Posts Tagged ‘Milton’

How Much Did Jim Morrison Know about William Blake?

Everyone knows the Doors are named for the doors of perception – but that phrase comes from Aldous Huxley’s book on hallucinogens as well as from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison quotes ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in ‘End of the Night’ on the first Doors album: ‘Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night’. But that is the only direct Blake reference in Morrison’s recorded lyrics. Is that it? Did Morrison only do a little vague and random dipping into Blake? Or was Ray Manzarek right to think of him as an authority on the visionary poet? ‘I wonder what Blake said… Too bad Morrison‘s not here. Morrison would know’ (Manzarek, as recorded by Joan Didion in The White Album, passage reprinted in Rocco’s Doors Companion, p. 13).

In interviews, Blake seems to come readily to Morrison’s lips. He demonstrates a basic acquaintance with famous lines from Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a 1968 interview with John Carpenter for the Los Angeles Free Press, he remarks (without attribution), ‘Opposition is true friendship, ha!’ (in Hopkins, Lizard King, p. 205). Speaking with Lizze James in 1969, Morrison’s thoughts go to Blake when asked about the ‘apocalyptic vision’ of his work on the first Doors album (1966-7): ‘It used to seem possible to generate a movement… they’d all put their strength together to break what Blake calls “the mind-forged manacles” … The love-street times are dead’ (Lizard King p. 279). They also turn to Blake when the topic is erotic mysticism: ‘Blake said that the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the “windows of the soul”. When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience’ (p. 281). Though initially this seems not the most subtle reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell‘s cleansing of the doors of perception, it picks up on the implications of ‘sensual enjoyment’ (MHH 14) carried forward into Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and detects Blake’s odd slide from windows to doors as transparent inlets of perception. A fuller knowledge might underlie these fairly obvious quotations: Blake actually does call the senses ‘This Lifes dim Windows of the Soul’ in The Everlasting Gospel, just before the more widely known lines, ‘And leads you to Believe a Lie / When you see with not thro the Eye’.

Manzarek, in his autobiography Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, recounts his memories of Jim Morrison’s book collection: ‘very eclectic, but also standard… we were all reading the same thing… Except Jim had more! A wall of books’ (p. 78-9). Though he doesn’t list Blake specifically, his omission from such an impressively full, typically bohemian bookshelf would be remarkable. Beyond his own collection, Morrison could also find Blake in the libraries of the colleges he attended. When Howard Smith asked him his opinion of the value of university, Morrison says, ‘If they have a good library, that’s about it… the main key to education is reading, basically. You could do the same thing on your own’ (in Lizard King p. 296). At UCLA, as well as having access as a student, he would have spent steady time in the stacks when he worked in the Powell Library from early 1964 until he was fired in August of the same year for lack of punctuality (as Davis narrates in his biography, p. 55). Unfortunately the library no longer has shelf lists to recreate the holdings from that time, but a look at the current collections shows that there may have been a good deal of Blake available: of pre-1964 editions, not only the Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1957), but also Poems of William Blake edited by W. B. Yeats (1938), Prophetic Writings of William Blake edited by Sloss and Wallis (1926), and further selections by Amelia H. Munson (1964), John Sampson (1960), Alfred Kazin (The Portable Blake, 1946), and Frederick E. Pierce (1915), plus in the way of criticism, The Divine Vision and Ruthven Todd’s Tracks in the Snow. The reference department at UCLA’s College Library were very kind in response to my queries, and shared the information that the Powell building housed the undergraduate College Library collection as well as the research collection while a new library was built for the latter (completed in 1964). My assumption, without being able to check acquisition dates, is that pre-1964 items in the College Library collection would have most likely been found in the Powell Library stacks where Morrison shelved books. (If the search is opened beyond the undergraduate to the research collection, there are of course many further possibilities; for instance, that is where Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is.)

Morrison may have done some purposeful Blake research in the library, since he wrote an essay on Blake for an English class in Romanticism. This was English 154, Spring Semester 1965. I am very grateful to the instructor, Fredrick Burwick, for sharing his memories of teaching Morrison. (And I want to credit and thank David Fallon for pointing out the connection.) Burwick recounts, ‘He showed me a paper on Hieronymus Bosch that he had written for a community college in Florida and wanted to know whether he might submit a similar paper on Blake. His Bosch paper focused on the visionary/hallucinatory experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights. I agreed that a similar approach to Blake’s illuminated works was possible. I remember that he wrote on MHH and referred to other Blake plates, but I can’t recall any details of the work he submitted’. One of Morrison’s main interests in Blake, then, was vision and intoxication: ‘Jim asked me if Blake did drugs. I told him that I didn’t think so’. (Burwick later wrote about Blake’s imagery of ergot poisoning from rotting grain – there is lysergic acid (LSD) in ergot fungus – in his book, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996), a fascinating and thoroughly researched account of Blake’s insight into the significance of this illness, and its dual potential of vision and suffering.)

It was in the previous summer, 1964, while Morrison was working in the library, that he began to write in his ‘Notes on Vision’ notebook that became The Lords, half of The Lords and The New Creatures, the one book of his poetry to be commercially published in his lifetime (by Simon & Schuster in 1969). Though it owes much to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Rimbaud’s principle of the derangement of the senses, there are specific Blakean echoes. It owes much to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are formal parallels: The Lords is a hybrid collection of verse and prose, veering among literary composition, philosophical musing, sensory exploration, and cultural commentary. Morrison’s ‘Cure blindness with a whore’s spittle’ (p. 37) sounds like it could be a Proverb of Hell. A description of a ‘happening… in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people through air vents’ breaks down the borders between audience and performer, while ‘the gas acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body’ (p. 39), tempting comparison with Blake’s Illuminated Books as multimedia experiments in composite art, dominated by the expressive Human Form Divine (which sometimes inhabits the words themselves, especially in titles), and demanding active participation from their readers.

As the passage goes on, it becomes evident that not only form, but also concepts and vocabulary are shared with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison writes,

The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which focus on narrower inlets of sensation. (p. 39)

In The Marriage (5), ‘that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age’. The aims of Blake’s artistic project are also described in terms of washing, purging, and bringing about ‘an improvement of sensual enjoyment’:

This I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. (MHH 14).

Morrison’s lines,

When men conceived buildings,
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves (p. 36)

are comparable to Blake’s lines following the cleansing of the doors of perception: ‘For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (MHH 14).

As well as the resemblances to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a passage on shamanism in The Lords makes use of the phrase ‘mental travels’, suggesting Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’. There is also a distinctly Blakean physical and metamorphic version of expanded perception in The Lords.

The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance (p. 24)

recalls the ‘two little orbs… fixed in two little caves / Hiding carefully from the wind’ in Blake’s Book of Urizen (11:13-15; also see Milton 3:15-16, and Four Zoas Night IV 54:21-2), and the apocalyptic ‘Expanding Eyes of Man’ that ‘behold the depths of wondrous worlds’ in The Four Zoas (Night IX 138:25; also the ‘eyelids expansive as morning’, Four Zoas Night VI 73:36).

