Blake’s ’Jerusalem’ as Visionary Theatre Entering the Divine Body
Metadata
- Author: Sklar, Susanne Marie
Highlights
The poem resists interpretation by rational means alone, and this is as it should be, for Jerusalem’s words and images seek to move us (with its characters) away from a purely rational way of seeing and living to one that is highly imaginative. Jerusalem is not a poem to which we assign ‘meaning’; it is meant to be experienced. It does not progress in a linear fashion: people and places morph into one another; the story unfolds kaleidoscopically, a changing montage of words and images. — location: 143
Blake wants us to experience imaginatively how we and all things are interconnected, ‘divine members of a Divine Body’. We can move (with Blake’s characters)from a state of rationality and isolation (which he calls Ulro) to one of creative interconnectedness (called Eden/Eternity). In Eden/Eternity forgiveness is a spiritual and social structuring principle—which Blake advocates as the basis for all human and political relationships. — location: 148
This can be confusing. It is especially confusing when a reader tries to assign a fixed meaning to Blake’s fluid creatures, places, and imagery. So it is helpful to think, not merely like an objective critic, but like an actor or director, responding to those visionary creatures by asking, not ‘what do they mean?’ but rather: ‘How do they look? What do they want? How do they sound? Where are they?’ Attending to their movements, motivations, and actions reveals, not the abstract meaning of Jerusalem, but an experience of the poem—as we experience a play by attending to what is happening onstage. Of course Blake’s Jerusalem cannot be confined to a mundane three-dimensional stage; it requires what I call visionary theatre. — location: 170
Imaginatively, we can think of ourselves as being as fluid as Blake’s peculiar characters. We can ‘enter into’ them imaginatively, as an actor would do—and we can be transformed by them. This is in keeping with the purpose of the poem; Blake wants to open our eyes ‘into Eternity… in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination’ (J4:18–20); he wants us to dwell with and in his characters, with one another—and with God. — location: 183
The ideal quality of relationship between the many is a unified field of love. This quality of love engenders what Blake calls ‘continual forgiveness’. It informs the whole of Blake’s vision: emotionally, aesthetically, theologically, intellectually. Expansion is essentially imaginative; contraction is essentially rational: imagination and analysis, like faith and reason, can complement one another. These themes recur throughout this monograph. — location: 226
What Blake calls ‘Selfhood’ creates this conflict. Selfhood impedes forgiveness and interconnection; entering the Divine Body involves annihilating Selfhood. ‘Self’ is not a good thing in Jerusalem. Here we do not aspire to attain the ‘true Self ’ as in the psychology of Carl Jung and his followers. Blake uses the term ‘Selfhood’ as it is found in the writings of Jacob Boehme, a German visionary whose works will be discussed throughout this book. Selfhood refers to that which dehumanises others, craving power and control. In Jerusalem Selfhood is a disease (J45.10–15), equated with Satan (J27) and a creature called the Spectre (J33.17–18, 58.48), ‘the abstract objecting power that negatives every thing’ (J10.14).10 Selfhood does not love; it consumes. Selfhood does not ‘emanate’, or give forth the ‘fibres of love’ that connect all things to each other. Selfhood traps us in a state of being called Ulro; it prevents us from moving to Eden/Eternity, the state in which we enter the Divine Body. — location: 248
He does not notice that in Jerusalem Satan is an abstraction; he is not a character. Satan (or Selfhood) is the Ulro state into which anyone can fall (J27:76) and from which all can be delivered. Blake’s Jesus is a character, both human and divine. — location: 371
I think Blake creates language and designs that are fascinating and difficult in order to engage both the intellect and the imagination of his readers. In a letter (1799) to Dr Trusler, an irascible patron who seems to have found Blake’s work ‘obscure’, Blake declares that ‘what is not too Explicit’ is ‘the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the Faculties to act’ (K793). Each plate of Jerusalem is like a puzzle in pictures and words that can lead readers into the world of Blake’s poem. — location: 396
