William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and the New Art: Blake Helps the Toronto School Unlock the Seals to the Great Code; Or Reconnecting R

Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020)

Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art: Blake Helps the Toronto School Unlock the Seals to the Great Code; or Reconnecting R. Bruce Elder—Professor Emeritus Ryerson University—[email protected]

In his last public lecture on Blake, presented in 1987 in London, England, Northrop Frye situated the poet’s formidable achievement in the context of Western mythology: To have turned a metaphorical cosmos eighteen centuries old upside down in a few poems, and provided the basis for a structure that practically every major thinker for the next century would build on, was one of the most colossal imaginative feats in the history of human culture. The only drawback, of course, was that no one knew Blake had done it: in fact Blake hardly realized he had done it either.

For some fifty years, Frye devoted significant efforts to discerning the deep structure of Blake’s universe and the underlying forces that give rise to it. In Anatomy of Criticism, he generalized the approach he developed while studying Blake: he decided to investigate literature as an “order of words” with an assumed coherence and set out to crack the great code the gives rise to its recurrent patterns. The investigation of patterns in literature (or in art history) is what Frye believes the critical method to be: one identifies basic elements and notes patterns in their reoccurrence, reorganization, transformation, and interaction.

Marshall McLuhan, Frye’s colleague in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, also believed that the study of media is a search of patterns. In remarks on Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent in Maelstrom,” he noted, pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. . . The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion or consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.

Like Frye, McLuhan believed artists are most able to tell us what world is like. The artist, alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. . . . Only

R. Bruce Elder the artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity [technical inventiveness].

Artists are not entertainers. They have a much more serious role to play in society: “The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival.”

Following up on Renato Barilli’s writings on McLuhan, I suggest in this essay that a key force that gives structure to recent art and thought is the development of the science of electromagnetism and, consequent upon that, the invention of electrotechnical devices. A foundational notion of the science of electromagnetism—a pattern that I suggest Blake was the first to recognize—is the idea of interpenetration. Alfred North Whitehead provided the classic statement of the idea: “My theory,” Whitehead says, involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

Frye told David Cayley, The concept of interpenetration . . . I found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. Other people have found it Mahayana Buddhism and the Avatamsaka Sutra. . . . The opposite of interpenetration, where everything exists everywhere at once, is an objective centrality, which it seems to me, is a most tyrannical conception.

The Lankatara and Avatamsaka Sutras became for Frye, despite their daunting challenge, “vade mecums [handbooks] of practical meditation.” Blake’s intermedial, verbi-voco-visual works I show embody a conception of interpenetration that turns out to be close to Avatamsaka Sutra’s.

In this paper I lay out some of the features of the Avatamsaka Sutra’s idea of interpenetration, show how that idea became the basis for exchanges between McLuhan and Frye and to constitute one of the hallmarks of the Toronto School, and demonstrate that a similar idea of interpenetration gave rise to the revolutionary intermedial forms Blake created and later became a defining feature of electromorphic art.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

In his last public lecture on Blake, presented in 1987 in London, England, Frye situated the poet’s formidable achievement in the context of Western mythology:

To have turned a metaphorical cosmos eighteen centuries old upside down in a few poems, and provided the basis for a structure that practically every major thinker for the next century would build on, was one of the most colossal imaginative feats in the history of human culture. The only drawback, of course, was that no one knew Blake had done it: in fact Blake hardly realized he had done it either.1

One idea that Blake’s mythology rejected was that of the chain of being that had dominated cosmology from the Classical era to his own time (the beginning of the Romantic era): the great chain of being was the ladder through different orders of reality, according to the ratio of matter to form in them: reality was thought to be “formed out of the two principles of form and matter and stretched from God, who was pure form, through spiritual and human existence into the subhuman world until it reached chaos, which is as close as we can come to pure matter without form.”2 The second idea Blake’s mythology dispatched was that of differentiated levels of reality in the Ptolemaic universe. According to that model, there was the extra-universal realm of Heaven, out there somewhere. Below this, and revolving in circles of diminishing circumference, are a series of spheres, from the primum mobile down through the planets to the moon, and from the moon to the “sublunar” world where things are composed of the material elements, earth, air, fire, and water—since the fall, this realm has been subject to decay. Newton’s discovery that the planets in the superlunary realm move according to the same laws that govern the movement of things

1. Northrop Frye, “Blake’s Bible,” 419–35 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), Collected Works of Northrop Frye (hereafter CW) 16: 427. From a typescript with handwritten changes and strike-overs. 2. Ibid, CW 16.425. At the time he wrote Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), Frye still harboured divided feelings about how to classify Blake’s poetry. He knew that Blake was resolutely, implacably, militantly anti-Enlightenment. That was a given—for all Frye tries to separate the study of poetry and literature from personal bias, there is nothing in Frye’s writings (even in the notebooks or articles or fragments thereof that went unpublished in Frye’s lifetime) that suggests anything but a complete lack of sympathy with the abstract, geometric, and atomizing language of the Enlightenment. But in regard to the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against it, Frye’s earlier writings show him to be in a position like that of Petrarch vis-à-vis Classical Antiquity and the renaissance. He half- adopted the views that dominated Blake scholarship in the decades between 1910 and 1930, that Blake was not a full-blown Romantic, though aspects of his work anticipated features of Romanticism. However, from the 1960s, and onwards, Frye seemed content to call Blake a Romantic. For example, in “The Road of Excess,” Frye writes, “Blake was the first and the most radical of the Romantics who identified the creative imagination of the poet with the creative power of God,” and his lyrics “can be used as a key to Romanticism” (Northrop Frye” The Road to Excess,” in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963], 3–20; reprinted 316–329 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW 16:327, 334). I declare at the outset my belief that William Blake is at once the first English Romantic poet and the greatest. That periodization is important to me, for it gives me grounds for identifying Romanticism with electromagnetic theory and the reaction against Newtonian-Enlightenment thought. It also allows me to stake the unpopular claim that we still are living in the Romantic—or as I describe it, the electrologic—era.

R. Bruce Elder here on earth brought that conception into question. Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion suggested the universe is a gigantic machine, devoid of intelligence and personality; and, however much that fact dismayed him, that is the image of the Newtonian universe that entered history. Blake could not abide the universe-as-a-giant machine metaphor and strived—and, according to Frye succeeded—to create a new metaphoric cosmos. A few years earlier, in a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Frye made similar claims for the revolutionary character of Blake’s vision. He presents Blake as a discovering, through an act almost akin to a Nietzschean transvaluation, a great code of Western myth and symbolism: his art discloses this great code in the act of revitalizing it and returning it to its primal truth.

