several critics imply, in various ways,
that Blake's inward
movement
emphasizes the inward at the expense of the outward.
Otto
indicts most of us:
Blake criticism, particularly since the
work of Northrop
Frye, has worked within a discourse which
tends to erase the
very distinction between self and other,
and time and
Eternity.
As a result the question of how our worlds are to
be opened, and how we can perceive what is
other, does not
appear in its full force.<6>
Attention
to the concept of the coincidence of opposites can help
to
rectify that distortion. Whereas
Cusanus, Pope, Coleridge,
Mary
Shelley, and Percy Shelley find balance or unbearable
tension
or unsolved mystery in the oppositions of inward and
outward
forces, Blake plays in both forces to the full extent of
their
power. His "Mental Traveller,"
explored in the previous
chapter,
shows what can happen when the opposing forces merely
try to
counter and even dominate each other: they create circles
of
torture. His later works, especially
can
escape from the horrible circles, essentially by plunging
more
deeply into the opposing forces and allowing them to
interpenetrate.
Stephen Behrendt, like Otto, emphasizes the
outward rather
than
the inward:
Blake's own art is explosive rather than
implosive in its
intellectual and aesthetic signals,
directing its audience
outward even when it appears to be doing
just the reverse:
the objective is to see not so much the
grain of sand as the
World it contains, to 'Hold Infinity in the
palm of your hand
/ And Eternity in an hour' <7>
Behrendt's
explanation is useful as a corrective to too much
emphasis
on the inward, but it should not be read as an absolute
in
which explosion replaces implosion; both are necessary.
I want to concentrate my discussion of
Blake's coincidences
of
opposites in
Bible,
which, according to Northrop Frye, is one of the only two
approaches
to the poem:
In reading
how Blake interpreted the Bible, and how he
placed that
interpretation in an English
context.<8>
I shall
neglect the latter admonition to pursue the former. In
Jerusalem
Blake uses the Bible to teach his readers to look
inward
and expand outward, a simultaneous double movement that
reveals
Eternity. On plate 16 the Bible is
equated with the
sculptures
in Los's Halls where every possible story is told.
From
that point of view the Bible is a revelation, hammered out
in
detail by the artist. On plate 48 the Bible makes up the
pillars
of the couch where
that
point of view, it is a creation of mercy, given to man to
keep
him safe. But in this latter scene, the
couch which is
identical
with the Bible is brought to man by his enemies, as
well as
by Jesus, and thus appears also as a tomb.
Therefore the
Bible
is both evidence of our fallen condition and at the same
time a
solace and a means of escape from the fallen condition.<9>
Blake insists that human perceptions and
actions must be
raised
from the fallen, temporal world which seems all too
obvious
to men's eyes into the eternal world of Vision which he
is
trying to open to them, and open them to.
Paradoxically the
only
way to reject that fallen world is to embrace it; the
eternal
and the temporal are inseparable, even though they are
3
exact
opposites. Fallen vision refuses to see
this fundamental
identity
and tries to separate the two worlds, either mystifying
or
ignoring the Visionary world. Like the opposing forces in "The
Mental
Traveller" fallen vision tries to divide the contraries
(in
that poem represented by male and female) and pit them
against
each other because they believe that they must destroy or
dominate
each other instead of seeing the other as identical to
the
self even while other than the self.
Eternal Vision reverses
and
then includes fallen vision by forgiving and transfiguring
it. For Blake the Bible is a model of a text
which induces in
the
reader a transformation, a transubstantiation, a
transfiguration
from fallen vision to Eternal Vision.
But since
Eternal
Vision includes fallen vision, the Bible contains both
perspectives,
and so does Blake. Eternal Vision is
full of
fallen
vision. Thus the Bible, like Blake, can
be read by some
readers
as a code book of morality instead of as a means of
expanding
vision. The reader must actively,
creatively, and
responsibly
read the Bible, just as he must live his life,
accountable
for his moral stance. Blake does to the
Bible what
eternal
perception does to the fallen world: reveal, oppose,
forgive,
and transfigure it, reversing it and including it in
total
Vision.
