GESTION DE RECLAMOS Y RESOLUCION DE CONFLICTOS

And am I wrong to worship where Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair Since my own soul can grant my prayer?

(Emily Brontë 1992:23)

I think William Blake was a great writer. He was also a great believer. He is often described as a visionary poet, a term also applied to others, such as Wordsworth, who are regarded as members of the English Romantic movement. In Blake’s case, however, the term has a particular meaning because from childhood to the end of his life he had visions, in the sense that Joan of Arc or Bernadette of Lourdes had visions; he insisted on their perceptual reality and the validity of their content. He had a one-person religion, or perhaps two-person, as Catherine Blake, his wife, played Echo to his Narcissus in a thoroughgoing way.

In this chapter I suggest that what Blake saw as a religious system necessary to redeem mankind from its calamitous fall from eternity I would see as a psycho-pathological organisation meant to remedy a psychological catastrophe. In some of his writings, for example The Everlasting Gospel or A Vision of the Last Judgement, he articulates his system as a religious creed. In his prophetic books he describes, in the form of a series of epics concerning his own mythological characters, a mental catastrophe and a psychic remedy. He insisted that these epics were not allegories, but visions.

And he believed that mankind s fall and redemption were a mental event since divinity existed only within the mind. I think that his conscious belief system served an unconscious purpose, that it was a counter-belief system which was meant to protect him from, and remedy, an already-existing unconscious belief that would lead him to terror or despair. The psychological situation that is dreaded has in fact already happened, and he

William Blake and epistemic narcissism

gives an account of it in his epic poetic accounts of the Fall. His defensive and remedial belief system is a remarkably insightful account of what I called epistemic narcissism in the last chapter. I defined an epistemic narcissist as someone who believes only in his own ideas, a counterpart in the realm of knowledge to the libidinal narcissist in the realm of love.

It is not my plan to categorise Blake as a narcissist, but, rather, to designate as epistemic narcissism the system of belief he described and advocated. Similarly, though I imagine his description of psychic catastrophe derives from personal experience, it is the poetic account, his text, that is my source and subject, not his life.

T.S.Eliot wrote in his essay William Blake:

[He] was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own.

(Johnson and Grant 1979:509) Eliot thought the problem a simple one of lack of personal education in Blake and a deficiency of Mediterranean culture in England. He saw Blake as an English philosophical Robinson Crusoe. This rather imperious explanation is, I think, too superficial. Blake eschewed impersonal reason, common sense and objectivity for profound psychological reasons, and as such he speaks for many others who may well be highly educated, and even infused with Mediterranean culture, but nevertheless fear that their subjective existence may be annihilated by the objectivity of others. It is a fear of the chaos which would follow should subjectivity and objectivity be integrated that I think lies at the root of the system of belief that Blake elaborates. I have described this underlying fear in Chapter 4.

Blake regarded his imagination as the divine source, the creator, and he regarded belief as the act of creation; self-doubt he saw as destruction:

If the Sun and Moon should Doubt They’d immediately Go out.

(Keynes 1959:433) He saw belief as truth, formed by imagination and not received by perception; not seeing is believing but believing is seeing. He wrote that Vision is the world of imagination: is Eternity. Vision is all that exists’ and

he claimed: ‘Mental things alone are real’. The eye is an organ for projection, not perception:

This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole And leads you to Believe a Lie

When you see with, not thro’ the Eye

(Keynes 1959:753) Belief, treated as the truth, was for him the limiting membrane of an otherwise bottomless void, the only curb on the total mental disintegration that followed the act of creation. Creation, he thought, resulted in the catastrophic separating out from within the primal unity of the self of the intellect, with its attachment to the illusion of a material universe as a finite and measurable physical world. The infantile catastrophe is told by Blake in the form of his account of Creation in his alternative Bible of Hell, which consists of The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los.

He has two versions of this catastrophe, just as in the Bible the Book of Genesis has two versions of Creation. In the first version Urizen, the personification of intellect, creates a fathomless void in the personality by wrenching himself from the side of the whole body of the eternal self. In the second account Los, imagination personified, is faced with the impenetrable, material, objective world created by Urizen. Blake describes this as a confrontation with a solid, non-fluctuant object. Los was driven wild with impatience by this black, adamantine, impenetrable rock created by Urizen. Los smashes it into fragments, thus producing a bottomless abyss, into which he then falls. So we have in the first version the subjective account of a pre-natal quiescent psychic unity ruptured by that part of mental life that is linked to the physical senses tearing itself off, leaving a chasm within the self. The second account is from an observer’s viewpoint;

in this account the infant imagination, in its frustration and antipathy to the impenetrability, blackness, coldness and hardness of its primal object, smashes it to pieces and then falls into the abyss thus created:

…Los fell & fell

Sunk precipitant, heavy, down, down, Times on times, night on night, day on day.