Blake was the first poet in English literature, and so far as I know the first person in the modern world, to realize that the traditional authoritarian cosmos had had it, that it no longer appealed to the intelligence or the imagination, and would have to be replaced by another model. Blake gave us a complete outline of such a model, but unfortunately nobody knew that he had done so, and one has to read thousands of pages of poetry and philosophy since his time to pick up bits and pieces of his insight.3

In the premiere issue of McLuhan Studies, the Italian theorist of visual art and literature published an article on “William Blake at the Origin of Postmodernity.”4 In that article, Renato Barilli goes a good distance towards characterizing that revolution and identifying the historical forces and conditions that gave rise to it. He uses the term postmodern to refer to that period whose cultural attributes and mentality reflect the rise to ascendancy of the science of the electromagnetism. He maintains that the first artist whose works are thoroughgoingly electromorphic is William Blake. He analyzes Blake’s paintings and watercolours to identify their electromorphic features and comments on their relation to the new ontology conditioned by the science of electromagnetism. This essay is an effort to explore and exfoliate further implications of the conceptual background of Barilli’s wonderfully insightful article. I turn first to Northrop Frye. In “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” Frye comments on a shift in Canadian poetry. Images of the landscape in earlier Canadian poetry were variations on the Leviathan topos, for the landscape swallowed human beings. The landscape, Frye says was “full of solitude and loneliness,” and representations of nature suggested the hostility and indifference of nature and the precariousness of human existence. In Canadian poetry of the time, he suggests—the essay was written in 1976—the image has undergone an interiorization:

3. Northrop Frye, “Blake’s Biblical Illustrations,” an address at the Blake Symposium at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in connection with an exhibit entitled “William Blake: His Art and Times”; 402–18 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW 16: 410 . 4. http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art14.htm.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Contemporary Canadian poetry seems to think rather of this outer Leviathan as a kind of objective correlative of some Minotaur that we find in our own mental labyrinths. The mind has become a dark chamber, or camera obscura, and its pictures are reflections of what is at once physical and human nature. A poem of Gwendolyn MacEwan, Dark Pines under Water, explicitly links the poetic consciousness with reflection and descent:

This land like a mirror turns you inward And you become a forest in a furtive lake; The dark pines of your mind reach downward . . . There is something down there and you want it told.5

When Frye goes on to expand his remarks on this introversion, he offers comments on the imperialist space-binding role of technology—more technologically determinist comments than we generally associate with Frye.

The conception of nature as a mechanism, which began to take its modern form in the seventeenth century, meant, of course, that Western man was developing an increasingly mechanistic civilization. Canada was opened up by the technology of navigation and surveying and held together by the technology of transportation, which has left its mark in the great bridges and railways and seaports and in the network of canals in Southern Ontario. Up to, say, the Second World War, the inarticulate aspect of communication was the one that had top priority. Pratt’s fascination with the rumbling and creaking of machinery, his constant aware-ness of the throbbing engines at the heart of the ship, indicated that poetry had with him become sufficiently aware of its surroundings to make poetic imagery out of technology.

Frye goes on to offer precisions about the increasing interiorization that has resulted from technological development:

The development of technology makes for a growing introversion in life, with the high-rise apartments and office buildings, the superhighways, where falling asleep is one of the hazards, the tunnel-like streets, with pedestrians hustled out of the way of motor traffic as peasants used to be on the approach of nobility.

5. Northrop Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry,” in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 22– 45; reprinted as “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 472–92 in Northrop Frye on Canada, ed. Jean O’Grady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), CW 12.489–90.

R. Bruce Elder

Culturally, this introversion reached its height with the blind man’s medium of the radio and the deaf man’s medium of the silent movie, the latter being a close relative of the puppet show. The television set is technically even more introverted, setting up a round-the-clock fantasy world that we can stay in without even making the effort of joining an audience. And yet the centring on both sound and vision sets limits to the introversion. Turn off the sound, and we are in the world of the puppet show again, totally uninvolved; turn off the screen and listen to the sound track, and a similar detachment occurs. But in the fully centred medium, for all the avoiding of reality, we are occasionally compelled to see glimpses of an actual and very human world. Whether cabinet ministers or Eskimos, people are ultimately compelled to look like people on television, instead of like abstractions of charisma or legend. The television set seems to me to provide an analogue, in the mass media, to the imagery of descent that I have been trying to trace in poetry, which ends not in introversion but in an intensely centred vision.6

Frye’s insight that the audio-visual cinema (including television) engenders a substantially different response than either the silent cinema or the radio was without parallel in screen theory. Radio, as a sightless medium, turns us inward rather than outward; and the silent movie, because of its similarities with the puppet show (I presume this means that it turns us towards inner, kinaesthetic sensations/identifications) similarly promote introversion. Frye acknowledges a peculiarity of television: one might think that because one can live in it all day and all night, it would be the ultimate in a self-centred medium that isolates one from reality, an around-the-clock fantasy that we join without ever joining with an audience. However, that is not its effect: because it is a synaesthetic medium, it incorporates reality at the same time as it modifies it. I noted above, when introducing Frye’s idea that the recurrent patterns of imagery in recent Canadian poetry had changed, that twentieth century Canadian poetry frequently analogized the mind to a camera obscura. That comment is signal. It evokes a metaphor that has been used since at least the time of Plato, namely, the mind as a theater. Here consciousness is seen as a “stage” on which our sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings play to a vast, silent audience (the immensely complicated inner-workings of the brain’s unconscious processes). But camerae obscurae were also devices constructed to bring the outside world into a darkened chamber. So they are images that are at once objective and subjective. The gist of the remark is to point towards the reality of the

6. Frye, “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” 490. People are sometimes some times surprised that I stress the relationships between Frye and McLuhan. In defense of my doing so, I point out that literary critics, historians, and theorists were not writing on the relations between technology and literary form/literary style—where would one find something like this in Cleanth Brooks’s, William K. Wimsatt’s, Harold Bloom’s, or Morris Weitz’s writings. The exceptions I can think are Lewis Mumford and Wylie Sypher. Sypher’s anti-Romantic, anti-democratic bias (modern art is doomed to dumbing-down effects of participatory forms) dooms his work to a dictatorial irrelevance. Mumford’s efforts to corral the “insurgent life force” into a too-simple, too-pat triatic drama (equilibrium, breakdown, renewal) simple falls flat.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art poetic vision, a reality that is neither subjective nor objective, but is brought into being by the creative process itself. This insight into the biotechnics of television/moving images—that TV encompasses reality at the same time that it enters reality and modifies it—we shall soon see derives from William Blake. Frye goes on to comment on the attitude to tradition in contemporary Canadian poetry.

Tradition is usually thought of as linear, and as forming a series of conventions which continually go out of date, so that a poet has to be careful not to become associated with an obsolete fashion. In Canada tradition has become, in the last generation or so at least, a much more simultaneous and kaleidoscopic affair, reminding us perhaps of the welter of historical allusions in the costumes of young people. The echoes of Spenser in James Reaney’s A Suit of Nettles, of descent themes from Ishtar to Boris Karloff movies in Macpherson’s Welcoming Disaster, of prosodic devices from Old English to concrete poetry in Earle Birney, while they certainly assume a cultivated reader, are both unforced and unpedantic, and illustrate very clearly the advantage, for a Canadian poet, of being able to look down on tradition all at once, instead of being pushed ahead of it like the terminal moraine of a glacier. In the words of the critic Milton Wilson: “But one of the advantages of a poetry less than a hundred years old is that all the things that couldn't happen when they should have happened keep happening all the time . . . Having begun a millennium too late, there is not much point being correctly fashionable.”7

So, Frye suggests, the uniquely belated character of Canadian culture can be seen as something of an affordance: all the things couldn’t happen when they should have—the literature of compound epithets appropriate to 9th century BCE Greece could not appear in Canadian literature when it should have because there was no Canadian literature in the 9th century BCE, nor was there at the time of the 19th century British novel—had to become annexed to the history of Canadian literature (as its heritage) as though in a single, massive tranche. That made it possible for Canadian writers, when Canadian literature did emerge, to experience their entire literary heritage synoptically. Tradition became simultaneous and kaleidoscope.8

7. Frye, ibid., 491; the quotation from Milton Wilson is from “Other Canadians and After,” Tamarack Review, no. 9 (958), 91. 8. Further on the topic of belonging to a belated culture as an affordance, Frye relates this to the history of technology: many languages, many cultures, many ways of understanding are sedimented on over the other, but all are permanently available.