In the summer after working in the library and taking the Romanticism course, Morrison threw away all of his notebooks except for his recent work toward The Lords. The summer of 1965 was also the time when he lived on a roof in Venice, California, hardly ate but took plenty of acid, and began writing the songs that would be the spark of the Doors’ creation when he sang them to Ray Manzarek in their legendary encounter on the beach.

secondary sources:

Davis, Stephen. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend. New York: Gotham, 2005.

Hopkins, Jerry. The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Revised and Updated. London: Plexus, 2006.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. First published 1954, 1956.

Manzarek, Ray. Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors. New York: Berkley Boulevard, 1999.

Rocco, John M. The Doors Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. London: Omnibus, 1997.

Tags: Jim Morrison, London, Milton, music, poetry, The Doors, The Four Zoas, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Posted in Arts and Culture |

L. A. Woman, A City Yet a Woman: Blake, Jim Morrison, and Prophecy

Morrison, ‘An American Poet’, and ‘English Blake’ are popularly espoused as voices of their nations. Both saw themselves as prophets, claiming at least to comment on and at most to influence the political and cultural events surrounding them. As part of their prophetic personae, they both invented new lineages for themselves, mystically adopting chosen ancestors that would tie them tightly to the kind of historical and creative inheritance they wanted for themselves and their countries.

Morrison tells a powerful memory of childhood trauma in ‘Dawn’s Highway’, one of the poems he recorded on his last birthday (it was put to music by the surviving Doors on An American Prayer):

Me and my – ah – mother and father – and a grandmother and a grandfather – were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truckload of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just – I don’t know what happened – but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta been about four – like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man.
The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back – is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians… maybe one or two of ‘em… were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they’re still in there.

Morrison’s personal mythology here is an attempt to attach himself to the shamanic traditions of native Americans, and also to opt for a more ‘authentic’ American identity than the one of oppressive white power that his biological lineage dictates (considering his father was an admiral in the US Navy, and very much involved in Vietnam).

In Milton, Blake describes becoming one with John Milton, Britain’s most imposing national poet:

The first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift;
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus enterd there;
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe
(Milton 15[17]:47-50)

Milton had used his writing talents to support the English Revolution (including defending the regicide), and suffered for holding to his beliefs in the Restoration. Blake is asserting radical political authority as well as literary prowess by identifying with Milton.

Blake’s possession by Milton apparently has wide repercussions (‘spread over Europe’ – like Morrison, Blake is writing in wartime). The most conspicuous appearance of Morrison’s recurring lines, ‘Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind’, is in ‘Peace Frog’ on Morrison Hotel, a prophetic, apocalyptic song with its own specific geography: ‘Blood on the streets / in the town of New Haven’, where Morrison had become the first rock star to be arrested on stage (as Fong-Torres notes, p. 112). Like Blake, he takes elements from his own biography and mythologizes them on a global and cosmic scale. And like Blake he creates catalogues of places to illustrate the national reach of his prophecy: ‘Blood in the streets / of the town of Chicago’, ‘Blood stains the roofs / and the palm trees of Venice’, ‘The Bloody red sun / of phantastic L.A.’. In such a visionary city, he combines literal and figurative geography: ‘blood on the streets / runs a river of sadness’, and most remarkably, ‘The river runs red down / the legs of the city’, recalling Blake’s imagery of birth trauma and miscarriage (in Morrison’s notebook these verses were titled ‘Abortion Stories’, according to Jerry Hopkins in The Lizard King, p. 129). Compare also the ‘unborn living living dead’ of ‘The Unknown Soldier’, and

Catacombs
Nursery bones
Winter women
growing stones
Carrying babies
to the river

in ‘The Soft Parade’. However, the lines could also suggest loss of virginity (which has revolutionary force in the case of Orc and the Nameless Shadowy Female in the Preludium to America); or menstruation as the simultaneous potential of fertility and infertility, life and death; or indeed human sacrifice as practiced by women in Jerusalem. ‘Blood hath staind her fair side beneath her bosom’ (Jerusalem 67:43) in the extended narrative of the Daughters of Albion ‘drunk with blood’ (Jerusalem 68:12), while for Morrison the blood is also the woman’s as victim:

Blood! screams her brain
as they chop off her fingers
Blood will be born
in the birth of a Nation

These lyrics are juxtaposed with a parallel set dominated by the repeated line ‘She came’: female orgasm is apocalyptic and violent for Morrison as it is for Blake at the end of The Song of Los, where

The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes
Her hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:
Her bosom swells with wild desire:
And milk & blood & glandous wine
In rivers rush & shout & dance,
On mountain, dale and plain (7:35-40)

In ‘Peace Frog’, and more clearly in ‘L. A. Woman’, Morrison also creates ‘a City yet a Woman’ (Four Zoas, Night IX:223) as Blake does in the figure of Jerusalem, with a kind personification which perceives both simultaneously – ‘I see your hair is burning / Hills are filled with fire’ – and mixes both, blurring external and internal – ‘Drive through your suburbs / Into your blues’. (Note how personification is used toward social commentary: the suburbs are a direct route to depression.) They draw on a collective origin in Biblical prophecy, and partake of its depiction of Israel as a combination of innocent wife and abandoned harlot: ‘Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light? / Or just another lost angel’. Like Blake’s persecuted Jerusalem, ‘Never saw a woman so alone’. (Oothoon also, as rejected but righteous harlot / wife, and as ‘the soft soul of America’ (Visions of the Daughters of Albion 1:3), is a precursor of ‘L. A. Woman’.)

Both Blake and Morrison proceed from this kind of imagery to imagery of male power: as in Blake the call, ‘Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time’ (Jerusalem 97:1) leads to the predominantly phallic imagery of Albion’s awakening and reuniting with the Zoas, Morrison also moves from the L. A. Woman to the combination of resurrection and erection in his anagram, ‘Mr. Mojo Risin / Got to keep on risin’ / Risin’, risin”. Morrison sings, ‘L. A. Woman, you’re my woman’, while for Blake Albion’s rising also is catalyzed by union with the feminine personification of nation: ‘England who is Brittannia’, who is also Jerusalem, ‘enterd Albions bosom rejoicing’ (Jerusalem 95:22, 32:28). Morrison once said, ‘Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and the Doors are looking for a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding’ (quoted by Federica Pudva, p. 133), like the ones evoked by Blake at the end of Jerusalem, and in the title of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In her essay on Morrison and Blake, Federica Pudva points out that ‘London was for Blake a real city and at the same time a spiritual and symbolic reality, part of a broad divine vision’ while in Morrison’s vision, Los Angeles was ‘the umbilicus of the world’ and a microcosm of fragmented modern society (p. 132-3, my translation). Morrison called Los Angeles a ‘”genetic blue-print” for the United States’ (Lizard King p. 301). In a poem, ‘The Guided Tour’, he writes,

“I am a guide to the labyrinth”
city is inside of body made manifest
meat organs & electrical
power plants (American Night p. 143)

reminiscent, in reverse, of Los searching ‘the interiors of Albions / Bosom’, which involves coming ‘down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London’ (Jerusalem 45[31]:3-4,14). Though the alienated modern city in Morrison owes much to Baudelaire and, as William Cook examines in detail, T. S. Eliot, Pudva finds that Morrison’s flâneur-like observation of prostitution in the city in his poem The Lords – ‘a ring of death with sex at its centre’ – is rooted in Blake’s ‘midnight streets’ and ‘Harlot’s curse’ in ‘London’ (p. 127-8).