When I apply these ‘vision-divisions’ to Jerusalem I see the structure of its story: Chapter One depicts the calamity of Albion rejecting the Saviour’s song and Jerusalem’s love; in Chapter Two, Albion’s cities, friends, and immortals offer comforts; in Chapter Three, calamities amplify as Jerusalem and Los both fall into error (‘Religion Hid in War, a Dragon Red and hidden Harlot’ triumphs (J75:20)); and in Chapter Four, the Spectrous Selfhood, or ‘Antichrist accursed’ (J89:10) is overcome. — location: 553
Jerusalem cannot understand why nations so furiously rage together when forgiveness could weave the social fabric ‘with wings of cherubim’ (J22:34–5). As in Messiah, so in Blake’s apocalypse: the fallen are transformed—not eternally condemned. — location: 641
In Blake (unlike Revelation) those who wage war in the name of God serve the Great Dragon; Blake’s lake of fire is actually the water of life; judgment is forgiveness. Blake’s apocalypse reveals apocatastasis, the universal salvation from which no one is excluded.12 Even the most destructive characters can be alchemically changed (J91:32–52) in Blake’s visionary theatre. — location: 644
In the seventeenth century, ‘All the world’s a stage’, was not just a phrase from Shakespeare, but ‘a normal piece of mental furniture’ (1972: 182). Thus the created world, a sect like the Rosicrucians, literary texts, and the human mind could all be seen as theatres,13 and in some alchemical works the macrocosmic theatre of the universe intersects with the microcosmic theatre of the mind. — location: 661
In Jerusalem, virginity obstructs divine vision, and ‘Imagination’ is another name for the Divine Body (J60:57, 70:19), a Body that includes all earthly things (J98–9). Blake’s Babylon harlot is the cold virgin Vala, negating imagination and promoting war. His Jerusalem, emanating liberty and forgiveness, loves freely in naked beauty. Erotic joy is integral to human divinity (J97–8). It is with such joy that Emanations create connections within human souls, between people, communities, nature, the cosmos, and God. — location: 806
In Blake the infinite and eternal body is both a container and the thing contained; the outside is within and the inside is without (J12). Systems, structures, and creatures coinhere. The microscopic spirits conducting digestion or sleep (J3, 53:13) coinhere with telescopic human planets and stars (J6:1–4, 12:51, 50:20); capillaries are streams within us (within cities) inhabited by living creatures (J38i, 32–5); and rivers like the Thames and Jordan are a circulatory system, the bloodstream of Albion (J66:61), coinhering with Israel, a man and a land, all animating the bright sculptures of Golgonooza (J16:61), a city of art. — location: 1052
According to Paul Evdokimov an icon is charged with a living presence (1990: 178), and, if it is thought to be an object, it is an object that determines or reveals the subject (1990: 25). The beauty of the image can spiritualize the senses so that they become like what they are sensing; the viewer is to participate in what Evdokimov calls the ‘theo-materialism’ whose beauty is made manifest in the forms of this world (1990: 28). In Blake’s poem, Jerusalem’s beauty must be revealed, unveiled, before Albion can awaken to self-annihilation and divine union (J86). When he can see the love of Christ made manifest in the form of his friend Los, a ‘Last Judgment’ passes upon him and he is changed, sensually and spiritually (J96–7). — location: 1071
The poem opens with Jesus singing: ‘I am in you and you in me mutual in love divine’ (J4:7). It ends with all living creatures emanating the divine music which is the ‘Song of Jerusalem’ (J99). The poem begins with a solo and ends with polyphony, but that polyphony is what Jesus sings from the beginning— for he is singing within every living being. In the human-divine song each character is distinct and they are all in ‘the Divine Body, the Saviour’s Kingdom’ (J3). In the Divine Body characters interpenetrate (coinhere) with one another; they are not confined by their bodies or their names. — location: 1106