As criticism expands in range and variety of subject, it will merge with communications theory, and the sprawling and disunited Canada, from its very beginning, has been preoccupied—obsessed would be a better word—with means of communication, whether animate or inanimate. As its literature

R. Bruce Elder

McLuhan comments on the kaleidoscopic, “multi-locational” character of electromorphic art in a review of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and the Surrealist poet and theorist Parker Tyler’s Magic and Myth of the Movies that appeared in the Fall 1947 issue of Sewanee Review. He notes:

[The two books] serve to remind us again that one of the principal intellectual developments of the past century or so has been the supplanting of the linear perspective by a multi-locational mode of perception. Among critics of Picasso this new mode is sometimes referred as a “circular point of view” in which a view from above may suddenly become a view from everywhere at once.9

has developed, it has formed an adjoining culture in time to the whole British tradition from Beowulf to Eliot and Joyce. From the point of view of a new culture using an old language, that tradition is not a moving belt in time but a kaleidoscope, all of it available for simultaneous study and imitation. One suggestion arising from this situation is that a major task facing criticism today is that of attaining a synoptic view of language. . . . Different modes of language . . . have entered into our speech, many of which have become obsolete although they still contain great potential powers of utterance. There is a metaphorical language of immanence, of a kind we find in the poetry of so- called “primitive” societies, where subject and object are not clearly separated and where words are words of power that can affect the environment directly. There is a metonymic language of transcendence of a kind that we find in theology or metaphysics, where language points in the direction of something beyond itself. There is a language of objectivity and description and clear definition, such as we find in expository prose. [These three languages reflect the character of the languages of Giambattista Vico’s three stages in history, which, as Frye pointed out, when viewed synoptically, appear as facets in a kaleidoscope, cycling through a limited range of configurations.] There is a meditative language for which all physical objects become foci of converging forces, as in some of the later essays of Heidegger. There is the language of what is called ordinary speech, where meaning bursts through the words and is eked out by gesture and body language, of the kind studied in the later works of Wittgenstein. There is the disguised and hieratic language of the kind typical of the dream, which makes its way into the waking world in all sorts of disconcerting ways. And there are dozens of other kinds. (Northrop Frye, “Criticism and Environment,” 567–581 in Northrop Frye on Canada, CW 12.579–80.)

9. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, “Inside Blake and Hollywood” The Sewanee Review 55, no. 4 (1947): 710–715, here 710. The idea about the relation between science and art that underlies this claim about a circular point of view is troublesome. McLuhan alludes here (as he did frequently across his corpus of writings) to one of the most forceful statements of the position, an often cited passage in Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) that connects Cubist painting and Einstein’s special theory of relativity. There Giedion cites a “celebrated statement” by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski who, in 1907, developed the mathematical techniques that allowed the Special Theory of Relativity, which Einstein had worked out in purely algebraic terms, to be presented as a geometry of spacetime: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” Minkowski, then, proposed the idea of spacetime as a way of simplifying the mathematics of Einstein’s special theory. Giedion relates Minkowski’s mathematical approach to relativity to Cubist and Futurist painting and draws a parallel between Minkowski’s mathematics of spacetime and the techniques and forms that the Cubists and Futurists used: “It was just at this time that in France and in Italy cubist and futurist painters develop the artistic equivalent of spacetime in their search for means of expressing purely contemporaneous feelings.” He characterized the changes that occurred in this way:

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

McLuhan lauds Frye’s book for discovering in Blake the means to liberate Western consciousness from the translatio studii tradition—that tradition outlined a continuous transmission of culture “from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Britain, from Britain to the court of Charlemagne. So that Abelard could view Paris in the Twelfth Century as the lineal descendent and sole legatee of Athens.”10 McLuhan also points out the tradition experienced something of a crisis at the time of

The Cubists did not seek to reproduce the appearance of objects from one vantage point; they went round them and tried to lay hold of their internal constitution. They sought to extend the scale of feeling, just as contemporary science extends its description to cover new levels of material phenomena.

Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides—from above and below, from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries there is added a fourth one—time. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was the first to recognize and express this change, around 1911. The same year saw the first Cubist exhibition at the Salon des Indepéndents. Considering the history of the principles from which they broke, it can well be understood that the paintings should have been thought a menace to the public peace and have become the subject of remarks in the Chamber of Deputies.

The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life—simultaneity. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work, Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper [The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies], in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity. (Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 436.)

Giedion’s claim wasn’t exactly novel: in 1910, the same year Picasso painted Portrait of Daniel Kahnweiller, Metzinger remarked that Picasso “lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry” (Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan October–November 1910: 60; cited in Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, 167). In 1912, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger produced the first book on Cubism, Du cubisme; the authors proclaimed the young painters had developed a new approach to representation that entailed “moving around an object so as to register its successive aspects which, when combined in a single image, reconstitute it as time” (Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du cubisme [Paris: Figuière, 1912]; according to the standard, English translation, Cubism [London: Fisher Unwin, 1913] this reads, “moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which, fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time” [35]). I have no doubt that this new form of representation—which breaks a representational form into many facets that, viewed together, seem to offer the object as seen from many different points of view—was influenced by changing conceptions of space and time. But, I suggest, this idea of moving around an object so as to register successive aspects is a conflicted one. For one thing, evoking the notion of an itinerary around the object paradoxically elicits both ideas of movement through space and time and of simultaneity. I lay out objections to Gideon’s view in the introductory chapter to Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect. Let me add this here: the Sewanee article shows that McLuhan understood that Frye had developed his ideas about the multi-locational mosaic form by studying Blake; Blake is the richer source of radically novel ideas about multi- locationality. 10. McLuhan, “Inside Blake and Hollywood”: 710. I doubt that many readers younger than I am will understand why McLuhan extols Frye’s reading of Blake with such full-throated enthusiasm. The notion of translatio studii dominated the teaching of the humanities from 1200s to 1960. Even in my time, the purpose of teaching high school

R. Bruce Elder

Petrarch: his writing foreshadowed what the legacy of the tradition of translatio studii would be. Petrarch looked back at the Classical era and forward to the renaissance, which, had he understood history as chronological time, he might have seen as “a dead past and living future” but preferred to see as “a dead future and living past.” He considered the scholastics to have been the barbarians of the intellectual world, who depleted culture of any vital potential. Gibbons saw history much as Petrarch did: the rich and vibrant culture of antiquity gradually, over the course of centuries, depleted its legacy. Ahead he could see only oblivion. The idea that history follows a linear pattern was falling into disrepute. What it gave way to was the view of history as cyclical, which had been propounded long in advance of its time by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). It was a “pattern-finding” approach to history, for it identified rhymes—or better, kaleidoscopic repetitions—among different eras of history. “The metaphor of a simple linear perspective,” McLuhan says, “yields in Vico to a complex genetic metaphor that becomes the intellectual means of being simultaneously present in all periods of the past and all intellectual climates of the modern world as well.”11 He sees the matter in terms of the possibility of identifying—elsewhere he describes this as a “put on”—across time and space:

For Vico contains Wordsworth, Freud, and Malinowski by anticipation in answering the questions: “Exactly how do people so remote in time or culture or condition as Lucy Gray or Ivanhoe or a neurotic or a Trobriander feel? What is the world they know?” Professor Frye takes us inside Blake in this way. . . . For having installed himself inside Blake he does a detailed job of exploration and is able to speak of current issues as we might suppose Blake would have spoken. And, indeed, “the voice of the bard” is heard with typical emphasis on most contemporary matters, artistic and political. It is at once clear that Blake was a great psychologist with clear insight into the mechanism of human motives and of historical periods—his own included. And his psychological insights grew into an all-embracing system which was nothing short of ferocious in its rationalistic completeness.12

