At the outset we are bound in politic and the natural. To emerge into our own province of struggle involves both personally and then intellectually, which includes the political and the natural.
In Galatians 4 the world is a tutor to instruct in its ways in
the analogy of a minor child under its governance before majority. The child
has no greater authority than a servant, ‘in bondage under the elements
of the world," earth, air, water and fire, to wit, nations, states and kingdoms. But when “the
heir’ of all things, God’s own Son, adopts and makes sons as heirs by His adoption, those sons and heirs of Yahweh through Messiah are not under these tutors, these Weak
and beggarly elements. So we are already, listen, beyond anything we have ever known. ’“Bondage” under the elements of the world is “nothing but idols” of time, but the sons are above time. “Days, months times, years
are idols of time. The analogy of time and eternity is furthered in Abraham's
two sons, one in bondage, one free. The bondage, Hagar, Sinai in Arabia vs “Jerusalem
which is above and free.” 4.26. This means the flesh and the spirit, which is
not subject to the flesh. Meanwhile back in the bondage, Israel and its false Messiah 7 Oct cup of trembling casts down upon the Whoever Will, but we keep coming.
Politic
To translate this to Blake’s Americ debt to Paine's Rights of Man, part II, in his America A Prophecy (1793), of a beginning millennial and universal liberation of
humankind—abstracted however from the liberation of the spirit in messiah,
judges the limitations of political revolution. Back and forth between
history and myth in the bondage of language go the raw materials of history made myth in contemporary
politics that reverse the process of mythmaking and dissolve the mythical in allusion to a specific historical events, say for example the election of Obama. The irreverent Americ use of Christian signifiers of the Savior who returns at
the Apocalypse as a politician, an Orc in Blake, antichrist in the rest, in
Blake depicted as a threatening serpent, but known better as leviathan, up from the sea, where, as if to
form new words outside the conventional and to probe how new words
formed in ways that suggest how all words originated in the guise of many, ancient-sounding, pose as
the Language of Adam, or as icons, idols if you wish, --the punning,
etymological association of literary echoes mirrored in the surface of these
names, provides a collective function of a politic.
So the Americ, in the vision of Washington’s False Prophet vision, as a new Atlantis Orc rose, rises up from the Atlantic
like a volcano in awful “dragon form" (5.14-5) as the
angel-dragon of Albion-England provokes the new age of the liberty of Paine as an abstraction stolen from the
freedom from time provided for the adopted sons of Galatians. (see References to Philadelphia in the Works).
Paine's counterfeit "timeless apocalypse” is a false state of rebellion, not deliverance from time. Reading the Bible against the grain so that Nebuchadnezzar's image is likewise "improved," so that iron and clay feet become brass, brass thighs turn silver, silver breast and head turn to gold, shows the counterfeit risen body improved in human values and ethics, making heart and brain equal, as the political Americ myth of the thirteen angel colonies of the union come up from the sunken lost Atlantis, not far from Bacon’s New Atlantis. Troy and Atlantis, ie, England and America, are all politics reviving, rising from the deep. Once sunk in water they rise in fire, as the original thirteen Americ angel colonies, by inversion, seen individually as Boston’s angel, mimicked from Philadelphia’s angel of Revelation, where the two might be seen as opposites, dialogue as among cities and speakers who arrogate to the AI itself the liberty to be wrong! That is their counterfeit freedom. That there is No Right must occur from the start of the Americ human liberation.
Language
“Polysemous, that is, having many meanings,” requiring a manifold approach; of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings.
The intrinsic difficulties of the text make satisfactory translation in logic
altogether difficult where the connections between the arguments are as clear to the interlocutor,
as to the author, so they are left them out. We must keep quoting Mr. Witt that it is the case that the only ones who know are the one predisposed to know. The
omission of logical links between passages, continuous leaps of
association bringing numerous inconsistencies are as unpredictable as the connections between the words in a
sentence … every word is a metaphor and a metonymy, one attribute substituted for the whole. Poets know the purpose of
this: they need it to say something for which there is not yet a name in the
language” with sudden leaps of
associative wireless connections,’ phonetics and prosody, where the center
of gravity of speech moves closer to the lips, the outer
parts of the mouth, the tip of the tongue rushed toward the teeth as in an infantile aspect of phonetic babbling, Ma Ma, Pa Pa, to some kind of
eternal Dadaism not only speaking, but eating and drinking, at times imitating animals, chirping and chirruping of insects, bleating of laments, cries of the
rack, where the hand makes
the magnetic storm of itself. You can hear all these sounds at the end of Keats, To Autumn.
Personally, If i ask what is it I am doing here, I am skilled in practically nothing, but that seems adapted to time and place where few are, compared to the meticulous boat builders, voyagers, farmers, explorers who preceded us. I am not particularly skilled as a scholar even with a degree, not in fastidious research, more of leap from place to place-dilettante. If there is something of focus it must be to account for life and birth, going out and coming in, in all the issues of the great thinkers and writers, and to make up little vignettes along the way, place to place, moment to moment, augment on arguments, a word here, an idea there, a patchwork surely drunk, but desired to be lyrical, fraught with sound and meaning. Whatever emerges from this I don't know except to say it seeks to confront from the top down, not the bottom up, to go right in the face of ultimate affronts to our life and sshow them for what they are. *Pollynoms.
So to start from the beginning of what a child can know, to speculate the coming down into the womb and being born with all the precipitate acts of contradiction encountered, and to end up at 80 and beyond with less understanding than before, but to keep going, hold to the plan, go give an account of what we are, all of us together who enter this life, there has never been a plot beyond that which we call accident, which is providence and faith. I explore this in every medium I can, first words, then family and flesh, then work and travel and finally in clay, a proper medium of the exchange between the created and the creator who makes the plan and pattern and then releases it slowly into the clay so that it knows and feels, for too sudden a release will cause it to fail. He set me down and let go slow. I think many of these sculptures, frescoes, pots ceramic display the Raison best because often it is the case that only when the process is done do we have any idea what has been made. Some show this better than others like the taurobolium of the figure of the United States that simply appeared in the Work and after was recognized as a form, slowly providing a setting for it, after the fact. The miracle of post-cognition is very great, as stated in the Afterword of Red Head (96f). After the fact, post cognition has become more and more important in the life of pattern recognition of 80 and on. Compared to all the works encountered on the way, the way a good charcoal is made to let the hand lead the eye to recognition, adds up to significance where all is vanity, and there is only good from the point of view of imperfection at best and at the worst, no hope. So to end up, to hope against knowledge, to hope against history and politics, to hope against the world is the last post cognition and to build faith in that time the true work of importance.
