SOURCE: Smith, Mark Trevor. “Striving with Blake's Systems.” In Blake and His Bibles, edited by David V. Erdman, pp. 157-78. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Smith, in attempting to understand Blake as a writer, analyzes the concept of the system that Blake claimed he must create in Jerusalem and other works.]

“It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.”¹

Foster Damon with his dictionary definitions² and Northrop Frye with his summarizing symmetries³ reveal tantalizing glimpses of Blake's promised land. These guides, and others, insist, implicitly if not explicitly, that they will lead us into Blake's “system.” However, most readers do not feel so sanguine about crossing over into that world. Denied entrance, they see at most the view from Pisgah. This border restriction does not fall only on beginners and shirkers. No one could exhibit more brilliance and learning than does Leopold Damrosch, Jr., when he sets Blake in philosophical contexts, but even he finally gives up on Blake as incomprehensible.⁴ Irene Chayes cleverly takes Damrosch to task for finding the long way round to the beginner's bafflement: Blake is a cult figure for the few.⁵

How is it that Blake's poetry creates such certainty in some of us and such confusion in others? It is almost as if we were reading two different poets, one clear and diagrammatic, prescriptive and static, triumphantly proclaiming his product, the other murky and confused, creative and dynamic, painfully struggling through process.

I would like to explore this problem by means of one of Blake's most famous lines: “I must Create a System.” Often this statement is conscripted in defense of Blake's clarity and accessibility (although sometimes of his crankiness and obstinacy). After all, he said he created a system; let us delineate it and be content. In the minority opposition is George Gilpin, who, when I was his student, laughingly insisted that the joke is on Los. Blake's character, said Gilpin, mistakes his task; he does not know as much as his creator does. There is no system; Blake abhors systems. Similarly, according to Thomas Altizer, the joke is on us: “Blake's is a ‘system’ which is not the product of a rational analysis and it can not be translated into rational terms. Blake profoundly opposed all of the established forms of conceptual coherence.”⁶

This tension between Blake's enthusiastic construction of systems, which makes it easy for us to understand him, and his scornful smashing of systems, which makes it impossible for us to understand him, becomes especially evident in Jerusalem. I choose Jerusalem not only because we find the intention to create system stated there, but also because, even though the issue appears often in Blake's earlier works, he works it through to a triumph in Jerusalem. Central to my inquiry are the Reuben episodes and the birth of Jesus, because these two Bible allusions are the longest and most powerful examples (although the poem contains many others) of the paradoxical combination of system-smashing and system-constructing.

The fundamental paradox, pervasive in Blake, is that disaster and blessing are inextricable; the fallen and the visionary, although opposed, cannot be separated. We cannot choose between them on moral grounds because such a discrimination cannot be made. Therefore it is impossible to decide either to build systems or to destroy them. We must, as Los learns in Jerusalem, simply decide to do both. We cannot always clearly distinguish between acts that cause falls and acts that create vision. The fact that man finds himself compelled to create systems provides evidence of the disaster of the Fall but at the same time it also contains a blessing of the imagination, the only way to re-construct what is lost. Whenever a system is constructed, it is a terrible mistake, leading to pain and loss. But any system is also, in the same place and at the same time, a merciful safety net, at worst preventing us from falling further, at best springing us back up where we belong.

Throughout this essay I am indebted to Hazard Adams, who has given us some penetrating insights into this question, couched in different Blakean terminology. What Adams calls myth (the Prolific, creative) and what he calls antimyth (the Devouring, restricting) must not be reduced into reconciliation; they must both be allowed to exist. He thereby advises an unreconciled juxtaposition and thereon bases his theory of the literary symbolic.⁷ I would add to his formulation a deepening of the paradox: we must hold in our mind simultaneously an absolute acceptance of the lack of reconciliation—that is, an inability to create system—and an absolute insistence on reconciliation—that is, a need to create system.

Recently Nelson Hilton, in an article that continues his analysis of “polysemous words” in Literal Imagination,⁸ explores some of the same kinds of paradoxes. For example, in applying Douglas Hofstadter's studies of infinite regress to Blake, Hilton states, “The system has … an interacting structure of cells coded into levels which in some places are both same and other”⁹ (Hilton's emphasis). At the beginning of his essay he invokes Steven Shaviro's idea that the phrase “striving with systems” is “an emblem for the contradictory determinations of Blake's poetry.”¹⁰ I find the approaches of Hilton and Shaviro compatible with my own, although my conclusions differ from theirs.

I have also learned much from the Jungian approach of Christine Gallant. She points out that in the early Lambeth books (The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los) Blake finds himself in a paradox when he tries to fight the rigidities of myth by constructing his own myth, which is in danger of becoming too rigid itself. There is a necessity for clear outlines, according to Blake's aesthetic, political, and religious beliefs, but clarity can become a Urizenic mistake. Putting the matter in its bluntest form, she observes that Urizen's earliest impulses toward fixed form are Blake's own.¹¹ I believe that Blake worked his way through this paradox and that Jerusalem shows his character Los undergoing a similar experience.

The paradoxical task of constructing systems and destroying systems is the work of Los throughout Jerusalem, especially when he tries to force Reuben over Jordan. It is the work of Jesus in Jerusalem when he creates his own body in the Incarnation. It is the work of Blake in writing Jerusalem.

