Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 11:00:24 -0700 (PDT)
To: blake-AT-albion.com
Subject: Re:  Scaffolds of the mind -Reply


To Pam Van Schaik:

Your account of forgiveness is far more comprehensive than mine.
I don't deny that this is a key concept in Blake's cosmology.  I
am rather skeptical about its applicability in practical life and
Blake's own ability to practice it.  I think Blake was conscious
of his own worst weaknesses including the implications of his own
bad temper.  A person who has to live an entire life of
frustration and repression has the option of nursing fantasies of
revenge, or of trying to find some other pyschological escape from
the bind that he is in.  I think Blake's interest in forgiveness
of sins also involves his own search for peace of mind, to
compensate for his own fiery temper and all the grudges he held
against others.  Ask me why I would understand this.  In a sense,
one cannot live without "forgiveness": in the sense of passing
beyond the finite limitations particular experiences have put you
in.  One has to reconcile oneself with circumstances somehow.
Otherwise one gets terminally constipated by one's past negative
experiences.  I am not convinced forgiving the perpetrators is a
realistic option, but leaving them behind on the path to the
future is a more psychologically plausible option.

To Gloudina Bower:

I'm not sure I have much to add to my account of Jesus the
Revolutionary, let alone take on Golgonooza.  Well, there are a
few points I could add on now.

The Urizenic universe is one of exact moral accounting, an eye for
an eye, etc.  It's the same dull round as described in "There is
No Natural Religion"; it's another aspect of the mechanistic
universe Blake hates.  How can one surpass the limitations of
finitude but by making a qualitative change; by breaking up the
equations of action and reaction and making a qualitative leap to
the future?  This is Jesus' forgiveness of sins.

Let's consider also the society in which we live, and our own
penal system and conceptions of justice.  Nothing in our system is
geared to reward good deeds or even to encourage them, or to
develop people or nurture them so that "crime" can be prevented in
the future, yet we are very scrupulous in meting out every atom of
"justice" to "criminals" so long as they are poor or working
class.  It's a static system.  It makes a person absolutely
responsible for actions for which he is only partly responsible,
not having been in full control of the circumstances which molded
him.  Rather than conceiving criminal justice as a relative moment
in the ongoing evolutionary motion of social development, it is
frozen into a static system of self-identity that is incapable of
making the dialectical leap into the future.  Bill "Cracker"
Clinton's three-strikes-'n-yer-out is a load of bullshit that
can't solve anything but make capitalists richer -- the privatized
prison industry. The criminal justice system is more criminal than
the criminals themselves.

Blake also writes somewhere that prevention of crime is more
important than forgiveness of the criminal, just as mercy would be
no more if we did not make somebody poor, and pity no more could
be if all were as happy as we.  Blake wants to burst the bonds of
the mechanistic universe and hence Jesus overturns the tables of
the martial moral virtues great and small of the druidic Urizenic
universe.

Also to be considered is the role of Jesus as the Universal.
Unlike Hegel's Geist, Blake's Jesus is not a bloated general form
that accumulates and imperialistically absorbs all finite
particulars.  (Of course, Hegel believes he is a particularizer
and not a generalizer, but he is a liar.)  I have no time for
petty and seeming arts of compliment; I have innocence to defend
and ignorance to instruct.  Who's going to defend my precious
minute particulars?  Instead of the brain (philosopher-king)
imperially dominating the body (workers), who's going to allow
each member to exult in its high breathing joy?  Without coercion,
all members with love and sympathy snuggle up to the Universal
Human Form Divine, whose archetype is Jesus.

This is a radical negation of the whole of ruling class philosophy
>from Plato and Confucius on down.  This is revolution.

>how will your revolutionary Jesus play in Marxist Peoria?

I'm not sure I have unravelled all of the subtleties of this
multiply ambiguous locution.  Is there either a Peoria in Marxism
or Marxism in Peoria?  Very dialectical.

Now what do I mean by saying Blake's cosmology is class conscious?
First, it is undeniable that this is so, from Blake's early
revolutionary period to his latest works (even after his
disillusion with the French Revolution).  Every word Blake writes
is to break down Urizen's cosmic order.  But of course Blake
doesn't say that the workers and peasants are morally virtuous,
whilst the evil capitalists and landed gentry are
doubleplusungood.  Of course the latter is a given, but the former
is not.  In delivering the individuals from the terrible states
that they're in, one must beware the same old moralistic
Self-Righteousness popping up again, say in the form of Maoism.
Ever see those dumb-ass revolutionary operas like "Red Detachment
of Women", which ends with all these fierce unisex females
machine-gunning all the counter-revolutionaries in sight?  Talk
about yer land of Ulro, oy, does that stuff give me a headache.
Of course Marx was never into such nonsense.



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