Today's Topics:
Re: Howard Roark? & Kabbalah/Scholem/Benjamin
a couple of conferences
Re: Ololon
Ololon
drunks in eternity
Re: why pillory Guillory? Cultural capital--who cares?
Altizer introduction
Ololon
Re: Ololon
Re: Greetings, Thomas the Doubter. Welcome to the Blake list!
Introduction
Re: Altizer introduction
Re: Altizer introduction
Thomas Altizer
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 23:06:14 -0600
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Howard Roark? & Kabbalah/Scholem/Benjamin
Message-Id: <97012723061465@wc.stephens.edu>
I have raised this question before, but cannot remember having any
answer--we have seen several people on the list raise the question of
Blake and Kabbalah, and they have commented on various hypothetical
ways of thinking about the possibility of influence or affinity--
I cannot remember that Van Schaik or the others (including the
most recent message from Edward Larrissy, though his would not
have required any more reference than he offered) have ever acknowledged
or even admitted the existence of Sheila Spector's published (and to
my eyes, very careful) study of precisely those questions.
(_Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly_ 17.3, 84-101). Is there some
reason why Spector's work can or may be ignored, brushed aside?
Are we to understand that these more recent speculations are
so far superior, even revolutionary, that they need not
acknowledge her existence? Or, for that matter, the several other
writers who have explored the questions, in addition to Raine, who
are also customarily ignored? Or perhaps it really is useful to
reinvent the wheel?
Tom Dillingham
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 16:30:41 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Tristanne J. Connolly"
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: a couple of conferences
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Hello!
I forgot to mention in my wee introduction that I am from Canada:
Hamilton, Ontario, near Toronto. Hamilton is the home of McMaster
University, where this year's conference of the North American society for
the STudy of Romanticism is taking place. The theme is Romanticism and its
Others. It looks to me like it will be very interesting and there are a
ton of different categories for discussion and papers (including
invent-your-own). A lot of the categories have much to do with Blake. If
you are interested please send a message to others@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca,
and/or check out the web page (wowee!) at
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~he-courses/research/NASSR.HTM
(what a mouthful!)
Please check this out! It will make my former professors and fellow
students very happy if you go...
Secondly I noticed that there is a conference on Romanticism and Violence
at Sheffield this Feb. 15. The contact address is j.labbe@sheffield.ac.uk
---Tristanne.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 14:56 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Ololon
Message-Id: <199701292103.PAA15905@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
---------------------------------- Forwarded ----------------------------------
From: MLGrant at president-po
Date: 1/28/97 5:19PM
To: Andrew Elfenbein at internet
Subject: Re: Ololon
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am so glad that Andrew Elfenbein has raised these questions about
Ololon, for I believe it is in allowing collective, communal
consideration of the interpretive possibilities of such difficult
characters, passages, and situations that this instantaneous medium of
conversation is most useful and exciting. Andew's desire to cast off
critical assumptions and look afresh at Blake's words strikes me as a
healthy and regenerative impulse. It took years for people to break
out of time-honored concepts which are useful only up to a point,
critically-invented terms such as "Orc cycle," "higher innocence,"
"androgyne," etc. -- even "consolidation of error" -- and realize that
Blake himself never used these words or phrases.
But as to Andrew's direct question on how Ololon could NOT have heard
the Bard's song and how Milton could NOT have realized he was missing
his Emanation, I do find some clues in the text.
It seems to me that we are to believe that Milton had been vaguely
unhappy in heaven (his limited idea of heaven) for 100 years in round
numbers without knowing exactly knowing why -- even though he could
see his Sixfold Emanation scatter'd thro' the deep / In torment! (but
he didn't want to make a fuss; he "obey'd, he murmur'd not, he was
silent." All of a sudden, hearing the Bard's song on an apparently
completely different subject (but one in which Satan is portrayed as a
far different character from the one in PL, the classes of Elect,
Reprobate, and Redeemed take on far different meanings from the ones
he had imagined in PL, Atonement has a different meaning, and the
relative guilt-load of male and female characters has been
redistributed) all this switches the light-bulb on: aha, what's wrong
with me is that I'm in a dull place and without the female side of my
humanity (and without feminine companionship besides, since I didn't
treat my wives and daughters very well) -- and the reason I'm stuck
here is that only my Puritanical Selfhood ever went to heaven in the
first place; my energies, creativity, and sexuality are all somewhere
else where I've banished them and I'm going to go find them,
acknowledge them, redeem them, make them part of myself again, reunite
with them, regain my full humanity.