Such daemonic characters embody behaviours, virtues, or vices—or, as Fletcher expresses it, they ‘compartmentalize function’ (Fletcher 1964: 34–48). Blake’s characters often do likewise. Constellating around Albion, Los embodies imaginative energy; Urizen embodies reason; Hand engineers what we call the militaryindustrial complex. Like Fletcher’s ‘daemons’, Blake’s Zoas and Emanations also act as intermediaries between the human and the divine. But I think they are more than what Fletcher calls ‘daemonic’; they are also what Crispin Fletcher-Louis calls ‘angelmorphic’. — location: 1132
Angus Fletcher uses the term ‘daemonic’ to discuss how quasi-human characters constellate around an ‘Everyman’ figure in Spenser or Dante (1964). Such daemonic characters embody behaviours, virtues, or vices—or, as Fletcher expresses it, they ‘compartmentalize function’ (Fletcher 1964: 34–48). Blake’s characters often do likewise. Constellating around Albion, Los embodies imaginative energy; Urizen embodies reason; Hand engineers what we call the militaryindustrial complex. Like Fletcher’s ‘daemons’, Blake’s Zoas and Emanations also act as intermediaries between the human and the divine. But I think they are more than what Fletcher calls ‘daemonic’; they are also what Crispin Fletcher-Louis calls ‘angelmorphic’. — location: 1130
Blake may have derived some of his ideas about angelic and human relations from Jacob Boehme, his acknowledged prophetic progenitor.6 Boehme thinks humanity can have an angelic form; we were not meant to be merely corporeal. Like Boehme, Blake is concerned with the journey from what he calls ‘Opakeness’, or corruptible corporeality, to a state of angelical clarity, or ‘Translucence’. The human Jesus was infused with such angelical clarity in his Transfiguration (Luke 9.29) and we too can be filled with clarity and divine light. — location: 1145
These uncannily fluid characters can dwell within an individual, walk London’s streets, and travel among the stars (J50:20). Blake’s angelmorphs can be creative, or as destructive as the lustful ‘Watchers’ in the Abyssinian Book of Enoch, a text for which Blake made drawings (c827/pl.1075–83). — location: 1174
Blake’s assertion is in keeping with how his characters relate in and with Jesus, the cosmic Divine Body in Jerusalem. Unconfined by mundane space and time, they can move through different places and states; they can wander in the Holy Land and England simultaneously. — location: 1193
However, when Blake builds Jerusalem in England’s pleasant land he subverts the traditional idea of ‘chosenness’; all people, nations, and creatures are children of Jerusalem. According to Blake both Christians and Jews are sadly mistaken when assuming ‘a right Exclusively to the benefits of God’ 29 and should be chastised not only because they separate themselves from others, but also because they slaughter the innocent in the name of God, who is the source of compassion and creativity. — location: 1310
In Jerusalem Erin is like Los, keeping divine vision despite Albion’s tyrannical cruelty. In Chapter One she offers creative ‘Spaces’ in which Jerusalem need not be overshadowed by Vala (J11:10–13, 12:22). — location: 1328
Infected by the Spectre, Enitharmon seeks dominion for herself (J87:12–24). What could be a creative partnership becomes a banal bickering-match. To create partnership, the Spectre must be broken in pieces like a potter’s vessel. — location: 1386
‘The Holy Reasoning Power’, when divorced from Imagination and compassion, is called ‘the Spectre of Man’ (J10.15–16, 36.23, 54.7). The Spectre, synonymous with Selfhood (which is Satan in J27, 33.17), is as divisive and greedy as an unfallen Emanation is connective and generous. Every character, as well as the author and reader, must contend with Spectres. — location: 1392
Revelation’s lake of fire (20.15) is one of the few things that can thoroughly consume a Spectre. So can the furnaces of Los. — location: 1405
Abstraction (the ethos of Ulro) obstructs emanation and can fill humanity and the world with destructive violence. Blake understands how spectrous fury feeds on itself; it creates a cycle of violence in which ‘the Punisher/ Mingles with his Victim’s Spectre enslav’d’ (J47:14–15). — location: 1413
The Spectre is the ‘Holy Reasoning’ and ‘Abstract Objecting Power’ that negates political cooperation as well as human love (J10:14–16); it is essentially divisive. — location: 1410
Youngquist thinks Jerusalem is a schizoid drama about the Spectre, Blake’s way of coping with his own disorders; but I think grappling with the Spectre is part of a process that is more than just psychological: it is also spiritual and theological. In Blake we are meant to be members of the Divine Body, participating in the Body of Christ. Spectres obstruct that participation. — location: 1419
but I think grappling with the Spectre is part of a process that is more than just psychological: it is also spiritual and theological. In Blake we are meant to be members of the Divine Body, participating in the Body of Christ. Spectres obstruct that participation. — location: 1420
Los’s contentions are akin to alchemical transformations, where darkening corruption—the nigredo—prefigures albedo, a whitening or translucence, which is both physical and spiritual.43 — location: 1440
Vala and Jerusalem are meant to be united, as body and soul are meant to coinhere. From the coinherent Emanation all life comes: Vala gives bodies; Jerusalem gives souls (J18:8). — location: 1443
It is composed of the spectres of the dead, vegetating and petrifying in Albion’s hands. Albion chooses to be trapped in this veil (J24); like King Lear, he foolishly favours the daughters who destroy him and banishes the one who truly loves him. — location: 1491
And Cordelia replies: ‘No cause, no cause’ (IV.7.72–5). Forgiveness eradicates causality. In Blake’s lifetime, London Lear productions featured an ‘improved’ ending, amended by Nahum Tate, in which Cordelia marries Edgar and Lear is restored. In Tate’s version, apocalyptic destruction leads to happy restoration.48 — location: 1500
Three times in 1804 Blake suggested that he engrave Romney’s ‘incomparable production… a picture of Lear and Cordelia, when he awakes and knows her’ (K845).47 When Lear awakens he wants to self-annihilate. He says to Cordelia: If you have poison for me, I will drink it… You have some cause… And Cordelia replies: ‘No cause, no cause’ (IV.7.72–5). Forgiveness eradicates causality. In Blake’s lifetime, London Lear productions featured an ‘improved’ ending, amended by Nahum Tate, in which Cordelia marries Edgar and Lear is restored. In Tate’s version, apocalyptic destruction leads to happy restoration.48 — location: 1498
Considering Albion in the light of Shakespeare’s fallen king helps to illuminate his character. As Lear disowns Cordelia because she cannot quantify love, so Albion casts out Jerusalem because she does not conform to demonstrative truth. As Lear is committed to ‘the professed bosoms’ of his lying daughters, so Albion embosoms wily Vala (J33:20–34:30). Wicked Edmund in Lear worships ‘the Goddess Nature’, seeking to kill his own brother and father, as Albion’s children, worshipping ‘the Goddess Nature’, seek to destroy him and each other. Apocalyptic storms beat around Albion. Loyal Kent and loving Cordelia work to rescue storm-torn Lear, engineering a war of love so that he may be restored. (Like Kent, Los is rather rough; he can roar forth in eloquent insult or beat out his Spectre on an anvil.) Jerusalem has no army, but, like Cordelia, she persists in the dangerous work of forgiveness, restoring her father to life. Like Lear, only when stripped to nothing can Albion perceive love. Of course, Blake’s Albion is more angelmorphic than Shakespeare’s king; his character is also influenced by Blake’s response to other mythopoetic texts. — location: 1511
Los’s work subverts several mytho-prophetic paradigms. For example, the spectrous sons seek Albion’s destruction as the Titans did Chronos (as in Hesiod’s Theogony),55 but Los labors to redeem (not to destroy) the devouring Father. Unlike jealous Hephaistos, whose artifice traps Venus in a net, Los’s work unveils Emanations, freeing them from shame. Unlike Freemasonry’s Tubal-Cain, Los forges not to uphold, but to shatter a sacred mystery (J91). His fires offer all who thirst a place in the embrace of Jerusalem (J96). Like Blake, Los tries to keep his divine vision when isolated and internally troubled. As Los is with and in Jesus and Albion (in the Divine Body), so is he also with and in the first-person narrator who explicitly addresses us in the preface to each chapter as well as occasionally within the action of the poem. — location: 1554
Word gaps are especially apparent in Chapter One (J3, 7). It took more than a century for scholars like Swinburne, Damon, Keynes, and Erdman to discern Plate 3’s missing ‘love’, ‘friendship’, ‘blessed’, and ‘forgive’ (P10–11). Perhaps the text asks that readers not only find, but also embody such words. In Chapter Two a diminutive Blake mirror-writes the message we must decipher (J41i) and his little hand might also be morphing from a mutant divine chariot with serpent-wheels (J46i). — location: 1570
His rage may be unintentionally transformative, for he uses Vala’s deadly veil to build the redemptive Mundane Shell, a space where forgiveness can happen (J59). — location: 1597
She is the heroine of Blake’s poem and is as undervalued by many critics as she is by Albion.59 Articles, essays, and book chapters explore the characters of Los, Albion, Luvah, and the Spectre. Shadowy Vala receives more scholarly attention than luminous Jerusalem. Yet every living thing emanates Jerusalem in the poem’s climax. She is the source and the end of being. When she is banished, human divinity is not possible. — location: 1608
Jerusalem Blake redefines the biblical notion of harlotry. Blake calls Jerusalem, his heroine, the Bride of the Lamb. But fallen characters (Albion and his warlike sons; Vala and her furious daughters) consider her a harlot because of the liberating forgiveness and love that emanate from her. By contrast, Vala (Jerusalem’s shadow) is a chaste virgin, offering love and freedom to no one. Blake (who is more reliable than Albion’s fallen sons) calls her a harlot, not because she fornicates, but because she propagates war. Propagating war makes Vala a whore. — location: 1640
In Jerusalem Blake redefines the biblical notion of harlotry. Blake calls Jerusalem, his heroine, the Bride of the Lamb. But fallen characters (Albion and his warlike sons; Vala and her furious daughters) consider her a harlot because of the liberating forgiveness and love that emanate from her. By contrast, Vala (Jerusalem’s shadow) is a chaste virgin, offering love and freedom to no one. Blake (who is more reliable than Albion’s fallen sons) calls her a harlot, not because she fornicates, but because she propagates war. Propagating war makes Vala a whore. — location: 1639
Like Ezekiel’s fallen sisters, Blake’s Jerusalem delights in multicultural gifts (J79). When war ravishes the earth these ‘arts of life’ are ruined, as is the multicultural intercourse that brings joy to the world. — location: 1686
Though Blake’s Vala/Babylon embraces the seven-headed dragon (J75i), devouring Jerusalem in Ulro (J89), she is not damned in Eden/Eternity. With Jerusalem she partakes of the embrace of Jesus (J20:26–41). No one is condemned; in Jerusalem what looks like Revelation’s lake of fire (Rev.20.15) becomes ‘Fountains of Living Water Flowing from the Humanity Divine’ (J96:37). — location: 1701
But in Blake’s poem Jerusalem suffers with those who suffer, works with her hands, directs international trade, opposes Albion, has cosmic orgasms, and protests articulately. She is not an untouchable virgin. — location: 1738
Jerusalem wisely retreats when condemned as a harlot, but when Erin awakens her (J48) she goes to work in Satanic mills (J59–62). She is both an industrial slave and a heavenly bride, — location: 1790
Blake asserts that appropriating the characteristics of Eve or the Woman inflates Selfhood. Becoming a divine archetype blots out one’s own minute particularity and that, in Blake’s vision, constricts the Holy Ghost within each living being. When Blake claims to be a prophet, he invites his readers to join him in that great task. All can contribute to the building of Jerusalem, laboring like Los or Blake’s heroine. His famous ‘Jerusalem’ hymn (prefacing Milton, K481) ends with a quotation from Numbers 11.29: ‘Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.’ Blake’s ‘Jerusalem is Liberty’, seeking obedience from no one (J26, 54:1). In Jerusalem when the feminine seeks precedence over the masculine and the masculine over the feminine, each becomes a selfcentered consuming Spectre, arrogating everything to itself. — location: 1962
From an expanded perspective, the woman rising can be seen as One, human-divine, who is uniquely Jerusalem and Vala, Erin, England and Brittannia, and all her daughters; she is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. Throughout the poem the Emanation may be naked or clothed or ‘winged with six wings’. She can be a double-female, commingling in Beulah’s ‘Lily of Havilah’ both verbally, in Plate 19, and visually in Plate 28. Winged and bedecked with bells, Jerusalem (the Emanation) appears in Plate 14’s design, hovering above the sleeping Albion, foreshadowing Los’s description of her descent in Plate 86. Her kaleidoscopic beauty makes her one of Blake’s most dynamic characters. — location: 1994
But Jerusalem’s sexuality inspires forgiveness and peace, concepts less frequently depicted than vengeance and war in art and literature.44 As peace and forgiveness are marginalized by strategic analysts, so is Blake’s heroine by too many readers. Her story of forgiveness is the matrix (or ‘golden string’) around which the poem’s other stories can constellate. — location: 2002
Though she ‘wanders far away’ in Ulro, in Eden/Eternity Jerusalem is ‘the Bride, the Lambs wife’ (J12:41–4). Ulro, Generation, Beulah, and Eden (the different states into which all can go) are eternally present. These different states are as fluid as Blake’s characters: they can overlap; they can also exist simultaneously. For instance, in Plate 14 Jerusalem’s depressed maternal anguish (J14:31–4) contrasts with the design depicting Los’s vision of her, winged beneath a rainbow, bells of peace tinkling around her knees. In that plate we hear Jerusalem suffering in Ulro and Generation, but we can see her, luminous, in Beulah/Eden. If we read with double-vision (see Chapter 2) we may see, as Boehme did, that ‘Heaven is every where present’ (WCss.IV.98). Unfortunately, Selfhood can hamper our visionary capacities. Again, in Plate 18, what we see is not what we hear (or read). We see naked angels, crowned with lilies and roses, flanking naked lovers—but we hear the fury of Albion’s sons, severing souls from bodies, and filling humanity with notions of sin and shame. — location: 2036
But she is not destroyed; she rises like Christ. She rises in Plate 92’s design, clad in her Sun-Woman gown, rising above four wormy heads.57 She rises beyond spectrous reasoning, as the naked Emanation in Plate 93 rises from the tomb to appear on Albion’s bosom in Plate 94. Like Christ, Jerusalem passes through ruin to life. After Jerusalem enters the Druid dragon stomach, Vala can be reincorporated into the Divine Body. The composite Emanation (Jerusalem/Vala) reappears as ‘England who is Brittannia’ (J95:21). When Albion sees Jesus, he calls in love to the Jerusalem he banished. He calls like the bridegroom in the Song of Solomon (2.13): ‘Awake Jerusalem and come away!’ (J97:4). All things emanate and the Emanations ‘are named Jerusalem’ (J99). Jerusalem’s forgiveness recreates individuals, societies, and the cosmos. Even tree, metal, earth, and ‘the all wondrous Serpent’ rejoice in the Divine Body in Jerusalem’s name (J98–9). No one is excluded. Jerusalem’s forgiveness goes beyond good and evil. Her beauty changes assumptions about territory, inclusion, and wealth. Conflict can be creative and difference can make harmony, as it does when Canaanites and Israelites join with Tyre, Assyria, and Egypt to enjoy her music and her peace (J86:26–33). Building Jerusalem is not about vanquishing enemies, but about creative disagreement, caring for others and rejoicing in the beauty of creation. She connects Albion and all humanity to ‘Jesus the Christ’ (J38:20), who is the cosmic Divine Body as well as a character within the poem. — location: 2199
Like his consort Jerusalem, he brings and embodies forgiveness; like her, Blake’s Jesus is a context (the body where we live) and a way of being (the love through which we create and relate)—as well as a multifaceted incarnate character. He is creative, erotic, fiery, and kind. — location: 2214
Those who think of Blake’s characters as ‘mental relationships, dispositions of the world, or psychological diagrams’ (Davies 1948: 112–15) do not notice that the Divine Body has a body, that Jesus, the Spirit of continual forgiveness, is not only transcendent, singing in sunbeams (J4), shining as a silent sun (J29), creating Eve from Adam in a swirling wave of flame (J35i)— he also has a human form (J29):4 born of a woman named Mary (J60), he suffers with those who suffer (J25:7), makes love to his bride (J20, 79), and works with his divine hands, building a couch, albeit a cosmic one (J48). — location: 2233
