William Blake on Self and Soul
Metadata
- Author: Laura Quinney
Highlights
Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode presents the traumatic experience of consciousness awakening to its alienation from actuality and seeking, with all deliberate if uncertain will, to create for itself a faith in its transcendent provenance. No dramatization of this plight is starker than the anguished soliloquy of Shelley’s Alastor Poet, who addresses his urgent questions about the purpose of consciousness to a swan who cannot understand him. — location: 277
For Blake the intuition of selfhood includes the intuition of its transcendence— its superiority to the material world— and he maintained that if this intuition is simply discounted as an illusion, it will not die down but rather rankle and torment. — location: 290
Blake’s essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity, or to use a more plangent idiom, the loneliness of the soul. This unhappiness is very often expressed in dualism, either of mind- body or of subject- object; both imply that subjectivity is anomalous in a material world and that each subject is isolated from others. Blake seeks to repair this deep ontological wound. — location: 308
But Blake’s more profound objection to empiricism is psychological: the New Science is “a Science [of] Despair” (M 41:15, E142). It encourages the center of consciousness, or “I,” to regard itself as passive and helpless. The “I” has been thrust into a material world whose power and influence over it are disproportionate; it is invisible and intangible where the world is solid and real. The world was there before it, and so its “life” is largely reactive. It floats about, an immaterial node, embedded in its disturbing private experience. It can master neither the stimuli to which it is exposed nor the effects of stimuli in its interior. The “I” finds the self to be dark and strange, occupied by things it does not acknowledge as its own— hidden pro cesses and extrinsic “impressions” the world has forced upon it. — location: 319
Tharmas says he feels like an “atom” because he is experiencing his subject- life in the terms that empirical science suggests. He must figure the “I” as a thing because the spiritual terms have been debarred. So he describes the “I” as a little node of consciousness adrift in a dark and alien world of matter. It is a like an atom: single, essential, small, opaque. And yet it is not material after all. — location: 329
The word “identity” takes over here from the word “atom”: it is still reductive, it still suggests thing- ness. Blake no doubt alludes to the chapter of Locke’s Essay in which he defines “personal identity,” or continuity of the self, in minimal terms as present consciousness plus its continuous memories of itself. This is a narrow definition, befitting a materialist psychology, and to Blake’s mind it deserves parody. Blake counters the empiricist definition in this passage by using the word “identity” in a subtly ironic sense, intimating its perverse inadequacy. Tharmas clearly feels no better once he has defined consciousness as “identity” because he right away dissolves into incoherent emotional protest: “Ah terrible terrible.” — location: 339
It must be owned, but possibly the worst way to own it is through orthodox cosmology, theology, or eschatology in which the divinity of the soul is referred to the noblesse oblige of a tyrannical creator- god and to fulfillment in another life. Blake recommends instead identifying it with a creative power that is your own possession in the here and now. — location: 355
When Tharmas adopts the empiricist view of the subject— when he de- fines himself as Natural Man— he falls into a revealing state of confusion. His bafflement reminds us that although empiricism and the scientific materialism to which it is related claim to present an objective or “neutral” view, they are themselves ideological, forcefully “interpellating a subject,” as we would say now, rather than leaving the domain blank, as it purports to do. — location: 359
Consciously or not, everyone holds some concept of the human and the divine and their interrelation. There is such a view hidden in empiricism, precisely insofar as it denies that anything meaningful can be said about the divine and the relation of the human to the divine. — location: 367
Blake makes this argument in his address “To the Deists,” where he insists “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan” (J 52, E201). Consciously or not, everyone holds some concept of the human and the divine and their interrelation. There is such a view hidden in empiricism, precisely insofar as it denies that anything meaningful can be said about the divine and the relation of the human to the divine. — location: 366
more pertinent to Blake’s purposes, both follow Plato’s lead in arguing that the soul feels, and thus comes to know, its discomfiture in the material world through the anguishing emotion of “homesickness.” — location: 384
The new note— pathos—is introduced by the idea that in beholding the visionary world, the soul beholds the world from which it is exiled, and momentarily returns to it. With this reply, Socrates answers the implicit question: What is the value of this ideal, “the perfect city,” or of any purely imaginary, idealistic projection? It satisfies the soul’s deepest desire: to rejoin what shares its nature. The Greek word is katoikein— to go home— and the Phaedo promises that with death the soul will finally have its homecoming. This promise might be gratifying did it not entail a painful implication: the soul is in the meantime not at home; it is alone, wandering, adrift, ill at ease. — location: 389
Existential alienation is linked to an experience of self- alienation, or con- flict within between what thinks itself the “real” part of the self and what it identifies as false or accrued. — location: 424
This insecurity is due to the fact that our existential trajectories— our life projects, roles, and identities— have “always already” been shaped by a past that we can never get behind and they head off into a future in which they will always be incomplete, cut short by a death we can neither avoid nor control. We exist as a “thrown project.” We have no choice but to project our life projects toward the impenetrable horizon of our impending deaths. This gives rise to the “uncanny” feeling that we are not at home in our lives. (235) Here is the well- known Geworfenheit, or “throwness,” a term which Heidegger evolves in giving a naturalistic explanation of what, as we saw earlier, the Gnostics call spiritual “exile.” Jonas argues, in fact, that throwness is an “originally Gnostic” term (Gnostic Religion 344). He cites Valentinus, who wrote of this world “wherein we have been thrown” and, Jonas adds, “in Mandaean literature it is a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body” (Gnostic Religion 35). — location: 433
Self- recognition entails recognition of otherness within the self. This recognition can be related, although with a manifest loss of nuance, to Augustine’s dread of the darkness within, or the ego’s apprehension of the id, or to the subduction of identity under Lacan’s Symbolic Order. — location: 449
He calls this empirical ego, which is grasping, desperate, and defensive, “the Selfhood” (somewhat confusingly for us, who have been using the term selfhood in a more neutral sense). In Blake’s poem Milton, the poet John Milton, who has returned from the afterlife to correct his errors, realizes that he actually has to annihilate this Selfhood before he can see the truth, or live properly, or fulfill his vocation as a prophet. He accuses Satan, the avatar of False Religion, of sponsoring selfishness by promoting the idea of personal immortality and the goal of personal salvation. — location: 469
Blake does not call for the recovery of a “true self,” which is to him another form of egotism traveling in an idealistic disguise. — location: 474
Blake would bridle at this proud insistence on first- person authority and singularity (as opposed to the intellectual originality on which he prided himself). He would say: indeed, the ego tries many ruses to persuade us that it is our “real self.” It may masquerade as something original, authentic, and pure. But that too is just another veil, another false self. The real part of us is impersonal. — location: 481
In a characteristically compressed formulation, Blake explains that the node of identity presents itself as the focal point, or center, of the self, but what lies at our hearts is divinity, wide and deep, by which we participate in a sense of larger being: “What is Above is Within, for every- thing in Eternity is translucent:/ The Circumference is Within: Without, is formed the Selfish Center” (J 71:6–7). Note the spatial meta phor: the node of singularity, the point, atom, or “Center,” which informs the concepts not only of ego but also of self and soul, is dispersed into its antithesis, an embracing “Circumference.” So far Blake’s ideas coincide well enough with Neoplatonism, but at this juncture Blake makes a difficult, original turn. He redefines this impersonal transcendence as intellectual creativity, and then asserts that although the Circumference, or ontological reality behind the veil of Selfhood, is impersonal, it remains intellectually individuated. — location: 489
For him “transcendent” does not mean that the soul has a divine origin, or that it will after death return to a divine sphere. The soul is divine now, and all that is there is of the divine. “What is Above is Within.” For the soul to be “transcendent” means that it can recognize its divinity, and it can embrace it by entering immediately into a conviction of its greatness and an enjoyment of its creativity. This is “the Eternal Now” that Blake implores us to ascend. In Blake’s vocabulary the opposite of the Eternal Now is not the vanquished past or the dubious future but “Eternal Death,” the great object of the ego or personal soul’s fear as it pleads for immortality. — location: 508
The prophetic mind feels that it participates in all times; it dwells in “the Eternal Spheres of Visionary Life” (M 34.51), and let the death of the body be damned. Thus Blake’s “transcendence” is paradoxically immanent: it is a new way of living in the world now. At this point it becomes clear why Blake believes he offers a cure for existential alienation: his immanent transcendence reconciles the self to actuality. It allows us to fulfill our vocation as transcendent beings in the present and to reclaim this world as ours. — location: 517
Visionary power brings the world alive, healing the rift between subject and object. But the mind has to work its way through to the paradox of such immanent transcendence. It does not come to us automatically or instinctively; it is not a property of youth or innocence. (The speakers of the Songs of Innocence have a pastoral relation to Nature, not a visionary one.) Visionary power is an achievement of the mature soul, a product of thought and experience. Here again Blake disputes Rousseau. It is not a question of returning to an earlier stage in one’s development, of reverting to a purer self as yet undeformed by adulthood or socialization. Instead, you discover something you did not know about your nature and your capabilities. But discovery alone is not enough: you must recast yourself so that you can fulfill the newfound vocation. — location: 527