McLuhan highlights an irony in the anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment Blake’s development as a poet:

history, English literature, Latin, and Greek (though Greek was eliminated before I started high school, and could be learned only in Greek clubs) was to be able trace, in rudimentary outline, the transmission of learning and culture “from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Britain, from Britain to the court of Charlegmagne” and thence back to Britain, in the poetry of Milton and English poets who drew of Greco-Roman mythology. University education in the humanities allowed one to flesh out the details in particular areas of this transmission, but the overall trajectory was constantly in the background. It had its effects: when my wife and I first went to Italy and visited temples of Venus and Jupiter, it felt like the culmination and completion of an education. 11. Ibid., 711. 12. Ibid., 711–12.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

That is the paradox of Blake—that he so largely became the image of the thing he hated and fought, namely Lockean rationalism and abstraction. In Professor Frye’s words (p. 143):

Blake was, it is obvious, so conscious of the shape of his central myth that his characters become almost diagrammatic. The heroism of Orc or the ululation of Ololon do not impress us as human realities, like Achilles or Cassandra, but as intellectual ideographs. It all depends on whether the reader has a taste for this kind of metaphysical poetry or not . . . what there is in Blake is a dialectic, an anatomy of poetry, a rigorously unified vision of the essential forms of the creative mind, piercing through its features to its articulate bones.

Unlike Vico and Joyce but like Freud, Blake mistook a psychology for metaphysics and theology. His rigorous monism had no place for “the many” save as modes of primal, divine energy. The created world is a part of fallen godhead and is essentially evil. Existence and corruption are the same. This makes for simplicity, intensity and inclusiveness of outlook, but it may not have been of as much use to Blake the poet as he himself supposed. It made Blake an encyclopedic allegorist but it also led him to attach a final rather than a provisionary value to his allegorical imagery. That is, Blake was not so much concerned with the visual and dramatic character of his imagery as with its intellectual meaning.13

13. Ibid, 712. McLuhan, these remarks imply, saw Blake as the complete Romantic, and that is pretty much where Frye would later put his poetry and drawings A short note on Blake’s response to Locke would help to exfoliate McLuhan’s point here, which relates directly to the theme of this article, the matter of everything being connected to everything. First, Blake was, despite the extravagant-seeming surface of his text-image syntheses, an enormously astute reader. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (substantially composed in 1681; published 1689) played a crucial role on the founding of America: the Founders were all well acquainted with it. Blake was aware of its colonialist implications. By the 1660s, more traditional thinkers, who still considered it the province of political thinking to consider the common good, had started to raise questions about the justice of England’s expansionist policies vis-à-vis America. They were asking, first, whether it was just for England to be involved in colonization at all and, second, whether it was just to appropriate land already occupied by Amerindians. Barbara Arneil’s John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), argues that Locke incorporated into his Two Treatises defences of colonization written by colonizers and that “the famous chapter on property, which contains most of the references to Amerindians in the Two Treatises, was written to justify the 17th-century dispossession of the aboriginal peoples of their land, through a vigorous defence of England’s ‘superior’ claims to proprietorship” (DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198279679.003.0001, second page of the introduction). Arneil’s “Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4 (1994): 591–609 offers compelling evidence that questions around colonial administration dominated Locke’s life from 1668 to 1675 when he was working with Lord Shaftesbury on the highly controversial governance of Carolina. Her “John Locke, Natural Law, and Colonialism” History of Political Thought, 13 no. 4 (1992): 587–603 DOI: 10.2307/26214161 is even more exhilarating. Some time ago, writers on the Enlightenment would point out

R. Bruce Elder

that the state of nature was not an actual historical event but a sort of thought experiment leading to a hypothesis about what the relations amongst humans in a state of anarchy would be. That hypothesis would serve as a set of common sense premises for deductions about the need for government and limitations on its powers in order to ensure the liberty natural to humankind (or to that part of humankind that possess the full powers of reason). Recent scholarship, including Arneil’s, has put paid to that idea. Locke’s ideas on the state of nature were influenced by Hugo Grotius, an employee of the Dutch East India Country, and his De Jure Pradae (Law of the Prize). Grotius’s maintained that natural man lived in a state of simplicity, and his conception of that state arose from reports on the Amerindians: “This primitive state . . . exemplified in the community of property arising from extreme simplicity, may be seen among certain tribes in America which have lived for many generations in such a condition” (De Jure Pradae, ch 2, sect. 2, §1, cited, “John Locke, Natural Law, and Colonialism”: 590). Grotius goes on to conclude, “If within a territory of a people there is any deserted or unproductive soil . . . it is right for foreigners even to take possession of such ground for the reason that uncultivated land ought not to be considered occupied” (De Jure Pradae, Book 2, chap. 2, section 17, cited in “John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism”: 592). Locke follows Grotius in his argument on property. Concerning the “uncultivated wast of America,” Locke writes, “vacant” lands will provide those who toil on them the right of appropriation. “Land that is left wholly to Nature, that has no Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called wast . . . As much land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property” (Locke, Two Treatises, 2, §2). Blake read with great care Locke’s treatise on epistemology, Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689/90), the founding document of the empiricist Enlightenment. After that Locke became for Blake “a symbol of every kind of evil, superstition, and tyranny.” Locke’s analysis of mind and reality relied on two crucial notions. The first was that thought could be resolved into discrete ideas, which Locke referred to as atoms; and the second was that there must be something that can scrutinize and manipulate ideas, which something Locke called mind. Locke asserts that all ideas come from either outer sense (the ideas are stimulated by the outside world) or inner sense (reflection on the ideas that originally came from the senses but are summoned to appear again by the scrutineer/manipulator). This leads Locke’s psychology in an associationist direction that many readers will be familiar with from the writings of David Hume, David Harvey, and John Stuart Mill. Three additional points must be made to understand Blake’s abhorrence of Locke’s psychology and (what is more important) Frye’s attraction to Blake’s critique. The first is that Locke was an atomist—in his day they were called corpuscularians—and he believed that a sort of mental corpuscularianism (which later came to be known as associationism) would furnish an understanding of thought and behaviour. He maintained that what our external senses furnish us with directly are ideas of qualities (for example, red, warm, rough). When we experience a table, for example, we receive from a number of discrete ideas of qualities—the idea of a particular shape (perhaps a rectangle), the idea of a smell from the wood or the polish used to shine it, the idea of brown, of a certain pattern of grain, etc. One does not directly receive the idea of table; rather what one receives through sense experiences is a number of ideas (atoms) arising from the different sensory modalities—contemporary epistemologists refer to these as sensa. He goes on to suggest, a separate scrutineer/manipulator combines the different atoms into the complex that is the idea of the table. (A second book that McLuhan and Harley Parker worked on together Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting [New York: HarperCollins, 1968] —a work almost as radically synthetic as Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations— concerns the different forms of intuition associated with the different sensory modalities.) That brings us to the second issue: many commentators (right up to the present) have believed as Blake did, that Locke’s account of the mind is deeply flawed. The very idea of inner mental pictures being called to mind and reperceived by the “mind’s eye” commits one to the absurdity of invoking a homunculus: it implicitly relies on the assumption that there is an agent with inexplicable mental powers, inside the head to reperceive and interpret the image. The third issue is this. Locke proposed that reflection leads to introducing abstractions and generalizations as a means to understand sense experience and to encapsulate principles regarding its character. Locke placed a premium on generalizations, as the Enlightenment thinkers that followed Locke would. When Frye outlines Blake’s objection to Locke’s theories in the first chapter of Fearful Symmetry, he stresses ways in which Blake’s ideas were synthetic, cross-modal, and implied a metaphysical neutral monism.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

