In the heightened state, exceeding immediate satisfaction, the goal of genital release is increased from a physical to a spiritual tension, and the original object becomes an instrument towards a sublimation. “The Greek aesthetic would seem to consist wholly in plastic, or in plastic moving towards coitus, and limited by incest, which is the sole Greek taboo,” Pound observes in the Cavalcanti essay. In the aesthetic of Provence “the conception of the body as a perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades”; beyond the sensory reality, “the impact of light on the eye,” and its ideal forms, in the spirit of Romance, the poets sought “an interactive force: the virtu.” A magic begins, and the poem as an operation of the new theurgy—love, sexual intercourse, as operations of the new theurgy—becomes other-worldly centered. Beatrice and Virgil, spiritual beings, are the true inspirations and hence critics of The Divine Comedy. In the high humor of the tradition, Blake will truly declare that he writes not for this world but for his true muses or lovers or readers in the spirit.
“Sex is, that is to say, of a double function and purpose, reproductive and educational; or,” Pound continues in “Psychology and Troubadours”: “as we see in the realm of the fluid force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities, heat and light.” Then:
The problem, in so far as it concerns Provence, is simply this: Did this ‘chivalric love,’ this exotic, take on mediumistic properties? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotion, did that ‘color’ take on forms interpretive of the divine order? Did it lead to an ‘exteriorization of the sensibility,’ and interpretation of the cosmos by feeling?
“Thirteen years ago I lost a brother,” Blake writes to his patron Hayley, upon the death of Hayley’s son in May of 1800: “and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the Spirit, See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice and even now write from his Dictate.” And in a letter to Flaxman in September that same year, he writes:
And Now Begins a New life, because another covering of Earth is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels. . . . I see our houses of Eternity, which can never be separated, tho’ our Mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.
In his excited state—“my Enthusiasm,” he calls it in his letter to Hayley, “which I wish all to partake of, Since it is to me a Source of Immortal joy . . . by it I am the companion of Angels”—Blake sees in terms of his Divine World, radiated with Love, a feeling as in Heaven above earthly feeling. This “Above” in Blake contrasts sharply with a “Below”—there seems to be a gap in feeling; for Hayley in Blake’s earthy moods is “Pick Thank” and Flaxman, “Sculptor of Eternity,” is “Blockhead.” Between 1808 and 1811, feeling mocked by Flaxman who had been his teacher and driven by Hayley who all Blake’s life was his patron or “angel,” Blake reviled them in epigrams and verses:
Anger & Wrath my bosom rends:
I thought them the Errors of friends.
But all my limbs with warmth glow:
I find them the Errors of the foe.
He had come to suspect that Hayley was patronizing and that Flaxman put him down as a madman. Hayley’s commissions for prints that had not been done yet pressed him and then depressed him. “I curse & bless Engravings alternately, because it takes so much time & is so untrac-table, tho’ capable of such beauty & perfection,” he writes Hayley or, again: “Your eager expectation of hearing from me compels me to write immediately,” Hayley’s very “generous & tender solicitude,” Blake calls it when Hayley paid his bail and court costs in Blake’s sedition trial, leave the artist feeling indebted and driven. “I received your kind letter with the note to Mr. Payne, and have had the cash from him.”
. . . Mr. Flaxman advises that the drawing of Mr. Romney’s which shall be chosen instead of the Witch (if that cannot be recovered), be ‘Hecate,’ the figure with the torch and snake, which he thinks one of the finest drawings.
September 4 [10], 1964
Joey, the “Mechanical Boy” of Bruno Bettelheim’s study in the Scientific American, March 1959 (“A case history of a schizophrenic child who converted himself into a ‘machine’ because he did not dare be human”), lives as a creature in a world created by an inaccessible creator, as a machine charged by invisible “pretend” electricity. “He functioned as if by remote control, run by machines of his own powerfully creative fantasy. Not only did he himself believe that he was a machine but, more remarkably, he created this impression in others,” Bettelheim tells us. “Entering the dining room, for example, he would string an imaginary wire from his ‘energy source’—an imaginary outlet—to the table. There he ‘insulated’ himself with paper napkins and finally plugged himself in. . . . So skillful was the pantomime that one had to look twice to be sure there was neither wire nor outlet nor plug. Children and members of our staff spontaneously avoided stepping on the ‘wires’ for fear of interrupting what seemed the source of his very life.”
