1985 - Fri April 5
"Warm today. Life is good.
4 Z's IV - Tharmas "rap'd bright Enitharmon far apart from Los." I just (maybe for the first time) realized the analogy with the making of Eve. "O how Los howl'd at their rending asunder."
Blake imagines a time before that when man and woman were one flesh - a happier time.
"That deadly night when Urizen gave the horses of Light into the hands of Luvah."
Blake - and everyone else - knows that intellect (the province of Urizen) is contaminated by Desire. Reason has become rationalized. Self interest is universally mistaken for Truth.
Ellie revolted against the general statement I was making last night about the corruption of colleges by money. A sad scene. She was saying that she doesn't want to hear the things I want to say.
I want to make statements about universal fallenness - which naturally no one wants to hear. It seems very important to me for people to become fully aware of the fallenness of the world in which they live. Everyone's existence is contaminated, corrupted, depraved, oppressed and diminished by it. People refuse to make the connection that we are all members of the one fallen, corrupt world."
Ellie's Comment
May 2017
Since I was not a student of Blake in 1985, I didn't realize that I was trying to play Ahania to Larry's Urizen. I was trying to warn Larry's intellectual side about failing to find the joy and delight in applying the intellect to seeking solutions to the world's problems.
He however was responding as Los to Enithamon as she tried to draw him away from his prophetic role to become engrossed in materiality.
Blake knew that he had to avoid both the pitfalls of projecting only the woes of the fallen world which stunted him, or only the joy of the visionary world which beckoned. For neither the joy nor the woe was the complete picture. It was the interplay of pain and pleasure, of shadow and light, of loss and gain, which provided the dynamic for a soul at home in two worlds.
Is this why Eve was initially separated from Adam: to initiate the creative dialogue which illuminates the appreciation of the 'not I' by the 'I?'
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| Found on Internet Frontispiece: Book of Ahania |
Book of Ahania, Plate 4, (E 88)
"Chap: V
1: The lamenting voice of Ahania
Weeping upon the void.
And round the Tree of Fuzon:
Distant in solitary night
Her voice was heard, but no form
Had she: but her tears from clouds
Eternal fell round the Tree
2: And the voice cried: Ah Urizen! Love!
Flower of morning! I weep on the verge
Of Non-entity; how wide the Abyss
Between Ahania and thee!
3: I lie on the verge of the deep.
I see thy dark clouds ascend,
I see thy black forests and floods,
A horrible waste to my eyes!
4: Weeping I walk over rocks
Over dens & thro' valleys of death
Why didst thou despise Ahania
To cast me from thy bright presence
Into the World of Loneness
5: I cannot touch his hand:
Nor weep on his knees, nor hear
His voice & bow, nor see his eyes
And joy, nor hear his footsteps, and
My heart leap at the lovely sound!
I cannot kiss the place
Whereon his bright feet have trod,
Plate 5
But I wander on the rocks
With hard necessity.
6: Where is my golden palace
Where my ivory bed
Where the joy of my morning hour
Where the sons of eternity, singing
7: To awake bright Urizen my king!
To arise to the mountain sport,
To the bliss of eternal valleys:
8: To awake my king in the morn!
To embrace Ahanias joy
On the bredth of his open bosom:
From my soft cloud of dew to fall
In showers of life on his harvests.
9: When he gave my happy soul
To the sons of eternal joy:
When he took the daughters of life.
Into my chambers of love:
10: When I found babes of bliss on my beds.
And bosoms of milk in my chambers
Fill'd with eternal seed
O! eternal births sung round Ahania
In interchange sweet of their joys.
11: Swell'd with ripeness & fat with fatness
Bursting on winds my odors,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates
In infant joy at thy feet
O Urizen, sported and sang;
12: Then thou with thy lap full of seed
With thy band full of generous fire
Walked forth from the clouds of morning
On the virgins of springing joy,
On the human soul to cast
The seed of eternal science.
13: The sweat poured down thy temples
To Ahania return'd in evening
The moisture awoke to birth
My mothers-joys, sleeping in bliss.
14: But now alone over rocks, mountains
Cast out from thy lovely bosom:
Cruel jealousy! selfish fear!
Self-destroying: how can delight,
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light.
FINIS"
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