Blake is not to be fully identified with his character Los; Blake in a sense knows more than his character knows. At the same time, Blake is not to be completely separated from his character; the struggles of the character are also the struggles of the poet. Perhaps it can be said that the poem knows more than either Los or Blake knows. Perhaps it can even be said that art itself, which is Blake's Christianity, knows even more.

Only a few plates into Jerusalem we hear Los cry: “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans” (J 10.20, E153).¹² Just before this line we see the system which would enslave him:

And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.

(10.7-16)

This last line evokes two Bible contexts which are essential to understanding Los's fury. First, in the Old Testament the Holy of Holies stands in the middle of the Temple, empty, forbidden to any but the High Priest.¹³ That central part of the Temple becomes in Jerusalem the most important example of an abstract center for a religion. Blake has the Sons of Albion construct an abstract and secret religion in their eagerness to separate good and evil. Second, the “Abomination of Desolation,” mentioned three times in the Old Testament (Daniel 9.27, 11.31, 12.11), and once by Jesus in the New (Matthew 2.15, quoting from Daniel), is some undefined violation of the Temple.¹⁴ By combining the void religion of secrecy and the heathen violation of that void, Blake thus gives us a desecration within an abomination.

The Sons fear evil and take strenuous measures to protect against it; at bottom they do not trust any scheme which is not abstractly, coherently moral. They seem to need to protect themselves from the encroachment of the details of life. Blake sees traditional religion enslaving itself to this system of abstraction, and thereby entombing the very life it seeks to love while enshrining the Abomination which desolates humanity's hope. A foolish abstract consistency works against the very goals which a religion thinks it desires: the finding of the eternal in the temporal.

Any abstraction of good and evil, such as that constructed by the Sons of Albion, sets up a standard of morality which can never be attained because its very standards are opposed to life itself. By defining God and religion in terms which are not really definitions at all, but negations of definitions, it makes all definite acts into sins, violations of its coherent code. It claims to be definite because it is rigid, but Blake's religion takes on definite shape without becoming rigid. Abstract religion refuses to give definite shape to good and evil, couching its tyranny in a hidden and capricious God who demands subservience and sacrifice. “Evil” is forbidden, and “good” is invisible, hidden, empty.

Traditional Christianity (not to mention many a Blake critic) makes a distinction between good and evil and assigns the former to the sheep and the latter to the goats at the Last Judgment.¹⁵ The traditional Last Judgment is a form of mass murder, whose purpose is to reassure those who abstract and separate in their exclusive self-righteousness. What is commonly considered the foundation of religion—the distinction between good and evil—is thus for Blake the basic negation perpetrated by religion. Negation murders because it abolishes half of life. Such an idea, in less inclusive form, structures Blake's earlier Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he juxtaposes the energetic voice of the Devil against the reasoning restrictions of God.

Los specifically tries to counter this system of moral discrimination: “Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza” (10.17). The “Therefore” expresses a cause-and-effect relationship. If Los does not build, then he becomes a victim of the system of abstract religion with its mystifications. He does not construct his new System in order to define a new tyranny, a rock-built refuge from which he is unassailable, but in order to prevent something worse from happening. He seems to believe that if he can just take actions exactly opposite to those of the Sons of Albion, then he can solve the problem. It is in this context that he makes the declaration in question:

I must create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans
I will not reason and compare; my business is to Create.

(10.20-21)

The theology of the Sons of Albion is consistent, coherent, and rational, resolutely avoiding chaos because it is formulated from abstractions around an empty center prescribing good and evil. It is tempting to believe that good and evil are easily distinguishable and that Los can therefore abstract his principles as the Sons of Albion do, make general rules of morality, and build his system against theirs. And indeed, many readers of Blake see him doing just that in plate 10 and throughout his entire oeuvre. But that very mode of thinking can lead to a trap, the same trap which the Sons of Albion set and catch themselves with. What is gradually revealed in Jerusalem, in precise detail, is that each such system must be constructed along with its contrary, which is the need to smash systems, or it leads to eternal death.

Throughout the poem, Los seems well-intentioned but somewhat ignorant. He never gives up; he keeps hammering until he learns that the distinctions he wants to make are impossible, until he learns to wait and watch as well as to weep and work, to be passive as well as active. Although Blake the poet knows more than Los the character, he implicates himself in the errors. Although Blake has worked his way through the problem before, Jerusalem shows him working his way through it again. Having gone through it once, or several times, is no guarantee against having to go through it again. The work and the waiting are always difficult, intricate, necessarily painstaking. Complacency never arrives. From this perspective, Blake does not present us with a fait accompli. Such an attitude would be the worst of complacent systematizing. He presents us with a never-ending process. But from another perspective he does not present us with an infinite repetition; there is an absolute end to time at the conclusion of Jerusalem. That paradox is the reason that Blake's “system” is impossible to pin down. The poet, and Los, and each one of us, must create precise systems, but there is no foolproof rule book, no consistent and coherent pattern handed down from on high. Each time is new. Success must include its apparent opposite. System and anti-system cannot be cloven in two.