We might see Morrison grasping more than content in the Songs if we take ‘People are Strange’ as commenting on the contingent voice of Songs of Experience and playing with the use of persona it offers.

People are strange
When you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you’re alone

emphasizes the kind of interior realities which may contribute to the compulsion of the speaker in ‘London’ to ‘mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. ‘Women seem wicked / When you’re unwanted’ distils the combination of blame and pity in the ‘Harlot’s curse’ seen as infecting the city and blighting both birth and marriage with death. ‘Faces come out of the rain / When you’re strange’ is like the fragmentation of faces and voices without bodies in ‘London’, and ‘Streets are uneven / When you’re down’ is a direct statement on psychogeography. If the song was inspired by an enlightening Laurel Canyon sunrise, as Robby Krieger narrates (in Fong-Torres 95-6), then it is located (or projected) on Morrison’s home territory as ‘London’ is on Blake’s.

secondary sources:

Cook, William. ‘Jim Morrison: A “Serious Poet”?’ Literary Kicks: Opinions, Observations and Research. 12 July 2003. http://www.litkicks.com/JamesDouglasMorrison

Fong-Torres, Ben, and the Doors. The Doors. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Hopkins, Jerry. The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Revised and Updated. London: Plexus, 2006.

Pudva, Federica. ‘The Devil’s Party: Jim Morrison e William Blake’ Anglistica Pisana 2:1 (2005) 119-37.

Tags: America, Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Jim Morrison, London, Milton, music, nationalism, poetry, politics, Song of Los, Songs of Experience, The Doors, Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Posted in Arts and Culture |

Mike Carey’s Unwritten Blake

As I argued in the introduction to the collection “William Blake and Visual Culture,” comic books contain frequent references to William Blake. J.M. DeMatteis, for example, includes the introductory poem to Blake’s Songs of Innocence in his graphic novel Moonshadow and a statue of Urizen appears in the first arc of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Alan Moore’s references to Blake are well known – appearing in V for Vendetta (1982-9), Watchmen (1986-7), From Hell (1991-6), and Angel Passage (2002) and acting as inspiration for his current novel-in-progress Jeruslaem. More often, Blake appears in comics that nevertheless give more focus to other figures from literature and media. A good example of this is James Robinson’s Starman (1994-2001) where quotes from Blake appear with references to Shakespeare, Bergman, and Elvis Presley, yet a much longer arc is devoted to a story involving a demon who lives in a poster and abducts people – a reference to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde even appears in an extended sequence where he has coffee with the Shade: a former villain who helps Starman throughout the series.

Mike Carey’s The Unwritten (2009-present) belongs to the second category of comics that include brief references to Blake amongst citations of a wide variety of literature. Carey is no stranger to stories that reference religious or mystical literature, working as he did on the popular Lucifer (1999-2006) series featuring the continuing adventures of a Miltonic Lucifer Morningstar after he gives up his station as the ruler of Hell. In an interview for The Examiner, Carey lists Paradise Lost and “William Blake’s ‘Between Heaven and Hell’” as literary references for Lucifer along with his previous appearance in Neil Gaiman’s celebrated series The Sandman (1989-1996). While admittedly getting the name of Blake’s work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell wrong, there is no doubt that Blake’s statement that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it” informs many of the stories Carey writes during the course of the series. In one storyline, Lucifer attempts to create a different universe that can free itself from what he sees as God’s tyrannical grip on humanity.

The Unwritten is a much more ambitious attempt to reconcile the imaginary universe Blake inhabits with the contemporary world. The main character is Tom Taylor, the son of Wilson Taylor: author of a famous book series featuring a boy wizard who, like Harry Potter, clashes with magical villains. Taylor is a celebrity of sorts, as he is seen as the basis for his father’s character Tommy Taylor. As the series begins, Taylor’s father has disappeared and Tommy spends most of his time going to fantasy conferences and signing autographs. During a particularly grueling Tommy Taylor panel, a graduate student reveals that photographs supposedly taken of him as a child are actually those of another child, and that his national insurance number belongs to another person. In fact, no one can find any information verifying that Tom is, indeed, Wilson Taylor’s son. The mystery becomes even stranger when Tom learns that the graduate student is named Lizzie Hexam, a named shared by one of the major characters from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Assassins start targeting Tom, and he begins to uncover a vast conspiracy linking literary authors from past centuries to the subjugation of the imagination. A particularly intriguing issue involves Rudyard Kipling who is employed to write pro-imperialist poetry and, unwittingly, helps entrap and enprison Oscar Wilde and ideologically prepare Britains for the destruction of the First World War. Carey’s saga paints a war between literary authors and the powerful people who try to exploit the imagination to their own benefits and cleverly connects the power of writing in the nineteenth century with the dissemination of celebrity, fandom, and social media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As a champion of the imagination, Blake’s presence in Carey’s story seems clear. He appears only briefly, however, in the third issue of the series. Here, Taylor visits the famous Villa Diodati – where Byron, the Shelleys, and John Polodori stayed during the famous Haunted Summer of 1816. (Carey also tries to link John Milton to Diodati, since the original owners of the Villa were related to Milton’s friend Charles Diodati. Though, as William S. Clark points out in his 1935 article “Milton and the Villa Diodati,” Milton died 36 years before the Villa Diodati was completed in 1710.) The Taylors stayed in the Villa during the early years of Tom’s life. Outside of Wilson’s study hangs Blake’s 1805 painting “Michael Binding Satan.” As Tom describes the image to Lizzie, he says that it depicts “the image of something terrible being put under lock and key.” Blake’s painting is used by Wilson to hide the key and the doorknob to his study. While taking the painting off of the wall, Tom exclaims that his father “was lousy at keeping secrets [...] and hooked on cheap symbolism, especially if it made him look clever at someone else’s expense.

