Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake
Metadata
- Author: Frye, Northrop
Highlights
Blake’s poetry, like that of every poet who knows what he is doing, is mythical, for myth is the language of concern: it is cosmology in movement, a living form and not a mathematical one. — location: 41
Yet his earliest book, Poetical Sketches, is evenly divided between lyrics and embryonic prophecies, and one of his last and most complicated prophecies contains his most famous lyric. — location: 90
He is not writing for a tired pedant who feels merely badgered by diɽculty: he is writing for enthusiasts of poetry who, like the readers of mystery stories, enjoy sitting up nights trying to ɹnd out what the mystery is. — location: 154
A visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transɹgured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism. This is quite consistent with art, because it never relinquishes the visualization which no artist can do without. It is a perceptive rather than a contemplative attitude of mind; — location: 166
The “intellectual powers” go to work rather diʃerently: they start with the hypothesis that the poem in front of them is an imaginative whole, and work out the implications of that hypothesis. — location: 196
But once he is understood and the language of allegory learned by means of him, a whole new dimension of pleasure in poetry will be opened up which will add increased depth and range, not only to the more explicitly allegorical writers, but to any poet who addresses the intellectual powers. — location: 229
When Samuel Johnson speaks in his diary of disorders of mind he experienced which were very near to madness, both what he meant by madness and what he implied by sanity have dropped out of our language. He thought of madness as a completely sterile, chaotic and socially useless deviation from normal behavior. Whatever art he approved of he considered sane and balanced, beneɹting society and adjusted to society. — location: 251
The sources of art are enthusiasm and inspiration: if society mocks and derides these, it is society that is mad, not the artist, no matter what excesses the latter may commit: — location: 260
The unit of this mental existence Blake calls indiʃerently a “form” or an “image.” — location: 291
But the abstract idea of “tree” ranks far below this. We have now sunk to the mental level of the dull-witted Philistine who in the ɹrst place saw “just a tree,” without noticing whether it was an oak or a poplar. — location: 311
and for another, that the diʃerences between the proportions of a bull and a horse are inɹnitely more signiɹcant than the mere fact that both of them have proportion. — location: 319
The acceptance of the esse-est-percipi principle unites the subject and the object. By introducing the idea of “reɻection” we separate them again. — location: 327
there is a material world, but that is literally the “material” of experience, and has no reality apart from the forms in which it subsists, except as an abstract idea on the same plane as that of “proportion.” — location: 339
Now insofar as a man is perceived by others (or, in fact, by himself), he is a form or image, and his reality consists in the perceived thing which we call a “body.” “Body” in Blake means the whole man as an object of perception. We need another word to describe the man as a perceiver, and that word must also describe the whole man. “Soul” is possible, though it has theological overtones suggesting an invisible vapor locked up in the body and released at death. — location: 359
“the Poetic Genius is the true Man,” he says, and “the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.”36 The commonest word, however, is “mind,” and Blake frequently employs it. We use ɹve senses in perception, but if we used ɹfteen we should still have only a single mind. The eye does not see: the eye is a lens for the mind to look through. Perception, then, is not something we do with our senses; it is a mental act. — location: 365
If man perceived is a form or image, man perceiving is a former or imaginer, so that “imagination” is the regular term used by Blake to denote man as an acting and perceiving being. That is, a man’s imagination is his life. “Mental” and “intellectual,” however, are exact synonyms of “imaginative” everywhere in Blake’s work. “Fancy” also means the imagination: “fantasy,” on the other hand, relates to the memory and its “spectres.” — location: 372
There is no “general nature,” therefore nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and hence there are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men. “Every man’s wisdom is peculiar to his own individuality,”37 and there is no other kind of wisdom: reality is as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty is said to be. — location: 377
No one can begin to think straight unless he has a passionate desire to think and an intense joy in thinking. The sex act without the play of intellect and emotion is mere rutting; and virility is as important to the artist as it is to the father. The more a man puts all he has into everything he does the more alive he is. Consequently there is not only inɹnite variety of imaginations, but diʃerences of degree as well. It is not only true that “every eye sees diʃerently,” but that “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” and that “the clearer the organ the more distinct the object.”41 — location: 401