The transfiguration that Blake works on the
Bible is based on
a
method of presenting oppositions and then transforming them,
much as
happens at the transfiguration of Jesus (see following
chapter
for discussion of the transfiguration scene in
it is
essential to the poem. At the same time
said to
alter the Bible so radically that it virtually dispenses
with
the Bible altogether; it surpasses the Bible.
Similarly,
when
Jesus stands transfigured on the mountain, his human body
exists
within his divine one: the transfigured form clearly
includes
the earthly form. At the same time the
presence of
Jesus
is altered so radically that his physical form seems
unnecessary,
completely transcended. From a different
perspective,
the transfigured form, whether Jesus or
reveals
the glowing presence that was co-existent with the
apparently
ordinary form, whether the man of
Bible,
all along.
And Blake refuses to compromise this
radical combination of
divine
and ordinary existence. The eternal
Vision that is
celebrated
in the transfiguration scene at the end of
can be
achieved only through an embrace of the fallen world as
brought
about by the birth of Jesus. Unity and
individuality,
God and
man, transcendence and immanence, minute particulars and
Eternity,
none of these pairs of supposed opposites can be
understood
by choosing between them. And neither
can fallen
vision
and eternal Vision, for to choose between them is to fall
again,
but to see them both is to enter Eternity.
My search for the principle of
transfiguration in Blake
receives
confirmation from David Wagenknecht's idea that a
principle
of transformation may be the key to Blake:
As intensive work on Blake continues, it
becomes increasingly
evident how central and common to all
approaches is the idea
of transformation. On this common ground meet ways of
reading Blake as different from each other
(though not
necessarily opposed) as Kathleen Raine's
and David Erdman's.
. . . Whether or not we want to accept a
given reading ought
to give way eventually to a concern for the
principle of
transformation itself.<10>
Quoting
Richard Cody's The Landscape of the Mind, Wagenknecht
sees
the idea of pastoral as a compromise between transcendence
and
immanence. But he intensifies the
relationship:
4
. . . the more apocalyptic the outlook, the
greater is man's
awareness of his fallen condition. The closer Blake comes to
the achievement of imaginative transcendence,
the more man
comes to seem immersed in a satanic
immanence. . . .Blake's
secular and religious concerns are one: to
demonstrate that
the ordinary world of extensive, fallen
vision includes the
imaginative wherewithal for that world's
intensive, visionary
transformation.<12>
Wagenknecht
concludes with a reading of the end of
which
agrees with mine: "the paradoxical intercourse between
universal
and individual. . . is the final . . .
transformation."<13>
Herbert Schneidau, in Sacred Discontent,
although he mentions
Blake
only twice in passing, sees the whole development of
Western
culture as based on a tension between acceptance and
rejection. The essence of biblical Hebrew culture and of
the
Christian
and secular cultures which have descended from it,
according
to Schneidau, is the struggle between continuity and
revolution:
"We love and hate our culture, and the resultant
force
is toward change. This ambivalence
derives from the
Bible".<14> The Yahweh of Israel, even though He is the
very
foundation
of the integrity and continuity of the community,
intercedes
again and again to discredit the culture of His people
and to
redefine His relationship to them. Each
intervention is
simultaneously
a destruction of established structures and a
construction
of new ones.
If Schneidau's thesis about biblical
culture and its
descendants
is accepted, then no one stands more clearly than
Blake
in the main line of Western cultural development, for Blake
insists
on redefining both his culture and its Bible even while
he
claims to honor them. Schneidau traces
the dilemma of
continuity-in-revolution
through Christianity and into modern
literature:
The dilemma is an old one in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition:
whether to regard the event primarily as
that which founds
and centers new structures or as that which
broke away so
radically from former structures as to put
in question all
possible new ones.<15>
This
dilemma can lead to a constant surging forward, always
hoping,
never accomplishing, every structure being undercut.