Unlike PL, THIS poem (as stated in the opening lines) is inspired not
by Milton's asexual Holy-Ghost-like Urania but by feminine Daughters
of Beulah, whom the poet (Blake) has summoned into his body and
nervous system, and through whom the Eternal Great Humanity Divine has
planted his Paradise not in the historical past but in B's brain.
Now when the Bard sings, the scene is set in a place where the
listeners are "sitting at eternal tables" and we're first told that
"all sat attentive to the awful man." When the song ends, "there was
great murmuring in the Heavens of Albion" -- enough to terrify the
Bard and cause him to take refuge in Milton's bosom. No one else gets
the message. The whole Assembly wept prophetic seeing what M is about
to do. And has he departs, "Eternity shudder'd." As M's journey
proceeds (and "the electric flame of Milton's awful precipitate
descent" starts to make Albion stir on his deathbed, surrounded by the
Seven Angels of the Presence) we find that some members of the Bard's
original audience are having a particularly negative reaction to what
M is doing.
But many of the Eternals rose up from eternal tables /
Drunk with the Spirit; burning round the Couch of death they stood /
Looking down into Beulah: wratful, fill'd with rage! /
They rend the heavens round the Watchers in a fiery circle:
etc.
This is enough to make Los despair, until he remembers an old prophecy
in Eden "often sung to the loud harp at the immortal feasts / That
Milton of the Land of Albion should up ascend / Forwards from Ulro,
from the Vale of Felpham: and set free / Orc from his Chain of
Jealousy."
(Look at the prepositions: It seems that while the unhappy Selfhood of
Milton is falling downward and backward from the Heaven where he was
unhappy, going "outside Humanity" and into Albion's heart, the
creative part of Milton, expressed through Blake, is rising up and
going forward out of Ulro-Felpham, etc. etc.)
Anyway, what I started to say is that yes, Ololon (plural) were among
those who were in the Bard's audience, but they did not receive the
song; they were sitting around after the banquet drunk with the spirit
and just not getting it; they were infuriated with Milton's heroic
decisions, so much so that they rent the heaven and threw him and the
Seven (making Eight in all) down into the Ulro -- where Los takes them
in. So I take it that this is why, later on, the Ololon group accept
responsibility for driving Milton out, and claim that they never heard
the song that called him to the attempt.
I don't pretend that I'm scratching the surface of all that's
happening here - just trying to follow B's plot-threads where he
leaves definite suggestions that This is supposed to connect to That.
Even if he's only dropping these suggestions in order to retract them
or frustrate our expectations, I think a good reading should pay
attention to these "hooks and eyes" (as Coleridge called similar
links) and trace them as far as possible before talking about the
ruptures and disconnections.
Glad to be stimulated to think about the poem again - thanks, Andrew
Elfenbein. -- Mary Lynn Johnson
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 97 08:36:09 -0600
From: Andrew Elfenbein
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Ololon
Message-Id: <32f0b1d8047b002@mhub1.tc.umn.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
The Eyes (I's? ayes?) see more than the Hooks know!
M. L. Johnson raises many important issues and makes several very helpful
connections. I am still the idiot questioner, I'm afraid, in part because I
think that in Blake every new pattern reveals more disjunctions than answers.
The invocation has always struck me because the spin-doctoring on the
hermaphrodite as a figure is even worse than that for the Female Will in
Blake, but before any of the guys get to hook up with Blake (Los, Milton,
etc.), the girls have first dibs - and they get the right arm, while Milton
is stuck with the left foot. The "Female-Males" and the "Male-Females" in
Book 2 are part of Blake's stock cast of miscellaneous goons, but this
invocation seems to make the stakes in their appearance much more
complicated. Suspect that C. Johnson's _Equivocal Beings_ (best recent book
on romanticism that has nothing to do with romanticism) will probably be
useful here; really opens up the under-explored relation of Blake to the
cult of sensibility (satire/sentiment = wrath/pity)
M. L. Johnson's comments made me see the odd imagistic connection between
the Eternals "Drunk with the Spirit" and Ololon's identity as a "sweet
River, of milk & liquid pearl" that helps support the identification between
them. There is a weird transformation of liquidity from drunkenness (having
hit the liquid pearl once too often) and the sudden (and, in Blake, always
vaguely threatening) prettification of the "sweet River." The casually
mocking "Drunk with the Spirit" is still a puzzler: it sounds like Swift on
the Dissenters. The Spirit of what? Where's the bar? Do they "rend the
heavens" _because_ they are drunk? Does the drunkenness mean that they, in
their wrath, also do not possess the "science of wrath"? And how does
Ololon go from being the drunken lout to the Miss Manners clone who turns
down the volume knob on the lamentations machine "fearing lest they should
others molest" (perhaps having provided Milton the economy-class ticket to
Ulro was a temporary but too hasty purging of wrath that allows for
prettiness and politnesss but not real redemption).