Despite being a rather obvious place for his father to hide his most precious belongings, Blake’s appearance – especially through a symbolically-loaded image like “Michael Binding Satan” – helps to conceptualize several of the imaginative and ideological struggles occurring in The Unwritten. First, the figure of binding and the serpentine form of Satan in the Michael painting have analogues in Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, where the iron and abstract laws of the tyrannic Urizen bind human beings to the earthly plane. Urizen portrays the creation of the world and the binding of the soul to the limitations of individuality, morality, and bodily form. Binding abounds in the poem, as well as the serpentine forms of the first human beings to be born on Earth (“The worm lay till it grew to a serpent/With dolorous hissings & poisons” [19.28-33]). In Urizen, the serpentine forms, chains and scenes of binding are products of narrowing human perception and fear. “We impose on one another” as Blake says to the Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (20). The serpent isn’t an agent of evil, (and indeed Satan is not always evil in Blake’s work) but merely a failure to understand or empathize with the other. What cannot be understood must be controlled, bound, stifled, killed. The struggle reflects the episodes of misunderstanding, mistrust, fear, and anger felt between Tom and his father throughout the many flashbacks in Carey’s story.

In The Unwritten binding, fear, and imposition are products of storytelling and the imagination. At the end of the Kipling story in issue #5, Carey shows notes from Wilson Taylor’s desk. Several of them are evocative of the complex web of fiction and reality weaved through the story. “Philosophies are stories.” “Fame is a story.” “Religions are stories.” Each of these stories are to be encoded upon a map. Tom is, as he revealed in the first issue, a master of “literary geography.” As he says in issue #2, he knows “not a word” of the stories he encounters only “the geography.” In this, Carey not only keys into the more recent debates surrounding digital literary mapping (as the practice of literary geography could be seen as an imaginative form of digital humanities projects already underway), but a long tradition of literary mapping that includes Blake’s walks throughout London and his imaginative remapping of Britain and Western literary tradition in Jerusalem. “If the story becomes reality, does the map become the place?”

At the end of Wilson Taylor’s map, we see brief references to unwritten stories. If, as I suspect, Tom is an imaginary character pulled from his fictional world (like the monster from Shelley’s Frankenstein who shows up in the second volume), then the question of the relationship between the imagination and reality will become central to this storyline in the future. And what then? What unwritten Blake can we, perhaps, anticipate seeing in the future installments of Carey’s epic? If the first two volumes and Carey’s past Blakean allusions are any indication, Tommy Taylor will encounter Blake in some form in the future.

Tags: comics, Mike Carey, Milton, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Unwritten, Urizen
Posted in Arts and Culture |

Zoapod 15 – The Devil’s Party: Blake’s Marriage and Milton

Zoapod 15: Of the Devil’s Party – Blake’s Marriage and Milton’s Paradise Lost
Length: 5 min 25 sec.

A reading of Blake’s commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, explaining the significance of his statement that Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”.

This podcast is taken from chapter four of the Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Tags: Milton, politics, religion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Posted in Podcasts |

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

Contents

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

Chapter 2: The Form & Style of The Marriage

Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The Marriage

Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No Progression

Selected Reading

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is The Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (E34)

William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790, is one of the strangest and most remarkable books ever to have been written. Although little noticed during Blake’s lifetime (and discussion of it largely repressed by those who had read it), it has also become one of the most important of his works to writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie whose books have been greatly influenced by its astonishing ideas and rhetoric.

The Marriage began as a pamphlet denouncing the system devised by the eighteenth century mystic and scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg, but it quickly developed into a much more radical assault on the conventions of religion, politics and morality, as well as providing ironic critiques of the theology of Milton and the Bible. Blake’s idiosyncratic, unsettling style and his resolution to write in the voice of the devil was also a response to the drama of the French Revolution, a time when the entire world appeared to have been turned upside down, when the conventions and certainties of Europe became less certain.

The Contrary Vision
As we shall see in the next chapter, The Marriage is not entirely a text that is sui generis, but it is certainly one whose format is exceedingly rare, a factor that accounts for its continuing ability to shock and stimulate generations of readers. The editors of the William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery edition of the book offer one of the best summaries of its effect:

The Marriage, provocative, mocking, sexy, pushy, and playful, bristles with… rebellious optimism. Its gumption is never exposed as bravado, and, although it hammers mercilessly on Emanuel Swedenborg and his “angelic” followers, the mockery is never disillusioned but youthfully, cheerfully antagonistic to foolish conventionality. (Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi 116-7)

After the Argument, which introduces one of Blake’s mythological figures, Rintrah, the just man driven from the paradise that he creates by a villain of false humility who prefers to steal the labour of others than disturb his ease, Blake establishes the key motifs of The Marriage in the plate cited at the beginning of this chapter. While the structure of The Marriage has often defied critics – S. Foster Damon called it a “scrap-book of Blake’s philosophy” (Damon 88) and Michael Ferber thought it a “structureless structure” (Ferber 90) – many have understood immediately the intellectual significance of Blake’s satire, exposing conventional folly through a system of dynamic contraries. Contraries – attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate and, of course, heaven and hell – display a significant element in Blake’s thought: one is not simply the negative or absence of the other. As he was to write in Milton a Poem, “Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary” (E129). Blake’s contraries share some features with those of other dialectical philosophers, from ancient Heraclitus through to Hegel writing after him, but – on the face of it, at least – he rejects what can be seen in all those writers as a tendency to subordinate one antinomy to another.

For a truly dynamic system, Blake argues that the opposing elements of human experience must engage equally with each other. Blake’s attempt to avoid the hierarchy of one term over another which is typical of the exercise of power is compelling but ultimately fails: if this is the marriage of heaven and hell, then too often, as critics have noted, it is devils who triumph over angels. When Harold Bloom attempted to demonstrate the dialectical progress that he argued was evident in the text, he did so “in a spirit of tentativeness, respecting its innate trickery” (Bloom 501).

Much of this is due to the extremely important nature of Blake’s struggle with notions of good and evil. John Howard saw The Marriage as “Blake’s prophetic testament on evil and the way to escape it” (Howard 61), which is to work by removing orthodox opposition to sensual enjoyment using his “infernal method of printing” which espouses irony, humour and provocation to subvert systems of codified morality. One means by which Blake does this is to deny the existence of evil – at least as it is commonly understood. Sensual enjoyment is not a negation of being in the Augustinian notion of evil but rather its very fulfilment. Yet here arises an important conceptual difficulty for Blake’s own system, for the temptation then is simply to invert the traditional hierarchies of good and evil, heaven and hell – to declare, as Satan does in Paradise Lost, “Evil, be thou my good” – so that frequently the angels appear as little more than privations of his diabolical heroes. It may be such radical subversion was necessary in the revolutionary contexts of 1790, and the importance of striking against his conservative enemies did not provide him with the luxury of that subtlety of the contrary states of the human soul he was later to demonstrate in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Nonetheless, this relative failure to achieve a true marriage does indicate the considerable difficulty that Blake had, not merely to oppose one system to another in a spirit of rebellion but to break free of systems altogether.