From the start, Frye was acutely aware of how new technologies had created a new image of the universe. In his review, McLuhan quotes from Fearful Symmetry to suggest Blake’s critique of the mechanistic language of industrialization:

No student of Blake can fail to be deeply impressed by the promptness with which Blake seizes on the machine as the symbol of a new kind of human existence developing in his own time. His poetry is an imaginative mechanism designed to

First, he notes (in essence) that Blake adopts a position close to Yogacara (or Mind-only) school in Buddhism. “Mental Things are alone Real,” Blake wrote. This “Mind-only” view committed Blake to rejecting Locke’s idea of the atom as the basic unit of reality, which, after all, was the passive reaction to input through a single (isolated) sensory modality. Against Locke’s idea of the atom Blake proposed that the basic unit of existence is the “image” which he also, significantly, calls a “form.” An image or form is an object of perception, but it is not divided from the perceiving subject. Blake also objected to Locke’s privileging abstractions. “Strictly Speaking All Knowledge Is Particular,” Blake wrote (quoted Fearful Symmetry, 15). And, even more provocatively, “To Generalize is to be an Idiot” (quoted Fearful Symmetry, 15) All that we can know is an image, Blake maintained, and images are always particular. Generalizations rely on on memory, and a memory “must always be less than the perception of the image” (quoted Fearful Symmetry, 15). Generalizations result as we compare memory images, from which comparison abstract qualities are inferred. Generalizations have no independent reality. “Things are real to the extent that they are sharply, clearly, particularly perceived by themselves and discriminated from one another” (Fearful Symmetry, 16). Believing abstract qualities is “a flight from reality” (ibid., 16). Blake also rejects Locke’s dividing the subject from the object, which he calls the “Cloven Fiction” (ibid., 17). This results in a retreat from the real world of forms and an acceptance of the shadowy world of memories and abstractions, which Blake calls spectres (ibid., 19). Blake’s conception of reality is thoroughgoingly monist (to be exact, of the neutral monist variety): for Blake, the body and the soul are the same thing, which appears under different aspects. We call this reality a body when it is an object and a soul when it is a subject. Blake’s language for expounding this idea sometimes had a remarkably electrologic tone:

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. (Blake, Complete Writings, 154.)

Frye points out that Blake uses several other words as synonyms for soul: mind, intellect, poetic genius, fancy, and most importantly, imagination. “If a man perceived is a form or image, man perceiving is a former or imaginer, so that ‘imagination’ is the regular term used by Blake to denote man as an acting and perceiving being. That is, a man’s imagination is his life” (Fearful Symmetry, 19). Blake was a relativist in the sense that he believed “nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality” (Fearful Symmetry, 19). The patterns will be unique for each individual, and so there is a different reality for every human being. Locke wants us to believe that there is one reality determined by a majority vote of normal men. Locke’s standard for reality is mediocre perception; by way of contrast, for Blake every perception is an action and like all human actions, perceptions range from completely involuntary to completely voluntary. The most real perceptions are those that are most voluntary, that are motivated by “passionate desire” and “intense joy” (ibid., 21). This is true regardless of the context within which those perceptions take place, whether it be science, farming, or poetry. A person with these kinds of perceptions “sees all that he can see of all that he wants to see” (quoted ibid., 21). People who think along the Enlightenment lines Locke laid down want to be reassured that they see what everyone else sees. They are paralyzed by doubt. They “see all they want to see of all that they can see” (quoted ibid., 21).

R. Bruce Elder

fight the machine age; it has the “wheels within wheels” of Ezekiel’s vision which will reverse the direction of the “wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic / Moving by compulsion each other” which we see in all natural machinery, including the stars.14

In the concluding paragraph of the part of “Inside Blake and Hollywood” dedicated to Fearful Symmetry, McLuhan pays tribute to Frye’s ability to grasp the coherence of Blake’s thought and to discern how every part relates to every other. That is offered in the context of a (somewhat ironic) recommendation, namely that Frye consider Blake within the tradition of the Patristics and Vico:

Professor Frye’s inside view of Blake in which every part of the bard’s thought is seen to have a strict etiolation and coherence is perhaps in need of some further development from the outside. Blake is psychologically in the tradition of patristic allegory unbroken from Philo of Alexander to the Cambridge Platonists, and he needs to be closely compared and contrasted with Vico. But much gratitude is due to Professor Frye for having brought into a conclusive focus all the elements of Blake’s thought and feeling.15

It is this idea of everything being connected to everything that turns out to form the basis of McLuhan’s extravagant pairing of Frye’s study of the Bible with the American Surrealist Parker Tyler’s Magic and Myth of the Movies. McLuhan opens this section of the article with a comment that repudiates the cultural isolationism that the language of the Enlightenment fostered:

Just how it has been possible for those who regard Joyce and Eliot with respect to exempt themselves from a rigorous evaluation of every phase of commercial culture is perhaps only to be explained by the obsession with mechanistic abstraction which an industrial society imposes.16

He highlights László Moholy-Nagy’s acuteness in discerning another effect of industrialization, namely, of understanding making as assembling forms from standard parts:

If one presupposes that there is an underlying unity of all creative work in a period, one can find in Joyce’s writings analogies to contemporary technological terms. In these terms, Joyce’s manifolded word aggutinations (often constructed from German, Hungarian or other composites which sound normal in these languages

14. From Northrop Frye Fearful Symmetry, 359; cited in “Inside Blake and Hollywood”: 713. 15. McLuhan, “Inside Blake and Hollywood”: 713. 16. Ibid.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

but strange in English) appear to be similar to the industrial process of assemblage by bolts, rivets, and screws.17

Moholy-Nagy’s forward-looking insight from Vision in Motion is one that McLuhan would go on to develop in The Gutenberg Galaxy. “Inside Blake and Hollywood” continues by commenting that in its own homeland American culture was assigned a lowly status as a result of its functional investment in high art/high culture. It takes no pride in its vibrant but vulgar entertainment culture.

Committed to an atomistic conception of himself and society, the American intellectual doesn’t really credit these things. Movies aren’t avant garde, therefore they are insignificant. This, in a word, is why the avant garde has to be imported. So Mr. Tyler’s books have been given a gentle brush-off in spite of his showing that vulgar and commercial entertainment is often of great psychological complexity and that there is nothing in high art which doesn’t appear in some confused mode in low art.18

McLuhan also composed a review of Frye’s second major book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Titled “Have with You to Madison Avenue, or, The Flush-Profile of Literature,” the piece went unpublished. The proposed title is cryptic and pithy. The expression “have with you” is a sort of double verbal-image, superimposing the titles of two pamphlets by controversial figures for whom McLuhan felt enthusiasm. (No doubt there is a measure of self-identification in this19). One of the pamphlets is by Thomas Nashe (the subject of McLuhan’s doctoral dissertation) and the other

17. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, IL: Institute of Design, 1947), 350. I have quoted slightly more of the passage than McLuhan did. Other passages in Vision in Motion analyze Joyce’s work in terms of interpenetration, distortion, and infinite plasticity, phenomena associated with the electrologic culture rather than machine culture. For example, he writes of Joyce’s “method of producing new and fuller meanings by recomposition, twisting and distortion of words. This is very similar to the technique of the cubist painter who superimposed and interpenetrated elevation, ground plan, and and cross-section into a space-time coherence” (347). And, further,

The method is quite simple! You distort the word in a passage so they suggest at one and the same time not only the original normal ones but also another series of verbalism which they now resemble. In order to convey the multiple phrases at once, it is important to respect the intonation of the whole as well as the individual words whose units of sound are being distorted. (Ibid.)

