LIBERTY

First posted Sept 2020

  Blake Archive

Orginal in British Museum

Jerusalem

Plate 26

Blake's Song of Liberty is often thought of in terms of support for the revolutionary spirit which could liberate man from political oppression. But this type of liberation has proven to be of a cyclical nature. Although man may temporarily acquire greater freedom by throwing off the tyranny under which he lives, he soon submits to rulers and laws which deprive him of his freedom. Blake was less interested in ending the recurring cycle of political control which kept man bound in the physical world, than he was in breaking out of the mental cycle which keeps him trapped mentally by finding repetitious patterns necessary.

Northrop Frye presents the question asked by Nietzsche: 'is the limit we see there really a limit.' Is it possible to transcend the barrier which we fear to cross? There is a New Song to be sung, but we cannot sing it unless we can look at one another not as 'the other' but as 'my other self.' In a way this would represent a return because we all crossed this barrier in the opposite direction when as infants we first discerned that we were separate from the mother who was the source of milk and warmth and the comforting touch.

There have been periods in history when man's self-perception changed. These events were evolutions of consciousness which permanently opened the psyche to new abilities. They altered the mind of man and the physical world followed as a result. The job of the individual is to follow his imagination as it leads to another dimension.

In The Great Code, Page 232-3, Northrop Frye writes about the conditions which inhibit man from achieving his potential:

"As soon as we begin to wonder whether, to use Nietzsche's phrase again, the limit we see there really is a limit, we find ourselves stumbling over the traditional Christian doctrine of 'original sin.' This doctrine holds that since the fall of Adam human life has been cursed with a built in inertia that will forever prevent man from fulfilling his destiny without divine help, and that that help can be described only in terms of the external and the objective. From our present vantage point we can characterize the conception of original sin more precisely as man's fear of freedom and his resentment of the discipline and responsibility that freedom brings.

"Thus in Milton ...liberty is the chief thing that the Gospel has to bring to man. But man for Milton does not and cannot 'naturally' want freedom, he gets it only because God wants him to have it. What man naturally wants is to collapse back into the master-slave duality, of which the creator-creature duality is perhaps a projection. Paradise Lost tells again the fall of Adam to explain, among other things, the failure of the Puritan Revolution as Milton saw it. 

"..If Milton's view of the Bible as a manifesto of human freedom has anything to be said for it, one would expect it to be written in a language that would smash these structures beyond repair, and let some genuine air and light in. But of course anxiety is very skillful at distorting languages".

Jerusalem, Plate 26, (E 171)
" SUCH VISIONS HAVE APPEARD TO ME 
     AS I MY ORDERD RACE HAVE RUN 
      JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY 
       AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION

Songs and Ballads, (E 473)
"Why should I care for the men of thames
Or the cheating waves of charterd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames     
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me    
I was born a slave but I go to be free"   

Songs and Ballads, (E 472)
[How to know Love from Deceit]

"Love to faults is always blind
Always is to joy inclind                             
Lawless wingd & unconfind                    
And breaks all chains from every mind

Deceit to secresy confind                       
Lawful cautious & refind                         
To every thing but interest blind             
And forges fetters for the mind"