This paradoxical combination of striving process and absolute end invests every action of Los. He is, we are told, “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems” (11.5). On the surface the phrase in 11.5 means that Los strives “against” (the obvious meaning of “with”) the destructive systems of others, especially the Sons of Albion, in order to bring innocent victims out from bondage to those systems. Los certainly knows this meaning. But since Los himself is constructing systems, then we must also read the “with” as meaning “by means of.” The way that he delivers individuals from systems is by creating his own systems. From this perspective the last words of the line take on additional meaning as well. Los constructs systems not only to bring the innocent away from the systems of others but also to deliver them from his own system. Like Blake, he builds systems in order to free individuals from systems, including his own system. The simple doubleness of this sentence is essentially the doubleness of Blake's system-making, which in the course of Jerusalem becomes a fourfold vision. It is not only a deliverance from the enemy, but also a deliverance from itself. All of us—Los, Blake, and reader—must live through this process.

The major difference between Los's work and that of the Sons of Albion is in revelation and definition. Los's work gives shape to truth and error, good and evil, pleasure and pain, and does not try to deny or conceal either apparent side of an opposition. The fight is against all denial, concealment, and doubt. All that exists must be revealed (the basic meaning of the word “apocalypse”) so that error can take on its clearest and most powerful shape, in particulars and in the aggregate, and finally fall away under its own dead weight (see 12.13). Like the Bible, Los's art reveals everything:

All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of
Los's Halls …
All that can happen to Man in his pilgrimage of seventy years
Such is the Divine Written Law of Horeb & Sinai:
And such the Holy Gospel of Mount Olivet & Calvary.

(16.61-62, 67-69)

If all is to be revealed, then nothing can be absolutely prohibited. Total revelation contains the impossibility of exclusion. Even the foolish aspect of Los's approach must be explored. Indeed, in chapter 2 Los finds that it is not possible to separate the correct from the incorrect and eliminate the latter, to separate the victim from the punisher and execute the latter. In fact, if he were able to separate and punish as he seems to want to do, he would be making a mistake like that of the Sons of Albion, would be making a rival system just as destructive of vision as theirs. Blake does not wish, nor does he present or advocate, a rival system which simply counters and negates the first system. Such is not possible anyway. Such a process, such a method, will not work in the poem, and it will not work for us as readers or critics or human beings.

The longest and most confusing single example of Los's frustration in simply carrying out his explicit goals occurs in chapter 2 when he tries to force Reuben to cross over the Jordan. These episodes (on plates 30 and 32) are crucial to understanding the complications and simplicities of Blake's systems. Blake bases the episodes on the story in Numbers 32 in which Reuben chooses to settle on the east side of the Jordan instead of crossing over and settling on the west with the other tribes of Israel.¹⁶

Blake's Reuben stories emphasize system-breaking (crossing the Jordan, destroying the Canaanites) and system-making (setting boundaries, establishing the state of Israel). Both tasks must be carried on simultaneously, and are not always easy to distinguish from each other. Los wants to break through the limits of perception which the Jordan represents, into the land of Canaan which Reuben perceives as a terror, and reorganize Canaan and Britain according to new categories and limits. Los's attempts to send Reuben are absolutely necessary, even if they are a mistake. Without those attempts, Vision can never be attained, but Los finds that the actions in and of themselves simply do not work.

When Reuben refuses Los's commands to cross over, he sleeps “Between Succoth & Zaretan beside the Stone of Bohan” (30.45). The first part of this phrase is taken from Solomon's building of the Temple:

In the plain of Jordan did the king cast them [vessels for the Temple] in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarthan.

(I Kings 7.46 [an identical passage occurs in II Chronicles 4.17])

This casting marks the culmination of the building of the Temple before the ark of the covenant is brought into the Holy of Holies (which, as pointed out above, Blake invokes in 10.15-16 when he describes the abstractions of the Sons of Albion). The New English Bible translates the words for “clay ground” as “foundry,”¹⁷ and that is certainly Blake's meaning in his only use of the phrase “clay ground” when Los works earlier in Jerusalem:

With great labour upon his anvils, & in his ladles the Ore
He lifted, pouring it into the clay ground prepar'd with art;
Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems.

(11.3-5)

It will be recalled that this last line is crucial to understanding the purpose of Los's system building. By their shared allusion to the clay ground between Succoth and Zaretan, these two passages from Jerusalem (30.45 and 11.4) reveal that the imaginative site of Los's artistic action is identical with the site of Reuben's sleepy recalcitrance. That is, the forging in the foundry happens at the very same place where Reuben lays his head on the rock and refuses to move. Trying to build and trying to force Reuben over Jordan are essentially the same action. But trying to build Golgonooza is clearly a visionary act; trying to force Reuben over Jordan often appears to be a mistake. As is often true in Blake, the site of a fallen action and the site of a Visionary action are identical. And in fact the actions themselves are identical. As Los discovers in the Reuben episodes and again later when he descends into the interiors of Albion's bosom, he is making a terrible mistake when he tries to force his system on others. He cannot simply push Reuben over Jordan, for Reuben simply will not go. Similarly, Los is discovering that he cannot simply oppose his system to that of the Sons of Albion. In other words, such abstract brutal morality, like that of the Sons of Albion, remains at a standstill. At the same time, Los's insistent hammering away at what he believes is the only way into Vision. Thus system building is both a mistake and a necessary part of redemption.

