And
comprehend within himself all things both small &
great.
Yet
the rupture takes place: the masculine and feminine souls part company in
dominance and submission. This is Blake's version of yin and yang falling out of
harmonious balance. Thus Los, wounded and diminished, is Prophesy reduced in
power — but nonetheless struggling on heroically against single vision. He is
the embattled poet in this world of generation. Los's cry, Blake's own:
I
must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's,
I will not Reason &
Compare:
my
business is to Create.
Los
is ever the strenuous workman. Creation is a sweaty labor for him; hammer and
anvil, looms and furnaces. Like Blake, his genius is born of the fiery forge
with bellows and tongs. Los and Enitharmon are, though divided and weakened,
nonetheless the enduring creative forces of human culture. Between them, they
raise up the strange city called Golgonooza, the fallen paradise: the best of
civilization under conditions of alienation. Golgonooza holds out against Urizen
and Orc, between Eden and Ulro, between
Beulah and Generation. Blake acknowledged: though we are fallen, yet there is
Milton, Shakespeare, Michelangelo...the saving remnant that reminds and draws us
on.
The
polarity of Urizen-Satan and Luvah-Orc is mirrored in the split between Los and
Enitharmon. Los is "the Sublime," gravitating toward Urizen,
Enitharmon is "the Pathos,"
gravitating toward Luvah.
.
. . no more the Masculine mingles
With
the Feminine, but the Sublime is shut out from the Pathos
In
howling torment, to build stone walls of separation,
compelling
The
Pathos to weave curtains of hiding secresy from the
torment
Los's
weakness is suppression of the feminine. He ejects Enitharmon from himself and
seeks to dominate her. Enitharmon resists ("be thou assured I never will be
thy slave"). She goes into hiding ("I will Create secret places"). She grows furtive, devious, vengeful.
Two
Wills they had, Two lntellects, & not as in times of old.
From
this follows the sexual delusion: masculine and feminine become sexual roles
rather than attributes of the integrated soul. Sexual union becomes a corporeal
counterfeit of psychic unity. Man and woman then seek to appropriate one
another's psyche through sexual love, physically and externally: "terrified
at each other's beauty, Envying each other, yet desiring in all-devouring
Love." Blake can accept sex at that level, as a beginning. But he
also sees the divine correspondence — as in the Tantric symbolism of Shakti
and Shiva. (He realized too that the role playing can make a mess of sex
relations. He is precociously good on the issue of women's liberation — as in
his Daughters of Albion.)
So
Los declares;
. . . Sexes
must vanish & cease
To
be when Albion arises from his dread repose. . .
Importantly,
Los forges the chains of both Orc and Urizen. What does Blake mean by this? It
is another image of the split between Los and Enitharmon. Prophesy ("poetic
genius") is the struggle to integrate divided mind. For Blake, the
integration is a constant labor, often failing. Los can never rest; the task of
holding Urizen and Ore at bay goes on forever. Surely Los is autobiographical:
Blake himself toiling fitfully at the marriage of heaven and hell, suffering
within himself the great western dissociation:
The
laborer of ages in the Valleys of Despair. . .
He
kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble. . .
So
we have the Zoas Of Reason and Energy — and the Zoa of Prophesy, which is
"the true man." And when Prophesy achieves masculine-feminine
wholeness, if only for a moment . . . what then? Then the quality of perception
alters, "Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonder Divine
of Human Imagination . . ."
A
new reality where the meanings of things predominate; where the
transcendent correspondences shine through. It is the world turned inside out by
visionary power: a world of bright symbolic presences.
Mental
Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal,
Nobody
knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy,
&
its Existence an Imposture. . . I assert for My Self
that
I do not behold the outward Creation that to me
it
is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my
feet,
No part of Me.. "What," it will be Question'd,
"When
the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of
fire
somewhat like a Guinea?" 0 no, no, I see Innu-
merable
company of the Heavenly host crying "Holy,
Holy,
Holy is the Lord God Almighty." I question not
my
Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would
Question
a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it &
not
with it.
And
he means it. He means it!
Los:
"the magician of perception" (Kathleen Raine)
As
above, so below.