Am also struck by the fact that Ololon isn't named at first. They don't get
to be "all alone" until they have hurled Milton headlong.
Enough and too much. Will stop bothering the list with my ramblings.
Andrew Elfenbein elfen001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 97 10:14 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com, Andrew Elfenbein
Subject: drunks in eternity
Message-Id: <199701301637.KAA18137@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
The allusion, as would would have been almost unconsciously recognized
in a more biblically-infused age than ours, is to the admonition "Be
ye not drunk with wine, but drunk with the spirit" (Ephesians 5:8)
which in turn alludes, I imagine, to the goings-on at Pentacost --
when the Holy Spirit descends and everyone (all Galileans) starts
speaking in toungues, in various middle eastern languages; when this
was "noised abroad" and multitudes gathered, "they were all amazed and
marveled . . . And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one
to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full
of new wine." Peter has to explain that it's only the "third hour,"
which I think is about 9 a.m., and they can't be drunk. He then quotes
"I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: / and your sons and your
daughters shall prophesy" (etc) (Acts 2:1 ff). (Interesting that both
sons and daughters receive this abilility.)
Andrew Elfenbein has a good point about the contrast between Ololon as
a river of liquid pearl and as a bunch of drunken louts sittin' around
the eternal tables and getting wrathful and furious when Milton acts
upon the impulse of the spirit. Another example of the pity/wrath
contrast (and mistaken identification and reversals) seen in the
Bard's Song and through the rest of the poem?
I don't think you ought to shut up - keep giving out your ideas! --
anyone not interested can delete before reading -- not much else being
discussed right now anyway. Anyway, I'm very much interested in what
you have to say -- Mary Lynn
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 15:13:59 -0500
From: Virginia DeMeres
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: why pillory Guillory? Cultural capital--who cares?
Message-Id: <32F10107.A86@rsad.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Ralph and somewhat with Susan. On the one hand
certainly canonicity is chiefly an affair (read all the meanings into that you like)
of the literary sub-cult. And I too have noted that we tend to be quite obsessive
about it and to disregard the fact that many (most?) students will not give much of a
damn WHAT we recommend. They will doggedly prefer what they prefer, though, as Susan
points out, what we fail to present (or choose not to present) they may never
encounter at all.
But choosing the canon is not something ANYONE (it seems to me) can do in any entirely
rational or even quasi-objective way. My friend David and I decided once that we
should teach what WE like, explaining our choices, noting that others might have been
made and in the course of our instruction providing some tools and approaches that
students may take with them WHATEVER THEY PREFER AND READ EVER AFTERWARDS. Our goal
might be not to indoctrinate students into some arcana of designated sacred texts but
to inculcate in them the critical skills to recognize first WHY they like what they
like and second WHETHER on that basis they want to continue consuming it or to switch
to something more nourishing, more interesting or just plain different.
Does this make any sense? Virginia
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 04:23:04 UT
From: "tHOMAS aLTIZER"
To: "Blake Group"
Subject: Altizer introduction
Message-Id:
Blake Group,
My name is Thomas Altizer, a retired professor from SUNY Stony Brook (and an
old friend of David Erdman), and I am a radical theologian, one deeply
inspired by William Blake, as witness my 1967 Book on Blake, The New
Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (Michigan State
University Press), as well as my subsequent theological work, particuarly
History as Apocalypse (Suny Press, 1985), and the just published, The
Contemporary Jesus (Suny Press). However, I must confess that I have had
little effect at this point upon my fellow theologians, few of whom are open
to radical vision and thinking, and I also have had little effect in
attempting to integrate Blake and Hegel, although it is surely undeniable that
Blake and Nietzsche and Joyce share a common vision, and the uncovering of
this common ground has also been a major project of mine. Let me note at this
point that my most poular book, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Westminster,
1966) was inspired by Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche. That book has long since
been out of print but I have many extra copies if anyone is interested.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 17:37:35 -0500 (EST)
From: bouwer
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Ololon
Message-Id: <199701302237.RAA01392@host.ott.igs.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Please Andrew, do not stop now. This discussion is very
stimulating; it is about something worth discussing.