Truth has bounds error none; falling, falling;

Years on Years, ages on ages,

Still he fell thro’ the void, still a void

(Keynes 1959:258) This second version strongly resembles that described by Melanie Klein as

William Blake and epistemic narcissism

the destructive attack on the internal object, resulting in states of mental fragmentation. She wrote: ‘The mechanism of one part of the ego annihilating other parts… I suggest underlies world catastrophe’ (Klein 1946:24). Bion, in several of his writings, emphasised this notion of Klein’s that the patient attacks his or her object with such violence that not only the object is felt to disintegrate but also the mental apparatus of the person delivering the attack. This poetic account by Blake describes this and the ensuing symptomatology in an extraordinarily vivid way.

Blake continues with his description of the Fall: ‘Incessant the falling Mind labour’d, Organizing itself’ (Keynes 1959:258). The resulting organisation designed to arrest the fall, by ‘the falling Mind’ Los, is an imaginary perceptual world with physical dimensions and bodily characteristics. This, Blake thinks, is Los’s error and the basis of the human illusion of physical existence in a material world in which mankind is subsequently trapped.

I see this dramatic story as an insightful account of a catastrophe that resulted from a violent fragmentation of irreducible psychic fact which was represented and experienced as a hard, unyielding object in the mind. The mind then falls into the abyss of ‘unknowingness’ thus created. As it falls it labours to produce a belief system that it can treat as the truth, the ‘bounds’

it needs to arrest its fall. Earlier Blake had propounded a dictum of absolutist subjectivity so that ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth’ (Blake 1927:8); so the belief system the mind creates ‘as an image of truth’ serves as its own safety net and remedy for chaos and the void. The enemies of belief are therefore the enemies of self-existence and the creators of chaos. The sceptics, ‘the Questioners’, as Blake calls them, are therefore the enemies of the mind. Professional questioners such as empirical or natural philosophers are the agents of Satan—Bacon, Locke and Newton in particular: Bacon for seeking truth through reason as opposed to revelation;

Locke for his emphasis on learning through experience as opposed to Blake’s belief that ‘Man is a garden ready planted and sown’ (Johnson and Grant 1979:443); and Newton for formulating the laws of nature in a material universe that Blake abhorred, and proof by mathematics, which he despised. ‘Science is the Tree of Death’, wrote Blake (Keynes 1959:777).

In this chapter I am concerned mainly with the nature and content of Blake’s beliefs rather than the quality of his verse. However, if I regard his ideas as seriously misguided, which I do, and if I consider that poetry should be judged by the test of truth, how is it that I rate his poetic verses as highly as I do? Louis Macneice, himself a considerable poet who was convinced that poetry was ultimately vindicated by its realism, addressed this question when considering the work of another great poet with strange convictions, W.B.Yeats. ‘Poetry gains body from beliefs’, MacNeice wrote, but ‘not necessarily because they are the right beliefs’. He went on: ‘It is not the

absolute, or objective, validity of a belief that vindicates the poetry; it is a gross over-simplification to maintain that a right belief makes a poem good and a wrong belief makes a poem bad’ (MacNeice 1941:231).

My own answer to the question of how a misguided belief can be the basis of a great poem would be to make a distinction between a true representation and the representation of the truth. Blake’s poetic account is a true, vivid and insightful description of an authentic psychological position and system of belief: it is a true representation. Even though I consider this psychological position to be false, defensive and based on an untenable belief system, it is one that forms the basis of some religious creeds; it is one held consciously by quite a number of individuals and unconsciously by many more. Because he was a great poet, he offers us a special opportunity to see, by the exposition of his own thinking, into the minds of others with similar belief systems and a similar need to protect themselves from like terrors.

Earlier I described his creed as exemplifying unashamedly and coherently epistemic narcissism. It is based on a claim to possess the truth by personal revelation; its reality rests on its subjective validity and on the basis of that alone, independently of its correspondence with other known truths and regardless of its disagreement with anything outside itself. In psychoanalytic terms, it is a psychic reality that claims to be true because it is internally valid and is independent of any correspondence with external reality. We could paraphrase Blake’s description of the eternal self as that of a true self that is only true to itself.

And in Melodious Accents, I Will sit me down and Cry, I, I.

(Keynes 1959:600) From outside, this self would seem to oppose any version of reality other than its own; from inside, any belief opposing that of the true self threatens to annihilate it. Accordingly, Blake, as he wrote in his prophetic poem Jerusalem, saw himself as:

Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.

I will not Reason & compare: my business is to Create.

(Keynes 1959:629) Blake unashamedly propounds as the route to salvation what in psycho-analysis has been called infantile megalomania. In this state, he claims, we are what we imagine we are, and our imagination is our share of the divine.