The higher claim to reality of Joey’s created world over the uncreated world is a counterpart of the higher reality the world of his creation has for the artist over the world as material from which it is drawn. The “charge” we feel in the recognition of high art, the breaking thru into special truths or keys of existence, is a power the artist has evoked in transforming a content from a private into a communal fantasy. At certain conjunctions, where form and content are suddenly revealed in full, waves of excitement, as if a current had been turned on, pass over the brain and thru the nervous systems, and the body seems tuned up in apprehension of what is happening in the work of art. “Many times a day,” Bettelheim tells us, Joey “would turn himself on until he ‘exploded,’ screaming ‘Crash, crash!’ and hurling items from his ever present apparatus—radio tubes, light bulbs, even motors. . . . ” It is as if he were seized by the reality of his conception. It is not Joey’s retreat into a private world that we experience, but rather the intensity of his communication, the obliterating power of the language he has made, that takes over not only his reality but also that of those about him. Even at night he is governed by his work, fixing apparatus to his bed to “live him” during his sleep, “contrived from masking tape, cardboard, wire and other paraphernalia.” With such an intensity, Orpheus in Harold Dull’s poem transforms the actual events of his life into fantastic events—questions that refuse their answers—that are really strings upon a lyre that is a triumph of the imagination. The poet would give himself over to the charge of song, or, beyond poetry, the seer Blake would give himself over to the charge of vision, as Joey gives himself over to the charge of his made-up machine.
Certainly at times we confront in Joey’s work the operations of metaphor, correspondence, persona, and word play that govern the poem, and like the poet, Joey must be obedient to laws that appear in the structure he makes. “He was unable to designate by its true name anything to which he attached feelings. Nor could he name his anxieties except through neologisms or word contaminations.” But the artist too must find new names and knows that the true name is hidden in the work he must do, as Isis knows that Ra’s Secret Name is not the name that all men know but is hidden in his breast. (“They are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies,” we remember from The Walls Do Not Fall.)
“For a long time he spoke about ‘master paintings’ and ‘a master painting room,’ ” Bettelheim continues, and translates “(i.e. masturbating and masturbating room).” But now it is as if “masturbating” were not the true word until we also understand it is “master painting,” an ideogram is forming that when complete may reveal the hidden, as yet unexperienced, term; something that masturbating and master painting are but instances of. As here, from Orpheus transforming his life into an instrument of music, or Nat
alia Saunderson transforming her sexual seizure into an electricity, or Pound’s concept of a universe of fluid force, Joey’s idea of being lived by an electric current, I would gather a picture of a power the artist knows in which the fictional real becomes most veridical, in which art comes closest to religion—as in Blake’s world, in which man appears as a creature of his own creative force.
Like the poet, Joey must face his adversary in his work. “One of his machines, the ‘criticizer,’ prevented him from ‘saying words which have unpleasant feelings.’ Yet he gave personal names to the tubes and motors in his collection of machinery. Moreover,” Bettelheim tells us, “these dead things had feelings; the tubes bled when hurt and sometimes got sick.” The excitement and the discharge of excitement in the work of art, “master painting,” and the aesthetic requirement, the inbuilt ‘criticizer’ of the artist that determines appropriate material, appear in a grotesque guise in Joey’s universe. His tubes and motors are personae of his poem that has overcome all terms of identity outside of its own operation; as in “Good Frend,” Claribel, no more than a name, is so a person. Joey’s tubes and motors are not dead things, for they are words in a language that would be living. Deprived of communication, for the adults about him would not listen, “When he began to master speech, he talked only to himself.” We gather that his parents cut off that current of questioning by which a child participates in first communications, taking apart and putting together the machinery of language which before he had known only as a vehicle of electric emotions and persuasions. But Joey turns to another mute or frozen language embodied in man-made objects about him. “At an early date he became preoccupied with machinery, including an old electric fan which he could take apart and put together again with surprising deftness.”
Bettelheim is concerned with the loss of the flow of feeling, represented in the universe of Joey by the need to be turned on or charged; but we are concerned here with how Joey’s powerful creative fantasy is like the poet’s creative fantasy, the poetic imagination that must have a higher claim to reality than immediate “distractions,” in order for the poem to come into being, and how much Joey, run by his own fantastic machinery, is like the inspired poet in his divine madness. Pound, Williams, and H.D. do not make that romantic claim, but all three are disturbed by the power of words over them. Memory (the past), awareness (the immediate), wish (the future) are all heightened and demand satisfaction in the excitement of the work; and more, in that nexus of three, a creativity is at work to change the nature of truth. Blake gave the Imagination highest authority and sought to live in Creation. He could call up the shades of Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton—“majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men” and converse with them by the seashore. In his marginalia to Lavater’s Aphorisms Blake writes:
As we cannot experience pleasure but by means of others who experience either pleasure or pain thro’ us, And as all of us on earth are united in thought, for it is impossible to think without images of somewhat on earth—So it is impossible to know God or heavenly things without conjunction with those who know God & heavenly things; therefore all who converse in the spirit, converse with spirits . . .
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That if it would but apprehend some joy
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
There is a story that when Blake was making a drawing of “The Ghost of a Flea” the sitter inconsiderately opened his mouth. The artist, “prevented from proceeding with the first sketch,” listened to the Flea’s conversation and made a separate study of the open mouth.
