The Outsider (44 page)

The times are ended, shadows pass, the morning
‘
gins to break,

The fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands

What night he led the starry host through the wide wilderness.

That stony law I stamp to dust, and scatter religion abroad

To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the
leaves.
...

To renew the fiery joy and burst the stony roof

That pale religious lechery, seeking virginity

May find it in a harlot, and in coarse clad honesty

The undefiled; tho
’
ravished in her cradle night and morn.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life

Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled

Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumed,

Amid the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass

His knees and thighs like silver, and his breast and head like
gold.
³⁴

In
‘
Europe
’
, he uses woman as a symbol of imprisonment, for the female temperament is lit
eral, practical, down-to-earth.

Enitharmon, the female counterpart of Los, the Outsider-principle, cries:

Go, tell the human race that woman
’
s love is sin

That an eternal life awaits the worm of sixty winters

In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come.. .
^8
5

The symbolism here is plain enough: literal thinking perverts the inspired truths of religion into superstitions. And Blake
’
s accusation, hurled at the whole world, is that it thinks literally. Blake
’
s particular bugbears were the rationalists and the
‘
natural-religionists
’
, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the scientists Priestley and Newton. (Modern counterparts of these would be the Secular Society, or thinkers like Dewey and Russell.) Such men, Blake swore, were
‘
villains and footpads
’
, men subjugated to the woman
’
s literal way of thinking.

In
‘
Europe
’
, Newton
’
s heresies bring about the Last Judgement (and anyone who will take the trouble to look into Newton
’
s
On the Prophecies
will see why Blake detested him so much); and Los, symbol of imaginative vitality,
‘
calls all his sons the strife of blood
’
. Blake, like Shaw after him, toyed with the idea that one day it might be necessary for the
‘
men of imagination
’
to shed the blood of the literal-minded who m
ake the world unfit to live in.

‘
Europe
’
is the first of a series of poems that deal with the narrow, literal state of mind,
‘
single vision and Newton
’
s sleep
’
. This, Blake believed, was the real enemy. To facilitate his analysis of Outsider problems, he divided man into the same three divisions that we arrived at in Chapter IV: body, heart and intellect, calling them respectively Tharmas, Luvah and Urizen. His major poems, the three epics
‘
Vala
’
,
‘
Milton
’
and
Jerusalem
’
, deal with the interaction of these three in a series of Apocalyptic scenes, that, on the surface, seem to lack simple coherence. Yet in spite of their confusion, it is in these epic prophecies that we can see Blake
’
s creative thought most clearly at work. All the action takes place
inside
the hero, the Giant Albion (man), as he lies stretched out on the rock of ages. (This method will bring to mind in most readers that other epic of obscurity
Finnegans Wake,
which also takes place in the hero
’
s mind while he lies asleep.) And perhaps the best idea of the import of these poems is contained in the line from
‘
Milton
’
(put into the mouth of an ancient bard, and repeated at intervals to drive it home) :

Mark well my words—they are of your Eternal Salvation

It is a line that could be put as an epigraph on the title-page of Blake
’
s Works.

To his three principles, Luvah, Tharmas, Urizen, Blake added a fourth, Los, symbol of the imagination,
’
identified at times with the saviour, Christ. But by
‘
imagination
’
Blake did not mean what Milton meant when Satan
‘
His proud imaginations thus displayed
’
, nor what Schiller meant in his distinction between imagination and fancy; Milton
’
s imagination was primarily a matter of intellect, Schiller
’
s a matter of emotion. Blake
’
s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all,
‘
body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses
’
; body has its place in imagination.

And the function of imagination was to look inward. In
‘
Jerusalem
’
Blake avowed his intention:

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes

Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity.
³⁶

Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.

But what must be grasped about Blake
’
s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect.

Los is only a half of Blake
’
s picture of man
’
s inner states. The other half is the strange being called
‘
the Spectre
’
:

Each man is in his spectre
’
s power

Until the arrival of that hour

When his humanity awakes

And casts his spectre into the lake...
³⁷

The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness.

Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits,
the identity.
‘
Man is not of fixed or enduring form
’
Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in
‘
the Spectre
’
s power
’
(and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of
‘
fixed and enduring form
’
.

Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.

And now we can begin to see how far Blake has solved the Outsider
’
s problems. His system with its terminology is the only one we have considered so far that provides a skeleton key to every Outsider in this book. Roquentin, Meursault, Lawrence, Krebs, Strowde and Oliver Gauntlett: all are men in
‘
the Spectre
’
s power
’
, in the stranglehold of their own identity, and they mistake their own stagnation for the world
’
s. The Spectre
’
s mark is Unreality.

Consider the root cause of the Vastation experience in these men; Tolstoy
’
s madman admitting that he could not escape
‘
the horror
’
because he carried its source about with him, and that source was himself; Lawrence confessing that
‘
I did not like the myself I could see and hear
’
, William James
’
s
‘
panic fear of his own existence
’
. All point to the accuracy of Blake
’
s diagnosis.

The cause, as T. E. Lawrence realized, lies in the
‘
thought-riddled nature
’
, in the intellect dominating the other two faculties. Blake symbolized the intellect as Urizen, the
‘
king of light
’
. It is Urizen who tries to play dictator over the other two. But man was never intended to be a dictator-state; it makes him lopsided, and if he goes on too long in that condition, something is bound to happen. It is bound to happen even if the dictator happens to be one of those far more genial
characters, Luvah and Tharmas, the emotions and the body (and Tharmas is
^‘
the mildest son of Heaven
⁵
), for the simple reason that the crises of living demand the active co-operation of intellect, emotions, body, on equal terms.

And now we are back again in the heart of Blake
’
s myth. His longest and most confused epic,
‘
Vala, or the Four Zoas^ is Blake
’
s own way of writing
The Brothers Karamazov.
It is a psychological novel that takes place in the human brain. The hero, the Giant Alvion, dreams the whole poem. It begins at the point where Urizen has tried to seize dictatorship. Tharmas laments:

Lost, lost, lost are my emanations ...

i.e. self-expression is now denied to him. (
‘
Emanation
’
in Blake means a form of self-expression.) In the course of the poem, we watch the confusion that results when one or the other of the faculties takes over completely; symbolically we watch the mutations of the hero Albion—T. E. Lawrence, Nijinsky and Van Gogh, Ivan, Mitya and Alyosha. Urizen is the chief villain always, because Urizen is not merely intellect; he is also personality, identity, the Spectre. As soon as man begins to think, he forms a notion of who he is. If man were entirely body or emotions, he would have no conception of his identity, consequently he could never become unbalanced like Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh. It is Urizen who starts the trouble. The Bible recounts the same legend when it ascribes the first discord in the universe to Lucifer and his pride. Lucifer is light; consciousness, Urizen.

Yet it is the Outsider
’
s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante
’
s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen
is
the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone. The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to
‘
praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of
dennoch preisen
is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly
recognized and underlined that this is
not
the Hegelian
‘
God
’
s in his heaven, all
’
s right with the world
’
. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies: the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary, but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the Existential view, first expressed by S0ren Kierkegaard, the Outsider
’
s view and, incidentally, the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel
’
s book,
The Philosophy of History,
and James Joyce
’
s phrase,
‘
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake
’
(Ulysses,
p. 31). Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake
’
s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.