The main issue of constructing systems is where to draw lines: which lines to break and which ones to establish.¹⁸ Both Succoth and Zaretan are located in the valley of the Jordan, the former in the east and the latter in the west, so that this reference locates Reuben on or near the borderline which is so crucial in this passage, the Jordan River. As W. H. Stevenson explains:

The valley [30.43] implies the Jordan rift valley which cuts Reuben off, as stated in [line] 44. Succoth and Zaretan are in the valley respectively east and west of Jordan. … The Stone of Bohan the Reubenite is mentioned twice as a boundary stone (Joshua xv 6, xviii 17): B[lake] only seems interested in the association of Reuben with a stone—always, to B[lake], an evil influence, implying rigidity, death and often sacrifice.¹⁹

Although Stevenson is helpful here, and largely correct, he is misleading in one important way: the Stone of Bohan is not only a stone. Surely Blake chose it because it is a border stone, and the Reuben episodes concern themselves with the nature of borders and limits. The account in the Old Testament of the Israelites' conquering of the Promised Land is obsessed with borders—whole chapters of the Bible are devoted to spelling out in great detail exactly where the territory of one tribe ends and that of another begins. The Jordan River itself becomes the most important border, and Reuben's refusal to cross it, in Blake and in the Bible, is a rebellion against hopes for redefinition and renewal. But at the same time Los's angry insistence is shown to be inadequate.

Blake is exploring here the nature of borders—the Jordan River which must be crossed (violated, broken) and the tribal boundaries which must be established (fixed, created). Twice in Jerusalem (16.1-60; 71.10-53, continued into 72.1-44) he goes to reader-stupefying lengths to detail assignments of geographical areas in imitation of the Bible. I believe Blake is both breaking through old limits and establishing new ones, a process analogous to the melting down and reshaping Los performs in his furnaces, and analogous to constructing systems in their minute details, a process both blessed and disastrous.

All of this leads to frustration in chapter 2, as the futility of mere action is demonstrated. Because Los is so furious to set his systems against those of the Sons of Albion, he descends into “the interiors of Albions / Boson, in all the terrors of friendship” to “search the tempters out” (43.3-5). In what Erdman calls “the central action of the whole poem,”²⁰ Los finds the task of destroying the punishers and sparing the victims completely impossible:

[Los] saw every Minute Particular of Albion degraded & murderd
But saw not by whom; they were hidden within in the minute particulars
… Los
Searchd in vain: closd from the minutia he walked, difficult.
What shall I do! what could I do, if I could find these Criminals
I could not dare to take vengeance; for all things are so constructed
And builded by the Divine hand, that the sinner shall always escape,
And he who takes vengeance alone is the criminal of Providence;
If I should dare to lay my finger on a grain of sand
In way of vengeance; I punish the already punishd.

(45.7-34)

This awareness of inextricability takes place near the end of a chapter which has been full of such frustrations. Again and again Los finds out that the method of the Sons of Albion does not work because it destroys the very thing the action is designed to preserve.

Some new consciousness is needed. It comes in the forgiveness which is the subject of chapter 3. Self-annihilation through identification with the other, even with the enemy, begins to bring us out of the trap.

We see a strong hint of this solution near the end of chapter 2, a merciful corollary to the frustrating inextricability Los discovers earlier in that chapter. If, frustratingly, victim cannot be separated from punisher, then, blessedly, neither can Savior be separated from death. Once the agonized Albion falls into death,

                                                                 the merciful Saviour in his arms
Reciev'd him [Albion], in the arms of tender mercy and repos'd
The pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality
Upon the Rock of Ages. Then, surrounded with a Cloud:
In silence the Divine Lord builded with immortal labour,
Of gold & jewels a sublime Ornament, a Couch of repose,
With Sixteen pillars: canopied with emblems & written verse,
Spiritual Verse, order'd & measur'd, from whence, time shall reveal.
The Five books of the Decalogue, the books of Joshua & Judges,
Samuel, a double book & Kings, a double book, the Psalms & Prophets
The Four-fold Gospel, and the Revelations everlasting.

(48.1-11)

This couch of repose, the pillars of which are books of the Bible, is from another point of view the same couch/tomb which the Sons of Albion have just brought for Albion:

In stern defiance came from Albions bosom …
… Albions Sons: they bore him a golden couch into the porch
And on the Couch reposd his limbs, trembling from the bloody field.
Rearing their Druid Patriarchal rocky Temples around his limbs.

(46.10-14)

Once again, the site of disaster is the site of blessing.

As they did on plate 10, the Sons of Albion try to consolidate the reasoning power not in order to reveal it, but in order to hide it and maintain its negating force. However, the splendid irony of Jerusalem is that even this work which sets itself against revelation, which attempts to solidify and enshrine an abominable holiness in its center, this essential error, is also a part of the solution. The fallen and the visionary cannot be separated.

The way to proceed is not to try to negate the opposition as Los has been trying to do, but to include it and re-create it, as Jesus is doing. This concept of inclusion becomes the key to the forgiveness of chapter 3. It breaks through the stand-off of simple contradiction in which one is pitted against one, and begins to create the fourfold wholeness all of Jerusalem strives toward. I am not hereby denying Blake's insistence on creating systems which will dispel error, but I am insisting on a method that does not allow itself to fall into the destructive morality of the Sons of Albion. The morality of Jesus, which is based on forgiveness, is simultaneously a method of exclusion and of inclusion.

As long as the holy secretiveness at the center, whether that of the original tabernacle and Temple or that of the usurping Abomination of Desolation (which is the same force to a higher power), tries to maintain itself, it is caught in the tomb of death-in-life. But even this tomb reveals itself to be also the site of the resurrection, life-out-of-death. Its force consolidates itself until it must reveal the self-destructive negation which reverses it. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise—with a merciful vengeance.