The Hallelujah-Chorus perception of the sun makes it a far more real sun than the guinea-sun, because more imagination has gone into perceiving it. Why, then, should intelligent men reject its reality? Because they hope that in the guinea-sun they will ɹnd their least common denominator and arrive at a common agreement which will point the way to a reality about the sun independent of their perception of it. — location: 410
In Blake the criterion or standard of reality is the genius; in Locke it is the mediocrity. If Locke can get a majority vote on the sun, a consensus of normal minds based on the lower limit of normality, he can eliminate the idiot who goes below this and the visionary who rises above it as equally irrelevant. This leaves him with a communal perception of the sun in which the individual units are identical, all reassuring one another that they see the same thing; that their minds are uniform and their eyes interchangeable. The individual mind thus becomes an indivisible but invariable unit: that is, it is the subjective equivalent of the “atom.” Blake calls the sum of experiences common to normal minds the “ratio,” and whenever the word “reason” appears in an unfavorable context in Blake, it always means “ratiocination,” or reɻection on the ratio. — location: 419
Locke does not think of sight as the mind directing itself through the eye to the object. He thinks of it as an involuntary and haphazard image imprinted on the mind through the eye by the object. In this process the mind remains passive and receives impressions automatically. We see the guinea-sun automatically: seeing the Hallelujah-Chorus sun demands a voluntary and conscious imaginative eʃort; or rather, it demands an exuberantly active mind which will not be a quiescent blank slate. The imaginative mind, therefore, is the one which has realized its own freedom and understood that perception is self-development. The unimaginative is paralyzed by its own doubt, its desire to cut parts of the mind oʃ from perception and parts of perception out of the mind, and by the dread of going beyond the least common denominator of the “normal.” This opposition of the freedom of the acting mind and the inertia of the response to an external impression will also meet us again. — location: 435
Perceptions form part of a logically unfolding organic unit, and just as an acorn will develop only into an oak, and not just any oak but the particular oak implicit in it, so the human being starts at birth to perceive in a characteristic and consistent way, relating his perception to his unique imaginative pattern. — location: 444
Blake is protesting against the implication that man is material to be formed by an external world and not the former or imaginer of the material world. We are not passively stimulated into maturity: we grow into it, and our environment does not alter our nature, though it may condition it. Blake is thus insisting on the importance of the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with. — location: 452
Sense experience in itself is a chaos, and must be employed either actively by the imagination or passively by the memory. The former is a deliberate and the latter a haphazard method of creating a mental form out of sense experience. The wise man will choose what he wants to do with his perceptions just as he will choose the books he wants to read, and his perceptions will thus be charged with an intelligible and coherent meaning. Meaning for him, that is, pointing to his own mind and not to, for instance, nature. It thus becomes obvious that the product of the imaginative life is most clearly seen in the work of art, which is a uniɹed mental vision of experience. For the work of art is produced by the entire imagination. The dull mind is always thinking in terms of general antitheses, and it is instructive to see how foolish these antitheses look when they are applied to art. We cannot say that painting a picture is either an intellectual or an emotional act: it is obviously both at once. We cannot say that it is either a reɻective or an active process: it is obviously both at once. We cannot say that it is “mental” or “bodily”: no distinction between brainwork and handwork is relevant to it. We cannot say that the picture is a product of internal choice or external compulsion, for what the painter wants to do is what he has to do. — location: 456
No painter ever painted an abstract idea; he paints only what he can visualize, and art owes its vividness and directness of impact, as compared with reasoning, to the fact that the concrete is more real than the general. — location: 475
It is, then, through art that we understand why perception is superior to abstraction, why perception is meaningless without an imaginative ordering of it, why the validity of such ordering depends on the normality of the perceiving mind, why that normality must be associated with genius rather than mediocrity, and why genius must be associated with the creative power of the artist. This last, which is what Blake means by “vision,” is the goal of all freedom, energy and wisdom. — location: 476
But what we see appearing before us on canvas is not a reproduction of memory or sense experience but a new and independent creation. The “visionary” is the man who has passed through sight into vision, — location: 490
If there is a reality beyond our perception we must increase the power and coherence of our perception, for we shall never reach reality in any other way. If the reality turns out to be inɹnite, perception must be inɹnite too. To visualize, therefore, is to realize. The artist is par excellence the man who struggles to develop his perception into creation, his sight into vision; and art is a technique of realizing, through an ordering of sense experience by the mind, a higher reality than linear unselected experience or a second-hand evocation of it can give. — location: 493