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Joey lives in the Imagination deprived of the current of human friendship except for the love and care invested in the machines about him. He does not retreat to become a ‘mechanical boy’ (“because he did not dare to be human,” Bettelheim sees it)—but he advances in the one initiation into human spirit opened to him, the area of achievement and wish embodied in the operations of electrical and plumbing systems, even as in words it is the human work embodied that makes possible the formation of consciousness. The shapes of Homer, Dante, Milton gathered in the mind in the magic of Blake’s intense reading, as a person of the electric fan—the human invention—gathered in Joey’s mind in the magic of his intense taking apart and putting together again, cast shadows “superior to the common height of men,” as Joey was convinced, Bettelheim tells us, that machines were superior to people, or Plato that ideas were superior to things. “If madness and absurdity be synonyms, which they are not, then Blake would be as ‘mad as a March hare’,” Samuel Palmer wrote to Mrs. Gilchrist in 1862: “for his love of art was so great that he would see nothing but art in anything he loved.” So Joey in his love for mechanism saw nothing but mechanism in what he loved. Language may mean all to me, more than art, for the universe seems striving to speak and the burden of life to be to understand what is being said in words that are things and persons and events about us.
“Not every child who possesses a fantasy world is possessed by it,” Bettelheim observes: “Normal children may retreat into realms of imaginary glory or magic powers, but they are easily recalled from these excursions. Disturbed children are not always able to make the return trip.” And those who know no disturbance of reality, we would add, cannot make the trip out at all.
The shaman’s trip to the Other World, the medium’s trip to the Astral field, the poet’s trip to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, is a counterpart of the dreamer’s trip to the dream or the child’s trip to the land he plays. In the process of realization, the Creator must so go into the whole of His Creation in order to create it that it becomes the most real and He becomes most real in it. In the full power of the Imagination, Creation is all, and Who had been Creator is now Creature. God is immanent in the Universe, and incarnate in a person. This is one of the mysteries of the human Christos. Here too there must be a round-trip, the return to God, but it must also be not easy but the least easy of all recallings, for Christ’s apotheosis in hubris must be fulfilled in crucifixion. In the full Christian persuasion—most high divine madness—there is a triumph of creativity: the Eternal insists that He has had a life-time and death in history; the Supreme Fiction insists that It has had a personality in the nonfictional Jesus.
October 1, 1964
To be easily recalled from these excursions, to possess a fantasy world and not to be possessed by it—the way of normal children—is achieved by keeping in mind that the imaginary is not real, that such areas of the psyche’s life are no more than child’s play, that it is no more than a story. Here, in the fairy tale, taking place in whatever far country and having that time between once upon a time and forever after, stored away for children in the minds of their old nurses and, since the seventeenth century, in a new literary form initiated by the Contes de ma mère l’oie of Charles Perrault, the nursery romance, the subversive force of man’s creativity hides in an amusement. “In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat”—in the old times, when Wishing still could help—the German folk Märchen begins, and in the guise of entertainment, the old woman imparts to her infant audience news of the underworld of man’s nature, of betrayals and cheats, of ogres and murderers, thieves and shape-changers. They learn to mistrust the real, but they learn also the wishes and powers of old religions and states that have fallen away. The fairy tale is the immortal residue of the spirit that seeks to find its place in the hearts of each generation. As in the twelfth century, religious mysteries and erotic formulations found immortal life in the high romances of the Arthurian cycles, so the folk world perpetuated itself in the yarns spun at the hearthside, and even now, when the spinning wheel has gone from the household way and the fireplace has lost its central function there, the märchen has survived in book form, rescued by the devoted Brothers Grimm. As, again, in the court nurseries of le Roi Soleil, like bees secreting the royal jelly to feed the possibility of a queen, imparting style and senti
ment, plot and wish, to life, a group of courtiers, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, as if apprehending the death of their way—Perrault, then the Countesses de Murat, d’Aulnoy, d’Auneuil, and the Count de Caylus—write their Cabinets des Fées. When the dust of the revolutionary tumbrels and the blood of the guillotine have come and gone, and the bourgeoisie, the merchants, industrialists, and managers of our age have taken over, Perrault’s Cinderella, like the Queen of Elfland who carried away Thomas of Erceldoune, would carry away the young from the common sense and capitalist reality into her irresponsible romance, the unreal of falling in love and being loved. Early in the process of the Christian era, Augustine, inspired by a most Puritanical demon of righteousness, had warned against such a corporeal light that “seasoneth the life of this world for her blind lovers, with an enticing and dangerous sweetness” and deplored the lot of those who are misled by requited love. Yet the ghosts of the dead, of defeated forces in history, survive in the fascination of the living. When the last nobility had died out in the nobility and the rule of public utilities succeeded, Beauty and The Beast from Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s eighteenth century tale, as well as Oedipus from the drama of Sophocles, revive in the art of Cocteau.
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