One might well ask why McLuhan failed to comment on the Moholy-Nagy’s commentary on Finnegans Wake. Moholy-Nagy’s analysis was certainly far enough ahead of its time to be worthy of highlighting. I think the answer is clear. In this part of the review, McLuhan is laying out the character and limitations of an Enlightenment conception of art and language. 18. McLuhan, “Inside Blake and Hollywood,” 715. 19. Throughout the piece, McLuhan displays a hardly contained pique over the renown Frye’s magisterial style had garnered.

R. Bruce Elder by McLuhan’s friend, Wyndham Lewis. The Thomas Nashe pamphlet was titled “Have With You To Saffron-Walden, Or, Gabriell Harveys hunt is up,” while the title of Wyndham Lewis’s pamphlet, “Have with You to Great Queen Street!” The History of a Rejected Review, by Roy Campbell (Enemy Pamphlet No. 1. London 1930)—the latter incorporated Campbell’s original review, the pompous rejection letter, and assorted correspondence. (Thus, both pamphlets defended their authors-editors against attacks and used a variety of voice in that defense.) The “flush-profile” refers to a technique for gauging viewership for TV programs: they measured how many toilets were flushed when advertisements came on.20 The primary concern of that text is that Frye’s scientific approach led him (unwittingly, as the article slyly suggests) towards a kaleidoscopic conception of literary history and a notion of synoptic collective intelligence.21 In my writing I use the term electrologic to refer to art and thought marked by attributes of the age whose leading science is the theory of electromagnetism and I call the art whose attributes reflect this new mentality and new conception of the universe as electromorphic art. McLuhan’s article starts out suggesting the collective, electrologic caste of Anatomy of Criticism.

Frye’s approach to criticism as a science turns from the training of taste and discrimination by literary means to the collective producer-orientation of the new mass media of the electronic age. The archetypal approach is the groove of collective conformity and of group-dynamics, which may explain why a uniquely opaque and almost unreadable book should have become a book-of-the-month choice.

Professor Frye has interpreted the message of the new media aright. Print had in the sixteenth century commanded private interpretation. The fixed stance of the private silent reader, identical with perspective in painting, suggested subliminally the need for an individual viewpoint in all matters. Hamlet confronted by his father’s ghost asserts that “thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain.” Then he snatches his “tables”: “Meet it is I set it down, that one may smile and smile and be a villain; At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.”

It had occurred to Montaigne that the snap-shotting of the impressions of the mind was the real message of the printed and written form. Shakespeare certainly made that point in this scene, even joking over the Montaigne technique of doubt, “At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.” For four centuries we have been

20. The article can be found at https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2019/03/review-of-northrop-fryes- anatomy-of-criticism/. 21. It is also, undoubtedly, an attack on Frye, for abandoning the idea that criticism is about shaping perception (a topic McLuhan explored under the biotechnical rubric of amputation) in favour of market analysis of consumer responses. At the same time, as I point out, McLuhan understood well that observing and predicting patterns, the very essence of the scientific method, was also his own approach to media studies. This ambivalence about scientific criticism might be the reason the article went unpublished.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

conditioned by the printed word as snap-shot of the postures of the individual mind. Segmental analysis of all motion, mental and industrial, has long been for us the norm of education and of civilized life.

But in recent decades Western culture has spawned totally new techniques of snap- shotting the postures of the group-mind. Statistical charts of group postures reached a kind of lyric pause or “moment out of time” with the discovery of the “flush- profile” which put the shaky intuitions of individual students of public attitudes on a scientific basis.22

The sixty years and more that have past since the publication of Anatomy of Criticism and developments of literary theory in Europe some fifty and more years ago have obscured the revolutionary impact of Frye’s summa. The mainstream tradition of literary criticism had the goal of teaching discrimination, and the debates in the field concerned what should be held up as valuable (formal innovation, the tautness of formal construction, depth of intuition of the presence of the divine, social utility, embeddedness in a tradition that results in a polysemic allusiveness, autobiographical insight, unsparing revelation of the Freudian dynamics of the unconscious, or reader engagement). Consequently, many professors and critics were shocked when dismissed that approach holus bolus, and demanded a critical theory of genres. In his remarkably self-assured “Polemic Introduction,” Frye notes that criticism is a mess. It relies on methods, ideas, and principles drawn from other fields. It lacks even the means to distinguish poetry from prose or lyrical from epic poetry. “The critical theory of genre is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. The very word ‘genre’ sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is.”23 The principles of literary criticism must be derived from literature itself, Frye declared, and not imported from psychoanalysis, social psychology, economic theory, theology, history, or sociology. Frye wanted to invent his own system of literary study, not to be enslaved by the Marxist’s, the Freudian’s, or the Thomist’s. Nor should the end of criticism be to promote good taste, the equivalent in the field of literature to connoisseurship in the field of visual art. (Charles Lamb and Matthew Arnold are Frye’s examples of writers who saw criticism as the cultivation of taste.) Taste, Frye recognizes, offers no secure foundation for a science of criticism, as it is always tethered to ideological assumptions. Value judgements cannot be demonstrated; and, what is worse, value judgements simply give expression to the taste of the time: the late eighteenth century deemed Blake a lunatic. But if one takes an empirical (Aristotelian) approach and explores

22. Marshall McLuhan, unpublished text. The document can be found online at https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2019/03/review-of-northrop-fryes-anatomy-of-criticism/ 23. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 13.

R. Bruce Elder the patterns in Blake’s writings, one comes to understand the operation of formidable imagination. David Cayley comments on the response to Frye’s proposal to create a science of criticism:

Frye’s desire to make criticism scientific rang alarm bells in the sacred precincts of humanism . . . but it is clear, at least in retrospect, that he intended the idea analogically. He did not imagine that critical knowledge could ever have the same status as knowledge in the mathematical sciences, but he did think that if critics investigated literature as an “order of words” with an assumed coherence they would be able to crack its code. Indeed, Frye had believed with Blake from the beginning that in Western civilization the Bible was this code.24

I began this article by mentioning on Northrop Frye’s “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts.” It is an exercise in scientific criticism of the sort Frye advocated in Anatomy of Criticism. In 1976, David Staines invited Frye to speak to a class he was giving at Harvard University on Canadian literature. In accepting the invitation, Frye promised Staines a lecture on the varied elements that constitute representative patterns in Canadian landscape painting; but when the date for the lecture drew near, Frye let Staines know that he would talk instead on patterns of imagery in Canadian poetry. This investigation of patterns in literature (or in art history) is what Frye understands as science— one identifies (through observation) basic elements and patterns in their reoccurrence, reorganization, transformation, and interaction. That’s what he learned to do in deciphering the code of Blake’s great prophetic books. He extended that into a summa of literary genres in Anatomy of Criticism, and then applied Blake’s idea that the great code of Western civilization was the Bible in his two late books, The Great Code and Words with Power.