It appears, then, that there are not only two worlds, but three: the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. — location: 502
world of memory is an unreal world of reɻection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is a potentially real world of subjects and objects; the world of vision is a world of creators and creatures. In the world of memory we see nothing; in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we see what we want to see. These are not three diʃerent worlds, as in the religions which speak of a heaven and hell in addition to ordinary life; they are the egocentric, the ordinary and the visionary ways of looking at the same world. — location: 504
Works of art are more concentrated and uniɹed than sense experience, and that proves that there is nothing chaotic about the unlimited use of the imagination. Hence an antithesis of energy and order, desire and reason, is as fallacious as all the other antitheses with which timid mediocrity attempts to split the world. Imagination is energy incorporated in form: — location: 511
Blake’s poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion ends in an apotheosis of desire; Jerusalem in one of intellect. — location: 515
We are so possessed with the idea of the duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, — location: 522
Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept. — location: 524
The religious, philosophical and scientiɹc presentations of reality are branches of art, and should be judged by their relationship to the principles and methods of the creative imagination of the artist. — location: 527
The religious synthesis, therefore, in trying to fulɹll the needs of a group, freezes the symbols both of its theology and ritual into invariable generalities. — location: 533
“All Religions are One” means that the material world provides a universal language of images and that each man’s imagination speaks that language with his own accent. Religions are grammars of this language. Seeing is believing, and belief is vision: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. — location: 537
be judged in terms of its inner coherence. “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth,” which means a form of truth, and if Plato’s or Locke’s philosophy makes sense in itself, it is as truly a form or image of reality as a picture, and an image of the same kind. — location: 540
A metaphysical system, again, is a system; that is, an art-form, to be judged in terms of its inner coherence. “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth,” which means a form of truth, and if Plato’s or Locke’s philosophy makes sense in itself, it is as truly a form or image of reality as a picture, and an image of the same kind. To try to verify a philosophical or religious system in relation to an objective nonmental “truth” is to dissolve an imaginative form back into the chaos of the material world, and this kind of veriɹcation will destroy whatever truth it has. — location: 539
He does not say that science is wrong; he says that a commonplace mind can make a wrong use of it. He does not say that philosophy is quibbling; he says it would be if philosophers had no imagination. — location: 554
Man in his creative acts and perceptions is God, and God is Man. God is the eternal Self, and the worship of God is self-development. This disentangles the idea raised in the preceding chapter of the two worlds of perception. This world is one of perceiver and perceived, of subject and objects; the world of imagination is one of creators and creatures. In his creative activity the artist expresses the creative activity of God; and as all men are contained in Man or God, so all creators are contained in the Creator. — location: 574
Hence the visionary expresses something latent in all men; — location: 583
As imagination is life, no one is born without any imagination except the stillborn, but those who cut their imagination down as far as they can, deny, as far as they can, their own manhood and their divinity which is that manhood. They will therefore turn their backs on the genius who greatly acts and greatly perceives; but they retain the power to enter into kinship with him: — location: 584
The identity of God and man is qualiɹed by the presence in man of the tendency to deny God by self-restriction. Thus, though God is the perfection of man, man is not wholly God: otherwise there would be no point in bringing in the idea of God at all. — location: 589
The ego plays with shadows like the men in Plato’s cave; to perceive the particular and imagine the real is to perceive and imagine as part of a Divine Body. A hand or eye is individual because it is an organ of a body: separated from the body it loses all individuality beyond what is dead and useless. That is why the imagination is constructive and communicable and why the “memory” is circular and sterile. The universal perception of the particular is the “divine image” of the Songs of Innocence; the egocentric perception of the general is the “human abstract” of the Songs of Experience. This is the basis of Blake’s theory of good and evil which we shall meet in the next chapter. — location: 603
Similarly in Blake all recurrent numbers and diagrams must be explained in terms of their context and their relation to the poems, not as indicating in Blake any aɽnity with mathematical mysticism. — location: 644
