In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1793), Blake writes having a strong prophetic voice, delivering forth a brand new set of proverbs, a new poetics, twisting and flipping classic wisdom. Blake challenges its condition, questioning flat, conventional thought. As if ranking before a gathering masses, he yowls out “All Bibles or perhaps sacred rules have been what causes the following Errors” (MHH 4). It is a agonizing, powerful, graceful production, an amount of proverbs that very easily increases over these still enchained in those forsaken “mind-forg’d manacles” ( London 27). The words of Blake, just like those of a prophet, at first, throw us into misunderstandings. He really wants to lead someone off the taken path, through the dark forest, making all of us feel as if we were lost, with hopes individuals entering into a fresh a removing, a new understanding of our being, throwing wide open the “doors of perception” (MHH 39). (We can simply imagine just how confused the Disciples were when Christ declared, “But I tell you that anyone that looks at a lady lustfully has recently committed coition with her in his cardiovascular system, ” taking commandment against coveting, marginalized within the set of ten, and making it central to his teaching, totally rearranging the social surroundings around the problem of desire. ) Blake desires to inverse the relationship among Energy and Reason, among Imagination/Vision and Materialism, normally known as the “Vegetable Ratio” (Mil 5. 35). Such a dramatic shift in paradigms calls for a dramatic approach, which Blake finds in the hyperbolic poetics of the prophets. Why although is affectation necessary?
Blake condemns the “Ratio of the five senses” (MHH 35), that abyss, known as the foundation of not only Lockean thought, but also age Reason, leading Man astray, the prophet need to call him back. Underneath the section “A Memorable Extravagant, ” Blake puts words and phrases into the mouth of Isaiah and Ezekiel to adjust to his new Vision. He has Isaiah profess, “I saw simply no God nor heard virtually any, in a finite organical notion, ” and Ezekiel assert, “we of Israel taught that the Graceful Geniuswas the first rule and all different ones derivative” (35). The Graceful Genius, the prophet, includes more than the correspondence theory of truth, of rectitudo, adaequatio, assimilatio, convenientia, into the poetics of prediction, a hyperbolic theory of truth. Do not seize and size up their revelations, but rather they will seize us. Blake’s publishing style is usually not a legs of whatever we can sit before all of us and measure, of what we can stand over and against. It gets to beyond that which we can perceive with our physical organs, “Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. This individual perceives a lot more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover” (NNR 2). Blake’s composing style is actually a testament to that which we can “perceive” with our Eyesight and Imagination, as he thus poetically puts it:
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision has to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And 3 fold in soft Beulahs night
And two fold Always. May possibly God all of us keep
From Solitary vision Newton’s sleep (TB, 722. 83-8).
Blake personifies the banality of single vision, the limitations of reason, the “Vegetable Percentage, ” described through the limited creation of closed, overarching systems, and generalizing concepts, in the god Urizen (a play on “your reason” plus the Greek horizo, meaning “to limit”). Urizen’s mechanical creation is sterile and clean, it is able only from the predictable duplication of the Same, not really of anything purely different in associated with itself, which in turn requires Imagination and ideas. He is Nobodaddy, “nobody’s daddy, ” the jealous god of the Older Testament as well as the Decalogue, stifling Imagination throughout the Net of Religion, shackling Gentleman to limited vision.
For Blake, “Energy is the only existence and is in the Body and Reason is a bound or perhaps outward circumference of Energy” (Blake, MHH 4. 8). Urizen is usually guilty of circumscribing and inserting form upon boundless, unlimited Energy: “Times on occasions he divided, measur’d as well as Space by simply space” (BU 3. 8-9). Blake identifies Urizen while having
form’d a dividing rule:
He formed weighing scales to ponder
He shaped a brzen quadrant
This individual formed fantastic compasses (35-39).
A closed program, Energy circumscribed, encompassed by the Mundane Covering (Mil 37. 19-43), refuses the possibility of the multiple, the specific, of distinctness, of a productive repetition, is it doesn’t reign of the Same. Blake is convinced “Every Minute Particular is definitely Holy” (Jer 69. 42), every multiple embodying difference, thus Urizen’s law, his absolute values, is an injustice, placing the One in the Many: “one command, one joy, one particular desire, one curse, one weight, one particular measure, one particular King, a single God, one Law” (BU 4. 34-40). Protesting the logic of Urizen’s legislation, Blake can decree, “One law for the ox and the big cat is oppression” (MHH 25). The affirmation of the poetics of prediction, demanding a great “elevation” within our vision over and above the messages of what conventionally is present just before us, further than adaequatio to the realm of hyperbole, attempts to deconstruct the Law, it is just a call for rights, opening a place for the multiplicity in the Minute Particular within the barren rule from the One.
Works Reported
Blake, Bill, David Sixth is v. Erdman, and Harold Blossom. Jerusalem. The full Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Core, 1988. 144-259.
. “London. ” 26-7.
. The Marriage of Heaven and Terrible. 33-44.
. Milton. 95-144.
. “There is No All-natural Religion. ” 2 .
. “To Thomas Butts, twenty-two November 1802. ” 720-22.