In these lectures, Foucault goes back to ancient philosophy to uncover a distinction between two models of knowledge: an older ethic in which the search for truth necessitates a transformation of the seeking subject, and the modern scientific approach to “objective” knowledge, which leaves the subject untouched. Foucault calls the epoch of the changeover “the Cartesian moment,” after which knowledge in itself is thought to give access to truth. The older ethic requires also “care of the self ”; the subject has to return to itself and remake itself so that it can gain access to truth, and respond adequately to the truth it has discovered. The phrase “care of the self ” translates Plato’s epimeleia heautou, and Foucault argues that this form of “spirituality” informs almost all the important movements in ancient philosophy: “throughout Antiquity (in the Pythagoreans, Plato, the Stoics, the Cynics, Epicureans and Neo- Platonists), the philosophical theme (how to have access to the truth?) and the question of spirituality (what transformations in the being of the subject are necessary for access to the truth?) were never separate” (Hermeneutics of the Subject 17). The subject will be abjured to go to “work on himself ” (Hermeneutics of the Subject 26); care of the self requires undertaking a deliberate labor of self- transformation. — location: 543
As soon as he or she begins to discover these larger truths, there should occur what Foucault calls “rebound” effects (de retour) or “effects of the truth on the subject” (Hermeneutics of the Subject 16). Subjectivity is illuminated; the subject begins to experience his or her own subjectivity differently, sees the possibility of a new way of existing as a subject, and strives for it. — location: 563
Blake can usefully be classed among the thinkers who foster care of the self. It is in this sense that he is a throwback, and for this reason that he felt a kinship with the ancient philosophy- religions. He bears a prophecy that means to change the relation of the self to itself— because he perceives the self to be unhappy in itself. Like the ancient phi los o phers Foucault lists above, Blake believes that the subject left to its own devices will encounter its subjectivity as a source of anxiety and bafflement. Like the others he offers a diagnosis of what is awry, then proceeds to invent a model of the self that explains the problem and allows one to imagine how it may be fixed, how the “Circumference” may be “opened” behind the “Center.” — location: 582
Blake boldly invents his own meta phors to analyze the different parts of the self: the “veil” of Selfhood, the “broken heart gates,” the baleful giants who guard them. Why should anyone doubt the suggestiveness of these figures (or of Plato’s or Freud’s) because they are merely meta phors? Let us take our cue from Søren Kierkegaard who, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, dauntlessly affirms, “If anyone says that this is only an exercise in elocution, that I have only a bit of irony, a bit of pathos, a bit of dialectic with which to work, I shall answer: what else should a person have who wants to present the ethical?” (153). Yes, we only have meta phors: what else should we have who wish to fathom subjective experience? — location: 607
Tiriel has been brought to this pass of self- contempt and self- estrangement because he accepts the materialist ontology of empiricism. He believes he is nothing but “a worm of sixty winters.” Blake will repeat this phrase throughout his poetry; it becomes his icon for the belittling self- definition of Natural Man. — location: 627
Blake contemns Lockean empiricism for providing a reductive account of subjective experience. It slights, or even represses, the imaginative component of perception— what Blake calls “the Poetic or Prophetic character,” or, more plainly, “Inspiration and Revelation.” According to empiricism, we have for our original stimulus only the elements of material reality: the pitiful circle of things, the routines of clock time and nature. If we truly are confined to natural reality, then our subjective experience must be increasingly homogenous. The subject as empiricism conceives it is condemned to monotony and hence to stultification— known in Blake’s poetry as the sleep of Urizen, or, “Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity!” — location: 643
“Empiricism,” “Natural Religion,” and “Deism” exalt into an authoritative philosophical position what is actually a terrible fear haunting humankind: the fear that the natural world is the real world. — location: 659
For if God made this world, if it is a reality expressing his being, then he is a monster from whom we have every reason to dread the worst. From this dark suspicion arises the concept of a punitive God whom we need to appease by means of sacrifice, for if he is a death- loving God only blood can please him. All the deep crimes humanity commits against itself— all the nightmares of “War & Religion”— follow this sacrificial logic, by which an incurable despair frantically spends itself in idle violence. Nature worship, although it seems benign, actually conceals submission to the truth of Eternal Death, and a submission of this kind, however tacit, leads to self- centered anxiety and desperation. — location: 671
With her first utterance Thel laments her transience, classing herself with other short- lived natural phenomena: “Ah Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud/ Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water” (1:8-9, E3). She does not explicitly distinguish herself as a mind— in fact, she compares herself to phenomena that are distinctly unaware— but her sense that she is different emerges in the last lines of her speech, where she wishfully imagines an easy dissolution of consciousness. — location: 688
In the Cloud’s absurd suggestion, Blake is mocking the attempt to redeem strictly natural existence. Consciousness cannot be content with its fate because the body nurtures worms. — location: 724
Unlike the Cloud and the Lilly, the Clod of Clay does not presume to correct Thel. Moreover, she admits that she does not know herself how it is that she has been blessed. She remains in a state of thoughtful uncertainty, but is not thereby rendered incapable of life and love (as Thel is). “I ponder, and I cannot ponder, yet I live and love” (5:6, E6). In her fruitless pondering, or questioning, she is the closest to Thel of the three natural phenomena, and at the same time, she offers Thel an example of happiness achieved without a spurious theory. — location: 730
However benevolent and appealing the maternal Clod of Clay, she is nonetheless a natural being whose philosophy of existence will not work for Thel. The Clod of Clay invites her to “enter my house,” that is, the sod or essence of matter, and also the clay of which the body is made. The scene immediately reverses from pastoral to infernal. — location: 737
Blake sets the template here for a pattern of imagery that will recur in many later poems. The dim subterranean land where the dead are infixed, twisting and turning in their anguish, reappears at crucial moments in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem (among other works), where it figures the suffering of the empiricist subject or Natural Man, buried alive by materiality. — location: 743
Thel travels through the psychological underworld, observing the strange community of Natural Man in which everyone undergoes the same suffering in isolation from everyone else: “She wanderd in the land of clouds thro’ the valleys dark, listning/ Dolours & lamentations… Till to her own grave plot she came” (Thel 6:6–7, E6). Now Thel rejoins her own experience, as one of the myriad suffocating “subjects” of empiricism, compelled to live at odds with their own subjectivity— longing for transcendence but persuaded to disown their longing. — location: 753
Blake thought that under certain conditions, it was bound to be anxious and lonely. That is, he thought that if the self is iden - tified with the main consciousness or “I,” especially the “I” as a center of rationality, it will feel solitary and insecure. The greater its insecurity, the more it tries to swell into a false but mighty “Selfhood.” And the larger the Selfhood bulks, the lonelier it grows. — location: 15
Blake believed one could behold the traumatic nature of empiricist selfhood in the earlier poems of William Wordsworth. The uneasy self of Wordsworth’s poetry exemplifies the sorrows of Natural Man. Blake and Wordsworth had emerged out of an intellectual culture dominated by John Locke, but whereas Blake reacted by rejecting received opinion, Wordsworth molded empiricism to his own ends. — location: 34
The troubled lyric “I” of Romantic and post- Romantic poetry owes a great deal to the empiricist repre sen ta tion of the self— or so Blake would argue. — location: 42
Blake has faults to find with both Neoplatonism and Gnosticism (and he tends to ignore their differences), but he approves of their argument that the cure for the soul’s loneliness is to be found within itself— in the recognition and assertion of its transcendental provenance, that is to say, its integrity and freedom, and its share in Eternity. — location: 51
The senses are represented as uncontrollable apertures through which external stimuli come flooding in. They are personified as in de pen dent entities because the empiricist subject feels estranged from his or her own body. — location: 777
Consciousness intuits itself as unique and yet cedes reality to the life of the body, which consequently seems alien and autonomous. It was re sis - tance to psychological disassociation of this kind, in which mind is separated from and subordinated to body, that led Blake to repudiate dualism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and to make his celebrated claim that the perception of the creation as infinite “will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (MHH 14, E39). — location: 783
Thel ends with this dramatization of embattled consciousness because Blake thinks the ultimate fate and worst outcome of empiricist subjectivity lies in internal disassociation, and the disintegration of agency that follows from it (more on this in the next section). Thence come inertia and despair. It is a dead end. No wonder Thel turns around and flies back to her inexperienced state. Blake thereby indicates that materialism offers no solution to the existential problem of consciousness. Thel attempts to find meaning for humanity within a purely natural order, and her attempt fails. She may arrive at a comforting theory, but in actual experience the theory breaks down, and consciousness deprived of agency frets itself away into psychological miasma. — location: 790
Later, in Milton, Blake will write the definitive version of the “shadowy female’s” malicious monologue. Her sadism movingly illustrates the panic of Natural Man. — location: 861
She will prove that life is an inescapable round of miseries, demonstrating it over and over until he learns the terrible lesson “by rote.” Every “poor mortal vegetation” shall be broken on this same wheel, “the Circle of Destiny,” or conviction of one’s entrapment. This is the some paranoid thought to which Thel was led: if nature is reality, then we are destined for humiliation. — location: 869
Orc rebels against a Necessity he knows no way of transcending. He kicks against the pricks. But the force by which he feels himself to be entrammeled is illusory: it is the classic example of a “mind- forg’d manacle” whose chains are “Brittle perhaps as straw” (Shelley’s phrase, l. 182 from “Julian and Maddalo,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 125). The natural world certainly has power over the human being, but only in some respects, and Blake takes the Kantian view that the sublime human “vocation” is to discover the soul’s freedom from the domination of nature. — location: 902
The shadowy daughter rightly perceives that the two of them, she and Orc, combine to extinguish humanity’s hope for itself: “thy fire and my frost/ Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent;/ This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold” (Amer 2:15–17, E52). Orc does not represent true opposition to the fatalism of material power; he is, rather, its partner, sustained by it in his despair as he bestows on it its voice and identity. In Eu rope, Blake shows more plainly that the shadowy female is Orc’s projection, stipulating in the opening line of the Preludium that “The nameless shadowy female arose from out the breast of Orc” (Eur 1:1, E60). — location: 911
Orc creates a tyrant and rebels against it, and this opposition defines his identity.