There can be no “life force” apart from things possessing it: universal life is the totality of living things, and God has intelligence, judgment, purpose and desire because we are alive and possess these things. — location: 668
Perfection, when it means anything, means the full development of all one’s imagination. This is what Jesus meant when he said “Be ye therefore perfect.” — location: 694
But usually the term “angel” or “spirit” in Blake, when not used in an ironic sense, means the imagination functioning as inspiration, and the fact that inspiration often takes on a purpose of its own which appears to be independent of the will is familiar to every creative artist. — location: 721
Metamorphoses of Ovid record the converse process, of humanized creatures dwindling into objects of perception, which implies that they are images of the fall of man. — location: 793
created by God and in God is the same as seeing things as created by Man and in Man: — location: 795
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,”34 he means in part that every imaginative victory won on this earth, whether by the artist, the prophet, the martyr, or by those who achieve triumphs of selfsacriɹce, kindliness and endurance, is a permanent reality, while the triumphs of the unimaginative are lost. — location: 883
Vision is the end of religion, and the destruction of the physical universe is the clearing of our own eyesight. — location: 840
the perceived forms of the eternal world are those which are constantly perceived in this one, and it is not in the grandiose or exceptional experience that “the types and symbols of Eternity” are to be found. — location: 848
The ordinary man assumes, as a working hypothesis, that all the universe outside his range is not worth bothering one’s head about unduly. The visionary sees, as the ɹnal revelation of the Word which God speaks to his mind, that the whole “outside” universe is a shadow of an eclipsed Man. — location: 895
We have said that there are at least three levels of imagination. The lowest is that of the isolated individual reɻecting on his memories of perception and evolving generalizations and abstract ideas. This world is single, for the distinction of subject and object is lost and we have only a brooding subject left. Blake calls this world Ulro; it is his hell, and his symbols for it are symbols of sterility, chieɻy rocks and sand. — location: 908
Love and wonder, then, are stages in an imaginative expansion: they establish a permanent unity of subject and object, and they lift us from a world of subject and object to a world of lover and beloved. — location: 919
The imaginative intensity which ɹnds delight and beauty in considering the lilies may remain suʃusing us with a vague and unlocalized joy, and with this we may well be content. But the impulse to make some kind of creation out of it is still there, and poetry and painting are the result of the perseverance of vision into conquest. — location: 925
Those for whom subject and object, existence and perception, activity and thought, are all parts of a gigantic antithesis, will naturally conceive of man as split between an egocentric will and a reason which establishes contact with the nonego. Believers in the cloven ɹction tend to come to rest ɹnally in either a will-philosophy or a reason-philosophy, trying in each case to minimize the importance of the one they reject, because they are seeking to unify their ideas by reducing the problem from the double world of Generation to the single world of Ulro. One group assumes that will and energy exist by themselves in vacuo, and the other makes similar assumptions about necessity and established order. — location: 941
“Beauty” to Blake is not a third form of the good, but good itself, the union in which the reality of the other two consists; it is pursued not by feeling or emotion or any part of the personality, but by the imagination which is “the Real Man.”41 The product of “beauty” is art; art is civilization; and it is only civilization that can give any value or any meaning to those impersonalizing tendencies of the mind which build up the imaginative forms of science and morality. Thus Blake’s identiɹcation of religion with art is utterly diʃerent from the Romantic identiɹcation of the religious and aesthetic experiences. — location: 961
Yet the conception of God as a Holy Spirit, the giver and incubator of life, the indwelling person of God, the eternal Self, is, once again, the unity in which the reality of the other two consists. It was the Holy Spirit that spoke by the prophets, which means that it continues to speak by the artists who have prophetic imaginations. The “inspiration” which artists have is therefore the breath or spirit of God which dwells in the artist and is the artist. Such inspiration is the only proof we have of the existence of a spiritual power greater than ourselves. Art, then, is “the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.”43 — location: 970
Hence evil is negative: all evil consists either in selfrestraint or restraint of others. There can be no such thing, strictly speaking, as an evil act; all acts are good, and evil comes when activity is perverted into the frustration of activity, in oneself or others. — location: 1028
By turning away from the world to be perceived we develop an imaginative idleness which spreads a sickness and lassitude over the whole soul, and all vices spring from this. — location: 1037