In our infantile innocence, he argues, we unselfconsciously believe this and

William Blake and epistemic narcissism

when redeemed will do so again. He celebrated this state of mind in his Songs of Innocence. The other part of that collection, Songs of Experience, is an altogether different matter. In these he brilliantly captures the cruelty of human nature and the horrors of Regency London.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appals;

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.

(Keynes 1959:216) In Blake’s view experience does not teach; it corrupts, with its deprivation, pain and provocation, and compels innocent egocentricity into giving a place to envy, jealousy and covetousness. As Jean Hagstrum wrote,

‘Experience is blighted Innocence…. It is a congregation of social, political, psychological, and unnatural horrors…. The one ray of light that penetrates its darkness is that of the coming judgement that will destroy it’ (Johnson and Grant 1979:529).

What is the price of experience? do men buy it for a song

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath; his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy, And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

(Keynes 1959:290) For Blake the sequence is not that of the tragic vision of life with a pattern of a beginning, a rise in maturity and fulfilment, and eventually a fall into age and death; his is the apocalyptic cycle. In this, as Northop Frye stated,

‘the tragedy comes in the middle with the eclipse of the innocent vision, and the story ends with the re-establishment of the vision’ (Johnson and Grant 1979:520). For Blake Creation is the Fall; we must therefore be redeemed by revelation and imagination to believe once more in the eternal and inviolate nature of the self free from the entanglements of that state of mind characteristic of the fallen world. In biological terms, conception, not birth, is the Fall; in traditional terms, it is not the loss of paradise by Adam and Eve but the separate creation of Adam and Eve. This fallen world in which

we live Blake called ‘generation’. In this, a world of the ‘human illusion’ of physicality and finite time, there were specifically two obstacles to a divine reunion of the self, namely the division of the sexes and the existence of generations. These are precisely the two ingredients that psychoanalysis has found to be the essential components of the Oedipus situation, the first unalterable facts of life that confront our wishful thinking with a disagreeable necessity and inevitably contentious future. The reality of generational and sexual difference, as solid, non-fluctuant and adamantine as that created by Urizen which confronted Los, in Blake’s epic, leading him to shatter it into fragments.

Before continuing with Blake’s ideas and their correspondence with some psychoanalytic theories, I would like briefly to place him and his family in a historical, literary and religious context. He was born in 1757, married in 1782 and died, childless, in 1827. Thus he lived through the American and French revolutions, and the English counter-revolution that followed, with its suspension of habeas corpus and free speech. It was a time resembling the McCarthy anti-Communist period in twentieth-century America. The poet Leigh Hunt, for example, was jailed for his writing.

Such was the class-consciousness of the period that a serious literary reviewer in Blackwoods felt able to dismiss the poetry of Keats and Leigh Hunt on the grounds that ‘All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society…but Mr. Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits’

(quoted in Coote 1995:102). London was a violent place; poverty and homelessness were rampant, and the cruel employment of children as chimney sweeps was considered respectable. It gives one a jolt when reading Jane Austen if one remembers that she was a contemporary of Blake, such were the different worlds that existed in one country intellectually and socially.

Blake came from a much lower class than the other Romantic poets. He was one of seven children born to a small shopkeeper in Soho. He was the third child; an elder brother died and he had one sister. Of his other brothers, he is described as adoring one and hating another, whom he regarded as ‘the evil one’. There is no evidence of family abuse or victimisation, but nevertheless he explained to the Jews in his epic poem Jerusalem:

A man’s worst enemies are those Of his own house and family.

(Keynes 1959:652) He felt his parents favoured his brother John, ‘the evil on’. He rarely spoke of his parents and, as Peter Ackroyd comments in his biography, Blake had

William Blake and epistemic narcissism

a sense of himself like ‘Shakespeare’s Coriolanus who stood “As if a man were Author of himself”’ (Ackroyd 1995:21). Frederick Tatham, his first biographer, five years after his death, wrote that ‘he despised restraints &

rules, so much that his Father dare not send him to School’ (quoted in ibid.:

23). Blake may not have been as self-conceived as he would have liked to have professed, but he was certainly self-taught. Later he asserted: ‘There is no use in education, I hold it wrong. It is the great Sin. It is eating of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’ (ibid.). He was apparently beaten once by his mother because he insisted on the reality of his visions. His parents never repeated this, although his father was tempted to do so when made anxious by the same insistence. The single beating remained with him as a grievance for life.

His parents sent him to drawing school at the age of 10 and five years later he was apprenticed as an engraver. On completion of this he gained a scholarship to the fairly newly founded Royal Academy School. The President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was later to become one of the favourite targets in Blake’s private intellectual shooting gallery. One of Reynolds s crimes was to be influenced by Locke. Blake wrote:

Reynolds Thinks that Man Learns all that he knows. I say on the Contrary that man Brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed.

Reynolds Thinks that Man Learns all that he knows. I say on the Contrary that man Brings All that he has or Can have Into the World with him. Man is Born like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed.