For obscure reasons – some slightly masochistic yen for intellectual puzzlement – I decided to return to William Blake. Not the (relatively) straightforward world of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Songs of Innocence and Experience, which had comprised my teaching syllabus in a bygone era. No, I decided to revisit Jerusalem, his last (1827) great sprawling work of spiritual enlightenment, narrating the difficult but ultimate attainment of what he called the “Poetic Genius”. Exactly 100 plates of dense text, laboriously etched back-to-front on copper sheets, printed (just one copy) and intricately hand-coloured. I’m not sure there’s a human being on this planet who fully understands it. The contortions some critics tie themselves into, just trying to formulate a method of approach to reading it, can be quite amusing. Jerusalem feels like a concatenation of interlocking wormholes governed by chaos theory. Between passages or lines of startling clarity and verve swarm a multitude of invented ‘characters’ pursuing obscure and turbulent agendas across a wild stage that flails between the cosmic and the homely geography of England. Blake claimed that every dot and letter was in its proper and appointed place, but you can forgive those of his contemporaries (and many later readers) who have regarded much of it as just plain bonkers.
Anyway, I hauled out my set of
wonderful facsimile volumes of Blake’s Illuminated Books, put out by the Tate
Gallery. Full-colour reproductions of the complete plates, amplified by all the
learned notes the aficionado could desire. What has struck me forcibly on this
revisiting is not so much the text, though, as some of the vividly coloured,
intricately lined, and wildly inventive illustrations. In anyone’s artistic
universe they have to register as quite extraordinary.
Several illustrations in
particular.
On the very title page, announcing
“Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion”, appear a number of
winged-but-humanoid figures. Now we’re familiar with dove-winged angels and
bat-winged devils from centuries of Christian iconography; one such
conventional figure appears on the left, and indeed elsewhere in innumerable
variations throughout Blake’s works. The other figures are more interesting. At
the top, a locust’s wings appear attached to a human body that shows just one
slender foot and perhaps the suggestion of a face; or almost certainly it’s a
soul emerging from a chrysalis, a fairly conventional symbol of emergence into
freedom, which of course is what the whole poem is about. On the right, human
arms seem to hold a sea-whelk within an arched arrangement of fleshy wings or
flanges, adorned with a moon-symbol. And the figure at the bottom, stretched
out in an attitude at once relaxed, vulnerable and ecstatic, seems to emanate
almost seamlessly from a blend of colourful butterfly’s wings, leaves, and some
strange veined sea-creature. What are these human-nonhuman composites doing
there?
Because there are more.
On Plate 11 appears a human woman with a long, drooping swan’s neck, head, and wings. Depressed, or just dipping to feed on the floating material suggested before her? Note the fish just behind her, as well as down the right-hand margin of the page. (There’s a minor variant, in forbidding dark red, on Plate 71.) Explanatory theories abound, none very convincing. The neighbouring text appears to offer no clues at all.
Another bird-related composite appears on Plate 78: a naked human figure, thoughtfully posed à la Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ – topped by a slightly comical chicken’s head. Some commentators have tried to suggest it was meant to be an eagle, or it’s a cockerel with a comb but a raptor’s bill. But it seems to me quite plainly a chicken, waking up and about to announce the dawn. Which is both homely and unusual since, unlike many other non-human creatures, chickens don’t feature much anywhere in Blake’s works. But there it is.
There are plant-related composites, too. The first page of Chapter Two, Plate 28, is adorned with entwined lovers emerging from or nestled within a lotus flower, itself floating on water – which in turn appears populated by little snail-like creatures, starfish, and scallops, at least one appearing to have a human arm, scattered down the right-hand margin. The motif is echoed at the head of Chapter Three, Plate 53, with a pensive or sad female figure placed on a sunflower and enveloped in strange wings (or, I’d like to think, elephant’s ears), adorned again with stars and moons.
A notably vigorous, even
rough-sketched picture boils at the bottom of Plate 75. A male and a female
human figure are all but indistinguishably co-existent with a nest of toothy
and horned snakes, or perhaps a multi-headed snake – happily so, to judge by
the cuddling going on between the woman and one of the several serpentine
heads. Now snakes occur often in Blake, sometimes wriggling in miniature along
the bottom of a page, sometimes threatening to envelop a human in its coils –
like the conventional Satan in Eden – but at other points quite benignly.
(Remember that in the “Proverbs of Hell” Blake cheekily took the Devil as his
heroic exemplar of rebellious energy.) (And we have to distinguish the serpent
from the humble or beneficent earthworm, like the one coiled around the buxom
female figure on Plate 63.)
The several-headed serpent recurs in my favourite Jerusalem illustration, the chariot scene on Plate 46. It’s as fiery, precise, suggestive and strange as anything in Blake’s whole oeuvre, and again most of the explanations seem tortuous and partial at best. Critics are obsessed with locating sources for these images, as if Blake can’t be credited with just making stuff up. The human-headed bulls or draft-oxen in this scene seem strongly modelled on ancient Assyrian friezes and monumental statuary, reproductions of which Blake would have seen. But the bulls’ coiling horns ending in delicate human hands, and the way the three-headed serpent curls to form the chariot’s wheel, seem to be Blake’s own touch. Not to mention the little harpy-like riders – surely those faces are meerkats’!? Being harnessed to a chariot or a plough is a regular motif of mental entrapment or limitation for Blake, but it’s by no means clear that that’s the import of this blazing portrayal. Though the presumably father-and-daughter passengers (identity controversial) do look rather miserable, don’t they?
(This isn’t the place to go down
wormholes of explanation – but ... here’s a thought...)
As my erstwhile student Jyoti Singh showed at length in her PhD thesis, animals abound symbolically in Blake’s work: lions and tigers, eagles and sheep, spiders and flies. He drew constantly and eclectically on these creatures’ established symbolic capital, as well as investing them with his own idiosyncratic meanings. He also closely observed the natural world in its own right: this is clear from the multiple quirky but naturalistic little marginal drawings to his big poems: flying birds, spiderwebs and seashells, fish eating other fish, caterpillars, frogs and snails. The same applies to plant-life: dozens of allusions to roses and sunflowers, vines and briars, and frequent depictions of human figures emerging from or merging into the twinings of creepers or roots.
Which brings me back to my central
question: What does Blake intend with these multispecies human-nonhuman
hybridisations?
The editor of the Tate facsimile of Jerusalem, Morton D Paley, says he
‘cannot but see Blake’s depiction of beasts as other than monstrous’ – expressions
of the dark, inhibiting sides of the human psyche. While this seems true of some deployments, I’m not convinced this
is so true of the Jerusalem examples.
What if we were to regard them quite differently, which is to say positively,
as expressions of a spiritual continuum of human and nonhuman? The hybrid
depictions do not appear at such a scale and regularity in any previous poem; here
Blake intends something new that transcends the struggle for independent creativity
that burdens the earlier epics, from Urizen
to The Four Zoas. What if, in a word,
we regard these hybrids as therianthropes?
Therianthropy, a word that entered our vocabulary only around 1901, is defined crudely as the transformation of animal into human, or vice versa. Here in Southern Africa we’re familiar with the phenomenon from San rock art, with shamans (it’s thought) taking on animal characteristics for spiritual and/or hunting purposes. Blake likely didn’t know about the San art (though he did know of the then “British Kaffraria”, which is precisely where I live). But therianthropic myths and tales and related artworks abound in almost all the world’s cultures, and Blake knew of many, from the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt to Greek myths of metamorphosis, from Irish and Nordic folktales to the gargoyles leering from mediaeval churches and the teeming beasts of Hindu mythology. What in ancient times was a genuinely spiritual sense of human-nonhuman continuity has in the West been largely debased to the entertaining tinsel of Mickey Mouse and Nemo. But given that Jerusalem is Blake’s great triumphal struggle of spiritual completion, it makes sense to me that these particular examples can be legitimately termed therianthropic.
This gels with Blake’s expression of
‘ecological’ continuities at other levels. The purely symbolic or heraldic
animal apparitions of his early work became, as I mentioned, amplified with
more naturalistic observation. This was notably deepened during a stay in a
rural cottage near Felpham on the coast, quite a change from his accustomed
London. While there, he wrote another daunting epic, Milton. Alongside wrestling with the theology of the author of Paradise Lost, Blake wrote some
arresting passages about spiritualised natural beauty. Here’s just one:
The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn
Appears, listens silent: then springing from the waving Corn-field!
loud
He leads the Choir of Day ...
His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather
On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine
...
Though Blake didn’t
lose sight of the predatory aspects of ‘nature’, he saw all of it as ultimately
‘Human’, that is to say, infused with a sacred spirit, if only one opens one’s
eyes to it. Even the
little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?
It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell,
Withinside wondrous & expansive ....
Hence, I propose,
all the little critters enlivening Jerusalem’s
pages. They, just as much as the great illuminated therianthropes, are manifestations
of our continuity with the nonhuman. We are obliged by the limitations in our
vision and artistic means to capture this indefinable continuum in little
flashes, like the illustration on Jerusalem’s
Plate 54 in which stars rising from human heads seem to mutate into bats and
then swarming insects, or the sweet footer
depicting a joyous child riding a serpent with reins like a horse. And
right towards the end, in the final ecstatic visionary phase, Blake puts it
succinctly in words.
And I heard Jehovah speak
Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant
Divine
On Chariots of gold & jewels with Living Creatures starry &
flaming
With every Colour. Lion. Tyger. Horse. Elephant. Eagle. Dove. Fly.
Worm.
And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems ...
All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all
Human Forms identified. living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
A totally bizarre
kind of modified Christian ecology. And right there is the chariot of Plate 46,
I reckon.
No doubt someone in the vast industry of Blake criticism has said this kind of thing before, but I’ve yet to see mention of therianthropes. Just putting it out there ...
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