ENGLISH BLAKE (REPLY TO BURFORD)

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris B. sez:

>To understand its mixture of religious and political significance
>you not only need to speak English but to be English, and I
>suspect really, northern English.

Where does that leave me?  If you prick me, do I not bleed?

>in what is at once a political and a religious ceremony.

Yes, that is so.  What is unique to Blake is that the religious
vision itself is political, the fight against oppression, carried
on in the cosmic order.

>If a future socialist England can tolerate even a hint of
>religious feeling, "Jerusalem" will be sung for ever.

Given the British reputation for emotional constipation, I would
say that toleration of feeling alone would suffice.  What is the
difference between feeling and religious feeling anyway?  My
capacity for feeling far exceeds that of most religious people I
know.

>first I was surprised to find that they are actually part of the
>preface to "Milton".

Indeed, few people know this, because the prefatory poem was
detached and set to music on its own and titled "Jerusalem", which
became part of British popular culture and also spread throughout
the world.  Hubert Parry composed a magnificent melody and there
are several recordings of Paul Robeson singing this majestic song,
which stirs me to the marrow.

>his appeal sounds to be an essentially political idealist one,
>whose failure was marked by the isolation of his later years.

>What have I got wrong/failed to grasp,  Ralph?

Well, you are doing pretty good, except for the preceding sentence
above.  Your words "appeal" and "failed" make the presumption that
the function of art is to serve political propaganda, and if
people don't go out and fight after reading your stuff, you are a
failure. I don't subscribe to this view, so your statement is
meaningless to me.

Please do not lower yourself to the level of Carroll Cox.   I am a
great admirer of Woody Guthrie myself, and Guthrie, who himself
admired John Cage, was not the low-grade Philistine that Cox is.
I was really nauseated by his comments on culture.

Blake saw himself and in fact was a prophet.  He knew he would not
be understood for generations but chose to encode everything he
knew in his poetry anyway.  He did not miss much.  Few people are
as sophisticated today.

You tell me what I have failed to grasp by not being English.  I
had planned to upload some of the juiciest metaphysical passages
from "Jerusalem", but there was just so much I could do on his
birthday.  Blake completely unravelled ruling class metaphysics.
In this he was far ahead of Hegel.  Now do you want to settle for
being a Marxist-Leninist creep or do you want to be a real human
being?


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