That
kind of movement is apparent in Blake; never does he allow
the
reader to rest content with any oversimplified structural
formula. And yet the conclusion of Jerusalem is an
undeniable
triumph,
an absolute end. These two contradictory
aspects of
Blake's
poetry create a problem for the reader: if we emphasize
the
constant revolution too strongly, a vicious cycle results; if
we
emphasize the construction of systems too strongly, dogma
threatens. We have seen the vicious cycle in "The
Mental
Traveller";
we have seen dogma in An Essay on Man.
We have seen
the
near impossibility of escape in Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and
Percy
Shelley. We have seen the promise of a
solution in
Nicholas
of Cusa. And we see the triumphant
solution in Blake.
The eschatology of the early Church, as
explained by Rudolf
Bultmann
in Theology of the New Testament, provides a very
Blakean
perspective on the problem. In Bultmann,
an absolute end
is
paradoxically combined with a hope for the future. Because
the
Christian feels the urgency of the meaning of Jesus so
strongly,
time is effectively ended:
The consciousness that man's relation
toward God decides his
fate and that the hour of decision is of
limited duration
clothes itself in the consciousness that
the hour of decision
is here for the world, too.<16>
5
The paradox of the kingdom of God is that
it is "future and
yet
already present." The individual
believer is torn out of
ordinary
historical time by a de-historicized and de-sacralized
God and
forced to confront his true history, his de-
secularization,
in concrete encounter with his neighbor.
I think
that it
is important not to sacrifice either the individual or
the
universal aspect of Blake's eschatology.
Ronald Grimes
attempts
to distinguish Bultmann's view from Blake's:
Blake's eschatology is a matter of renewed
vision, but the
consummation is not complete until the new
personal
consciousness has become a new social and
cosmic
consciousness. . . . Bultmann's
existentialist eschatology
remains on a personal and subjective
level.<17>
Similarly,
Thomas Altizer attempts to separate the individual and
the
universal:
Orthodox Christianity . . . has proclaimed
an individual
redemption that takes place without
affecting the reality of
the world; but radical Christianity refuses
a redemption
which is confined to individual selfhood,
and seeks an
apocalyptic transformation of the
world.<18>
Whether
or not Bultmann makes that distinction, Blake does not.
In
Blake there is no separation of the individual's personal
transfiguration
and the transfiguration of the cosmos.
In Bultmann, the paradox in time extends to
include an
ethical
one: God's reign is not a demand for good.
"It aims
neither
at the formation of `character' nor at the molding of
human
society." The fulfillment of God's
will is "nothing else
but
true readiness for it, genuine and earnest desire for
it."<19>
A similar affront to ordinary understanding
is proposed by
Stanley
Fish, in Self-Consuming Artifacts, as the distinguishing
6
characteristic
of a dialectical, rather than a rhetorical,
literary
method. Rhetorical literature satisfies
the reader,
telling
him what he already knows (as in Pope's "What oft was
thought
but ne'er so well express'd"), whereas dialectical
literature
disturbs, often humiliates, acting as a "good
physician"
who urges a conversion. The dialectic
demands a
radical
new life from the reader: to remain unchanged is to fail
to
understand.
In his discussion of the Phaedrus Fish sees
a method in which
each
part of the work invalidates the part before it. The
contradictions
and non-sequiturs force a larger perspective of
understanding. The technique is not based on logic and
reason:
"what
is being processed in the Phaedrus is not an argument or a
proposition,
but a vision".<20> The reader
of Blake must enter
into
that same spirit of loving confrontation to create his own
reconstruction
of Jerusalem, which is Blake's reconstruction of
the
Bible.