In the untitled proem to Eu rope, Blake asks a Fairy who has been mocking empiricism, “tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?” (Eur iii:13, E60). The Fairy laughs and offers to “shew you all alive/ The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy” (Eur iii:16–17, E60). The grieving shadowy female is the “dead” nature of the empiricists— nature cut off from its own share in Eternity. Orc and the shadowy female, the humiliation of the soul and the death of nature, go hand in hand. — location: 924
Locke’s epistemology proposes that the mind is passive before an overwhelming external force, nature, which is irrational, insensible, and sinister. This repre sen ta tion implicitly formulates a concept of subjectivity in which the subject is consigned to psychic division and existential terror. — location: 937
The experiencing consciousness undergoes two forms of alienation, an alienation from the outside world and from itself. For Locke’s notion of consciousness creates its own abyss: the point of consciousness is diminished radically, but it remains self- conscious and, like Thel, conscious of itself, in par tic u lar, as an anomaly. — location: 977
These lines present in embryo a group of images for empiricist subjectivity that Blake will repeat and expand on all through the prophetic books. They echo the famous passage from the Marriage on “enclosure” in the senses, launch the description of shrinking down into the organs of the body, and end with the grim climax Blake returns to again and again— that the empiricist subject is obliterated from life. — location: 986
Oothoon has correctly deduced that the real issue is not the relation of mind to body, but of the subject to her own subjectivity. — location: 1002
Neither Theotormon nor Bromion really hears anyone else. But why in any case are thoughts and feelings the central topic? Oothoon has correctly deduced that the real issue is not the relation of mind to body, but of the subject to her own subjectivity. — location: 1001
two slightly different forms. His thoughts and emotions are not under his own power: he cannot predict whether those now developing will be consoling or poisonous. This makes some sense insofar as anticipation belongs to the future. But Theotormon is also puzzled as to the whereabouts of thoughts, especially memories and past feelings, which seem to come and go at their own volition. “Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves?/ And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past?” (VDA 4:2–3, E48). He asks what has been since antiquity an important philosophical question: — location: 1019
Theotormon manifests an estrangement from his own subjectivity, which takes two slightly different forms. His thoughts and emotions are not under his own power: he cannot predict whether those now developing will be consoling or poisonous. This makes some sense insofar as anticipation belongs to the future. But Theotormon is also puzzled as to the whereabouts of thoughts, especially memories and past feelings, which seem to come and go at their own volition. “Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves?/ And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past?” (VDA 4:2–3, E48). — location: 1018
If Theotormon represents the depressive side of empiricism, Bromion is its manic half. Theotormon feels powerless, whereas Bromion delights in an aggrandized sense of personal power that expresses itself in tyranny — location: 1032
Given the limitations of experience, an intellect that has gained all its knowledge from the senses will remain abysmally ignorant, a just object of mockery. But why then does Bromion feel so powerful? It turns out that he is thinking like the god of the law— the God both of the Hebrew Bible (as Blake saw it) and the Deists. Blake regards this god as a projection of the omnipotent agency the disempowered empiricist subject longs to have. This agency is conceived of as personal or individual. As the empiricist subject feels alone and helpless, so the dream is to be alone but all- powerful. Individual agency demonstrating its power to itself is likely to do so by exerting power over others through sadism and tyranny. — location: 1038
With his universal law and homogenization of desire, she says, he treats everyone as if they shared his nature, and, in fact, aims to turn them into a version of himself. — location: 1054
She implicitly distinguishes between the tyrannical self- imposition of a Urizen and the visionary in de pen dence she herself exemplifies. With his universal law and homogenization of desire, she says, he treats everyone as if they shared his nature, and, in fact, aims to turn them into a version of himself. — location: 1053
The singular agent fortifies its singularity by imposing uniformity on the multitude of others. “One law for both the lion and the ox” becomes Urizen’s encompassing equation: “One command, one joy, one desire,/ One curse, one weight, one mea sure/ One King, one God, one Law” (BU 4:38–40, E72). “I” versus it. One God leads to one law: individuation to hegemony to homogeneity. — location: 1062
For the moment we see that Blake is drawing psychological connections among the desire for personal power, the perceived helplessness of the empiricist subject, and the heartless tyranny of that subject’s God. Oothoon repudiates the whole package, including sexual repression and the moralizing cult of virginity. She reproaches Bromion, “Father of Jealousy,” for teaching “my Theotormon this accursed thing,” and she foresees that as a rejected beloved, and a dissident, she will end as “A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non- entity” (VDA 7:11,12,14, E50). These are just the terms in which Blake will describe the prophetic Emanations; Oothoon is thus a forerunner of the exiled wisdom represented by Enion and Ahania. It is the fate of these Emanations, as of most prophets, not to be heard. — location: 1066
In fact, it will become standard for Blake’s male characters to take the route either of Theotormon or Bromion— that is, either subsiding into passivity, like Tharmas, or retreating into the defensive formation of atomic selfhood, like Urizen. — location: 1077
As usual in Blake, the moment of creation is simultaneously the moment of the fall; here it is the joint creation and fall of the individual soul. Anxiety results immediately, as the world divides into the “I” and the not-“I.” Urizen has hypostasized the external world as everything outside him— alien to, and empty of, his own consciousness. The void he creates is the whole material universe, bereft of consciousness, and also the dark hollow in it where consciousness used to be. Naturally he finds this “external” universe to be threatening, and he develops a fearful, hostile, and violent relation to it, embarking on futile efforts to bring it under his control. “Times on times he divided, & measur’d/ Space by space in his ninefold darkness” (BU 3:8–9, E70). His relation to his own “I” becomes schizoid. Sometimes Urizen exults: as the only consciousness, he is the only power (“I alone, even I”). And sometimes he feels dwarfed and disempowered: as the only consciousness, he is a mere phantasm in a dead material world. He develops power hunger as a reaction to his sense of impotence. He is a “self- contemplating shadow,” spooked by his own insubstantiality (BU 3:21, E71). — location: 1118
Both are described as abysses “Where nothing was,” yet that nothing is clearly full of danger, for it is the not-“I.” The dark infinity of the alien, both within and without, spring into being together upon the advent of the “I.” Both are soul- shuddering vacuums: the “I” shudders at the voids it has made of the world and of itself. More deeply, these voids issue out of the shuddering or fearful self- affection of the soul, the moment in which it consolidates its identity and feels alone. — location: 1139
Against their view, Thompson argued that Blake learned most from the radical pop u - lar religion of the En glish Reformation. The material he quotes from various outlying dissident sects— particularly concerning the claim that Christ is everyman and that God is “internal” to humanity— resonates beautifully with Blake. — location: 1160
By “religious humanism,” I do not mean to exclude religions with supernatural or mystical ideas, but to identify religions that treat the human as the divine. I cite Gnosticism first because it came first. Blake was a religious humanist of this kind, rejecting orthodoxy on account of its anthropomorphized Creator- God and its subjection of the human soul. — location: 1182
Altizer points out, Urizen is not an external agency, but a psychological phenomenon (88). Urizen is a part of us— and in fact a part of Blake, an incomplete authorial surrogate. — location: 1192
Blake would say: we have within us an imp of the perverse, a Demiurge, who incites us to anxious individuation and then “creates” the material world as an enemy of consciousness. Whereas the Demiurge is a dummy villain, Urizen is an anguishing error we commit again and again every day. — location: 1195
“But unknown, abstracted,/ Brooding secret, the dark power hid.” The word unknown plays on the Gnostic term agnostos theos (the Unknown God) just as “secret,” “dark,” and “hid” play on the Gnostic idea of the hidden God more generally. “Brooding” comes of course from Genesis, and “abstracted” is chosen, apparently, out of Blake’s arsenal of terms for mocking Natural Religion and the New Science. The “abstracted” God is the deus absconditus of Deism. By condensing these references into a single line, Blake is suggesting that all of these gods are really one: one mysterious, inaccessible object of desire. — location: 1201
Individuation is the Gnostic and Neoplatonic version of original sin, but it has almost none of the connotations of the Christian concept, which no doubt made it all the more appealing to Blake. It is not, at root, a moral but a cognitive failure. If anyone is betrayed it is oneself, not the fearsome, non ex - is tent Nobodaddy. Guilt is irrelevant. There is no crime— certainly nothing inherited from the days of Adam!— but error. And the error can be undone. The fall is psychological, and, therefore, reiterated every day by the individual psyche, first in its impulse to distinguish itself, and then in the loneliness and anxiety that follow. — location: 1227
Blake argues that Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and empiricism have psychological content, hidden within the meta phors or “myths” of epistemology and ontology. A given philosophy has psychological implications insofar as it offers a par tic u lar view of the subject and its relation to “objects.” — location: 1246
The Platonic subject is lonely, too, but its loneliness is radically different. As Jonas points out, the forlorness and dread of the Gnostic arise from the awakening of the soul; it perceives its transcendence and feels anomalous, trapped, in the material world. The recognition of its exile is the first element of the liberating gnosis. It must find its real home. In empiricism, solitary consciousness fronts an alien world, and that is the final discovery. — location: 1259
When Urizen raves about the power of consciousness (“I alone, even I”), he is reacting against his own desperate suspicion: all that is real of him is his bones. Consciousness will dissipate and leave the remains of matter. So it is his skeleton that is ultimately his “identity.” — location: 1267
