Vision fo Daughters of Albion frontic piece
Flower/Nymph
Oothoon asks the bright Marygold of Leutha s vale Art thou a flower! arth
thou a nymph! I
see thee now a flower ¦ Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy
bed!
Transformations begin in Blake's technique for his early works. The illustration of thevine in "The Divine Image" is a simple transformation from a white line image to a black line image, "The manipulation of white and black line is most obvious in the vine, which is positive outside the broad leaf and negative when crossing it. Without the white parallels line, the vine would in fact disappear during its crossing" (Viscomi 61).
There is a visual and technical keenness to this crossing from white to black. The viewer's eye moves from white to black as the artist's hand moved from broad brush strokes of black to fine needle work creating white spaces or lines. The eye moves from black to white, the hand moves from brush to needle. There is a shuttling between physical image and mental transformation. Transformations at the visual level of Blake's early texts become in his later texts' complex transformations incorporating multiple fields rather than the tension of twosides of a single field.
Other examples of the folding.
A woman s body is the fold between two worlds, a lower world and a higher
world which the
arms gesture toward in Sea of Time and Space , a.k.a. The Arlington
Court Picture
(1821)
The same is true in Blake s early work such as his illustration for Young s Night Thoughts (1797).
The child-worm looks upward hoping to become a butterfly while the
caterpillar looks
downward. The two form a mobus turning inward/outward on itself.
For children: the Gates of Paradise (1793)
Swan-->Woman; page eleven of Jeusalum (1815-20) is double sided.
The swan at one end and the woman at the other end of the text share similar properties and seem to fold into each other. However to understand how the swan becomes woman and woman becomes swan, a more complex understanding of transformations is necessary.
Blake's Notebook Daphane-->tree circa 1790
Reference to vibrations occur throughout Blake's texts. Take for example The Four Zoas. Orc wails as he is bound down by Los. Urizen who has been bound into a stupor by Losseveral Nights earlier feels a wailing from a source unknown to him that has traveled acrossdistances until it becomes a "deep pulsation/ That shakes my caverns." The pulsation causes Urizen to leave his den and to journey across the landscape of Night Six (65:9-10). The wailing of Enion makes "the golden heavens tremble" such that "Ahania heard the Lamentation & a swift Vibration/ Spread thro her Golden frame." (34:100, 36:14-15).
Blake's letter to Haley in 1804 shows his concern for crossing over:
Imitation respects the boundaries between wholes or units while, setting up comparisons between bodies considered separately, as entities unto themselves. It conceives of the body as a structural whole with determinate parts in stable interaction with one another. The model is the organism: a body is made up of parts (organs) with identifiable characteristics, supposedly intrinsic qualities, which predispose the whole they compose to certain habitual patterns of action. (Brian Massumi A User's Guide to Captialism and Schizophrenia 96)
Blake does not persue analogical thought. Analogy maintains the reference to complete frames or fields which serve as the standard of measure for all elements within the frames. Such standardizing frames provide each object enframed with its contextualized meaning. Breaking frames, resonating between frames, or having an aleatory quality launched into a new frame disturbes a unified framing of meaning.
America pages 14-15 leaf-->flame--.woman-->tree
In many ways, America is a landmark of what is possible for Blake in illuminated folio. There are several moments in America which illustrate Blake's experimentation. Take forexample page fourteen. At the bottom of the page is a dragon spitting forked fire who emerges out of the roots of a tree. This dragon resonates with the snake/phallus protrudingwith forked tongue from a man's (or perhaps it is a woman's) legs as drawn in the middle of the page. At the top of the page a number of leaves are drawn with a bird flying around them. One of the leaves, a forked leaf, is painted red. The dragon's fire has transformed the leaves of the tree. The tree is aflame, but so subtlety that it seems to be simply a tree. The last line(s) of the page read(s), "The red fires rag'd! the plagues recoil'd! then rolled they back with fury" and the following page "On Albions Angels." The rolling back of the fires is seen in the small red leaf, hardly noticeable but obvious on the next page where flames engulf foliage and strip a tree bear. What is significant about the red leaf is that there is a body, the leaf, separated from an attribute, the color of a leaf. This separation of body from attribute allows for the transformation of leaf to flame. Redness and curves of flames at the bottom of page fourteen and on page fifteen resonate with redness and the curves of the leaf. As the reader's eye shuttles back and forth from one to the other the reader becomes aware of the transformation of leaf to flame, the becoming-flame of the leaf. Otherwise, to see the leaf as only a leaf is to be stuck in "Single vision & Newtons sleep." Becoming-otheris a means of liberation via imagination (Massumi 100). As mentioned earlier, the leaf of "The Divine Image" changes from a positive to a negative image and corresponds to changes in the artist's hand and the viewer's eye. Transformation is taken further in becomings where perceptions change as the very bodies and organs undergo transformation and destabilization of their functions. As the body changes, so does its perceptual capabilities. As the capabilities change, so does the body. "If Perceptive organs vary: objects of Perception seem to vary."