From the fallen perspective the tomb/couch is a tomb of despair, but from the eternal perspective the couch/tomb is a restful couch of hope. It is both at the same time. The eternal does not cancel the fallen, but operates with it as its contrary. The work of redemption is carried on with the same raw materials as is the work of destruction. The tomb of Albion, which is analogous to the tomb of Jesus in the Bible, is a nadir, evidence of absolute despair. At the same time, party precisely because it is the lowest point, it is also the point of the beginning of renewal. It is the point where the worst and the best meet, are, in fact, simultaneous, inextricable.

The doubleness in these co-existent contraries does not consist merely in seeing the same thing in two different ways. The event is simultaneously fallen and eternal, sinful and redemptive, accepted and rejected at the same time. In the well-known optical illusion where one can see either two profiles or a vase, it is possible to see both things at the same time with the proper mixture of concentration and relaxation. Similarly, if the reader can bring to Jerusalem's paradoxes the same inextricable mixture of activity and passivity the poet brings, and Los learns to bring, then he can perceive things which he thought were mutually exclusive, and he will be seeing no illusion, but Vision.

As a more complete version of his virtuoso couch carpentry, Jesus in chapter 3 creates himself as the ultimate Christian artist. He becomes the other, the enemy, the Satanic Selfhood.

Imaginative acts must take definite shape; if they remain undefined, then man is forever lost in the void. (This is part of the idea of the merciful limits described on plate 31, between the two plates containing the Reuben episodes: Adam, the limit of contraction, prevents the body from falling into more disorder; Satan, the limit of opacity, similarly protects the spirit.) Fallen vision does not perceive the eternal, and so tries to create a substitute of concealment and mystery. Eternal Vision perceives the essential coincidence of opposites which fallen vision divides, and so it fully enters into the definite shapes, the minute particulars where the center and the circumference of Eternity meet. Jesus is born, gives himself a definite shape, for the same reason that Los sets limits and Blake engraves lines: to break through the false abstract categories which fallen vision tries to maintain, to create new definite forms and thereby to reveal the eternal in the temporal. Jesus submits to the fallen world in order to reveal it for what it is: the eternal perversely reflected.²¹ However, in order to do this, he must accept his opposite, take on his Satanic Selfhood, make a terrible error. The Incarnation is not a gimmick, as in Paradise Lost where the heroic Jesus knows he will win, but is instead a complete descent into dark otherness. Paradoxically, embracing that error is the only way to escape its terrors, the only way to fight it. To be taken on (combatted) it must be taken on (assumed).

The event of Incarnation, which is the ultimate extent of falling away from divinity because spirit has become flesh, is the beginning of re-unification. Just as the stars of the created universe are both evidence of the Fall and a merciful holding structure, just as the Bible as a work of art reveals the disastrous extent of the Fall and at the same time urges Regeneration, so the birth of Jesus occurs only because man has fallen so far away, but at the same time it assures his re-unification with God. God becomes as we are so that we may become as he is. The birth of Jesus is a way that the infinite becomes finite, becomes its opposite, the absolute other. Instead of trying to eliminate otherness or defend against it or deny its existence, Jesus forgives by becoming that other. This is the very movement of Spirit.²² Forgiveness does not assume sin on the part of the other and therefore exclude the other, but assumes and creates a fundamental identity between self and other and is therefore a forgiveness of self as well as other. Constructing a system must thus be not only a way of protecting the artist from the destructive errors of the others, but also at the same time must be a becoming of the other, an acceptance of the sin of the other, which is in effect a redefinition of that sin.

The Incarnation of Jesus is an act of forgiveness in the deepest sense because it accepts completely the fallen world while at the same time transforming it through the resurrection which follows the crucifixion. The death of Jesus in the fallen world allows him to pass through the apparent limit of death (see Jerusalem 62.18-20) into a resurrection which absolutely reverses the power of death and the Fall even while appearing to succumb to it.

This is the way to solve the problem, by breaking through apparent limits, taking on (in both senses of the term) the Selfhood. The purpose of Jesus in being born, crucified, and resurrected is precisely to convert religious/sexual energy into redemption:

Hence the Infernal Veil grows in the disobedient Female.
Which Jesus rends & the whole Druid Law removes away
From the Inner Sanctuary: a False Holiness hid within the Center,
For the Sanctuary of Eden. is in the Camp: in the Outline,
In the Circumference: & every Minute Particular is Holy:
Embraces are Cominglings: from the Head even to the Feet;
And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place.

(69.38-44)

The birth of Jesus, which has already been shown on plate 61 to have arisen from a sexual act, is here revealed to be another sexual act, because not only does it penetrate the veil at the mysterious center, but it also embraces all the minute particulars of existence. Just as it destroys female falsehood, so it destroys the male falsehoods the Sons of Albion create when they abstract good and evil and set up the Abomination of Desolation in the Holy of Holies. The rending of the veil of the Temple, a New Testament type for the redefinition of God's Old Testament law by Jesus, serves as a sexual and a religious metaphor.

Even after several reassurances, Los fears that if he immerses himself too much in the fallen world, in other words, if he builds systems too well, if he allows himself to become completely fallen as Jesus has done, he will lose eternity:

But pangs of love draw me down to my loins which are
Become a fountain of veiny pipes: O Albion! my brother!
Corruptibility appears upon thy limbs, and never more
Can I arise and leave thy side, but labour here incessant
Till thy awaking! yet alas I shall forget Eternity!
Against the Patriarchal pomp and cruelty, labouring incessant
I shall become an Infant horror.