Materialism spells mortalism, and mortalism harrasses the Selfhood: the unique little “I” dreads its extinction (or Eternal Death of the soul) above all else precisely because it has learned to value its uniqueness above all else. And the threat of Eternal Death evacuates life of meaning. So suggests Luvah, the love god of The Four Zoas, who takes no comfort in Epicurean assurances that the soul is mortal. This means that after a lifetime of vexing passions, we will merely be scattered back into warring atoms. — location: 1276
He argues that Christianity identifies the soul with the “I” (the unique empirical self) and then, through its emphasis on personal salvation, fosters self- concern and more— promotes Urizenic terrors. — location: 1285
The character of Urizen, “Self- closed, all- repelling,” is essentially the character of the Selfhood or Spectre, opposing, in vain, its imperiled vital singularity to an encroaching world of death. The insistence on singularity— or the uniqueness of the soul— necessarily leads to the dread of Eternal Death, and then on to gross selfishness. — location: 1303
The “Self ” Milton pledges to annihilate is the ego, the singular soul, or what philosophical discourse calls “personal identity.” To privilege one’s uniqueness is a mistake, because it gives rise to a profound sense of vulnerability— and hence, as we have seen, to anxieties about loneliness, incapacity, and death. Blake thinks adherence to identity a misguided aim and a form of constraint. — location: 1312
The final definitive error is the limitation of the true or full self to this “Identity.” I use the words “true or full self ” advisedly. Blake would not use them, because he treats “self,” “Selfhood,” and “Identity” synonymously as three names for the illusion of the unique, atomic “I”; his alternative, his term for the unbounded wealth of the interior, is “Imagination,” a universal rather than individual reserve. — location: 1317
The Books of Ahania and Los provide additional perspectives on the creation and fall of Urizen. In par tic u lar, they elaborate on his reductiveness, his precipitation out of some larger figure of mind. On this subject, The Book of Urizen is powerfully abrupt and cryptic, opening in medias res with the summons to behold the “shadow of horror” that has suddenly appeared. — location: 1329
These two books portray Urizen not as a spontaneous self- creation but as a mutation from a vital form. The Book of Los reminds us that Los and Urizen, or imagination and Reason, are not naturally distinguishable; it is an artifact of error that they set themselves at odds. Thus, the fall of Los is described in exactly the same terms as the fall of Urizen. In The Book of Los it is Los who creates the “horrible vacuum/ Beneath him & on all sides round” (BL 4:4092), — location: 1333
Like Satan wheeling through Chaos with a false sense of freedom, Los achieves a suppositious autonomy at great cost. The mind may feel free to roam about its objects by means of contemplation but only at the expense of having first thrust them into the void of otherness. It seems strange at first to find the defensive errors of Urizen attributed to Los; the point is that Urizen himself, with his restrictive conceptions of self and world, represents a failure of imagination. — location: 1341
She represents the self- awareness from which Urizen has shut himself off and, specifically, the awareness of what more he might be— creative, generous, life- giving— instead of what he has “petrified” himself into: punitive, defensive, death- dealing. She — location: 1350
Wandering in disembodied exile, Ahania laments having been “cast [out] from thy bright presence/ Into the World of Loneness” (BA 4:64–65, E89). She represents the self- awareness from which Urizen has shut himself off and, specifically, the awareness of what more he might be— creative, generous, life- giving— instead of what he has “petrified” himself into: punitive, defensive, death- dealing. — location: 1349
Urizen is not Reason as it must ever be, but Reason without “soul”: contracted, reactive, self- policing, suspicious of itself (and the imagination in it). Urizen preexisted this contraction so the mentality he embodies must have a benign form. Here is a joyous and invigorating “eternal science,” as opposed to the empiricists’ “Science [of] Despair.” Creative Reason is possible, Blake suggests, no matter how unimaginable in our paradigms. Ahania’s memory, although logically “retrospective,” is affectively Utopian: it makes us dream of experience in which the discipline of reason is not a torment to the spirit. — location: 1354
“Empiricist” subjectivity has tempted the subject from the beginning, quite in de pen dently of philosophical history; it is a constant danger threatening to malform the psyche and pervert human relations. The Continental Prophecies and the Books of Urizen launch the mythic cast in whose struggles Blake illustrates the psychological impact— the conflicts of emotion, internal division, mistrust of others, and bad faith— that follow from empiricist subjectivity. In his epic prophecies, he proliferates the number of characters and radically intensifies the complexity of their interactions. He expands, deepens, and corrects his psychological analysis, even as he works to answer the question of how the disaster can be circumvented. — location: 1362
In fact, Blake was arguing with a temptation present to his own mind, and if he sometimes seems positively aggressive in his response to Wordsworth, we should understand him to be engaged in a war of re sis tance against his own fears. Like any attentive reader— and Blake was much more than that— he felt the power of Wordsworth’s grand melancholy, and he quarreled with Wordsworth’s poetry precisely to the extent that he was moved by it. — location: 1374
Blake recognized that Wordsworth was haunted by apprehension of the soul’s solitude. In Blake’s characteristic way, he gives a polemical analysis of where this apprehension came from, and how it might be surmounted. He seems to have had the opposite intuition from Wordsworth: namely that loneliness comes from naturalism rather than transcendentalism. To overcome loneliness, Blake said, one must accept the transcendent provenance or what the Gnostics called the “acosmicism of the soul.” — location: 1390
The Gnostics say the life of the soul in the world is characterized by “forlorness,” “dread,” and “homesickness” (to borrow Jonas’s words in The Gnostic Religion, 65.) For Blake and Wordsworth, this picture captures the feature of phenomenal selfhood that their own poetry dwells on— its sense of itself as solitary and anomalous. Despite their great differences, they agree on the pressing importance of one topic: the uneasiness of the subject within its own subjectivity. — location: 1398
The version of experience adumbrated in empiricism (according to Blake) and extrapolated, or given force and life (in Wordsworth), dissolves the confidence and integrity of consciousness: The “I,” the mind, consciousness, or self, experiences itself as solitary, belated, and besieged; it finds that it has awoken in an object world that existed before it, and whose reality is greater than its own. This world is empty and monotonous at the same time that it is frightening and unpredictable, and the “I” feels small, isolated, and adrift; it cannot even command the contents of its own interior, but finds the self amorphous, incoherent, and mysterious, occupied by floating chunks of alterity that have somehow invaded it from the world beyond. — location: 1424
Out of the empiricist characterization of the mind as a substanceless thinking thing, as a blank slate, as tutored only by experience, Wordsworth created a thought of the self by which he might convey its experience of being disconcerted in its own presence. We may say that he poeticized Locke, where poeticize means to deepen the resonance. — location: 1472
Wordsworth uses the language of impression and implantation to convey the substantial— which is to say, autonomous— character of images or memories. And their autonomy is what gives them the power to “haunt.” — location: 1523
Is this not the vitality of things that haunts the protagnist of the Fall…Usher?
Of all the alien bits and pieces that press on the self and make it aware of its elusiveness, the most commanding for Wordsworth are these estranged residues of former selves, the old consciousnesses that haunt the present self in which they have become obsolete. — location: 1599
One feels “that one is not in full possession of one’s self, that one does not fully belong to oneself, or, therefore, to anybody else. The lost parts too, are felt to be lonely” (300). Wordsworth’s “phantoms” and “strange forms” do seem to share in his loneliness. However stimulating his inner world, it is not festively populated. The alien presences remain elusive, and their separateness inspires Wordsworth with his classic yearning. As in Klein, the discovery of the exotic within the self (paradoxically) causes loneliness. Blake had had the same thought expressed negatively: without a window into the transcendent, Natural Man experiences the inner life as a huddle of forlorn parts. — location: 1627
When Blake writes in his annotations to Wordsworth’s Poems (1815), “I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually” (E665), he employs a favorite shorthand, but there is much more in this than a philosophical objection. His very formulation— the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually— shows that he is making a psychological observation, seeing in Wordsworth’s poems a pattern of self- division, self- occlusion, and denial.5 — location: 1633
Wordsworth fi- nally surrenders his reverence for Nature in favor of the Gnostic and Neoplatonist view that Nature is inferior to the soul, and in this world the soul, remaining alien, must be forlorn. Wordsworth likens this life to death, as Blake had done: the child knows “those truths… Which we are toiling all our lives to find/ In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave” (ll. 115–17, Poetical Works 1969, 461). The Intimations Ode was published in 1807 after Blake had written his major poetry. But Blake clearly interpreted it as a confirmation of his general views and of his interpretation of Wordsworth. — location: 1680
Tintern Abbey and the Intimations Ode demonstrate the result of this coincidence: the Neoplatonist soul is just as lonely as the dwarfed “I” in the dark box of Lockean consciousness, because Wordsworth’s Neoplatonist soul must still await its reunion with infinitude. Blake does not wish to accept this tragic conclusion. He claims that Neoplatonist idealism is the cure for the despair of the subject. This means ceasing to identify one’s “real self ” with the ego or Selfhood and identifying it instead with the impersonal Plotinian soul, or as Blake calls it, the “Imagination.” The Imagination can escape, at this very moment, from the stranglehold of the material world into the freedom of the “Eternal Now.” — location: 1736
Wordsworth and Blake draw opposite conclusions from the meta phor of “awakening.” In Wordsworth the soul awakens to an intensified alienation and loneliness for which there is no immediate remedy, whereas in Blake the soul awakens to an invigorating awareness of its own power and freedom. Ultimately, Blake is a spiritual phi los o pher where Wordsworth is and remains a natural psychologist. — location: 1761
In The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem Blake addresses himself to the psychology — location: 1777