Most writing, whatever the intention of its
author, can be
read,
if the reader insists, as a moral lesson, a rhetorical
confirmation
of principles which we already know, and which, if
we
apply them gradually to our lives, will improve us.<21> The
oral
teachings of a master dialectician, such as Jesus or
Socrates,
however, engage the students and disciples in a direct
and
surprising way, shattering complacencies, preventing that
easy
and self-satisfied kind of learning.
Even though all that
we know
of Jesus and Socrates has come down to us through
writing,
it is significant that neither of them was a writer. In
fact
writing itself necessarily distorts their teachings.<22> As
soon as
the teachings of a master, especially a master
dialectician,
are written, they begin to be codified and to lose
some of
their power. This process occurs not
only because the
writers
may intentionally alter the teachings, but because of the
very
nature of writing itself. Whatever
advantages the medium of
writing
may have over a spoken dialectic--longevity, logical
progression,
linear sequentiality--it also has disadvantages. It
does
not allow for genuine dialogue; it does not allow for
certain
modes of simultaneity. Blake created a
form of art which
attempts
to transcend and revolutionize methods of writing, even
while
it employs them. Logic and sequence are
blasted by
paratactical
strategies; contradictions and paradoxes halt the
reader;
illustrations violate or ignore the text.
Such a poet is
quite
simply incomprehensible to anyone who sits down to read
complacently. In effect Blake found a way to confront his
reader
in his
text as Jesus and Socrates confronted their listeners in
person.
The reader does not so much have to go away
and contemplate
the
text in tranquility, as he has to confront the Eternity of
Blake's
minute particulars with every sweep of the eyes across
the
words and illuminations. And such a
confrontation is
contained
right at the beginning of Jerusalem in the phrase
"Monos
o Iesous." (See further discussion
in following chapter.)
The
coincidence of opposites--the forgiving immanence of the
woman
taken in adultery and the judging transcendence of the
transfiguration--teaches
us by embodying, not by merely urging
and
preaching, the expanded consciousness of contradictions.
The dialectic is not only the cause of the
method and the
object
of the method; it is the method itself.
The simultaneous
imitation
and rejection, the simultaneous immanence and
transcendence,
of all experience and of the Bible in particular,
teach
us a new way to read and a new way to live, a way that
demands
awareness of how our ordinary understanding distorts
everything
from religion to sex, from perception to philosophy.
In
plate 3 Blake follows the example of St. Paul in declaring
himself
the greatest of sinners; if we deny our own sin, or any
undesirable
quality that we can abstractly conceive, then we deny
ourselves
dialogue with Jesus.
Exploring Blake from philosophical
perspectives, Leopold
Damrosch,
in Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, finds four
categories
of irreconcilable differences: epistemological
(sense/intuition);
psychological (solipsism/universal humanity);
7
ontological
(divine immanence/transcendence); and aesthetic
(imaginative/fallen
art). He claims that Blake cannot come
to
terms
with oppositions because of his refusal to compromise:
"Rather
than accepting one or another of the compromises that
have
been developed over the centuries, he aspired to put the
entire
structure of Western thought together again"<23>. But
always
Damrosch refuses to accept the contradictions which Blake
presents;
when he finds logical inconsistencies, he stops short:
for
example, the meanings in "The Blossom" are "mutually
contradictory:
if the body is a prison, then it is not a source
of joy."
(112) In a related issue very important
in Jerusalem,
he
relegates Blake to the realm of mystical vision which is
unintelligible
to all non-mystics:
. . . the body is at once a merciful `limit
of contraction'
and a trap from which we must escape. But it is easier to
say that it is both at once than to
understand how it can be.