(82.83-84; 83.1-5)

Not realizing how close he is to seeing Albion awaken, Los here doubts the very principle of action—immersion in the fallen world—which will help bring about the desired result. He forgets that complete descent into the horror of infancy is precisely what Jesus accomplished in chapter 3. He fears that the constant work which is absolutely necessary may lead to the opposite of what he intends. But he has forgotten that apparently direct action, on the model of that of the Sons of Albion, does lead to a result opposite to what he intends. Thus he is still trapped somewhat in the original error of Jerusalem 10.7-16, only resisting the error and not also becoming it. However, to say so is not to distance that voice of superior knowledge. I can judge Los in that way, but I am no less caught in the trap, and neither is Blake. Blake's ironies do not take a superior attitude toward his poem's characters, but a sympathetic, self-implicating one. To take the superior, snide attitude would be once again to fall into the original problem of false, abstract self-righteous error.

There is a special poignancy in Los's fear if we read it as Blake's own. What is to be done when one cannot vigorously and optimistically build systems? After proclaiming on plate 77 that the essence of Christianity is constant striving without idleness, Blake here reveals that this very striving may entangle him helplessly in the fallen world. A story told by Alexander Gilchrist about the aging Blake illustrates perfectly Blake's own solution to the problem of losing eternity:

‘Never,’ [says] Mr. Richmond, ‘have I known an artist so spiritual, so devoted, so single-minded, or cherishing imagination as he did.’ Once, the young artist finding his invention flag during a whole fortnight, went to Blake, as was his wont, for some advice or comfort. He found him sitting at tea with his wife. He related his distress; how he felt deserted by the power of invention. To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said: ‘It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?’ ‘We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.’²³

Los's method of praying, undoubtedly like Blake's, is not a cessation of action, but a continued hammering while he cries for divine aid. Los seems to learn, however, that not everything can be achieved through active percussion:

The land is markd for desolation & unless we plant
The seeds of Cities & of Villages in the Human bosom
Albion must be a rock of blood: mark ye the points
Where Cities shall remain & where Villages; for the rest!
It must lie in confusion till Albions time of awaking.

(83.54-58)

Not only does Los admit that some parts of the world cannot be organized by him by force, no matter how hard he tries; he also changes his mode of action: instead of being only a blacksmith and a builder, he becomes also a farmer. That is, he engages in an activity which demands both action and waiting, not just action.

This realization has already been adumbrated in plate 3. The poet informs us, “When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence …,” but he decides to produce variety instead. Several critics find a problem in this passage. Many ignore either the passive inspiration or the active choice. But we ignore the paradox at our own peril. The poet and the blacksmith and the reader must combine within themselves the freedom of individual choice and the passivity of the divine unity, the construction of systems and the acceptance of confusion.

The essential solution finally is to allow annihilation of the fixed and jealous self.²⁴ The Christian artist must become his opposite, instead of trying to exclude it. Only through this apparently paradoxical activity, which is the action of forgiveness, can the dead-end be broken through. Anything more sensible fails because it keeps us in the endless round of reprisal, most vividly sung in “The Mental Traveller.” Jesus, as the self-creating artist, becomes the horrible Satan to which he seems the antithesis. He does not, as do the Sons of Albion and as Los seems to be trying to do at first, try to separate off evil, but he recreates it, in the sense of accepting and becoming it, so that he can recreate in both senses: he imitates it and he changes it. This is, in fact, the essence of forgiveness.

It is also the essence of Blake's systems. Systems, like bodies, like tribal boundaries, must take particular shape, even at the risk of falling into sin. Trying to avoid evil or sin or the fall as abstractions keeps us in the trap. Jesus does not shrink squeamishly from sin. He is the Friend of Sinners, and in Blake's re-writing of the birth of Jesus in plate 61 even becomes the product of sin. The result of a human sexual embrace, he reenacts another by penetrating the veil, reversing center and circumference, finding thereby a new way of seeing:

He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children
One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst
Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole
Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized & not as thou
O Fiend of Righteousness pretendest …
You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you
May take the aggregate; & you call the aggregate Moral Law:
And you call that Swelld & bloated form a Minute Particular.
But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every
Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.

(91.18-22, 26-30)

This recommendation for new vision culminates in a scene of transfiguration:²⁵

Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd
By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it
Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form
A Man. & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity
And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los.

(96.3-7)

The movement of systems which I see in Jerusalem provides an interesting way to look at Blake's conception of his fourfold vision. Single vision, called “Newton's sleep” in the letter to Butts, 24 November 1802 (E720), is in this scheme the negating vision of the Sons of Albion. It is imposed vision. Double vision is the realization, through the attempt to separate, that “good” and “evil” are inseparable. It is the attempt to create a rival system, which finds that the contraries are inextricable. Since, after this realization, double vision cannot simply blindly oppose the other, it must learn to accept and reject simultaneously through the power of forgiveness, and thereby become threefold vision, the vision which sees through the doubleness of oppositions and contraries. The birth of Jesus brings this third dimension to the opposition of the sexes. Threefold vision, by self-implication through self-annihilation, even comes to the point of becoming the other, the Satanic Selfhood. The movement from twofold to threefold is the realization that simple opposition is a dead-end and that only joining with the other provides escape. Fourfold vision reciprocates the movement of the infinite into the finite and transfigures limited existence into infinity.