Blake himself had to work hard in his three epic prophecies to imagine how the internal deadlock might be broken. In The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem Blake addresses himself to the psychology of emergence: how the empiricist subject might escape from the cave and how the culture at large might be transformed. He will discern stages and obstacles, and his scenarios will accordingly grow more detailed and complex. Yet the intensity of his Utopian moments, when the Selfhood is undone, conveys such force of longing as to suggest that even to Blake they were elusive. In a central formulation, Blake images the revelation as scarce, imperiled, and magical. This stirring passage pays homage to a precious illumination surrounded by darkness. — location: 1776
Frosch notes this parallel when he remarks of The Four Zoas, “Blake’s first epic tells on a mythic and historical plane the same story that the ‘crisis’ poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge do on an individual level, that of a crippling dejection and an inability to create, now in civilization itself ” (36). I would add that Blake often tells the story at an individual level as well. The Blakean idealism of Wordsworth finds its inverse in the Wordsworthian pathos of Blake. — location: 1809
The most striking difference between Urizen and The Four Zoas lies in form and feeling: The Book of Urizen is a satire whereas The Four Zoas is a drama, and, consequently, the Zoas gives occasion to much greater pathos. Urizen and its satellite books contain tragic moments and tragic potential, but The Four Zoas concentrates on the anguish of its characters. Its original subtitle, The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man, identifies emotional suffering as its topic. — location: 1842
Blake wants now not only to work out his analysis of intellectual and historical error but also to dramatize the sorrow (the daily sorrow of the soul) that, Blake would say, it has precipitated in every human heart. This is ontological unhappiness— the anxiety of subjectivity or the soul’s unease in itself. The Four Zoas focuses on this form of unhappiness and its provenance with an intensity that distinguishes it from the rest of Blake’s prophetic books. — location: 1847
Blake adds two characters, Tharmas and Enion, whose roles are specifically to embody passivation and despair. In the revised version of the poem, they are the first characters to appear so as to suggest that the pro cess of disintegration begins with the collapse of agency. This conceptual adjustment produces others. Now that Urizen is no longer responsible for every error, Blake modulates his meaning and character. He is more sympathetic toward Urizen, who comes into his own, as it were, as not simply a caricature of Reason, but rather the approximation of a larger consciousness, something like the ordinary sense of self. For the first time Urizen laments— he is unhappy and aware of it— as if to suggest that the mind intuits its own failure and, reproaches itself instead of remaining complacent and obtuse. — location: 1855
But Enion, Ahania, and Enitharmon, with her “broken heart Gate,” reach a more advanced stage; they have awoken, they perceive the truth, and they feel an appropriate sorrow. When translated into the experience of the individual, this sorrow becomes regret on behalf of the soul. Awakening from the stupor of materialism, one recognizes the “Eternal Life” one “forgot”; one feels guilty for having ignored the transcendental intuition and betrayed the proper vocation of humanity. I call this affect “transcendental remorse.” — location: 1878
Why does Blake create this new scheme? He makes the change, I believe, because he has changed his definition of the fundamental evil in empiricist subjectivity: it is not the egoism of the isolated Ratio but the assumption of helplessness. The anxiety of interiority, in Blake’s view, brings with it this radical passivation. One neither grows out of it nor into it by getting older; it is an always- available concomitant of subjectivity, and the only way to transcend it is to replace one experience of self with another. — location: 1952
Therefore, Blake promotes not the recovery of an empirical agency (which was never possessed) but the discovery of agency of another kind, and this is the work of a mature intelligence. The form of agency he promotes is not that which the speakers of Experience long for and sometimes claim they have— that of empirical confidence, or trust that one can enact one’s will in the world; it is a larger assurance, the conviction of one’s transcendental power. Blake knows that no form of empirical power can dispel helplessness, but transcendental agency— Vision if it helps to call it that— moves in another realm over which materiality has no purchase. — location: 1975
Out of this essential pessimism of selfhood comes the invention of Fate. We see Tharmas setting the “Circle of Destiny” in motion. That is to say, it is only after perceiving the futility of consciousness that Tharmas discovers a principle of necessity in the world. In a paradox that captures the essence of projection, Tharmas creates this Circle of Destiny by which he imagines himself to be bound. — location: 2012
Tharmas rationalizes the anxiety of interiority by locating a force of determination outside the self. Something out there oppresses him; something else has the power of agency, and that allows him to explain why he feels incapable. Once invented, his concept assumes authority. It hardens into truth. — location: 2019
Blake names this supposition of Fate the “Spectre of Tharmas”— a shadow or projection out of Tharmas’s passivity. — location: 2028
Blake emphasizes the fact that we are witnessing a transfer of agency. The Circle of Destiny Complete— the attribution of all power to nature— springs from humanity’s conspiracy in its own subjection, which it imagines itself to have accepted only reluctantly. Nature assumes the might surrendered by the transcendental and immortal Human. Therefore, the benign Daughters of Beulah remark, “this Spectre of Tharmas/ Is Eternal Death” (FZ 5:41–42, E303), the death of the soul. Enion is horrified when she beholds her creation, the Circle of Destiny, and in her guilt she turns inward to find that a ghastly change has taken place. — location: 2034
From this haunted world the mind flees outward, but it can find no stability or comfort in a world defined as the sphere of Fate, the “world of woe.” — location: 2050
in her agony, Enion “rehumaniz[es] from the Spectre in pangs of maternal love” (FZ 9:3, E304). Enion returns to herself— she recovers some of her status as an intuiter of truth— but only after a compromised form of it, prophecy, has entered the empirical world. Thus she is reduced to straying in the void as a murmur of conscience while Los and Enitharmon— the remains of imaginative agency— glory in an illusory sense of power. It is illusory because deracinated, “grounded” in the false authority of empirical presence, while cut off from the real source of power, which is transcendental intuition. Under these circumstances, imaginative agency cannot cooperate with itself, it cannot gather its own force. — location: 2106
Enion has become the representative of despairing knowledge, knowledge that knows its own truth but finds itself empty to the extent that it cannot be acted on. Soon she will communicate her despair to Urizen’s Emanation, Ahania. Ahania, the wisdom which rationality affords, hears Enion’s lament, and she is haunted by it: “never from that moment could she rest upon her pillow” (FZ 36:19, E326). Ahania floats about, intuiting truth but remaining unheard and unseen, like Enion: “Where Enion, blind & age bent wanderd Ahania wanders now” (FZ 46:8, E331). Enitharmon will become a figure of desolation in “Night the Fourth” and following. These Emanations represent the perception that their Zoa refuses, or denies, and is therefore rendered powerless. Thus they are reduced to the pure lamentation of Cassandra. — location: 2130
Blake “weaves a tenuous connection between the giant forms who split and fragment, and the individual humans who are both subject to the actions of the splitting forms of the Zoas and whose subjectivities in some sense are represented by them” (396). In the Zoas Blake wished to make plain the translation to individual experience; he seems to have been particularly moved by the subject at this moment. — location: 2153
With the formation of this “Net of Religion,” ordinary people (as opposed to mythological characters) first appear in the poem. They are the “Inhabitants of those Cities” “Whereever the footsteps of Urizen/ Walk’d… in sorrow,” and they adopt his distorted views without question (BU 25:13–14, E82). A hoard of the unnamed, “They” take the empiricist view that they are bodies without souls, doomed to extinction: “They lived a period of years/ Then left a noisom body/ To the jaws of devouring darkness” (BU 28:1–3, E83). In their desperation, they embrace Urizen’s religion, with its reductive ontologies and its false benevolence. By this they are further diminished. — location: 2170
With these lines, Blake summaries the contortions by which the mind brings itself to participate in harmful religion. But Blake’s myth also tells of a family romance: — location: 2190
vitiating — location: 2195
An archaic meaning, “to wander aimlessly, bewildered,” is clearly relevant along with two intransitive uses given by the Oxford En glish Dictionary: (1) “to be in a state of unconsciousness, to move and act without the impulse and guidance of thought” (Obs.) and (2) “to yield oneself up to ennui, to remain in a listless, apathetic condition, without making any effort to rouse oneself, to be dull, dejected and spiritless.” — location: 2211
In Urizen Blake called people the offspring of Urizen, but in the Zoas he gives them a new lineage emphasizing the ruination not just of their ideas but of their emotional lives. Now people are the children of Urizen and Luvah, the product of an intellectual and affective distortion. Blake had concentrated on the malformation of reason and ego in Urizen; in the Zoas he introduces the characters of Luvah (love) and Vala, Luvah’s tormenting consort, to show how passional life is thwarted. The capacity for love we manifest in our relation to other creatures, and to nature, is diverted by insecurity and self- mistrust into malign affects (hatred, jealousy, fear). Frustration results, then contraction and surrender. — location: 2222
During this initial survey of the fallen world, when Urizen first beholds the devastation he has caused, he feels genuine dismay. The deterioration of human beings makes him cry; he speaks to them through tears. We are reminded of Satan’s response to the sight of his troops when first assembled in Hell: “cruel his eye, but cast/ Signs of remorse and passion to behold/ The fellows of his crime, the followers rather… condemned for ever now to have their lot in pain/ Millions of Spirits for his fault amerced/ Of heav’n” (Paradise Lost I.ll.604–10, pp. 20–21). Like Satan— and unlike Dante— Urizen is responsible for the suffering he beholds. He recognizes his guilt, and evidently desires to reverse the damage, but it is too late. He cannot lift the curse. — location: 2247
Like Enion weaving the “Circle of Destiny,” Urizen sees the consequences of his retrenchment spiral out of his control. It is suggestive that he cannot calm the Elements “because himself was Subject.” Clearly this idea alludes to the passivating materialism Urizen practices; he thinks himself a consciousness without power over the Elements. But Blake, capitalizing the word “Subject,” may very well intend a pun. In that case, the word might function not only as an adjective (subject to) but also as a noun (a subject). It is precisely because he has described himself, to himself, as a Subject that he has no power. The fetters now grow from the soul. This figure signifies that self- limitation has been so thoroughly internalized as to seem intractable, but it also means that self- limitation has infected the concept of the soul. — location: 2256