Reason and Energy
If the relationship of good and evil is a fundamental moral concern of The Marriage, then the metaphysical origin of conventional dualism also has an important role to play, and this Blake traces to what he considers its source in the split between body and soul, outlined most clearly in plate 4:

All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight (E34)

The origins of good and evil lie in religions and the errors of their sacred codes, fundamental to which is the separation of soul and body, the latter being repressed in the service of the former. However, religious folly, which denies the true nature of humanity by denying the body, is also served by philosophy. Since Plato’s division of reason from appetite at least, philosophy had been complicit in the error of dualism and this is an important area in which Blake distinguishes himself from Enlightened anti-religious commentators: Cartesian dualism may have been an extreme version, but to Blake most if not all Enlightenment philosophers had mistakenly deposed a theistic god, only to replace him with deistic reason that was equally effective in repressing the desires and energy of the body, forgetting the origins of intellectual life that lay in those desires.

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged &  numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (E38)

Robert Essick has noted the ways in which politics, science, the Bible, and linguistics collide in Blake’s work during the 1790s (Essick 189), and though this was particularly the case following the publication of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason in 1794, the beginning of the decade saw a surge in biblical exegesis that spread the fruits of Enlightenment criticism. Much of what Blake writes in plate 11 above would not look entirely out of place in David Hume, Voltaire, Pierre Bayle or Constantin Volney, but Blake’s attitude to perception creates an important distinction from such figures: for them, reason operates upon the faculties of sense as a higher order, ordering and categorising sense impressions. However, for Blake the role of energy and imagination as the animating motivation of such systems of categorisation (whereby poets placed cities and countries under mental deities) returns the desires of the body to the highest capabilities of which humanity is capable.

Blake’s final statement, that “All deities reside in the human breast”, can be read as remarkably close to atheism: however, it is more accurate to emphasise that in this and his other works he emphasises again and again the divine nature of humanity. God is a creation of imagination, and Blake appears to have no problem with conceiving of man as the creator of God. Man’s mistake is to apotheosise his reason, abstracting a system of mental deities as separate from the material world and projecting it onto the heavens. Plate 11 explicitly attacks priestcraft, denounced by many Enlightenment philosophers as that scheme by which God was removed to the heavens from where he could still meddle in human affairs. The radical nature of Blake’s critique is that ultimately he sees little difference between such abstraction and that of the philosophers themselves, who removed the divine entirely from the universe and, through Deism, contented themselves with a prime mover which, like Newton’s Pantocrator, established an immutable system of nature that imposed upon the passive perception of mankind. Both priest and philosopher forgot that all divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out there, whether heaven or the origin of the universe.

Revolutionary Satire
While Blake’s Marriage may have begun life as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet, it very quickly transformed into a much more wide-ranging satire as the events of 1790 unfolded. David Erdman was one of the first critics to trace in detail the connection between The Marriage and the events of the French Revolution, although unfortunately the fact that he dates its composition between 1790 and 1793 means that he frequently looks for allusions that are simply not there, seeing the final “Song of Liberty”, for example, as a celebration of “the casting out of French monarchy and the rout… of Brunswick’s starry hosts” at the end of 1792 (Erdman 192).

By contrast, if we view Blake as being inspired into a new way of thinking by the progress of the Revolution in 1789-90, it is possible to understand more profoundly what Eaves, Essick and Viscomi recognise as the optimism of his diabolic support for what was taking place in France. After the meeting of the Three Estates in 1789 and the formation of a new National Assembly at the end of that year, which brought with it the promise of potential republicanism or at the very least constitutional monarchy, the Revolution was largely still in its benevolent phase. Certainly there had been the Great Fear of the Summer of 1789, which betokened the potential tyranny that would come, but the brief fits of violence that occurred, such as the storming of the Bastille, could still be presented as part of the progress of France towards enlightened government. Feudalism had been abolished and in May the Assembly had even renounced any involvement in wars of conquest. With the exception of Edmund Burke, perhaps, few suspected that the Revolution itself would lead directly to despotism, and even he could not have realised just how bloody the Terror would be when it was unleashed in 1793.

As such, Blake’s Marriage is a joyful manifesto, one which celebrates fully the revolutionary fervour that had exploded in France. Announcing himself as being of the devil’s party, he launched into radical visions with an exuberance that rapidly disappeared from his illuminated books as the decade progressed. There is little of that exultation in texts such as The [First] Book of Urizen or The Book of Ahania where the innocence of his diabolism is tempered by the knowledge of revolutionary violence. Peter A. Schock has observed the ways in which the figure and mythology of Satan was used by both radicals and conservatives in the early years of the Revolution. His argument, like that of Erdman, suffers slightly from the current understanding that The Marriage was published in 1790 (thus removing some of the immediate sources that he draws upon), but it is clear that British propaganda against Satanic rebels made Blake increasingly proud of his diabolism – at least until it became no longer safe to display such partisanship publicly (Schock 446).

Richard Cronin notes the difficulty of determining who The Marriage was actually written for, building on Howard’s observation that it could have been the circle around Joseph Johnson, which included Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestley. Cronin suggests that Blake had turned against the Swedenborgians when they abandoned the more revolutionary aspects of their founder’s ideals and increasingly declared themselves in favour of the political status quo (Cronin 48-51). Yet the Johnson circle, as Cronin observes, was not itself amenable to the wilder flights of fancy that Blake indulged in and, in Jon Mee’s words, The Marriage does not represent a retreat from conventional Christianity into Deism but rather a move into “radical enthusiasm” that would have been denounced by the rationalists gathered around Johnson’s table (Mee 53).

The Marriage, then, responds with energy and optimism to the events of 1789-1790. Although Blake had originally sought to mock the tenets of a fashionable but still slightly obscure sect in London, he quickly expanded his vision to politics, religion, and literature, easily sweeping in literary giants such as Milton. In tone and style, if not always in content, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is sometimes reminiscent of his earlier satire of the 1780s, the unpublished An Island in the Moon, mixing raucous Augustan comedy with matters of import. As the dawn of Revolution turned into the bloody sunset of the Terror, it was a mood that was largely to disappear from his writing for more than two decades.

Next – The Form & Style of The Marriage

Tags: French Revolution, Milton, politics, religion, Swedenborg, the Bible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – 4

Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No Progression

During the 1790s, the Enlightenment critique of religion was to advance rapidly into outright hostility. Critical ideas that had been the preserve of an elite of educated philosophers or the rich echelons of society were taken up in very different forms by a wider section of society.