The shuttling back and forth between pages fourteen and fifteen of America is also amovement from the calmer darker page fourteen to the more destructive and furious flames of page fifteen. The furious energy of page fifteen is expressed in a series of becomings, textual transformations. Following the rising of the flames from the bottom of the page to the top, the curves of a woman's body and the color of her flesh resonate with the rising flame. Her left foot is on the tip of a flame and her right foot extends as if standing on her toes. The woman rises with the flame. This is the becoming-flame of the woman. The top of the flame changes color and shape: is it a flame, or a fleur-de-lis, or a root?
There are several perceptual levels here. (these levels are fields of meaning.)Then from the root a woman's foot rises. Moving upward from her foot is the woman's body and a tree. But, there is no visible trunk to the tree, only her legs, hips, and torso. Roots become woman. But the woman has no hands; rather her arms become tree limbs. Woman is becoming tree branches (a sort of pun on limbs). Above this woman/tree another tree hovers over a grave which is shaped and colored like the back and behind of a human whose head and torso are buried in the earth. These are not isolated moments of America.
On page one of the Preludium to America a man appears to descend down a tree. Amid theroots of the tree is a woman's torso and legs. America page 6 leaf-->skull
Page twelve of America places a youthful and hopeful man next to a leaf which is shaped likea skull colored yellowish white or ivory (Morton D. Paley's William Blake 22, 29). Theshadows of a leaf are the eyes and teeth of a skull. The image is a visual pun on the word"fall." The image recalls both the season and the metaphysical state. The notion of a "vegitative body" arises as a resonance in the verbal pun.
Tyger stripes-->tree-->limbs-->Y,
Examples of separating attributes from bodies in a visual transformation
can be found inmany early texts. One such striking transformation is in
"The Tyger" where the grayish
stripes as an attribute of the tyger's body are also found on the tree
beside the tyger.
Furthermore, the limbs of the tree stripe the body of the poem, intruding
into the corpus of
the poem like stripes on the corpus of a tyger. Striping and absolution
are major themes of
Songs of Innocence and Experience as in "I made a rural pen, / And stained
the water clear"from the "Introduction" of Songs of Innocence.
Striping
continues in the repetition of Y s: thy, tyger, symmetry. The slant of
the "y" cuts
thought the line and stripes the text. Visual image effects the graphic
quality of words.
Tyger is spelled with a stripping "y." The "y" cutting into the tyger's
verbal body recalls the
mark of sin or evil, "who form'd thy fearful symmetry."
The right foot is redrawn twice on page 99. Something is about to change. Look at theillustration on page 100.
Again there is the face and beard of an old man. Again there are wings. Again there is a stable right foot and an left foot in motion. But this is not a man, nor is it an animal, despite the lion- or tyger-like body, despite the horse- or deer-like legs. Not man nor animal, this is becoming-animal of a man. In the body organized by organs, in the organism, each body part takes on a habitual way of functioning. Habit is standardization and mechanization, performing the same action again and again over time. Thus organs take on different functions and each function distinguishes itself. Consider Los who in The [First] Book ofUrizen and The Four Zoas continually swings a hammer in forging body parts. Hismechanized motion turns his actions into habits till he becomes what he beholds. Los gains limbs by reducing his motions to redundancy and thus limiting the freedom of possibilities of these limbs. Becoming-animal is bodily thought (Massumi 99). Becoming opens the organs to new dimensions, opens "the doors of perception." Instead of the same forces acting on a body for the same functions, new forces are applied so that the body functions differently and so that no organ remains caught within the redundancy of identity. Analogy works by transcendence and abstraction while becoming works by immanence. Analogy abstracts from concrete particulars to create a general, transcendental model, particulars of concrete matter are left behind. Becoming begins with concrete particulars, the line of a foot for example, and transforms the concrete.
