Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 22:09:05 -0800 (PST)
Subject: BLAKE & THE MODERNS & THE UNIVERSE OF KNOWLEDGE


"My soul has grown deep like the rivers." -- Langston Hughes

Gloudina Bouwer cries out in the wilderness:

>Marxism, Romanticism, modernism, structuralism,
>formalism, skepticism -- it is nice to play around with these
>concepts and lose oneself in little universes a la Jorge Luis
>Borges -- but what is Blake trying to teach us, Ralph? He felt
>the need to talk about something very urgently.

Gloudina, I shall spare you my thoughts on Borges.  I'm not
playing around with any concepts.  I don't play.  The urgency you
mention is indeed there.  There are many things I have to say
about Blake to various people and audiences, and what I have been
discussing in this thread is just one of them.  Here I have not
been so much concentrating on the content of Blake's message, but
on Blake as a mode of knowledge in the historical universe of
knowledge.  Bear with me and we will shall see whether this is a
trivial exercise or something much more profound.  Perhaps the
reasons for my own sense of urgency will unfold.

Naturally, I am not the first person to recognize that
poetic/symbolic communication is different from literal discursive
communication, nor is Blake the only one who had profound truths
to communicate symbolically rather than literally.  Nor do I think
that Blake could have written it all in plain English in
expository form and he only chose to encode his ideas in mythic
form for fear of state repression.  There are consequences for the
fact that he chose to express himself and apparently thought in
the way that he did, as well as consequences for the fact that I
am expressing myself in quite the opposite manner with a very
different ostensible ontological commitment.  Now, when Blake
makes a statement, do we interpret his statement or its motive as
being the exact same as someone who makes a statement, even one
that reads similarly, in quite another mode of discourse based on
a different way of thinking or different priorities, say in a
philosophical essay?  How do we relate the two different sets of
statements and the ways of thinking and their motives?

Do you think this is a pointless intellectual exercise?  Very
well, when we try to relate Blake to science, to Newton, or to
Plato, or to liberation theology, or to anything else we know in
our universe of knowledge -- things that may matter to us a great
deal in constructing a picture of the totality of our world and
the meanings of its contents -- we are up against this question.

Take a statement such as "man is all imagination."  Taken as a
simple proposition, it's not one I would make.  I imagine Blake
meant what he said.  Now we can just leave it as a proposition to
be debated pro or con, or we can try to re-create in ourselves the
psychological, cognitive experience that would lead to such a
statement.  What must it be like for a man of imagination, whose
center of meaning comes from his own symbolic approach to the
world, to look out on what according to the world of industrial
capitalism is an external universe of dead objects, the land of
Ulro?  If I try, I can recreate something like that psychological
approach to the world in my own head, and it's something I can
empathize with, though I may not literally believe that to be
true.  Now if somebody sat down and wrote an essay trying to prove
in a literal mode that the physical world is an illusion, an idea
in my brain, etc., in the same way that one would argue any other
issue in a logical manner, why should I assume that that person is
coming from the same place Blake is, has the same motives for
making the statement, or has experienced the content of this
proposition in the same way?

I did learn something very valuable from Allen Ginsberg, by the
way.  I am a linguistic rather than a visual person, so I need to
be reminded what it's like.  In one of his Naropa Institute
lectures, not the one I cited, I don't think, Ginsberg follows the
imagery step by step, questioning what is the experience of this
imagery?  He analyzes two poems: one is "Auguries of Innocence."
The fact that he would take the literal imagination so literally,
so concretely, gave me something to think about, since I don't
customarily think in that manner.  For all I know, Ginsberg
recreated the psychological process whereby Blake created his
images.  My quarrel with Ginsberg lies in his discursive
interpretations, which are of a different order than what I have
just described.  I don't have time to get into what I think is
naive about Ginsberg's approach to Blake or to the world in
general.

Anyway, I injected this anecdote not only to give penance to
Ginsberg, but to give a feel for the literal imagination, which
should not be assumed to be the same as a literal set of
propositions, though it should not also be seen as allegoric
either.

It might be quite a job to prove that certain of Blake's
statements represent an entirely different experience and attitude
>from similar statements made by Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, etc.,
but then we just might have evidence to show that something
different was going on with Blake.  Perhaps Plato's God, like the
other Greek gods, was just a mathematical diagram.

There is already plenty of scholarship to demonstrate that Blake's
contrary engagement with Newton is not simple know-nothing
nostalgia for superstition and ignorance, nor is his problem
Newton's physical theories per se.  Blake is not even arguing on
that level.  The threat of Newton's naturalism to Blake's
imagination is not any insipid fear that knowledge of the laws of
nature would unweave a rainbow, no imbecilic nostalgic yearning
for a creed outworn, no sentimental crap about how listening to
the learned astronomer is a drag on just looking up at the stars.
The one-dimensionality that Blake fears from the scientific
imagination as embedded in the kind of society he lives in is in
fact the same one-dimensionality that can be found in childish
anti-scientific irrationalism or the dehumanizing ideological
idiocy of turning quantum mechanics into a spiritual path.  Blake
is operating on an entirely different level.

Had Blake been a different kind of person, he would have
criticized British empiricism and mechanical materialism in a very
different manner, with an analytical apparatus that could have
challenged this world view in a different way.  Given his
background in Christian radicalism, his imaginative life, his
taking his psychological experience of the world as real, etc.
etc., he formulated his critique of empiricism and reductive
naturalism that leaves man a grovelling little root outside of
himself in a different way than I would.  (What did he understand
or even care about Newton's physics, literally speaking, after
all?)  I'm willing to respect that Blake and I are travelling in
different ontological modes, but then again there might be a real
kinship between the two that accounts for my capacity to relate to
him.

So the historical importance of Blake as a certain kind of
teacher, dear Gloudina, is not only in what he has to teach, but
in the fact that he can teach us things, given his social position
and using _his_ methods, that Plato nor Aristotle nor Aquinas nor
the whole lot of state tricksters have ever been able to teach nor
could even dream of, since they would have undermined the
justification for their own existence.  Long before Feuerbach
decided it was his mission to bring this whole tradition tumbling
down, and before Marx completed the process by tying alienated
consciousness to the division of labor and morally destroying
forever the privileged position of the state intellectual as
bearer of universal truth, Blake figured out the essentials of
this whole problem, and formulated them in a peculiar language,
based on symbols known and invented.

Sometime I will show why Jesus as destroyer of the Moral Virtues
of the heathen is so important.  In real history, this fictional
character of Jesus did far less for humanity's development than
the invention of the flush toilet, but in the system of Blake,
Jesus as the annihilator of the moral system of the silly Greek
and Latin slaves of the sword and all like them is critical and
revolutionary.

These are just a few examples of what it means to situate Blake in
the universe of knowledge.  It is not an academic exercise at all
-- it's about the question of how we make sense out of our world
and the tools around us we use to do so.  It's a question as deep
as human subjectivity itself -- deep, deep, that's how deep it
is.

Living in a society where the dominant spiritual forces are the
Christian Coalition and the Nation of Islam, please believe that I
feel an urgency in my work you can scarcely imagine.

(Ralph Dumain, 4 April 1996, 1:00 am EST, in memory of Martin
Luther King, Jr.)


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