As probably a lot of other people, I have been scanning
"Milton" for clues about the identity of Ololon. One passage
holds my attention particularly:
"Are those who contemn Religion & seek to annihilate it
Become in their Feminine portions the causes & promoters
Of these Religions? how is this thing, this Newtonian Phantasm,
This Voltaire & Rousseau, this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke,
This Natural Religion, this impossible absurdity?
IS OLOLON THE CAUSE OF THIS? O where shall I hide my face?"
M40 K532
Is it possible that Ololon is a type of Ahania? Somehow, if I
read "Milton" with this at the back of my mind, everything
seems to fall in place a little better. But perhaps I am just
wandering in the desart, like most everybody else, in and
out of Milton.
Gloudina Bouwer
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 19:15:44 -0800
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Ololon
Message-Id: <199701310315.TAA09780@dfw-ix6.ix.netcom.com>
Andrew,
I can't help seeing in the "River of milk & liquid pearl" an amalgamation of the male
& female life-giving forces (I guess you can say "Lap of seed" just so many times!)
This seems to go along with the Male-Female & Female-Male imagery you describe, and
might make more sense when you consider that pearls are formed by a secretion from the
mollusk.
Just a thought...
You wrote:
>
>The Eyes (I's? ayes?) see more than the Hooks know!
>
>M. L. Johnson raises many important issues and makes several very helpful
>connections. I am still the idiot questioner, I'm afraid, in part because I
>think that in Blake every new pattern reveals more disjunctions than answers.
>
>The invocation has always struck me because the spin-doctoring on the
>hermaphrodite as a figure is even worse than that for the Female Will in
>Blake, but before any of the guys get to hook up with Blake (Los, Milton,
>etc.), the girls have first dibs - and they get the right arm, while Milton
>is stuck with the left foot. The "Female-Males" and the "Male-Females" in
>Book 2 are part of Blake's stock cast of miscellaneous goons, but this
>invocation seems to make the stakes in their appearance much more
>complicated. Suspect that C. Johnson's _Equivocal Beings_ (best recent book
>on romanticism that has nothing to do with romanticism) will probably be
>useful here; really opens up the under-explored relation of Blake to the
>cult of sensibility (satire/sentiment = wrath/pity)
>
>M. L. Johnson's comments made me see the odd imagistic connection between
>the Eternals "Drunk with the Spirit" and Ololon's identity as a "sweet
>River, of milk & liquid pearl" that helps support the identification between
>them. There is a weird transformation of liquidity from drunkenness (having
>hit the liquid pearl once too often) and the sudden (and, in Blake, always
>vaguely threatening) prettification of the "sweet River." The casually
>mocking "Drunk with the Spirit" is still a puzzler: it sounds like Swift on
>the Dissenters. The Spirit of what? Where's the bar? Do they "rend the
>heavens" _because_ they are drunk? Does the drunkenness mean that they, in
>their wrath, also do not possess the "science of wrath"? And how does
>Ololon go from being the drunken lout to the Miss Manners clone who turns
>down the volume knob on the lamentations machine "fearing lest they should
>others molest" (perhaps having provided Milton the economy-class ticket to
>Ulro was a temporary but too hasty purging of wrath that allows for
>prettiness and politnesss but not real redemption).
>
>Am also struck by the fact that Ololon isn't named at first. They don't get
>to be "all alone" until they have hurled Milton headlong.
>
>Enough and too much. Will stop bothering the list with my ramblings.
>Andrew Elfenbein elfen001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 20:01:53 -0800
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Greetings, Thomas the Doubter. Welcome to the Blake list!
Message-Id: <199701310401.UAA09723@dfw-ix5.ix.netcom.com>
Hi, Thomas.
Welcome to the list. Tell me a little about your work on Chrisitan
Atheism and how you resolve those 2 seemingly contradictory terms. As
I think about it, I guess you are saying that one can be an adherant of
Xian thought yet not of the belief in the supreme being as Xianity sets
it out. How exactly does Blake come into your work on Xian atheism?