When all human forms are identified in 99.1-2, the word “identified” contains a similar fourfold meaning: in single vision, each individual is identified as an ego, unique as in an identification card; in twofold vision, each individual sees the separation of the other which is caused by single vision, identifies it as other and begins to oppose it; in threefold vision, by becoming the other, the individual identifies with the other, in a way that we call sympathy, and all human forms become the same; in fourfold vision, we see clearly, identified as what we are, both individuals and parts of the whole of humanity, neither extreme compromised, expanding and contracting at will.

The conclusion of Jerusalem shows us this absolute end which is paradoxically also an ongoing process:

Driving outward the Body of Death in an Eternal Death & Resurrection
Awaking it to Life among the Flowers of Beulah rejoicing in Unity
In the Four Senses in the Outline the Circumference & Form, for ever
In Forgiveness of Sins which is Self Annihilation. it is the Covenant of Jehovah.

(98.20-23)

The “Covenant” of the Old Law, which established the abstractions that made Los so angry in the first place, becomes identical with forgiveness.

Like the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, this ultimate vision of unity also remains in the real world. There seems to be a happy oscillation which includes both the large and the small view:

                                   the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order.

(98.33-40)

In the twentieth century, the theologian Rudolf Bultmann has defined a similar Christianity of an absolute end which is also an open continuation:

According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the eschatological event, the action of God by which God has set an end to the old world. … It is the paradox of the Christian message that the eschatological event … is not to be understood as a dramatic cosmic catastrophe but as happening within history, beginning with the appearance of Jesus Christ and in continuity with this occurring again and again in history, but not as the kind of historical development which can be confirmed by any historian. … [A]lthough the advent of Christ is an historical event which happened “once” in the past, it is, at the same time an eternal event which occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian in whose soul Christ is born, suffers, dies and is raised up to eternal life. … [E]very instant has the possibility of being an eschatological instant and in Christian faith this possibility is realised. … In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.²⁶

Thus Blake's system, while insisting upon an absolute end, at the same time goes on in the world. To choose absolutely either an end or a continuation is to recapitulate the horrors of the Sons of Albion.

It is appropriate to conclude this study with a statement from Blake's greatest critic, who approaches this problem from the question of whether Blake's art is complete or not:

It is clear that the argument over whether art is complete in itself or suggests something beyond itself … is dealt with by Blake as he deals with all questions that are cracked down the middle by a cloven fiction. … The work of art suggests something beyond itself most obviously when it is most complete in itself.²⁷

Similarly, the question of whether Blake does or does not construct a system is a cloven fiction. Blake is constructing systems most coherently when he is smashing systems; Blake is smashing systems most vigorously when he is constructing systems.

Notes

1. Friedrich Schlegel, Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1971), Atheneum Fragment n53.

2. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (1965; rpt. Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1979).

3. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969).

4. Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980). For example, writing of Emanations, Damrosch admits that they must be understood “as a mystical attempt to keep what we have and yet transform it utterly” (240). However, on a similar subject, he refuses this mysticism: “the body is at once a merciful ‘limit of contraction’ and a trap from which we must escape. But it is easier to say that it is both at once than to understand how it can be” (175). Finally, Damrosch has a definition of sense which excludes him from Blake's vision: “I do not deny that analogues to Blake's position [concerning the paradoxes of sexuality] may be found in Boehme and elsewhere; I deny that they make sense” (238).

5. Review of Damrosch in David V. Erdman, ed., The Romantic Movement: A Selective and Critical Bibliography for 1981 (New York: Garland, 1982), pp. 79-80.

6. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1967), p. xvi.

7. Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Tallahassee: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1983). Adams writes: “from poetry's point of view the poem makes a language, which creates and contains its signified and allows it to emanate into the world to be devoured; though I shall recognize that from the opposite point of view, which I shall call ‘antimyth,’ it copies or signifies only and cannot contain or radically form. And I shall hold that both views are necessary fictions—Blakean contraries from which a desirable culture can, but admittedly may not, emerge. This book is an attempt to build a language that expresses this situation of contraries as fundamental and necessary” (28) [italics mine].

8. Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983).

9. “Blakean Zen,” Studies in Romanticism, 24 (1985), p. 196.

10. Steven Shaviro, “‘Striving With Systems’: Blake and the Politics of Difference,” boundary 2, 10 (1983): pp. 229-50.

11. Christine Gallant, Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 10-15.

12. For abbreviations, see above, pp. ix-x.

13. See 69.44 (quoted later in this essay), Blake's improvement on Hebrews 9.7-15, in which Jesus is described as the new high priest.

14. Biblical scholars are not sure exactly what the Abomination was thought to be, but Daniel seems to expect some kind of Babylonian idol to be set up in the Temple.

    Blake similarly equates the Abomination of Desolation and the Temple's secrecies in his annotations to Watson: “The Bible or Peculiar Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination which like the Jewish ceremonies is for ever removed & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house” (E615).

15. The first words on plate 3 of Jerusalem (the first words in the poem after Blake effaced the words on plate 2), in white-line etching in the black border above the clouds, are “SHEEP” and “GOATS.” Because “SHEEP” appears on the reader's left and “GOATS” on his right, it seems as if Blake is inviting the reader to be judged by the text which he sees before him. As Erdman puts it, “the judging-forgiving Christ would be sitting just above the page (his name appears in top center, Plate 4)” (IB 283).