No longer does the drawing of a foot represent a foot. It loses its form anddeterrtiorializes. It is a series of lines. Page 100 is filled with random lines not representing any object.
Eventually, the lines reterritorialize, or at least some of them do. They become a human- lion-deer-wolf, bat-winged figure. The image seems to illustrate not the words of page 100 but the Urizen's battle as it appears on pages 101 and 102. The image on page 100 depictsan element of the war which is mentioned briefly here and is described in more detail on pages 101 and 102. While the figure of page 99 looks to his left toward the text, the figure on page 100 emerges from the darkness of a future description and looks toward the past page, 99. The two figures face each other, one of the past (99) and one of the future (100, 101-02). The futurity which Urizen has dreaded since Night Two of the Four Zoas is nowfacing the past. The text itself describes two creatures hovering over the Fallen Man, "Two winged immortal shapes one standing at his feet/ Toward the East one standing at his head toward the west." It is worth noting that because many of the lines regarding wings are crossed out in the Zoas "manuscript," the Zoas in the Erdman Complete Poetry and Proseedition gives little attention to wings on pages 99 and 100. In contrast, the "manuscript"shows a much larger concern for wings. Not only are the figures on these pages winged, but also five deleted lines in the margins (or wings) of the manuscript are marked through. These lines describe "other wings" in addition to the ones in the body of the text. These wings as "other," in the margins, and crossed out makes them virtual or suspended. It is possible thatthe body of the text can stand alone without a winged margin; however, since a winged margin does exist--highlighted by the lines which mark its deletion--the transformation from feathered wings to bat wings is intensified.
The drawing of on page 100 has bat wings. Since more than analogy is at work, wings ofTime from page 99 do not simply translate into bat wings. The bat wings replace arms and feathered wings. What guides transformation in becoming is not similarity but rather a constellation of forces applied to an object. The war forces have been evident since Night One. Likewise, weighing animal against man begins in Night One. In dire misery, Enion laments that "The Horse is of more value than the Man. The Tyger fierce/ Laughs at the Human form. the Lion mocks & thirsts for blood" (15:1-2). And likewise, sexual division has played its role in the narrative. The phallus combines with the troops of war and the animals to express at various levels the conflicts of the narrative. Granted the figure on page 100 does not look overtly phallic, but the protruding head does look like a penis. What makes the phallic attribute evident is actually the bat wings. Page 42 shows clearly a bat winged phallus, another flying bat winged phallus appears on page 134. Thus, the constellations of war, sexual division, and the animal attributes of both move the line of the deterritorialized right foot into a human becoming lion-tyger-wolf-bat winged-phallus.The bat-winged phallus on page 100 forms a constellation of war, sexual division, andanimals. The bat-winged phallus is not an analog. The conjunctive synthesis which is performed is not transcendental; rather it proceeds by way of immanence. It is not the idea of the perfect foot which creates the new image, rather it is deviance from perfection, the need to draw the foot again which causes deterritorialization by means of immanence. There is also an element of abstraction, but not an abstraction toward a model, rather the abstraction of a pure line, a trajectory which reconfigures according to a the variety of forces at work on it--war forces, sexual forces, animal force, forces of the narrative past and future.
the Nebuchadnezzar moment
The position of the hand, the look of the face, the knees bending, the overly long toes of the left foot bring to mind the image of Nebuchadnezzar, the man becoming-animal who crawls among his caves. Beneath the figure in Marriage a caption reads "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression. Lines and limits of organs composing an organism become lines of flight, from foot to claw and from face to phallus.
By 1800 the narrative of the Zoas is well under way, and Blake moves to Felpham. There he will become obscure, as will the Zoas. John Johnson asks Hayley "is our dear Blake dead." He is not dead, or rather as Blake confesses, he himself has died several times and crossed over at least twenty twenty times (Erdman 316, 756). He is deterritorializing, becoming-zoa.