Laboring “of dire necessity,” the children are subjugated and stripped of agency. As ghosts of former human beings, they take “the spectre form.” They look to others and to themselves like automata, but it is an excess of feeling— frustration and hopelessness— that makes them so. They are overwhelmed, first by the nature of their labor and then by the despair it creates. — location: 2323
The Spectre of Urthona, the prophet’s worldly will, is the first to perceive the deterioration of human beings, and he is conscience stricken: “I began the dreadful state of Separation & on my dark head the curse & punishment” (FZ 87:33–34, E369). He articulates the guilt of the prophet who has abandoned his proper task in favor of wordly ambition. (Milton will voice guilt of the same order.) The prophet’s vital mission is to lift transcendental amnesia— to remind people of their own constitutive divinity. The empirical “eye” of the prophet has, logically, been first to recognize that the mission is unaccomplished: people have sunk to such a low as to be spiritually extinguished. “Urthonas Spectre terrified beheld the Spectres of the Dead/ Each male formd without a counterpart without a concentering vision” (FZ 87:29– 30, E369). As Jerusalem constitutes the Divine Vision of Albion (which he has lost), so here a “counterpart” is an emanation and an emanation is a “concentering vision,” a perception that opens the Center. — location: 2345
Specifically, Los and Enitharmon labor to make counterparts for the Spectrous Dead. This is evidently the chief task of art, but the language in which Blake describes the work remains enigmatic, as we shall see. Enitharmon is intimidated by the task, but Los encourages her. Her “bosom translucent” provides “a soft repose” where the “piteous victims of battle… sleep in happy obscurity.” Los wants to revive them, “to fabricate embodied semblances in which the dead/ May live before us in our palaces & in our gardens of labour” — location: 2367
the spectrous dead “may assimilate themselves into” (FZ 90:23, E370). The plan works, and we next see the spectres of the dead being transformed by assimilation into their young and beautiful selves. — location: 2375
to fabricate “embodied semblances” means to fabricate “forms sublime” that the spectrous dead “may assimilate themselves into” (FZ 90:23, E370). The plan works, and we next see the spectres of the dead being transformed by assimilation into their young and beautiful selves. — location: 2374
Blake means to adduce the role art plays in reawakening transcendental intuition, insofar as it escapes a mea sure of confinement to empirical reality. He seems to share something of Percy Shelley’s thought in his “Defence”: “poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions… It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos… [it] creates for us a being within our being” (533). Shelley’s “being within our being” resembles Blake’s “Center,” the “World within” that “Open[s] its gates” (FZ 86:7–8, E368). This is the transcendental capacity of the soul that art inspires us to remember. But before anyone accuses either poet of naivete, let it be recalled that in both Blake and Shelley, the idealizing effect of art is short lived. For Blake, the power of art (and sex) is singular but also local, yielding only one of those moments in each day that Satan cannot find. The work of Los and Enitharmon brings “comfort” to Orc and “hope” to Tharmas at the end of “Night the Seventh,” but the battle resumes in “Night the Eighth.” — location: 2384
Los forges and Enitharmon weaves, trying jointly to nourish the spirituality of the spectres with art, passion, and plea sure. Enitharmon becomes a sympathetic emanation. The work she undertakes on behalf of humanity is limited but not in effec tive. Once an obstacle, she is now a conduit to transcendental awakening, as is exemplified by her new relation to Jerusalem. Together she and Los and their children form “a Vast family wondrous,” which (Blake now says) can also be called Jerusalem, a figure for human spirituality, “a Universal female form created/ From those who were dead in Ulro from the Spectres of the Dead” (FZ 103:37–39, E376). It is Enitharmon who recognizes Jerusalem, names her, and perceives her significance. — location: 2395
To apprehend the vision, Enitharmon must first have her heart broken, or to use Blake’s full meta phor, the gates of her heart must be broken open. Los has seen her at these gates, despairing as an abject creature “on the outside of Existence,” deprived of life and power. If she looks through the opened gates, she will see the life and power within. Behind this image is the image of the Garden of Eden, its gates blocked by the Covering Cherub. One does not seek to escape without the gates, but to fling them wide apart and return to the paradise within. The image of “Opening a Center” is consistent with the image of the garden, and Los combines them when he exclaims, “Even I already feel a World within/ Opening its gates” (FZ 86:7–8, E368). In Blake’s landscape of the interior life, transcendental power awaits recovery in a hortus conclusus, an “inmost deep recess,” whose gates have been shut by opacity or blindness. — location: 2410
This imagery is manifestly destructive, and the horror of the scene seems to be confirmed when in the next moment the zombies arise. Yet, if the figure of the open gates signifies access to vision, then the breaking of the gates signifies enlightenment. Enitharmon has had an awakening as a dialectical reaction to the apotheosis of nature; total passivation can provoke a response. — location: 2425
Enitharmon’s heart is no longer “Obdurate” to the extent that it is no longer Opaque. But she is not exalted; in fact, with her new understanding, she grieves for the oblivious spectres whom she now regards with “Compassion & Love” (FZ 99:16, E372). They descend through her Gates of Pity because she represents the awareness of their stupefaction that they, of course, cannot have. She has attained consciousness of how far prophecy and humanity have strayed from their vocation; her broken heart gates stand for the regret following upon this consciousness. But as yet she is pure regret. In Los’s image of her lingering “at the awful gates of [her] poor broken heart… like a shadow withering,” she reveals her sadness but also her continued vacillation. She stands on the threshold. She glimpses the Divine Vision within her, but she sees it at a distance, not feeling herself to be possessed of it or— even better— to be possessed by it. The sight is tantalizing enough to remind her of transcendental potential but not to let her grasp it. — location: 2435
looking both ways like Janus, outside to the natural self and inside to the Divine Vision. — location: 2448
The Four Zoas uses this meta phor in an especially arresting formulation when Enion complains: “Already are my Eyes reverted all that I behold/ Within my Soul has lost its splendor.” The “I” is the outward part of the inner life; to go further inward is to discover not a personal identity but an impersonal Divine Vision. You expand by going inward and contract by going outward. — location: 2491
This is a significant revision of tradition, but Blake makes his most original contribution in his epic prophecies, where he gives a psychological analysis of what stands in the way of the soul’s rehabilitation. Knowledge is not a cure in itself; the internal obstacles are too tenacious to be dispelled by epiphany. The key is to dissolve the grip of individuation and to regard one’s true self, instead, as immortal and impersonal Imagination. But the task is by no means easy because so much in experience and education nourishes the anxieties and cravings of the “I,” as well as its more basic illusion of being substantial. Blake admits that is hard for us to uncover the inmost soul. We are in a deep “sleep” of worldliness; we instinctively prefer this soporific superficiality to the dread of “awakening.” Obstacles arise not only from social (including philosophical and religious) conditioning but also from the leanings of the natural or empirical self. — location: 2511
Whereas in earlier and later prophetic books Blake diagnoses the ills of “six thousand years” of Western history, in Milton he focuses on the stop gaps, shrinkings, and failures of an individual mind. He sets himself the task of imagining, in detail, how an individual can successfully put off Self. Blake chooses Milton as his model, most capable and most in need of such a reformation.1 But it is clear that Blake means to instruct and inspire himself. — location: 2530
Now Milton recognizes that he confused his true prophetic authority with the will- to- power of the wordly self, or “I.” — location: 2540
He takes on the correction of his errors, striving with Urizen, who is his worst legacy. But Urizen also represents a tenacious internal obstacle, the “inner Urizen,” or Milton’s attraction to absolute masculine authority. This is Milton’s patriarchal overidentification, which accounts for the streak of authoritarianism in his personality and hence his misogyny, pride, and self- righteousness. He struggles with Urizen in silence because the struggle is an internal one. — location: 2554
This is a powerful scene; in answer to Urizen’s aggression, Milton rather tenderly seeks to recast and warm “the Demon cold.” He turns the tables, acting as God to Urizen’s Adam; now the human is reforming the divine. This means in part its idea of the divine. But Urizen also represents something within Milton’s par tic u lar psyche, and at this moment it is something subtler than the Selfhood that requires “annihilation.” It is a part of Milton that cannot be extirpated but has to be remade or redeemed. The illustration shows Milton as a heroic nude commanding the inert blue Urizen, although the gesture is ambiguous: is he caressing Urizen, or trying to strangle him? (Blake, Milton: A Poem Pl. 15). The equivocations here reflect Blake’s own ambivalence toward Urizen, whom Ahania had imaged as a figure of sexual and creative generosity in his pre- fallen state. Apparently at this point Blake is not thinking of Urizen as Satan or the Selfhood but as internal powers and capacities for whose benign manifestation one might long. — location: 2562
While Milton confronts “the darkend Urizen,” Blake turns to Albion, and simultaneously to the reader, exhorting us to recognize the self- obstruction “in every human heart.” This obstruction causes the kind of blindness— or “Opacity to the Divine Vision”— that made someone like Milton believe in Nobodaddy instead of in his own “Eternal Great Humanity Divine.” — location: 2575
This passage gives the reader a sharp rhetorical shock: it is the only time in Milton that the narrator turns to the reader and speaks to her directly. In fact, it is one of the only times in his epic prophecies that Blake (or the Blake narrator) ever uses a second- person address. Here he pivots and makes a pointed, even somewhat accusatory, remark— I hope your gates are not closed— designed to render us suddenly self- conscious. Blake reminds us that he intends his comments to have a universal application: we are to recognize that this is our story, too. Thus the passage continues in the second- person imperative: do not look for power in an external God—“Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies,” for such a projection of God can become a spiritual blocking- agent: “There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old.” (Og and Anak are biblical giants, enemies of the Israelites.) The passage segues from this fairly familiar argument into material that is new in Blake: a universal psychology of the blocking agents within the self, the Og and Anak who may be keeping our own gates closed. — location: 2581