The Bible of Hell
As has been noted, a considerable amount of The Marriage echoes some of the classical Enlightenment critique of religion that could be discovered in Hume, Voltaire and Bayle. For example, in his The Natural History of Religion (1757), David Hume offered the following account of the origins of polytheism that appears to share some similarities with Blake’s version of the beginnings of religion which we have already encountered in chapter 1:

…if, leaving the works of nature, we trace the footsteps of invisible power in the various and contrary events of human life, we are necessarily led into polytheism and to the acknowledgement of several limited and imperfect deities. Storms and tempests ruin what is nourished by the sun. The sun destroys what is fostered by the moisture of dews and rains. War may be favourable to a nation, whom the inclemency of the seasons afflicts with famine. Sickness and famine may depopulate a kingdom, amidst the most profuse plenty… In short, the conduct of events, or what we call the plan of a particular providence, is so full of variety and uncertainty, that, if we suppose it immediately ordered by any intelligent beings, we must acknowledge a contrariety in their designs and intentions, a constant combat of opposite powers, and a repentance or change of intention in the same power, from impotence or levity. Each nation has its titular deity. Each element is subject to its invisible power or agent. The province of each god is separate from that of another. (Hume 6)

The resemblances between Hume’s and Blake’s texts are that both look for the human rather than superhuman origins of religion (at least – explicitly – in polytheism), and Hume’s combative vision of the natural world appears to share features with Blake’s universe of contraries. The differences, however, are more profound: for Hume, the beginnings of religion are fear, war, famine and privation – faced with uncontrollable nature mankind takes refuge in the whims and caprices of human projections, a position that was espoused as one of the three principles of history by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova (New Science 1725). While Blake does not spell out the motivating desire that leads to religion in plate 11 of The Marriage, by placing its origins in the words of poets immediately he conveys a very different source for religious sentiment than fear, for it is priests not poets who “choose systems of worship from poetic tales” (E38) and so corrupt the original impulse. Likewise, the contrarian nature of Blake’s angels and devils is not that of domination and extermination through war, the subordination of one opposite to another, but argument and intellectual fight whereby angels may become devils (and, presumably, though it must be admitted Blake offers no concrete examples of this in The Marriage, devils transform into angels).

While Blake, like the philosophes, has no truck with conventional organised religion, he does not strike camp with the philosophers. In his first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, he had critiqued the use of reason as sufficient to explain religion, choosing instead imagination as its source: “Conclusion, If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.” (E3) To depend on reason alone, as Hume and others had done, is to submit to the dull round in which mankind must ultimately acquiesce to a Deism in which the original creator (or creators) is resigned to rule according to either the iron laws of necessitarianism or fear. While Blake maintained this position throughout his life, he could, however, understand the significance of contemporary attacks on superstition and priestcraft. In his annotations to Robert Watson, Bishop of Landaff’s An Apology for the Bible (1797), written in response to Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794-5), Blake observes that “It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines attack but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible” (E611), indicating that while Paine’s Deism troubled him greatly he also recognised the need for such revolutionary attacks on organised religion.

Blake was to decide that, according to E. P. Thompson, Paine had not understood the Everlasting Gospel but was correct in his assault on moral law (Thompson 60), but his radical sympathies with Paine are indicated by an observation near the beginning of his copy of An Apology for the Bible: “I have been commanded from Hell not to print this as it is what our Enemies wish” (E611). What is more radical than Paine, and which continues to make The Marriage such a remarkable text, is that not only does not Blake remark himself as aware of being of the devil’s party but recruits the fount of Christianity to the same cause:

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire. who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud. and the Devil utterd these words.
The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied,
Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?
The Devil answer’d; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules.
When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well (E43-4)

As philosophers and priests looked for the origins of religion in fear and reason, Blake’s source was very different Jesus Christ was the “greatest man” because he “acted from impulse: not from rules”. In his later works, particularly Milton and Jerusalem, Blake linked deistic Natural Religion and pious Moral Law as twin pillars of repression, the gods of this world as it were; as Christ opposes such worldly deities which comprise our mind-forg’d manacles, then the only option for both Blake (and Christ) to ally with the devil and produce the “Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no” (E44).

Of the Devils party
While much of The Marriage was written as a counter-argument to Swedenborg, for the majority of readers it is Blake’s argument with Milton that has proved to be more stimulating and controversial, taking on as he does one of the greatest poets in the English canon.

On Plates 5 and 6, Blake provides a summary of his response to Paradise Lost which has become one of the most famous readings ever to have been made of the poem, even more remarkably so considering its brevity:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire.
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it (E34-5)

Here Paradise Lost provides a specific textual example of the more philosophical statement that precedes it: as the narrator has inverted the relationship between energy and reason to explain the error of biblical codes, so this diabolical reader (the section is titled “The voice of the Devil”) now performs a similar reversal of the typicall reception of Milton’s account of the war in heaven, ascribing the role of heroic messiah to Satan and concluding with his famous assertion that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it.”

Readings of Milton by the Romantics generally, and Blake in particular, have been well-discussed, providing for Blake a role model for the sublime and religious verse (see, for example, Newlyn, Wittreich and Dunbar). At the time of writing The Marriage, it is not necessarily the case that Blake’s knowledge of Milton extended much further than Paradise Lost, although he draws on images from the ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity in Europe A Prophecy. A more extensive demonstration of his knowledge, however, is clear after 1800, not only in his composition of Milton a Poem but also the series of illustrations to Milton’s works undertaken for a number of clients and covering a very wide range. In this he was almost certainly stimulated by William Hayley who was working on completing Cowper’s edition of Milton while Blake was at Felpham (having written a Life of Milton in the early 1790s). Of these illustrated works, Dunbar remarks that they show how “Blake’s relationship with Milton never became a slavish, one-sided affair” but was instead “a lively, stimulating, intimate, intense, and provocative kinship of mind and spirit” (Dunbar 1).

It is important to note that Blake’s comments on Milton in The Marriage do not represent his whole opinion of the poet, which indicated much greater complexity in the nineteenth century. Not that he necessarily became less critical of the epic poet: if, as Lucy Newlyn points out, Milton is more important in Blake’s works after the return from Felpham then his concerns have also deepened, for he saw that “the classicist had won out over the Hebrew prophet” (Newlyn 260), impairing Milton’s poetic craft and corrupting it to the services of war.

While being aware, then, that Blake’s response to Milton is much more complex than the few lines from The Marriage cited previously would indicate, there is a pugnacious attitude that runs through all his references to the poet. Although being much more receptive to Milton’s revolutionary credentials than many writers of the eighteenth century, Blake has little time for the hagiography that had attended the epic creator of Paradise Lost. The irony of the rebuke to one who could only write at liberty when writing of the devil’s party should not be forgotten (after all, this is not Blake’s voice, but that of the devil); it is also quite clear from Milton a Poem that Blake does not regard Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. However, the remark in The Marriage draws attention to the unconscious energies of Milton’s work and seems especially perceptive insofar as it draws attention to the repressed features of the poet’s life: the pamphleteer of political liberty could also serve a republican dictatorship, the theological freethinker ended with a vision of God as predestinarian tyrant, and the biblical prophet was seduced by the possibilities of neoclassical militarism.

The Song of Liberty
Ultimately, Blake does not simply invert the marriage of heaven and hell simply to place Satan in the role of Messiah. The whole of The Marriage is a satirical rebuke to Milton’s pomposity and autocracy that deploys a playful energy to indulge the unconscious desires that Milton dares not indulge and so – ironically – renders more dangerous in their repressed perversity: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”, as one of the Proverbs of Hell has it.