A man may specialize in selfrestraint or in restraint of others. The former produces the vices which spring from fear; the latter those which spring from cruelty. But the thwarting of imagination is the basis of both: all the cruel are frightened, and all the fearful are cruel. — location: 1061
For in the state of “memory” or reɻection we withdraw into ourselves and are locked up there with our own keys in a dark spiritual solitude in which we are unable to conceive activity except in terms of hindrance and restraint. — location: 1071
But self-development leads us into a higher state of integration with a larger imaginative unit which is ultimately God. Hence the paradox that one gains his life by losing it, which Jesus taught. The selɹsh or egocentric are incapable of developing themselves; that comes from expansion outward, not withdrawal inward. Hence there are two selves in man absolutely opposed to one another, the better self which grows and lives and the worse self which rots and withers, the good and the evil angel: — location: 1073
The imagination in seeing a bird sees through it an “immense world of delight”; the imagination in looking at society not only sees its hypocrisies but sees through them, and sees an inɹnitely better world. — location: 1106
Man has within him the principle of life and the principle of death: one is the imagination, the other the natural man. In the natural world the natural principle will win out eventually and the man will die. As an individual ego reɻecting on his sensations of an outer space-world while existing in time, the natural man is a dying man; and like most chronic invalids the ego is fretful, irascible, cruel, bothered by triɻes, jealous and inordinately vain. Its only freedom is in domineering over or hindering others; its only happiness is in solitary possession; and in everything it does it seeks, like Cleopatra, for a painless form of suicide. — location: 1086
The fully imaginative man is therefore a visionary whose imaginative activity is prophecy and whose perception produces art. These two are the same thing, perception being an act. — location: 1100
IN Eden the two fundamental processes of the imagination, Blake says, are war and hunting; that is, struggle and search, perverted here into diʃerent kinds of murder. In the unfallen world the creative joy of the artist expands into that of the Creator God twisting the sinews of the tiger’s heart; that of the exploring scientist into the vision of the Titan Orc piercing into “the Elemental Planets & the orbs of eccentric ɹre.” — location: 1317
When we see that all men are part of the larger body of a single Man we can also see that only the pleasure of creation is real, and that creation is the only outcome of conɻict which satisɹes the imagination. The pleasure of mastery is morbid, and the pleasure of danger a gambler’s delirium. — location: 1338
Mastery over woman produces the same morbidity and imaginative idleness as mastery over man, and Blake uses the word “jealousy” to cover the Selfhood’s attitude to both. — location: 1351
Selfhood cannot love in the sense of establishing a kinship with the beloved: it can regard the latter only as a possession, something to contemplate in solitude. These irreconcilable attitudes to love are represented in “The Clod and the Pebble” in the Songs of Experience. Mastery over woman produces the same morbidity and imaginative idleness as mastery over man, and Blake uses the word “jealousy” to cover the Selfhood’s attitude to both. — location: 1349
Abstract ideas are called spectres by Blake, and Spectre with a capital letter is the Selfhood. The corresponding term is “Emanation,” which means the total form of all the things a man loves and creates. In the fallen states the Emanation is conceived as outside, and hence it becomes the source of a continuously tantalizing and elusive torment. In imaginative states it is united with and emanates from the man, hence its name. — location: 1352
Sexual love, however, is the door through which most of us enter the imaginative world, and for many it aʃords the sole glimpse into that world. It is thus especially pathetic when a chance to love is thwarted or missed, — location: 1362
Nobodaddy is a jealous God, and the killing of love is as dear to him as the killing of life, which, of course, it includes. Here again the myth of a higher “soul” and a lower “body” rears its foolish head. The latter, we are told, is “tainted” and “corrupt”; the former becomes “pure” when separated from the body and purged of ɻeshly desires. As the body is the soul seen from the perspective of this world, it is easy to see how murderous this denial of those simple desires which are imaginative needs must be. — location: 1373
Money for those who have it, on the other hand, can belong only to the Selfhood, as it assumes the possibility of enjoyment through possession, which we have seen to be impossible; and hence of being passively or externally stimulated into imagination. — location: 1412
We may notice that in all four areas of imaginative conɻict the Selfhood sets up a parody of the imagination. The physical ɹght of the hero parodies the mental ɹght of the artist; the jealous wife and teasing mistress parody the emanation; money and morality parody the community of minds; the ghost or nightmare parodies the vision. This pattern of superɹcial resemblance combined with profound contrast, the illustration of the doctrine that truth clariɹes error into the negation of itself, reaches its culmination in the parody of Christ by Antichrist. — location: 1449