. . . I do not deny that analogues to
Blake's position may be
found in Boehme and elsewhere; I deny that
they make
sense.<24>
Damrosch's book provides an invaluable
service by continually
confronting
the paradoxes in Blake, and many times, despite his
refusal
to enter fully into Blake's Vision, he formulates
concepts
in a precise and revelatory way: writing of Emanations,
he
thinks that they, like many other parts of Blake, "must
similarly
be understood as a mystical attempt to keep what we
have
and yet transform it utterly." He
realizes that Los's work
is
important, but that it is not Eden. He
concludes that Blake's
symbols
must point beyond themselves to the truth and that
Blake's
myth believes in man's spiritual power "while fully
recognizing
the self-deluding tendencies of the imagination and
its
symbols"<25>. But finally
Damrosch stands forlornly outside:
. . . if we inhabit a world that no longer
believes in its
symbols--if we can neither trust the
products of our symbol-
making imagination nor bear to live with
them--then Blake
speaks to us with a special poignancy. His Eden is forever
closed to us by the Cherub with the flaming
sword.<26>
Damrosch's
thought is an extreme consequence of approaching Blake
with
too much of a commitment to logic.
Despite his genuine
insights
into Blake and his obvious affection for Blake,
Damrosch's
Covering Cherub, which forbids his entrance into
Blake's
Eden, is his insistence on reasonable, logical, coherent,
philosophical
systematizing as a way in. Instead, the
recognition
of the coincidence of opposites can provide the tool
for
entering Blake's vision.
A rational approach to the Bible sees it as
a code of
morality,
but Blake's Bible is not a code of morality; instead,
as
declared in his most famous pronouncement on the Bible, in The
Laocoon:
The Old and New Testaments are the great
Code of Art. (E273)
Peter
Fisher, in The Valley of Vision, presents a good
formulation
of the accepted interpretation of this statement:
Blake called the biblical record "the
Great Code of Art" not
because it outlined the rules of
composition, but because it
presented a collection of literary forms
inspired by the
Hebrew genius who was Jehovah in the Old
Testament and Jesus
in the New.
It had an inevitable pattern undistorted and
unrestricted by the accidental events of
the narrative.<27>
8
However,
Blake's word "code" contains a contrary tension, like
that in
the word "system."<28>
In every one of the six other
times
that Blake uses the word "code" or "codes"<29> it is
a
pejorative
term, always referring to a divinely inspired law given for the
purpose
of restriction or war. The most vehement
use occurs in the
annotations
to Watson:
The laws of the Jews were (both ceremonial
& real) the basest
& most oppressive of human codes, &
being like all other
codes given under pretence of divine
command were what Christ
pronounced them The Abomination that maketh
desolate, i.e.
State Religion which is the Source of all
Cruelty. (E618)
Any
code which pretends to divine inspiration is liable to usurp
the
place of God. Of course the phrase has
the positive meaning
that
Fisher assigns to it, but at the same time, any code,
because
it exists in the fallen world, must partake of the nature
of that
world.
One of Blake's earliest works (generally assumed
to be his
first
attempt at illuminated printing) the tractate "All
Religions
Are One," helps to clarify what is at stake here:
The Jewish and Christian Testaments are an
original
derivation from the Poetic Genius. This is necessary from
the confined nature of bodily
sensation. (E1)
Of
course the common interpretation of this statement, as
exemplified
by Fisher above, is correct, but working at the same
time is
the restrictive nature of the Bible and the body. As
usual
in Blake, if the interpreter too much emphasizes one
extreme
in Blake, that interpreter is probably missing the
equally
strong contrary movement. In the same
tractate, Blake
states:
"As all men are alike in outward form, so (and with the
same
infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius." Just
as each
man's body is a particular expression of the human form,
so each
religion is a particular culture's expression of the
Poetic
Genius: "The Religions of all Nations are derived from
each
Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius." Any
particular
body, or any particular Bible, is an expression of
"the
Poetic Genius," which "is the true Man" (E1).
But the limited shape of the human body,
just like the
limited
shape of the Bible, just like any code or any system, can
be seen
in its exclusive sense rather than its universal one.
Imaginative
acts must take definite shape; if they remain
undefined,
then man is forever lost in the void.