4.
Finally, Tharmas.
The
most subtle image. He is the alchemist's deus absconditus, awaiting
redemption: the spiritual essence of nature — the chrysosperm —
trapped in matter. Matter is personified in his temptress-consort Enion, the
watery principle in which spirit first contemplates its reflection, and then,
Narcissus-like,
falls.
The
Neoplatonic-Hermetic myth: light fallen into darkness, the subtle and gross
joined in forced marriage. But Enion is not for Blake a figure of
evil and contempt; Blake could not be so world-denying. Rather, she is pitiful:
a lonely and guilt-stricken woman bordering on non-entity, wanting Tharmas,
loving him, yet afraid of his spiritual potency.
Their
troubled love affair is the alchemical master myth of Blake's prophetic books,
leading at last to their reconciliation and apotheosis — and to some of
Blake's loveliest lyric passages.
Thus
Enion:
"The
clouds fall off from my wet brow, the dust from my cold limbs
Into
the sea of Tharmas. Soon renew'd, a Golden Moth,
I
shall cast off my death clothes & Embrace Tharmas again."
Joy
thrill'd thro' all the Furious forms Of Tharmas humanizing.
Mild
he embrac'd her whom he sought; he rais'd her thro'
the heavens,
Sounding
his trumpet to awake the dead, on high he soar'd
Over
the ruin'd worlds, the smoking tomb of the Eternal
Prophet.
The
Eternal Man arose.
The
love feast and "chemical marriage" of Tharmas-Enion: this is
what imagination, at its highest power, perceives. The Zoas unify in this master
symbol. Blake is talking about more than psychic transformations. Jung would not
do justice here. For with Blake, perception makes reality. At the heart
of the fourfold vision we have the universe as the stage on which the
sacrificial drama is eternally played out: "Visionary forms dramatic"
— amid which the human soul performs its peculiar role as Witness and
celebrant.
Here
was what Newton's science could not, would not see behind the veil of
appearances: the descent, passion, and resurrection of spirit, the redemption of
inert nature, nature sanctified. For the whole meaning of science is to
"vegetate the Divine Vision," to block out the transcendent
correspondences
in favor of power-knowledge.
The
science of Ulro is — uniquely and willfully — love-drunk
on
the "delusions of Vala": necrophilia.
Against
Newton's sleep, the conclusion of Jerusalem raises up its Hermetic paean
of joy: the ancient science for which everything, everything was live and
holy. "And every Man stood Fourfold; each Four Faces had." And. the
vision was of unity:
All
Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal; Earth &
Stone: all
Human
Forms identified, living, going forth & returning
wearied
Into
the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours;
reposing,
And
then Awaking into his Bosom, in the Life of Immortality.
What
at last, is the "sickness of Albion," our sickness? That we
cannot perceive the sacrificial drama which we are in spirit
participants. Albion cannot see that natural history is the projection at large
of his own spiritual history. "He has lost part of his soul; and
conversely, the phenomenal world, emptied of spiritual life, has become a
desert." (Kathleen Raine)
Blake's
prophetic epics are a troubling literature. For all their power — and there
are passages as great as anything in the shorter lyrics — they are too often
impossibly bookish. (Here again Blake reminds of Joyce.) Blake takes his
symbolic vocabulary from formidable sources: the Gnostic and Hermetic
philosophers, Boehme, Paracelsus, Thomas Taylor, Swedenborg, the Bible, and all
this overlaid with the Christianity of the English "Everlasting
Gospel" tradition — an intoxicating brew, but often murky in the extreme.
There is a deadening amount of haze and allusive congestion — and much that is
bound always to hide in the obscurity of the initial inspiration.
Blake
says he took the poems down from "immediate dictation . . . without
premeditation & even against my will." "Spiritual Mystery and Real
Vision" was what he wanted, not well-wrought allegory — the obvious vice
of this type of literature. A watertight system would have been a surrender to
Urizen, prophetic power yielding to neat intellectual equations. But often still
he gropes his way out of the mythological density by resorting to flat prosaic
Statements of abstract metaphysics:
What
is Above is Within, for everything in Eternity is translucent:
The
Circumference is Within, Without is formed the
Selfish Center,
And
the Circumference still expands going forward to
Eternity. . .