Susan
You wrote:
>
>Blake Group,
>
>My name is Thomas Altizer, a retired professor from SUNY Stony Brook
(and an
>old friend of David Erdman), and I am a radical theologian, one deeply
>inspired by William Blake, as witness my 1967 Book on Blake, The New
>Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (Michigan
State
>University Press), as well as my subsequent theological work,
particuarly
>History as Apocalypse (Suny Press, 1985), and the just published, The
>Contemporary Jesus (Suny Press). However, I must confess that I have
had
>little effect at this point upon my fellow theologians, few of whom
are open
>to radical vision and thinking, and I also have had little effect in
>attempting to integrate Blake and Hegel, although it is surely
undeniable that
>Blake and Nietzsche and Joyce share a common vision, and the
uncovering of
>this common ground has also been a major project of mine. Let me note
at this
>point that my most poular book, The Gospel of Christian Atheism
(Westminster,
>1966) was inspired by Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche. That book has long
since
>been out of print but I have many extra copies if anyone is
interested.
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 23:44:12 -0500 (EST)
From: kdick@interlynx.net
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Introduction
Message-Id: <199701310444.XAA14578@boris.interlynx.net>
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Hello,
I am writing to introduce myself, as I have recently added my name to your
mailing list. I am a Master's student at McMaster University, in Hamilton
Ontario. I am not studying Blake, I'm actually studying eighteenth century
British naval medicine, but I find his poetry facinating. I took a senior level
seminar devoted to Blake and I wrote my final paper on tradition myths that form
the basis of Blake's wonderful "anti-myth" -The Book of Urizen-. My copy of
Blake's complete works is dog-eared and well marked with pencil and I always
travel with it. I am constantly reading the poetry over and over and each time
I see something new.
I have found the discussions here most enlightening in helping me to continue to
learn more about this very difficult genius and his poetry. I don't know if
I'll be able to contribute much but I will always read with the greatest
interest.
Karen.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 22:14:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Altizer introduction
Message-Id: <199701310614.WAA04586@igc6.igc.org>
Prof. Altizer, I have been searching for your book on Blake THE
NEW APOCALYPSE ib used books stores for the past year or tow to no
avail. If you have any extra copies, I wish to purchase one from
you. Yours is one of the very few works conatingin comparisons of
Blake and Hegel, and though I have read a library copy, I need one
for my own collection. I think I have one of your death-of-god
books, but I can;t recall which.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 16:53:34 +0000
From: Albion Rose
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Altizer introduction
Message-Id: <32F22387.291@mb.inforyukyu.or.jp>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
tHOMAS aLTIZER wrote:
That book has long since been out of print but I have many extra copies
if anyone is interested.
I am deeply interested. How do I go about getting a copy.
--
____ ______
/ \~/ \
/ ^ \ ____________________________
| / \ |
\(( === ))))))))/ R. Joshua Murry
|( @ )=( @ )| PSC 80, Box 15929
{| ~~ | ~~ |} APO AP 96367-5929
__ __\ < /
/ \ / \\ \___/ / rjoshua@mb.inforyukyu.or.jp
\ \ / / \__\\_//__/ ____________________________
\ _ V / |||||
/\/ \ _ | \|/
/ | )/ _ \
\_/\_/(_/( )
\_ _/
\_ /
===========================================================================
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 09:24:16 -0500 (EST)
From: bouwer
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Thomas Altizer
Message-Id: <199701311424.JAA04860@host.ott.igs.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Dear Thomas Altizer,
I have already ordered "The Gospel of Christian Atheism" by
private e-mail from you, writing to the address with which
your name appears. If that was not the way to do it, I would
like to add my name to the list of people eager to purchase
your book. Like Ralph Dumain, I would also be eager to find
out where one could still find "The New Apocalypse."
You were responsible for me "discovering" Blake, a find that
subsequently changed my whole outlook on life. In the seventies
I was trying to find out what this "death of God" theology was
all about, and read "New Apocalypse." That book, and reading
Kathleen Raine's "Blake and Tradition" straight afterwards, set
my husband and me on a path of exploration which is still as
fresh as it was more than two decades ago. I never thought I
would be able to tell you this directly, but thank you, THOMAS
ALTIZER, you are an intellectual giant. I hope you will continue
reading this listgroup and periodically share your insights with
us.
Gloudina Bouwer (Ottawa, Canada)
--------------------------------
End of blake-d Digest V1997 Issue #10
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