But whatever
shape
they take is determined by both their eternal and fallen
nature. The eternal exhibits itself in the temporal,
fallen
world;
the distinctions in the fallen world derive from eternal
unity. The Christian artist must honor the gifts of
God in other
men and
in other bibles, not because each one is a Platonic
shadow
of something more real, but because each one is eternal if
perceived
with expanded Vision.
Fallen vision does not perceive the
eternal, and so tries to
create
its own substitute for eternity by concealment and
mystery. Eternal Vision perceives the essential
coincidence of
opposites
which fallen vision falsely divides, and so fully
enters
into the definite shapes, the minute particulars where the
center
and the circumference of Eternity meet.
But once such a
particular
shape is entered into, the Fall happens again.
Jesus
is born
in Jerusalem and gives himself a definite shape, in order
to
break through the false categories that fallen vision tries to
9
maintain. Jesus submits to the fallen world in order to
reveal
it for
what it is: the eternal perversely reflected.
When Blake describes the process by which Jerusalem
was
composed,
he unexpectedly incorporates the Old Testament God who
gave
the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai:
Reader!
lover of books! lover of heaven.
And of that God from whom all books are
given,
Who in mysterious Sinais awful cave
To Man the wond'rous art of writing gave,
Again he speaks in thunder and in fire!
Thunder of Thought, & flames of fierce
desire:
Even from the depths of Hell his voice I
hear,
Within the unfathomd caverns of my Ear.
Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall
be:
Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth shall
live in harmony.
(Jerusalem, 3)
Blake
includes here the tradition that God gave man the gift of
writing
on Sinai.<30> That art can be used
to record a
restrictive
code like the Ten Commandments or it can be used to
unite
Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Blake insists
on both modes of
writing:
the restrictive writing which comes from a terrifying
God in
a secret place is also a means of regeneration.
The code
of
prohibitions arises from a shrunken perception of the nature
of
writing; as a list of negatives ("Thou shalt not"), it negates
the
visionary power which is visible to expanded perception. But
expanded
perception does not negate the cave or the fearful God
or the
limitations of writing. It sees them
anew, assimilating
while
overturning. That which had been denied,
the prohibitive
Law
from Sinai, is now included in a new totality of Vision.
Total
Vision does not simply exorcise the old punitive God; it
assimilates
Him.<31> Similarly Vision must use
the tools and
work
with the limits of the fallen world. A
Heaven which
excludes
Hell, a Hell which excludes Heaven, or an Earth which
excludes
either one will not enter the Savior's kingdom.
All
that
exists must be revealed, because refusal to acknowledge any
part of
existence in itself negates the transforming power of
Vision.
But this inclusiveness necessarily entails
redefinitions, of
both
the new covenant and the old. The
exterior, corporeal
thunders
and fire have been interiorized. In one
sense, this
makes
them less fierce: they are contained. In
another sense, it
makes
them all the more terrible. Now instead
of an unfathomable
distant
heaven, the poet feels the terrors of the unfathomable
inside
his own mind and body, in an exhilarating and terrifying
coincidence
of opposites.
Blake
strongly insists on both aspects of his God, the
transcendent
and the immanent:
We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of
ourselves, everything
is conducted by Spirits, no less than
Digestion or Sleep. . .
. When this Verse was first dictated to me
I consider'd a
Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton
& Shakespeare . .
. . But I soon found that in the mouth of a
true Orator such
monotony was not only awkward, but as much
a bondage as rhyme
itself.
I therefore have produced a variety in every line,
both of cadences & number of
syllables. (E145-46)<32>
These
statements contain a clear and uncompromising paradox: on
the one
hand, the poet has no power of his own; on the other
hand,
the poet decides how to write his poetry.
