Today's Topics:
introduction
Re: The Blake Archive
RE: introduction
Re: introduction
RE:uni of california
Re: Chinks
Re: Re: Chinks
Re: Chinks
Re: uni of california
Re: RE:uni of california
Strictly Academic
Re: Chinks
Re: Strictly Academic
Re: Strictly Academic
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 17:02:39 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Henriette Stavis
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: introduction
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
My name is Henriette Stavis, and I work as a teacher of British
Literature at the University of Copenhagen. My interest in Blake stems
from my MA-thesis, where I compared Blake's time symbolism with that of
Yeats. I am presently trying to get a Ph.D. scholarship with a project
that focuses on Blake's relationship to early German Romanticism. If
anyone has information on any of these (or other) topics, I would be more
than pleased to hear from you.
Henriette.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 11:54:10 -0400
From: Patricia Neill
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: The Blake Archive
Message-Id: <2.2.32.19980629155410.006ef3bc@db6.cc.rochester.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
You're more than welcome Tom. I still have a few copies left if anyone is
interested. The Brochure isn't so much about Blake, or the House of Blake,
but as Tom says it does have wonderful echoes of WB.
Patty
>Just wanted to report that I received today the "House of William Blake"
>brochure that Patricia Neill offered us a few days ago. It is just as she
>said: "lovely, smashingly well-designed and scrumptious." Even though they
>include a "Cogito ergo sum" (I think "Esse est percipi" would fit their
>purpose better and be closer to Blake), their work is wonderfully imaginative,
>delightful, and filled with beautifully rendered echoes of WB.
>
>Thanks, Patricia!
>
>--Tom Devine
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 09:38:02 -0700
From: "Steve Perry"
To:
Subject: RE: introduction
Message-Id: <000a01bda37c$49297d90$02646464@perry1.perry>
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Ralph,
I think this is your cue.
Steve Perry
My name is Henriette Stavis, and I work as a teacher of British
Literature at the University of Copenhagen. My interest in Blake stems
from my MA-thesis, where I compared Blake's time symbolism with that of
Yeats. I am presently trying to get a Ph.D. scholarship with a project
that focuses on Blake's relationship to early German Romanticism. If
anyone has information on any of these (or other) topics, I would be more
than pleased to hear from you.
Henriette.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 00:29:19 EDT
From: NorNob@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: introduction
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Henriette, You might try finding the University of California at Riverside
on the web. Then try to locate Reinhold Grimm of the Comparative Literature
Program (Dept. of Literature and Languages, I believe) or Georg Gugelberger of
same, perhaps Stephanie Hammer. Ron Javorsky
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 11:04:26 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Henriette Stavis
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: RE:uni of california
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Dear Ron Javorsky,
Thank you for your tip. I have tried to look for Reinhold Grimm, Georg
Gugelberger, and Stephanie Hammer on the web. But I'm afraid that my
computer's server isn't quite compatible with that of the University of
California so I can't access the part about the Department of Literature
and Language. I will, however, try again on my home computer. The names
look very promising. At least the first two sound German! How did you
know about them, and are you connected to the university?
Sincerely,
Henriette Stavis.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 11:21:52 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Chinks
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
"If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has has closed himself up, till he sees
all thing thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
---end of Plate 14, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
~~~~~~~~
Krishna, Krishna...
Holy, Holy...
The mind and body are indeed restless, William Blake.
It is indeed hard to train.
But by constant practice and by freedom both from and to passion,
the mind and body in truth can be trained.
When the mind and body are not in harmony,
this divine communion is hard to attain.
But the person who in harmony tries to attains it,
will continue to STRIVE.
The doors of perception.
Who closed them?
Was it Blake? Was it Urizen?
Or was it some weak and timid MIND.................
---Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 17:03:27 EDT
From: ScarltGrrl@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Re: Chinks
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
That was simply lovely.
heather corinna
http://scarletletters.com
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 17:32:05 -0400
From: Bill & Ingrid Wagner
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Chinks
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> "If the doors of perception were cleansed
>every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
> For man has has closed himself up, till he sees
>all thing thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
> ---end of Plate 14, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
>
>~~~~~~~~
>
>Krishna, Krishna...
>
>Holy, Holy...
>
>The mind and body are indeed restless, William Blake.
>
>It is indeed hard to train.
>
>But by constant practice and by freedom both from and to passion,
>the mind and body in truth can be trained.
>
>When the mind and body are not in harmony,
>this divine communion is hard to attain.
>But the person who in harmony tries to attains it,
>will continue to STRIVE.
>
>The doors of perception.
>Who closed them?
>Was it Blake? Was it Urizen?
>Or was it some weak and timid MIND.................
>
> ---Randall Albright
> http://world.std.com/~albright/
Whew Whew the wind blows in and we have the option of looking up.
Very difficult for us hungry sheep. Where that come from? Ah reclaiming
Blake from academia. A difficult task when it is not your job.
But vocation can be much more. You have to ground oneself in the mundane
knowing "For man has has closed himself up, till he sees
all thing thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." IS A CHIOCE that few champion.
Yet is requires less energy. So practice to become strong and filter fools
like
Albright and Wagner.