It is this sense of play that remains with the reader long after the conundrums of Swedenborgianism, or the subtleties of arguments with Milton have been settled. The ideas of The Marriage are astonishing, and Swinburne was surely right to number this book among the most profound produced in English literature, but those ideas ferment and proliferate because presented the boldest, liveliest and most vivacious style possible. Blake ends his satire with “A Song of Liberty”, heralding in his prophetic voice the power of revolutionary forces unleashed in France, searching for the day when “Empire is no more!” Although that declaration was premature, the line with which The Marriage concludes demonstrates just how far his vision was able to see beyond what would become factional power struggles within the French National Assembly and between the nations of Europe: “Everything that lives is Holy” (E45).

Next – Selected Reading

Tags: Milton, Paradise Lost, religion, the Bible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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Zoapod 10: His Dark Materials – Blake and Pullman

Zoapod 10: His Dark Materials – Blake and Pullman
Length: 7 min 5 sec.

Philip Pullman has often drawn on Blake’s works to inform his own writings, and this podcast considers the role of Blake’s poetry in the trilogy, His Dark Materials.

To read the transcript of this podcast click here.

Tags: books, iTunes, Milton, Philip Pullman, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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Zoapod 10: His Dark Materials – Blake and Pullman (transcript)

Transcript of Zoamorphosis podcast. To listen to the full podcast click here.

1. Welcome to Zoamorphosis podcast 10, which is an introduction to some of the Blakean motifs included in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. The three books, Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, were published between 1995 and 2000 to critical acclaim, The Amber Spyglass having won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year prize while The Golden Compass was made into a film in 2007.

2. Pullman has long had an interest in Blake, having become President of the Blake Society in 2004, and he has written extensively about the Romantic poet and engraver. Regarding His Dark Materials, Pullman makes explicit its link to Blake in the acknowledgements to The Amber Spyglass, where he writes that although he has “stolen ideas from nearly every book I have ever read”, three debts are to be acknowledged above all others: Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and “the works of William Blake”. Blake’s poetry is also frequently cited in the headings to the chapters of The Amber Spyglass. Before discussing some of the ways in which Blake appears in those works, it is worth noting that while von Kleist and Milton provide a central text that influences Pullman, with Blake it is the complete corpus. Nor should this be restricted to the poetry, as he encountered Blake’s paintings shortly after leaving Oxford University, which were to affect him greatly.

3. The influence of Milton is immediately self-evident to any reader of His Dark Materials who has a working knowledge of Paradise Lost, the trilogy reworking the rebellion of Satan and the Fall from a sceptical perspective. Trying to pin down Blake’s role, however, is a more subtle affair. The most obvious starting point is Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which provides his infamous re-reading of Milton:

4. Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is calld Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are calld Sin & Death
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is calld Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appeard to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss…
Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it (E34-5) 

5. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2002, Pullman remarked that “Blake said Milton was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. I am of the Devil’s party and know it”, and his assault on religious dogma throughout the novels – which has drawn considerable criticism in the United States in particular – is clearly a diabolical re-reading of the role of churches in human oppression that echoes the infernal spirit of Blake’s classic text. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, the transcendental system that sustains the church of mystery is imploded when the rebel angel, Baruch, is revealed to have once been a man and the Authority, known as Yahweh, El and the Almighty, is shown as a frail old man who was himself created and cannot survive eternally – yet whose death bring him peace. At the end of the trilogy, the Kingdom of Heaven is reconstituted as a Republic (drawing also on the ideas of the seventeenth century Digger, Gerard Winstanley), giving emphasis to another of Pullman’s guiding principles that has its origins in Blake, the notion that “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans”.

6. The diabolical reading of Paradise Lost is the clearest and most sustained example of Blake’s influence, but I would like to concentrate now on two others: Lyra Belacqua and Dust, both also being significant in Pullman’s forthcoming novel, The Book of Dust. Lyra’s first name is adapted from Lyca, who appears in the Songs of Experience poems, “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found”:

7. Frowning frowning night, 
O’er this desart bright,
Let thy moon arise, 
While I close my eyes.  

Sleeping Lyca lay; 
While the beasts of prey, 
Come from caverns deep,
View’d the maid asleep 

8. The first four of these lines from “The Little Girl Lost” are cited at the beginning of Chapter 13 of The Amber Spyglass, and Pullman took this poem and its companion as the source for the opening chapter in that novel, in which Mrs Coulter keeps Lyra in a cave in the Himalayas. What Pullman seems to take from Lyca is the sense of bravery, even rebelliousness, and innocence within a world of experience, so that in Blake’s poem Lyca is unharmed by the beasts of prey, while in Pullman’s novels Lyra is able to move safely among the dangers that she encounters, inspiring those she meets to help her in her struggles.

9. As well as the character of Lyra, the mysterious Dust that permeates the trilogy owes much to Blake. In the novels, Dust is an elementary particle, a dark matter that is conscious and attracted to individuals. The Church, believing it to be a manifestation of original sin, attempts foolishly to destroy its connection to humans, not realising that it is the very material that bestows consciousness itself. The sources of Dust are manifold – the Book of Genesis, Buddhism and quantum physics, but Blake also has an important role to play in the development of this motif. At a lecture to the Blake Society in 2005, Pullman presented a series of seven axioms describing the Republic of Heaven, each of which ended with a citation from Blake. Susan Matthews quotes the first of these in a 2007 essay on Blake and Pullman:

10. The physical world, this matter of which are made, is amorous by nature. Matter rejoices in matter, and each atom of it falls in love with other atoms and delights to join up with them to form complex and even more delightful structures: “and shew you all alive This world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.”

11. As Matthews remarks, this quotation from the Preludium to Europe, which is also the heading for chapter 34 of The Amber Spyglass, “stresses the constantly joyful quality of the material world” and emphasises the bodily nature of Blake, who considered the separation of body and soul as the grounding error of the Church which had allowed it to create so effectively the mind-forg’d manacles of mystery.

Tags: books, Milton, Philip Pullman, Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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William Blake’s Life & Works 4: Felpham and the Return to London

By the mid 1790s, Blake had clearly demonstrated his talents as an engraver but had failed to establish his reputation more widely. Blake hoped that a commission by the publisher Richard Edwards to engrave a large folio edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts would change this, producing 537 large watercolours by 1796. Unfortunately, by the time this vast project, described by Bentley as “one of the most ambitious and sensational illustrated books of that or any other time in England” (Stranger 172), was completed in late 1797 it received no advertising or reviews and was a commercial disaster for Blake. Thus although some of Blake’s friends such as George Cumberland were looking after his interests, the late 1790s proved to be a very difficult time for him and Catherine.

Friendship & patronage: Butts & Hayley

In 1799, Blake found what Bentley describes as ‘the perfect patron’ (Stranger 185) in the person of Thomas Butts. Butts, a Joint Chief Clerk in the Commissary General of Musters, recognised the value of Blake’s work and commissioned some fifty biblical paintings, paying the artist more than £400 between 1803-10. More than this much valued income, however, Thomas and his wife Elizabeth, or Betsy, provided moral support and friendship, and Blake wrote to them frequently over the subsequent years.