We have already seen the necessity of “broken heart gates” in The Four Zoas. The heart’s gates remain closed here because they are guarded by Og and Anak, figures for self- created fears and self- imposed limitations. Og and Anak are not beyond the skies but within: with typical inversion, Blake reminds us that the imposing forces we perceive outside are actually internal— not only internal insofar as they are fantasies (“all in the mind”) but also insofar as such forces do occupy the inner life. All deities reside in the human breast, and so do the dev ils. — location: 2592
The Orphics, the Pythagoreans, and the Platonists all spoke of the soul as the “psyche,” but the Gnostics revisionistically contrast “psyche,” or empirical self, with “pneuma,” or “divine spark.” — location: 2606
Selfhood can never be simply elided; it has to be confronted and transcended. Thus Blake has no desire that we should return to an infantile psychological state. But in his view experience does tend to enhance the claims of the Selfhood insofar as it increases anxiety and the need for self- defense. From The Book of Urizen onward, we have seen Blake working out an analysis of how the Selfhood grows on one, how it conspires with the pressures of experience to bulk itself up at the expense of spiritual well- being. The “Real Man, the Imagination” cannot by definition participate in wordly concerns; it is exclusive of the empirical man and vice versa. — location: 2618
The subject apprehending itself as a unique node of consciousness builds and builds on this apprehension, hardening its position and accreting around itself layers of protection and defense. Og and Anak represent such inner bulwarks, the force of the “I’s” self- preservative instinct. Thus “every human heart” maintains in itself the principle of re sis tance to the Divine Vision. — location: 2635
I believe Blake had not thought through the phenomenon of self- obstruction until he came to write The Four Zoas and Milton. The Urizen books present an analysis of the division and malformation of the self. Urizen figures the characteristics of the “I” insofar as he is willfully blind and self- torturing. Certainly he embodies a force of re sis tance to enlightenment. But Urizen is not yet represented as an obstacle with a power of psychological necessity. When Blake in Milton sets out to imagine the transcendence of the “I,” he is brought by reflection to recognize the strength of the internal impediments. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and Blake wrote Milton because he had come to perceive the strength of internal impediments, and he wanted now not only to enlarge his theory to accommodate the new ideas but also to provide the hypothesis of a cure for a disease that seemed harder to deracinate than before. — location: 2642
The sublime dereliction testifies to extinguished greatness. Satan’s inner world is like Nineveh, a crumbling capital, a blasted civilization. That is what the degradation of human potential amounts to: a tragedy of this or even greater magnitude. Poignantly, what was good in this world lingers on, in reduced form, in subordination and neglect: “Angels & Emanations” toil on in the wreckage as slaves. The spark of divinity has been mishandled and forced to labor against itself. — location: 2670
“The Selfhood,” it turns out, has its own layers: one ventures in and encounters first the “outline of Identity,” the atomic person, then “beyond” it, the Covering Cherub, and within the Covering Cherub, Satan and Rahab. Blake often runs most of these terms together as synonymous, but here he has visualized them in an arrangement like that of Chinese boxes, nestling one inside another. — location: 2688
As Blake puts it later in Milton, one cannot “behold Golgonooza without passing the Polypus/ A wondrous journey not passable by Immortal feet” (M 35[39]:19–20, E135). (Similarly, in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Earth tells Prometheus he cannot hear her voice because he is immortal.) The Polypus is the gross nexus of the material world; only a mortal being knows the experience of being subject to it— of fearing harm from it and “Eternal Death.” You have to have suffered— or at least truly apprehended— the despair of materialism before you can perceive the beauteous inspiration of Golgonooza. — location: 2736
As it is, we “sleepers” are lost in emotion, experiencing our own interiority as a storm of “Passions & Desires.” But the Sons of Los channel the chaotic power of emotion into literature and philosophy where it can become a source of enchantment, a “beautiful House for the piteous sufferer.” — location: 2763
Alluding to Theseus’s definition of poetry, Blake concurs that its “form & beauty” encompass the “dark regions of sorrow.” Poetry converts incoherent emotion and mental abyss into “most holy forms of Thought” (M 28[30]:1–4, E125). To Theseus’s notion Blake adds that it thereby reshapes the experience of the inner life. It soothes the embattled “I,” “the piteous sufferer,” with its doubts and fears, its dread of Eternal Death, and its attraction- repulsion to other selves. — location: 2766
Blake figures the desperation of the mortal soul in the person of Orc, who rebels against oppression without knowledge of the transcendental window. Orc has lost some of the rebel charisma he had in the early prophecies, and has become more clearly a principle of frustration, unease, and chaotic re sis tance. Blake now pointedly describes the state he represents as the universal inheritance of Natural Man. Orc himself is the “Polypus,” the unwilling submission to materiality: he howls “Within the vegetated mortal Nerves; for every Man born is joined/ Within into One mighty Polypus, and this Polypus is Orc” (M 29[31]:27–31, E127). — location: 2803
Socrates in the Symposium defines love as the desire for that which one lacks. This is the “love” with which nature inspires Natural Man, making him “sick” with unfulfilled desire. Love gestures beyond itself to transcendence it does not embody. — location: 2846
But Satan is also the Selfhood, and we can see readily enough that the Angels’ gibe applies to the Selfhood too, which has made itself the “God” of the self by displacing the “Human Form Divine.” (This is a dig at Milton too, who only went as far as “the human face divine,” a phrase sanctioned by Genesis, which affirms that we are made in God’s image, but not that we are divine.) — location: 2870
Note that in this passage, Blake wrests the term “identity” away from the empiricists, redefining and transvaluating it. Here identity is the eternal, the soul, and also the Eternal is the Divine Voice, Jesus, the Opened Center, the Human Form Divine. The annihilable is Satan the Selfhood, the Covering Cherub that silences that Voice, solidifying itself into an illusory power and projecting its tyrannical likeness onto the heavens. As a mere “incrustation,” it can be removed. — location: 2880
No assertion of authority that comes from the Selfhood can reform the Selfhood, and the “I” that polices itself re creates the Urizenic spiral. At this turning point Milton wants to make a more radical change: to quell the needs and ambitions of the empirical self, including the pride it takes in its Christian “virtue.” Such pride enables prudential morality to devolve into mere selfishness, and puritan discipline into mendacity and aggression. — location: 2895
The Selfhood seems like the most human, most unique part of one, but it is in fact the “Not Human,” the parodic inverse of the “Human Form Divine.” Fortunately one can “wash off ” this “Incrustation” or (changing the meta phor) shed these “filthy garments”— these grave clothes— and leave them behind in the tomb, along with the science, aesthetics, and religion of the Enlightenment. By discarding the Selfhood and embracing impersonal “Inspiration,” Milton himself has recovered his prophetic calling, arriving at a truth good for all, and a redemptive project. — location: 2939
In keeping with the altruistic ethic of Jerusalem, Blake now represents “Self- Annihilation” as a possibility to be realized primarily in one’s relation to others: that is the test and the proof of psychological progress. Therefore, declarations lose their significance. Thus Blake solves the rhetorical problem of Milton’s assertiveness, in part, by having Albion demonstrate his rejection of Selfhood in another way. But he goes well beyond this, redefining the goal so that the puzzle of the “I” that asserts itself by annihilating itself becomes academic: the aim is not self- reformation first, but altruistic behavior first. This objective is more realistic and less paradoxical, although at the same time more conventional. — location: 2970
Blake may be thinking along the lines of Shelley in Prometheus Unbound that moral and psychological evolution cannot simply be willed. — location: 3001
He may be introducing the unpredictability of the psyche into his scenario so that transformation takes place punctually, like a sudden jump in evolution. Milton’s involuntary changes can be understood in this light. A final possibility is that these aporiae gape as Blake’s reminder of how momentous and difficult transformation would be, a reminder for himself as well as for his reader. — location: 3040
But there is a major shift of emphasis. In Jerusalem the fall is epitomized by every person’s entrenchment in his or her own Selfhood and consequent hostility to others. As the prophetess Erin puts it, the Satan in us has made “A World where Man is by Nature the enemy of Man” (J 49:69, E199). — location: 3051
Conversely, it argues that the revival of the Divine Vision inspires friendship and brotherhood, and vice versa. The idea is not new in Blake, but the stress is: he shifts from focusing on solitude within the self to alienation from others. — location: 3056
This shift follows from the ethical focus of Jerusalem, the announced theme of which is the necessity of “Forgiveness.” Envy and self- righteousness represent consolidations of the Selfhood, while the “Forgiveness of Sins… is Self Annihilation.” “Self Annihilation” now means not only suppression of the Selfhood but also active self- sacrifice on behalf of others (J 98:23, E257). Thus Blake dispenses with the residual self- emphasis of the prophet Milton. In the final pages of Jerusalem, Albion, like Milton, annihilates his Selfhood, but unlike Milton, he does so to help his “Friends” rather than to redeem himself. This self- sacrifice revives the Divine Vision within Albion, and the heaven that springs into being is a heaven of “conversation.” Rather than dwelling apart, each immured in his own blind subjectivity, the inhabitants of Eden are intertranspicuous: “they walked/ To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen/ And seeing” (J 98:38–40, E258). — location: 3057