Train at the Piano Train at the Family Train at ....You fill it in.
Bill
Ps Albright is to blame ;))))
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 23:19:47 EDT
From: NorNob@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: uni of california
Message-Id: <44bd74fc.3599aad4@aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Henriette, I'm a former student of all three of them. If you need help
contacting them, I should be able to do something for you. Ron Javorsky
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 01:43:01 EDT
From: HumWolf@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: RE:uni of california
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
There is also Professor Pete Fairchild at California State University San
Bernardino who is a Blake expert. Donna Guiliano
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 11:14:11 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Strictly Academic
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Actually, the Chinese got much of their Hindu-Buddhist heritage, and then
modified it, from India. Blake well knew that "All Religions Are One", at
least in his younger days before he turned his art into "Become a
Christian!" on every single one of the introductory plates to _Jerusalem_.
For *some* of how Blake changed, particularly toward Greco-Roman art, to
show that his "system" was in fact one of highly thought moving through "a
sequence of sharp and sudden ruptures," I still highly recommend _Blake's
Altering Aesthetic_ by William Richey (1996). It explained to me in words
things that I had only intuited before. And you know that creations of
genius merely come back to you as your own thoughts......
A view that looks intriguing for academics is offered by www.amazon.com:
_Chariot of Fire: A Study of William Blake in the Light of Hindu Thought_,
by Charu Sheel Singh (1981). But I haven't cruised the Library of Congress
on the subject.
_The Bhagavad-Gita_ is indeed a delightful book. Blake seems to have read
it, doesn't he? Frye's _Fearful Symmetry_ (1947) only has eight footnotes
on the subject. He did a picture of "The Brahmins" as "an ideal design" of
"Mr Walkin translating the Geeta" from the "Hindoo scriptures". That
particular information comes to me from Michael Davis's _William Blake, A
New Kind of Man_ (1977) on page 128. Whitman too seems to have been
inspired, in a way that, as I recall from memory, Emerson called _Leaves of
Grass_ "half Bhagavad-Gita and half New York Herald." I saw that there is
also _Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean Reading_ by
Richard R. O'Keefe (1995) now available w/ Amazon, too. I'm glad people can
put lenses from the past on to people of the future, as well as vice versa!
I also saw _Wheels of Eternity : A Comparative Study of William Blake and
W.B. Yeats_ by Rachel V. Billigheimer (1990) and _Sons and Adversaries :
Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence_ by Margaret Storch (1990) on
Amazon. (It was only a brief cruise.)
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
There may be no natural religion, but the constructed ones that last do
indicate that there was a bit more going on in Blake's art, directed toward
his Christian audience, than he perhaps revealed at times.
Glad he was an Ovid fan, too, but... did I hear somewhere that he couldn't
come to terms w/ Ovid's implied bisexuality? Talk about hung up and
judgmental! Oh well. I ask not if Blake was free. Only where he was coming
from. At least in _Jerusalem_, Los calls for annihilation of the sexes,
does he not? However you want to interpret that.
And wasn't Samuel Palmer a bit naive to call Blake "a man without a mask"?
If you were a fox at times, wouldn't you use cunning, too? I'd call him "a
propagandist extraordinaire", myself.
"The Eye sees more than the Heart knows."
---title page, "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"
Still can't figure out how Eden and the Here and Now are any different.
After all the Heavens and Hells I've seen, surely I'll be released to...
something I know not what... after I die.
I've also been re-reading Thomas Paine lately. Pity that Burke was more
prophetically true about what actually happened to the French Revolution
than Blake or Paine, isn't it? The price of liberty is an eternally
expanding tent of tolerance.
I'm not sure how or if Blake, finally, came to terms with Paine in his "To
The Deists" plate, or whether he too realized that words fixed on copper
plates were little better than those etched into stone compared to the
Visions of Fire that originally come to the bearers-- that there are
exceptions to every rule-- that his scorn for Rousseau, while eloquent, was
merely an illumination of some aspects of the man while de-illuminating
others.
Derrida can talk about "erasure", but "Pity would be no more/if we did not
make somebody Poor" sounds awfully Rousseauian to me! But that's just one
interpretation.
Thomas Jefferson, I note, at least cared about Paine even when others in
his own adopted United States of America thought he was... better off
forgotten. And, like Jefferson, I'm more interested in the history of the
future than the history of the past.
---Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 14:16:58 -0500 (EST)
From: Watt James
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Chinks
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Dear Randall: I applaud you for sharing your feeling about the loss that
follows on the closing of the doors of perception. The agent of this
closure is liable, I believe to be any one of the Zoas; all of them, at
one time or another, tend to argue for their own self-sufficiency. That
itself is a warning, isn't it? ie. the word and the concept of
self-sufficiency are closing agencies, not opening ones. In your case,
tho' I can't accept the notion of the mind being timid! Remember Kafka's
parable in "The Trial" about the doorkeeper?
Jim Watt
Butler Univ.
ps: I'm sending this to the entire group b/c I think the energies Randall
is invoking are probably more than familiar to all of us; they certainly
are "old acquaintances" of mine! Peace to you all.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 18:06:57 -0400
From: Bill & Ingrid Wagner
To: blake@al