It was also during this time that Blake engaged in relations with another patron who, for the next four years, was to influence his life in much more dramatic ways. Thomas Hayley, a wealthy and liberal squire from Eartham, Sussex, and a popular poet of the day, was first introduced to Blake by John Flaxman in 1784, when plans were devised to try and send the engraver to Rome. Hayley, a generous man for all Blake’s later ingratitude, invited the Blakes to nearby Felpham, hoping to help the couple financially and also to calm what he saw as a troubled mind, similar to that of his friend, William Cowper.

Initially, the Blakes were delighted with their new home, William writing that it was “a perfect Model for Cottages & I think for Palaces of Magnificence” (cited in Stranger 213). Blake began work almost immediately on commissions for Hayley, beginning with illustrations for the broadsheet ballad of Little Tom the Sailor, and he also discovered an aptitude for miniature portraits. Yet by January 1802, Blake was already finding the work for Hayley tedious, interfering with his own projects including the completion of an epic he had begun while working on Night Thoughts, called Vala, later revised as The Four Zoas, and a new prophetic work based on the life of John Milton. Although the couple were already planning to return to London, in 1803 an incident was to occur that further marred their memories of Felpham.

Vala, or The Four Zoas, was subtitled “The torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man”. This is the most extensive of Blake’s Prophetic Books, and he began work on the manuscript probably in 1796 while engraving illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, continuing to revise the text until about 1807 although the poem was left unfinished. The Four Zoas introduces or expands the role of many principle characters in Blake’s mythology, and was conceived as an attempt to provide a more or less coherent account of this mythology, detailing the wars between the Zoas, “Four Mighty Ones… in every Man” (3.4, E300) whose conflict leads to the fall of the Ancient Man, later identified by Blake as Albion. The poem is divided into nine “Nights” (following the schema of Young’s Night Thoughts) that culminate in a vision of the final judgement.

Trial for Sedition

In the spring of 1803 a troop of the First Regiment of Royal Dragoons was quartered in Felpham in response to the threat of invasion by French troops. On 12 August, one of the soldiers, John Scofield, had come to visit the ostler at the Fox Inn where the troops were staying and found him in Blake’s garden. After an altercation, Blake asked Scofield to leave, eventually pushing him out of the garden. Two days later, Scofield and another private, John Cock (spelt by Blake as Kock and Kox), prepared evidence that Blake had “Damned the King of England – his Country and his Subjects – [and said] that his soldiers were all bound for Slaves & all the poor people in general” (cited in BR 160).

On 16 August, Blake was charged with sedition. The problem for Scofield was that the charge would not hold on the allegation of one witness (hence the involvement of Cock), but despite character testimonies of other villagers in Blake’s favour prosecution was set for October. In the meantime, the Blakes left Felpham for London in September, moving into 17 South Molton Street, before returning to hear the prosecution charges on 4 October. The trial itself took place in January 1804.

Hayley volunteered as a character witness (having almost certainly loaned Blake the money for his bail), and arranged for Samuel Rose to serve as attorney. The trial took place at Chichester and Blake was acquitted. Initially, he was immensely grateful to Hayley (who served him well in this incident), but later paranoia was to lead him to associate the wrongs he felt he had suffered at the hands of his former patron with the injustices brought against him by Scofield, Cock and others involved in the accusation.

Milton & Jerusalem

Returning to a London in the grip of war, the Blakes found life in the capital extremely difficult, although William did record a moment of illumination following a visit to the Truchsessian Picture Gallery in October 1804:

Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters. (Letter to Hayley E756)

Despair and depression did not leave him, however, and although Blake engaged in a number of commercial projects over the next decade, most notably illutrations on Robert Blair’s The Grave in 1808 for Robert Cromek, Blake always felt he was denied the recognition he deserved. In the case of The Grave, although Blake prepared the designs the lucrative engraving work was passed to Louis Schiavonetti after Cromek saw a specimen that Blake had prepared and was shocked at what he believed was its poor quality. Similarly, in 1809, Blake organised an exhibition of his work at his brother’s haberdashery shop in Broad Street, producing a Descriptive Catalogue to accompany the exhibits: what little response there was generally consisted of hostile reviews and he retreated from public view for some ten years.

Yet this period of disappointment also saw the second great burst of Blake’s imaginative work in illuminated printing. His inability to complete The Four Zoas to his satisfaction led instead to the composition of his two longest, often most obscure but also most impressive prophetic books. Milton a Poem had been begun while the Blakes were resident in Felpham, a critical retelling of Milton’s spiritual life that recast the epic poet’s religion, politics and sexual ideas. In 1804 he also started to compose a remarkable history centred on the figure of the giant Albion, representative of both England at war and universal man, entitled Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion. For the best part of two decades, Blake worked on these dense and beautiful works of art while he felt himself more neglected by the wider public.

As its title suggests, Milton a Poem is a reworking of the work of John Milton, drawing principally on the epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained but also incorporating a wide range of ideas from Milton’s prose tracts on divorce, religion and history. Divided into two books (although the original title page suggested that it was to be an epic in 12 books), the poem tells the descent of Milton from heaven into Ulro (Blake’s version of hell) to recover his female emanation Ololon. The “Preface” to Milton also contained the lines beginning “And did those feet in ancient time” which later became the famous hymn “Jerusalem”.

The second of Blake’s two final great illuminated epics, Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, represents the epitome of Blake’s art of book making. Work began on Jerusalem in 1804 (the date on the title page) and Blake had probably completed about 60 plates by 1807. By 1820, he was able to print three complete copies, and in 1827 two more, including the beautifully coloured Copy E.

Jerusalem is Blake’s most extensive Prophetic Book and the most lavishly designed (using gold in one copy) but which, after high hopes, he despaired of getting a buyer for, as he wrote in a letter to George Cumberland in 1827. It is also one of the most complex and dense of Blake’s books, almost entirely lacking in a linear structure but rather presenting a cycle of motifs from Blake’s mythology to depict the fallen state of Albion and the struggle of Los to retern him to a state of eternity. The book is divided into four chapters with a frontispiece that explains how on his couch of death Albion separated into his spectre, reason, and his emanation, Jerusalem; to bring him back from this state, Los enters through death’s door out of friendship to save Albion.

Next – Chapter 4: Later Years

Tags: biography, Jerusalem, Milton
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Zoapod 7: Dreams Unlimited – J. G. Ballard and Blake

Zoapod 7: Dreams Unlimited – J. G. Ballard and Blake
Length: 7 min 16 sec.

The surrealistic fiction of J. G. Ballard had many affinities with the work of William Blake, expressed most clearly in his 1981 novel, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To read the transcript of this podcast click here.

Tags: books, iTunes, J. G. Ballard, Milton, science fiction, surrealism
Posted in Podcasts |