16. Useful discussions of Reuben can be found in Karl Kiralis, “A Guide to the Intellectual Symbolism of William Blake's Later Prophetic Writings,” Criticism, 1 (1959), pp. 190-210; James Ferguson, “Prefaces to Jerusalem,” in Michael Phillips, ed., Interpreting Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 164-95; and W. H. Stevenson, ed., The Poems of William Blake (London: Longmans, 1971).

17. New English Bible, with the Apocrypha (Oxford Univ. and Cambridge Univ., 1970), p. 383.

18. Of course Blake's statements about the wiry bounding line in his drawing and painting make an interesting juxtaposition here.

19. Stevenson, p. 686.

20. Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), p. 469.

21. For a brilliant discussion of this concept see Northrop Frye's explanation of “the central point of the argument of Jerusalem” in terms of reflection (Fearful Symmetry, pp. 383-90).

    In addition, this idea of the reversed relationship of the visionary and the fallen finds a fascinating analogue in Blake's physical production of his illuminated poems. The raised surfaces on copper are literally the type of the finished product on paper. But the entire physical process of printing is figuratively a type of the spiritual process of regeneration. Although it has its own identity as a physical process, it fulfills itself only in its reversal into a spiritual or mental product.

    Furthermore, the printmaker can complete his task only in an action of physical reversal. That is, when he prints on paper, his design is reversed. For detailed explanations of Blake's probable methods, see Robert Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), passim, especially pp. 89-92. Throughout Jerusalem Blake indicates that the attainment of eternal Vision can come only through a reversal of the fallen world.

    In a profound sense, to find the eternal world is to reverse the fallen world, just as the printmaker must reverse his design in order to print it onto paper. But he cannot reverse the plate until he has fully shaped it, in all its minute particularity. Furthermore, the design on paper is identical in every detail to the design on copper, except that it has been completely reversed, transformed in its perspective as well as in its medium. It is entirely different, even while it is the same, and both the sameness and the difference have been radically redefined from their original connotations.

    Just as the printmaker's work must be fulfilled by a process of reversal, so the Christian artist's task must be fulfilled by a process of reversal, a reversal which completely accepts the fallen world and at the same time utterly transforms it.

    “The poet himself must be able to write his script in reverse, so that it should appear in legible form through the second inversion in the mirror of art” (Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Asthetik n39, quoted in Lillian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), p. 121). This wonderful little statement encapsulizes the process of reversal. See also the illustration on Jerusalem 81, in which Gwendolyn's secret is displayed in mirror writing.

22. “The full meaning of the Incarnation is that the Incarnation is a dual and dialectical process whereby God empties Himself of Himself and becomes man and man empties himself of his historical particularity and his individual selfhood and becomes God: ‘Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.’ … Spirit is this eternal movement of absolute self-negation” (Altizer, pp. 74-75).

23. Life of William Blake I (1880; rpt. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), pp. 342-43.

24. For a brilliant explanation of the annihilation of the self in Blake's Milton see Mark Bracher's Being Form'd: Thinking Through Blake's Milton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), esp. pp. 243-44.

25. I argue elsewhere that the whole of Jerusalem is framed by a transfiguration scene, analogous to that found in Matthew and Luke, which is set up on plate 4 and completed in this passage on plate 96.

26. History and Eschatology (New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 151-55.

27. Frye, p. 418.

Much of the work on this paper took place in the summer of 1985, during which I studied at Stanford University in a seminar for college teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I thank the NEH for that opportunity.

Several other members of the seminar, particularly Patricia L. Skarda, encouraged me in discussions; above all, the leader of the seminar, Michael Cooke, gave me suggestions and courage. His Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979) had already proved valuable to me before the seminar. His “Romanticism and the Paradox of Wholeness,” Studies in Romanticism, 23 (1985), pp. 435-53, which appeared during the summer of 1985, stimulated me with its similarities to and differences from my own views.

I would also like to thank Michael Tolley, whose groundbreaking work in his unpublished dissertation, William Blake's Use of the Bible (London, 1974), revealed much to me.

No words can acknowledge the debt I owe David Erdman, who guided my doctoral studies at Stony Brook and who made suggestions to improve this article.

Abbreviations

B: (with catalogue number, followed by plate number) Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981)

BIQ: Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly

E: (with page number, e.g., E275): David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City: Doubleday; Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982) (some errors of pagination)

Essick: Robert N. Essick, William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983)

IB: The Illuminated Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City: Doubleday; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974)

PL: John Milton, Paradise Lost

Blake's illuminated works are referred to by plate and line numbers, e.g., J 49.50-52.

A: America a Prophecy

ARO: All Religions Are One

Eur: Europe a Prophecy

J: Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion

M: Milton a Poem

MHH: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

NNR: There Is No Natural Religion

Ur: The Book of Urizen

Other Blake works:

DC: A Descriptive Catalogue

EG: “The Everlasting Gospel” (in Blake's Notebook)

FZ: Vala, or The Four Zoas (cited by Night, page, lines)

NT: Night Thoughts; Blake's illustrations to Young's poem

VLJ: “A Vision of the Last Judgment” (E554-66)

Versions of the English Bible:

KJV: King James Version (1611)

NEB: New English Bible (1970)

RSV: Revised Standard Version (1952)