In that imaginative world we shall learn that we (the readers), Los, and/ or Blake are not separate from Jesus; for when we and Albion, climactically, see Jesus incarnate in Los, all living things are liberated from Ulro’s ‘Sleep of Death’ (J96–9), the hell within and around Albion through most of the poem. We, Los, Blake, and Jesus are (implicitly) coinherent in the very first plate of Jerusalem. All together we can open the way to heaven (Eden/Eternity). — location: 2252
The words ı (monos o Iesous), ‘Jesus alone’ or ‘only Jesus’, hover in a cloud at the top of the plate. Blake tells us that Jesus is ‘dictating the words of this mild song’ (J4:5); in a way ‘Jesus alone’ or ‘only Jesus’ is speaking the whole poem. He is speaking through the voice of many fluid characters—and each of these characters is ultimately ‘a Divine Member’ of his Divine Body (J91:31), sensually transfigured in the bliss of forgiveness. — location: 2262
Through Jerusalem humanity can dwell in life with the Holy-one (J4.18), the appellation of God in Jewish prayers. As in both the Old and New Testaments, Blake’s Holy-one is ‘not a God afar off’ (J4.18; Deut.30.11–20; Rom.10.6–8); the God who ‘speaks in thunder and in fire!’ (J3:5) is also ‘a brother and a friend’ (J4.18). The transcendent ‘Holy-one’, streaming in glorious light, also resides within each human breast (J4.19). He is immanent in our hearts (as in Jer.31.33–4; Heb.8.10–12); his kingdom is within us (as in Luke 17.21). ‘Lo! We are One’, Blake’s Jesus/Jehovah, the Holy-one sings, ‘forgiving all Evil, not seeking recompense’ (J4:20). Blake’s God is not (like Milton’s) a god who values justice more than life, a god who damns humanity because of one curious snack. In Blake, if God damns humanity, then God hurts himself, for Blake’s Jesus proclaims that we are all his members.8 We are all divine members of his Divine Body, connected by ‘Fibres of love’ (J4:8). In Eden/Eternity all living things (including you and me) can be creative, erotic, fiery, and kind. We give life to one another and to the world around us, streaming in the sun and walking on the earth. — location: 2294
There can be more than one maker: God, Blake, and the reader all together make Tygers and Lambs—as well as ‘the Song of Jerusalem’ (J99). As Essick notes (2008: 50–1) it is Blake who made ‘the Lamb’ in Innocence—hammering out images and words like the divine blacksmith (prefiguring Los) who also forges ‘The Tyger’. ‘The Tyger’ in Blake’s design, however, does not look at all like the Tyger painted by his words. On occasion ‘The Tyger’ looks positively friendly; in no edition does he seem to be burning and filled with ‘deadly terrors’. The image we make in our minds is ‘The Tyger’ we fear—like the image of a punitive God made by Albion and his fallen sons.15 Of course, the loving and creative God who speaks in thunder in Jerusalem dwells in ‘flames of fierce desire’ (J3:5–6)—but paradoxically, that thundering fire is creative. Creative wrath vivifies the Divine Body; wrath can be incorporate in love. Jesus does not protect us from wrath; he allows us to enter into it, to use it creatively, and to be transformed by it. — location: 2397
In mainstream Christian theology God is both singular and plural; in the Trinity three divine persons coinhere in one substance.41 In Blake, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit certainly coinhere with another,42 but they also coinhere with universal humanity: trees, animals, rivers, and angels are all part of universal humanity. This includes every living thing, and when universal humanity dwells with God in Eden/Eternity, God becomes not a Trinity but a ‘Quaternity’ (Blake’s ‘fourfold’ man). Like God we are one and we are many—as Jesus is throughout the poem. Jesus appears as a single character (he opens the poem with a solo) but also with, and/or as a chorus: of Eternals, Cathedral Cities, a Divine Family. Additionally, he is one of ‘the seven eyes of God’ and, as we have seen, he is in league with Jehovah Elohim when he produces a vision for the edification of Jerusalem (J61–2). Jehovah Elohim is, like humanity, both one and many. — location: 2696