These
are deep sayings; but it is not Blake at his poetic best. And there is much of
this.
The weakness relates to Blake's greatest problem. He worked from esoteric
tradition because he could nowhere else entrust his vision. The world he lived
in — both human and natural — had become for him a void, an unreality: too
fallen and corrupted to take into his art. He could take nothing for what it
simply and immediately was. He was like a man with X-ray eyesight. He never
saw the world before his eyes. He never wanted to. His gaze burned right
through the "Mundane Shell" to the visionary dimension beyond it; as
he put it, "melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite
which was hid." Blake's vision was
only for "the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in
the Vegetable Glass of Nature."
There
is not a single piece of autonomous, physical nature in Blake: no poetic still
lives, or landscapes. Everything natural and social is subordinated to its
transcendent correspondence. The tyger is not for a moment nature's tyger, but a
symbol. The sunflower is not nature's sunflower, but a symbol. The London
Blake walked through was, though not wholly, a symbolic London — and
the chimney sweeps he Writes of have more metaphysical echoes than flesh and
blood to them. Even the stars could not be for Blake the beautiful sight they
simply are to the eyes, but became (uniquely for him of all poets) a negative
image:
they
belong to Urizen as the symbol of frigid, regimented Rationality.
Sad
to say: Blake did not love nature. It remained for him the Shadowy Female, the
seductive Vala. "Satan's Wife. The Goddess Nature." "Natural
Objects, he confesses in his notes on Wordsworth, "always did & now do
weaken, deaden & obliterate Imagination in me." And elsewhere:
"Nature Teaches nothing of Spiritual Life but only Natural Life." Love
of nature, Blake felt, "had to be purchased at the cost of divine love:
"Everything is atheism which assumes the reality of the natural and
spiritual world." Finally, at his Gnostic darkest: "Nature is the work
of the Devil."
Blake's
anti-naturalism cuts him off sharply from the other Romantics. But why the
hostility? Because nature had become, since Newton, the province of the single-visioned
scientists. They laid claim to "saving the appearances" Blake
(mistakenly) surrendered to the claim — then reacted against the loss by
bitterly abandoning all poetic interest in "natural objects." They
survive as symbols to him, but as nothing in their own right.
Blake
was too naively, too crudely the disciple of Berkeley. "Mental Things are
alone Real." Accepting that the world was "really" in the mind,
he could not then make much of the fact that it is also "really" in
the senses and there to be enjoyed.
To
be sure, in the Marriage, Blake pleads for "an improvement of
sensual enjoyment." The notion is there; Blake is nothing if not
rich and various. But the idea never makes its way into his poetry. He discusses
it, but does not express it.
What
he failed to grasp is that the scientist's sense-world (Ulro) is not
the sense-world as it really is. It claims to be
"empirical," but is in fact a materialist-theoretical model designed
for the sake of power-knowledge. It corresponds to nature as a map does to a
landscape: as a useful reduction of reality. It is painters and poets who
really look at the world — and look at it, and look at it, until they
lovingly gaze
it into their art; no explaining, no theorizing, no generalizing, no analyzing
. . . only the pure pleasure of seeing (or hearing, or smelling, or feeling).
The "Newtonian Phantasm" is exactly that: a phantasm, a gray
ghost of the immediate sensory environment.
So
to grow drunk on the sensory delights of nature — birdsong, flowersmell,
skycolor, herbtaste — is as much a way of undermining "Satan's Mathematic
Holiness" as to pierce through to the visionary correspondences. Here was
an element of Hermeticism which Blake lost along the way. For alchemy is a
science of just those "secondary qualities" that Galileo, Descartes,
Locke had banished: the feel and odor, hue and texture of the world's sensible
stuff.
But
then, Blake could not do the whole
job. His task was to save the other aspect
of Hermetic science: the transcendent symbolism.
I rest not from my great task!
To
open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of
man inwards into the Worlds of thought, into Eternity
Ever
expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human
Imagination.