McLuhan, too, was a student of patterns. McLuhan would frequently suggest that Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” offers an allegory of the work of an analyst of our current predicament (the result of a the supercession of the culture of Gutenberg and Newton). “Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing,” recounted McLuhan, paraphrasing Poe’s story.25 In order to survive, the sailor looks around the currents and what they are doing to objects caught in it. By discerning certain recurring patterns, he is able to grab hold what doesn’t disappear, and save himself. “Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom,” said McLuhan. “The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion or consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a

24. David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1992), 20. 25. Marshall McLuhan, remarks on man and media offered in a 1977 lecture at York University.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art strategy of evasion and survival.”26 Artists will be the most sensitive observers of patterns: “The artist’s insights or perceptions seem to have been given to mankind as a providential means of bridging the gap between evolution and technology,” said McLuhan. “The artist, when he encounters the present, the contemporary artist, is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven’s sake. His great need—the absolute indispensability of the artist—is that he alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. . . . Only the artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.” Artists are not entertainers. They have a much more serious role to play in society: “The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival.”27 A key synthetic pattern McLuhan found in Joyce (McLuhan coined the term verbi-voco-visual to refer to these synthetic/synaesthetic forms) Frye discovered almost simultaneously in Blake. Frye discerned it by analyzing the mythopoeic patterns in Blake’s Prophetic Books, including the interrelations amongst their graphics and texts. In the 1960s, McLuhan (like Blake) adopted this synthetic form for the purpose of creative delectation as well as instruction (docere and delectare). Perhaps the best example of this is Explorations no. 8, which included a collage of images and texts (including texts by McLuhan that are themselves collages of texts, and thus implement a self-similar mode of construction); the overall layout was assembled by Harley Parker, Head of Design and Installation at the Royal Ontario Museum—the ROM is across the street and up a ways from the St. Michaels College, where McLuhan taught poetry, and almost daily, at 4:00 pm, McLuhan and a changing coterie of friends, that often included Harley Parker and sometimes included Harold Innis and Edward Carpenter, would meet for coffee.

Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations was a self-reflexive work, that commented on cultural evolution towards synthetic/synaesthetic artworks, of which it was itself an example. In 1967, an expanded version of that special issue appeared as a book, Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, brought out by Something Else Press, a radically experimental publisher, mostly of avant-garde text-image works—many books published by Something Else Press were works that (like the Harley Parker– Marshall McLuhan Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations) contested the convention of the dominant mode of book production that the materiality of the printed sign-vehicle be overlooked as non- symbolic. They were, to use a McLuhanite expression, works in which the type-design and layout would constitute a counter-environment. Like Joyce’s Wake (which, as Frye noted about books in general, makes the dead speak in and to the present), they made one aware of “what papyr is meed

26. Ibid. 27. Marshall McLuhan Speaks Special Collection: Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Norman Mailer. Online at http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/interview/1968-marshall-mcluhan-in-conversation-with-norman- mailer/index.html#:~:text=The%20artist%2C%20when%20he%20encounters,can%20get%20the%20pattern%20r ecognition.

R. Bruce Elder of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.”—and as with Joyce’s writing, this encounter with Mister Typus would have verbal, aural, and visual dimensions and the signifying marks take on iconic meaning.28

28. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1934) (New York: Viking, 1984), I.1.10–13 (page 20).

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Another sensory modality, taste!

Harley Parker’s cover design itself has an interesting feature. A bold, simplified spherical graphic occupies most of the front cover (as an emblem of the oral world, which is spherical in nature), but along an arc at the top right the term πείρω (peírō) appears. The book’s prefatory material includes a note, “About the Cover,” that explains πείρω means sound.29 It doesn’t. It means to

29. As one would expect, the cover design, in its Cubistic character emblemizes the book’s character: Parker had been a student of Josef Albers; the former Bauhaus instructor’s classroom teaching was the stuff of legend, and in the later 1960s and the 1970s his The Interaction of Color appeared on the reading list of most design courses across the continent. (It was the design text when I was in film school.) Albers’s work extended the flatting and decentralizing tendencies of Cubism. The notion of collage Harley Parker implemented in Verbi-Voco-Visual

R. Bruce Elder pierce, to run though, to cleave. The reasons for including a reference to piercing and running in a marvellous verbi-voco-visual collage on the themes of synthesis I will get to soon.

Section three of Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, titled “Electronics as E. S. P.,” presents thoughts on synaesthesia.

Synasthesia is simply totalism in the use of the senses. After centuries of abstract, printed lineality the Baudelaires and Rimbauds revolted into synesthesia because the telegraphic and photographic resources of the earlier nineteenth century had suddenly revealed the possibility of experience at many levels. Wagner leapt at the possibilities. The Bauhaus gave institutional form to the same developments. Today we take the entire Bauhaus program of Synesthesia for granted as normal suburban living. The tactile sculpture, the bleached stump, as much as the bleached blonde, have supplanted the conch shell, the aspidistra, and the peignoir as properties of the suburban scene. [I suspect that this might be references to the Rosalind Russell vehicle, Auntie Mame (1957)]

The most ordinary ads feature Cubist and Dada gimmicks “as dumb as old medallions to the thumb” which put us inside and outside every situation simultaneously.

Imagine people in 1910 being baffled by visual cubism when they wallowed in it their newspapers every day! The difficulty is not to explain cubism but to account for the mental processes of those who found it obscure. [The account? Their sensoria had been amputated by the pre-electrologic sensory regimen.] . . .

Sculpture has discovered the auditory world. Sculptors know that the cello and musical instruments are perfect relations of auditory space.

And later, regarding the media overcoming time, space and death

Gutenberg made all history SIMULTANEOUS: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentleman’s library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman’s breakfast table.30

Explorations hybridized Synthetic Cubist ideas of collage/montage with Albers’s practices of flattening and creating interaction between masses. But Parker’s layout resembles even more closely that of Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, a pioneering work McLuhan lauded in “Inside Blake and Hollywood”; both Albers and Moholy-Nagy had been teachers at the Bauhaus. 30. McLuhan and Parker, Verbi-voco-visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), n. p.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Thus McLuhan highlights book’s capacity to situate readers in a particular sort of space: readers are potentially inside and outside every situation, no matter what time or place if hails from. The are simultaneously inside and outside all historical events.

Northrop Frye uses a similar expression. Regarding Blake’s view of the imagination in Milton, he writes,

The imaginative view turns the natural one inside out. Here the subject is not at the centre but at the circumference of reality, hence all perceivers are one perceiver, who is the totality of humanity (Albion) and, because totally human, divine as well (Jesus). Rilke is close to Blake when he speaks of the poet’s perspective as that of an angel containing all time and space, but blind and looking into himself. From this point of view, space is no longer extension . . ., but form . . .; time is no longer duration . . . but creative life . . .. In plates 30–1 we learn that the view of space and time as indifferent extensions receding from us s a projection caused by the cramped quarters of our present bodies.31

In conversation with CBC broadcaster and writer David Cayley, Frye relates having had a visionary experience:

I was staying at the YMCA in Edmonton, where I was for very dubious reasons reading Spengler’s Decline of the West, and I suddenly got a vision of coherence. That’s the only way I can describe it. Things begin to form patterns and make sense.32

A little while later, he returned to reading Decline of the West, expanding on the experience he had while reading it.

There’s a remark in Malraux’s Voices of Silence to the effect that he thought that Spengler’s book started out as a meditation on the destiny of art forms and then expanded from there. And what it expanded into is the key idea that has always been on my mind, the idea of interpenetration, which I later found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, the notion that things don’t get reconciled, but everything is everywhere at once. Wherever you are the centre of everything. And Spengler showed that operated in history, so I threw out the muzzy Teuton [Frye

31. Northrop Frye, “Notes for a Commentary on Milton” (1957). Originally published, The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957), 99–137. Reprinted 239–65 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW16: 244. 32. David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi, 1992), 48.