This Eternal congress then elects the Seven Eyes of God: ‘Lucifer, Molech, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah, Jesus’ (J55:32). What is called God (Jesus, Jehovah, Elohim, Pahad, Shaddai) is not separate from what is called demonic (Lucifer, Molech). From an Eternal’s perspective the fallen angels, Lucifer and Molech, are part of the divine constellation; they are integral to how God sees. Damon thinks ‘these Eyes represent man’s spiritual development from the completely self-centered Lucifer to Jesus’ (1973: 283–4),45 but I think the eyes also indicate that no one in Eden/Eternity, not even Lucifer or Molech, is excluded from the Divine Body. Like fallen humanity, the fallen angels can be changed, spiritually and sensually. — location: 2739
Those places (the looms, the furnaces, the river, the wilderness) are not in a fixed location; they are both external settings and internal (psychological) ones. Furthermore, some places are also characters: Albion is a land, Jerusalem is a city, — location: 2849
When describing Golgonooza, Erin’s Spaces, Cathedron’s looms, Los’s furnaces, and the nature of Jerusalem in Chapter One, Blake (and Los) repeatedly let us know that these places (along with God) are ‘within & without’ (J12:15–20; 13:36). This means the poem’s action takes place internally within its characters (and readers), and externally in a socio-political landscape. — location: 2861
To complicate matters even further, the different states of being—rational Ulro, cyclical Generation, erotic Beulah, and imaginative Eden/Eternity— affect how these fluid settings are seen and relate to one another. The way in which a person, place, or thing is seen shapes its perceived identity. In Ulro (where all things must be expressed empirically and that which cannot be measured or proven does not exist) Albion calls Jesus, the Divine Body, a ‘Phantom of the over-heated brain’ (J4:24), but in Eden/Eternity Albion becomes a part of that Body and, like God, he can create space and time (J98:28–31). When Albion can see with ‘fourfold vision’ in Eden/Eternity, the earth, all living creatures, and the cosmos interrelate as one body, one song (J99). After all, in the history of science the cosmos changes when perspectives change (e.g. in response to the discoveries of Galileo or Copernicus)—as Jerusalem’s narrator knows: — location: 2873
Ideally, Golgonooza (or the earth) is a redemptive space in which all living things can be seen as ‘human’; all creatures are worthy of attention and respect. But, as shall be discussed below, ‘mighty Golgonooza’ (like the vision of Jesus) can be corrupted by Ulro’s reductive vision and the depredations of Selfhood—made manifest by the Druid building projects of Albion’s fallen sons. Those Druid projects obstruct the building of Jerusalem—a body politic in which all things coinhere creatively. — location: 2885
Like the human form, the Mundane Shell can be opaque in Ulro or translucent in Eden. (In fourfold vision, translucence, opacity, time, and space all vary ‘as the Organs of Perception vary’ (J98:36–8).) Golgonooza is a continuing city because, like its Mundane Shell, it can continually change. It is ‘continually creating, continually decaying desolate’ (J53:19). — location: 3152
Blake’s circumference (west) melds with the centre (east). When the human form divine emanates outward, the centre becomes an ever-expanding circumference (J71:8). What is divine within each creature ‘expands in stars’, beyond horizons, infinitely (and sensually) expanding the universe. — location: 3171
Bateson’s ecology of mind is like an extension of the I–Thou relationship in Martin Buber, where interconnectedness is an essentially human phenomenon. In The Art of Interpretation, Wallace Bacon applies Buber’s insights to a reader’s engagement with literature. ‘Literature has presence’, Bacon writes, and readers can seek to be in ‘full communion with a work of art’ (1979: 35–7). Building Jerusalem in Blake means being in an I–Thou relationship not only with humans and art, but also with cities, rivers, trees, and rocks. Nature, culture, and individuals interconnect. — location: 3213
To those who are creating projects from within the poem, Blake’s strange words can be whimsical and inspiring, moving the mind from academic Ulro to imaginative Eternity. — location: 3318
The preface ends (as the Book of Revelation begins) explaining that Jerusalem is crafted from divine dictation. Word gaps suggest that Blake cannot capture every imaginatively heard word; readers must use their inward ears to perceive them. — location: 3397