The poem thematizes such lonely labor in the struggles of Los, seen hammering at his forge, repeatedly, throughout the four chapters. He sometimes entertains despair because he is forced to confront the same principles of re sis tance over and over and over, a loop Blake impresses on the reader in the form of the poem’s nonnarrative structure, or pattern of “synchronous” repetitions (Paley, The Continuing City 294–314). If The Four Zoas steeped us in the darkness of night (and its nightmares), Jerusalem makes us wander in a labyrinth. As Stuart Curran puts it, the reader is “fated to return again and again to the same landmarks without discovering an egress” (“The Structures of Jerusalem” 340). Curran points out that this structure is meant to have a mimetic force, recalling wider failure to progress. — location: 3066
who feels himself to be “Shrunk to a narrow doleful form in the dark land of Cabul” (J 79:63, E235), everything seems “remote and separate.” Even so, we have no real autonomy; we are entangled in a web of mutual antagonism, “by Invisible Hatreds adjoind.” For there is no escaping others, and “He who will not commingle in Love, must be adjoined by Hate” (J 66:56, E219). — location: 3077
Blake wants to restore the potential for agency to the individual, who may have lost it for the present but will have to regain it if any progress is to occur. An empty stage has no potential for agency. For this reason Blake replaces the anonymous, helpless masses of “the spectrous dead,” wholly dominated by the acts of the Zoas and Emanations, with the single figure of Albion, who may be drastically self- divided and driven by false consciousness but at least provides a single site of contestation and thus of catalysis. Although Jerusalem is still a drama— Paley compares it to an oratorio, an arrangement of rival voices (The Continuing City 293)— and the chief characters still quarrel, the convergence on Albion has the effect of making individual experience a constant theme. We see to some extent from one point of view, which allows Blake to show that, for Albion, mutual hostility not only characterizes the relationships between different parts of the self but also has infected relationships with other people and with the external world. This antipathy toward others then rebounds, as error always does in Blake, to exacerbate the loneliness of selfhood. — location: 3105
Blake had said before that when the human “eye & ear” contract, the world that they perceive contracts. Now he seems to extend sympathy to the features of the diminished world, as if they suffered from their reduction in the human mind. Everything flies apart, dwindling and fading into the distance, enlarging the abyssal gulfs: — location: 3117
The empiricist subject has looked out, and still looks out, on a world governed by the essential antipathy of being in which every singularity is a citadel, but not a free one because it remains bound to others in its difference from them. — location: 3124
In fact, by a chiasmatic reversal, spiritual hate begets sexual love, where spiritual love begets the opposition that is true friendship. (Compare “Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies.”) What is spiritual hate? It is not personal antagonism, not merely an affect. It is one of the two stances a person can have toward otherness: “He who will not commingle in Love, must be adjoined by Hate.” The system is binary: there is no neutral position, as we might be tempted to postulate, no state of solipsism or egotistical sublimity indifferent to otherness. There is either “commingling” with spiritual love— love that has transcended Selfhood— or there is the usual (mere) confrontation of Selfhoods. For Selfhoods cannot commingle; they protect their own integrity at all costs, and each by definition “hates” the others. Thus sexual love, undertaken with what ever conscious hope and happiness, will fail of its promises. — location: 3145
Los indicates what commingling in love is like: “in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter/ Into each others Bosom (which are universes of delight)/ In mutual interchange” (J 88:3–5, E246). Lest we imagine that the Utopian ideal is wholly intellectual and masculine, Blake also gives us a picture of redeemed sexual love, polymorphous and entire: “Embraces are Comminglings: from the Head even to the Feet/ And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place” (J 69:43–44, E223). As it is now, in place of angelic sexuality, we have genital sex, which Blake treats as distorted and disappointing. Fallen sexuality entails defeat of the union it seems to promise because it isolates consciousness, accentuating divergence and separation. Heterosexual genital coupling is asymmetrical; the partners have different, and in a certain sense, opposite experiences. Its very anatomical nature seems designed to provoke ambivalence. — location: 3153
By the time Blake wrote Jerusalem, he has apparently come to believe, too, that the unfallen human being is sexless. (Compare Hayes.) He has Jerusalem sadly reproach Vala, the incarnation of the Female Will: “O Vala Humanity is far above/ Sexual or ga ni za tion… Wherefore then do you realize these nets of beauty & delusion” (J 79:73–78, E236). Bear in mind that the Female Will develops in a dialectic with patriarchy; Blake’s argument is not that Eve or woman started it all, but that sexual difference gives rise— at least in a misguided culture— to a pernicious dynamic in which masculine tyranny incites “Female Secresy” and seductive wiles. — location: 3177
He is suggesting that the insecurities of the Selfhood remain all- absorbing. It lives in a perpetual miasma of “grief & fear & love & desire” because it subsists in a restless state of anxiety and self- contradiction. This state expresses itself in a chronic syndrome of attraction- repulsion to others and to everything in the world. Sex roles petrify under these conditions. — location: 3210
Blake locates Albion’s salvation in the dissolution of this dread, and of re- sis tance to the incursions of otherness. “Petrific” Albion turns away “from Universal Love,” but the Savior follows him, Displaying the Eternal Vision! The Divine Similitude! In loves and tears of brothers, sisters, sons, fathers and friends Which if Man ceases to behold, he ceases to exist. (34[38]:11–14, E180) — location: 3258
The Selfhood imagines that it will “die” if it surrenders its integrity to love. And it is right; its self- preservation depends on insularity. But Humanity itself will cease to exist unless it admits love. Overcoming the re sis tance to others entails removing the Covering Cherub, the dark “opake” obstacle of the Selfhood. Opacity is hate; Vision is Love. Blake has made the synthesis before, in appositional clusters that equate “the Eternal Great Humanity Divine,” the “Divine Vision,” Jesus the Savior, and Universal Love. But here Love moves to the forefront. — location: 3261
Blake still believes that the Divine Vision lives within, “behind” the heart gates, but he now asserts that it also appears “outside”— as it were— in the love of others, rightly beheld and rightly felt. — location: 3268
When the Savior addresses Albion, he declares that love means Mental Fight: “Our wars are wars of life, & wounds of love/ With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought” (J 34[38]:14–15, E180). This is the naked encounter–confrontation without the ulterior motives and the delusions of the Selfhood, with its Moral Law. To behold the “Divine Similitude” in the “loves and tears” of others is to behold others. — location: 3273
Blake’s “memory” is the antithesis of Platonic recollection; it dodges or even masks “innate ideas,” replacing them with the accretions of experience. — location: 3305
The “ratio” is the identity of this subject— the “I,” the Reason, the self established by the continuity of memory. Thus this “I” binds itself to the egoism of memory, trea suring its stock of testimonies to its own uniqueness. This is identity formation as narcissistic self- confinement: “He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only” (TNNR b, E3). The empiricist subject, whose sense of self includes only the “I” and its memories, sinks back into the meager empirical self, with no access to other people, to living nature, or to her or his own “Immortal Spirit.” — location: 3310
Thus memory passivates; it underscores finitude and helplessness. Good or bad, memories are by definition recollections of what is gone. They serve to remind us that we are powerless in relation to time, which is rapidly converting everything into memory. As the ninetieth Psalm says: “we spend our years as a tale that is told.” But under Utopian conditions, the momentum of time will not be allied with finitude. In the great scene of reconciliation at the end of Jerusalem, Heaven and the Four Faces of Humanity will go “forward forward irresistable from Eternity to Eternity” (J 98:27, E257). But the temporality of memory is the antithesis of the Eternal Now: — location: 3324
The inner world of Natural Man is a world of obscure impulses and dark memories, material that can barely be owned by the central consciousness. The self has been reduced to what Melanie Klein terms “inner chaos,” provoking that anxiety of interiority from which many Blake characters suffer. This corrosive effect of memory contrasts with the recuperative power attributed to it in the Wordsworthian tradition. But Blake would argue that Wordsworth is debilitatingly “haunted” by his memories in just the way he, Blake, would predict. — location: 3336
Memory will become an aid to imagination rather than displacing it. The Intellect itself will cease to be identified as Reason, and the Symbolic order will lose its power to alienate and oppress: “every Word and Every Character” will grow “Human.” Forgiveness will replace Moral Law. And it is perhaps in this transformation that memory will be most fully redeemed if we recall that “Forgiveness of Sins… is Self Annihilation.” The memories to which the Selfhood clings, and by which it maintains its identity, will give way to neutral memories, surviving without their power and their sting. For that is what forgiveness does: it surrenders the past.2 — location: 3354
In a better world, Mental Fight is ce re bral and invigorating and does not lead to death. In the unredeemed world—“here”—war takes a bodily and, therefore, truly mortal form. — location: 3391
In Milton self- reformation, and thus self- annihilation, were ends in themselves. With the dissolution of the Selfhood, one rose by one’s own power into possession of one’s divinity. One could secure the end of transformation by means of self- examination and self- correction. The journey could be solitary. Jerusalem revises this view. The first act in the new era of the self no longer follows Plotinus’s “Withdraw into yourself and look.” The ancient convertere ad se is reversed. Now it is: empty yourself and turn outside. You cannot “exist” in a new form except “by Brotherhood.” The avenue to self- remaking opens by way of attention to the other. Thus the turning point in Jerusalem occurs not with a crisis of self- recognition or a healing of self- division, as it does in Milton, but with a gesture of true self- abandonment, when Albion throws himself willingly “into the Furnaces of affliction.” — location: 3456
This is a radical ontological redefinition of agape or Charity in which “Man,” or the full and divine potential of humanity, remains unrealized until the self is annihilated on another’s behalf. Albion asks rhetorically, “Cannot man exist without Mysterious/ Offering of Self for Another” (J 96:20–21, E256). The answer is no: true humanity does not come into being until self- sacrifice is done. When Blake’s Jesus says that the true “Man” exists only “by Brotherhood,” he means the Brotherhood established by self- sacrifice. — location: 3447