The assertions
about
the process of composition contradict the theory of all-
powerful
spirits; the word "consider'd" contradicts the word
"dictated"
just a few spaces before it. Some
critics find Blake
simply
confused here; most ignore the transcendence and make
Blake's
God completely immanent. But surely
Blake wants it both
ways:
not only does he use the terminology of a transcendent,
all-powerful
God, but he carefully sets up the tone of awe which
such a
God induces. The very art of writing
which Blake is using
to
escape from mystery and caves is given from a "mysterious"
cave. Just as any code or system necessarily
participates in the
fallen
world, so language itself cannot, and should not try to,
totally
escape its fallen nature.
For Blake, the claim of individual
expressive authority and
the disclaimer of authority . . . involves
no contradiction,
for the universal poetic genius that is God
acts only through
individuals. That is why Blake can seem to be both the
author of original writings and merely a
conduit through
which innumerable writings . . . transmit
themselves.<33>
Imitating his God even while he rebels
against Him, fearing
His
transcendent power while internalizing Him, the poet performs
his
paradoxical task.
Again he [God] speaks in thunder and
in fire!
Thunder of Thought, & flames of
fierce desire:
Even from the depths of Hell his voice
I hear,
Within the unfathomd caverns of my
Ear.
Therefore I print; nor vain my types
shall be:
Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth
shall live in harmony.
(Jerusalem
3:4-10, E145)
With
his only use of the word "types"<34> Blake includes not only
a
direct reference to his techniques of printmaking, but also a
hint of
his method of typology and the kinds of reversal and
fulfillment
contained within it. Blake used very
laborious and
exact
engraving and etching methods to produce his illuminated
books,
as well as his commissioned works to earn his
livelihood.<35> He first wrote and drew on copper plates with
a
wax
ground. A corrosive acid then burned
away the exposed
surfaces,
leaving only the design to be printed.
The copper
plate
was inked and pressed onto paper. The
raised surfaces on
copper
are literally the type of the finished product on paper.
But the
entire physical process of printing is figuratively a
type of
the spiritual process of regeneration. Although it has
its own
identity as a physical process, it fulfills itself only
in its
spiritual or mental final product.
The printmaker can complete his task only
in an action of
physical
reversal. That is, when he prints on
paper, his design
is
reversed. Throughout Jerusalem Blake indicates that the
attainment
of eternal Vision can come only through a reversal of
the
fallen world.<37>
In a profound sense, to find the eternal
world is to reverse
the
fallen world, just as the printmaker must reverse his design
in
order to print it onto paper. But he
cannot reverse the plate
until
he has fully shaped it, in all its minute particularity.
Furthermore,
the design on paper is identical in every detail to
the
design on copper, except that it has been completely
reversed,
transformed in its perspective as well as in its
medium. It is entirely different, even while it is
the same, and
both
the sameness and the difference have been radically
redefined
from their original connotations. The
physical
importance
of the simultaneous identity and difference strikes us
immediately
when we encounter the mirror writing in Jerusalem on
plates
37 and 8l, and yet that process of transferring mirror
images
is embodied in every single plate of Blake's illuminated
works. Its spiritual importance, similar to its
physical
importance
and yet quite different, also strikes us when we
encounter
on almost every plate the stunning redefinitions and
rewritings
that are the soul and method of Jerusalem.
Just as the printmaker's work must be
fulfilled by a process
of
reversal, so the Christian artist's task must also be
fulfilled
by a process of reversal, a reversal which completely
accepts
the fallen world and at the same time utterly transforms
it. The dialectic is like that of the story of
the woman taken
in
adultery. Jesus forgives the sin by
simultaneously accepting
it
(refusing to punish, implicating the accusers) and rejecting
it (not
condoning it, telling the woman to "go and sin no more").
This
paradoxical behavior cuts across old categories and, if not
ignored
or avoided or explained away, re-creates the world in a
new
way. Likewise, the Bible, most clearly
in the relationship
of the
New Testament to the Old (especially in the entrance of
Jesus into the world)