R. Bruce Elder

had just remarked that Spengler was “the most stupid bastard I ever picked up”] and kept those two intuitions.33

Cayley asked Frye for more specifics about “Whitehead and the idea of interpenetration.” Frye responded,

The concept of interpenetration, as I said, I found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. Other people have found it Mahayana Buddhism and the Avatamsaka Sutra. It’s a way of accounting for the fact that the centre is everywhere. Traditionally we have described God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. But I would think of God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is everywhere too. The opposite of interpenetration, where everything exists everywhere at once, is an objective centrality, which it seems to me, is a most tyrannical conception.34

The remark suggests resonances between Whitehead’s cosmology and aspects of Mahayana Buddhist soteriology. Frye explored the parallels between Whitehead’s writings and ideas from Lankavatara and the Avatamsaka Sutras, and he often noted the parallels between Blake’s ideas and Mahayana Buddhism. His notebooks contain many references to works on Chan (Zen) Buddhism, to the writings of D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese philosophy professor who helped introduce Chan ideas into the West. The Lankatara and Avatamsaka Sutras became for Frye, despite their daunting challenge, “vade mecums [handbooks, literally ‘go with me’s] of practical meditation.”35 There is remarkable resonance between Eastern ideas of process and Whitehead’s ontology.

33. Ibid., 61. 34. Ibid., 64. In The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991). Frye tells us he read Science and the Modern World while at college; it was, he said, “the first book of philosophy that I read . . . purely for pleasure.” (Northrop Frye on Religion, 198; The Double Vision, 40–1). Whitehead writes, “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world’ (Science and the Modern World [New York: The Free Press, 1925, 1953], 114). Frye tells us that reading the passage was an “initiation into what Christianity means by spiritual vision” (Northrop Frye on Religion, 198; The Double Vision, 41). 35. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual Worlds, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), CW6:714. “I can’t make any sense out of these infernal Sutras,” he laments: “they seem designed for people who really can’t read” CW 6:616). “The initial impression the [Lankavatara] Sutra makes on the candid reader [is] of an almost intolerable prolixity & obscurantism” (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks . . . , ed. Robert D. Denham [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003], CW 13:46). I do think both these sutras, and especially the wondrous Avatamsaka Sutra, require a different than ordinary manner of reading (and that might be the reason Frye thought they were for non-readers). They need to be read slowly and “aloud,” sounding out each phrase (if only in one’s head). And some passages need to be read a second time before moving on the next. In other words, they need to be read in the manner one reads Finnegans Wake. Since the English translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra is 1600 pages long, it takes a bit of patience—like many great religious texts, reading it does require commitment. But reading that way does restructure consciousness. I understand it is even

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

First, one of the classics of early Chinese literature, The Book of Changes gives us the image of a universe filled with events that interact in spontaneous and creative ways, giving rise to patterns of connection that have myriad meanings amid the inevitability of change. Whitehead pictures the universe in much the same way. He pictures the building blocks of the universe as events rather than substances, and says that these events reveal various patterns of connection which he calls pure potentialities or eternal objects. He offers a philosophy of events in process. Chinese Buddhism in the Huayan tradition gives us the image of a universe in which every entity is present in every other entity in a network of densely interrelated beings. There is an infinite mutual fusion or penetration of all that is, even while each thing maintains its individuality. Each process-element is unique and individual and at the same time universal. The Buddhist concept of dharmakāya resembles the pagan conception of the λόγoς (logos) insofar as it guides the unfolding of the universe. The dharmakāya “pervades the universe and manifests itself before all beings according to causality; nowhere is [it] not found, yet [it] is immovable from the seat of enlightenment.”36 Dharamakāya (which is sometimes referred to as tathatā, or suchness) is by nature pure and tranquil, and though the phenomena of the world seem variegated, in reality they are all simply manifestations of a common underlying reality (tathatā), in whose nature they partake.

Each thing is a complete manifestation of the whole. Fa Zang’s (643–712) Calming and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of Huayan offered one of Chinese Buddhism’s great metaphysical images:

The jeweled net of Śakra is also called Indra’s Net, and is made up of jewels. The jewels are shiny and reflect each other successively, their images permeating each other over and over. In a single jewel they all appear at the same time, and this can be seen in each and every jewel. There is really no coming or going.

Now if we turn to the southwest direction and pick up one of the jewels to examine it, we will see that this one jewel can immediately reflect the images of all of the other jewels. Each of the other jewels will do the same. Each jewel will simultaneously reflect the images of all the jewels in this manner, as will all of the other jewels. The images are repeated and multiplied in each other in a manner that is unbounded. Within the boundaries of a single jewel are contained the unbounded

more effective to read the Chinese aloud—the Sanskrit original exists only in fragments—but my Classical Literary Chinese is almost non-existent, and I can’t vouch for what I have heard. 36. Beatrice Lane Suzuki, “Extracts from the Mahayana Sutras,” in Mahayana Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 103–15, here 117.

R. Bruce Elder

repetition and profusion of the images of all the jewels. The reflections are exceedingly clear and are completely unhindered.37

The image is renowned because it captures so splendidly the great theme of Huayan Buddhism: the perfect realm of the Buddha (li, often translated as principle) is interfused with the ordinary world (shi, which is ordinarily translated as event, affair, or thing). Buddhist tradition maintains that the first thing the Buddha said when he awakened was, “Wonder of wonders! All beings, just as they are, are whole and complete. All beings are endowed with Buddha-nature.” That is, the fundamental nature of any being is no different from that of all existence.

But process philosophy proposes a similar view. Whitehead proclaimed, in Process and Reality, that the whole purpose of his philosophy is to show how one being can be present in another and proposes that all entities are present within all others—every “actual event” contains every other being, even as it is distinct from every other. The Chan tradition in Chinese Buddhism emphasizes the primacy of each present moment of experience, as the place where enlightenment occurs. For Whitehead, too, there is a primacy to the present moment of experience—the here-and-now—because only the present moment possesses subjective immediacy: the immediacy of the past has perished and the immediacy of the future does not yet exist. The Avatamsaka Sutra, the core text for the Huayan school, is a particularly rich source of ideas on interpenetration—D. T. Suzuki considered it to be the crowning achievement of Buddhist philosophy. Central to the work is the idea of sunyata, or emptiness. By emptiness, Buddhist philosophers do not mean being unreal—it means not having independent existence (dependent existence means existence that is caused by or dependent on another). Huayan Buddhism raises the idea of being dependent on other existents to a level of grandeur and intricacy unparalleled in world literature. The Huayan school taught the doctrine of the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena, as expressed in Indra’s net. Each thing contains all other existing things, and all existing things contain that one thing. This sutra describes a cosmos of infinite realms upon infinite realms, every one of them mutually containing all others.

The sutra offers ten similes on emptiness. I draw on Garma C. C. Chang’s The Buddhist Teaching of Totality in outlining them. (Consider when reading them Frye’s comment on interpenetration—it is the image of that whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is everywhere.)

37. From “Indra’s Net,” trans. George Tanabe, in “Flower Garland (Huayan School),” in Sources of East Asian Tradition, vol. 1, Premodern Asia, ed. W. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 257– 58, here 258.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Emptiness implies non-obstruction . . . like space of the Void it exists within many things but never hinders or obstructs anything. Emptiness implies omnipresence. . . . like the Void, it is ubiquitous; it embraces everything everywhere. Emptiness implies equality . . . like the Void, it is equal to all; it makes no discrimination anywhere. Emptiness implies vastness . . . like the Void, it is vast, broad, and infinite. Emptiness implies formlessness and shapelessness . . . like the Void, it is without form or mark. Emptiness implies purity . . . like the Void, it is always pure and without defilement. Emptiness implies motionlessness . . . like the Void, it is always at rest, rising above the process of construction and destruction. Emptiness implies the positive negation . . . it negates all that has limits or ends. Emptiness implies the negation of negation . . . it negates all Selfhood and destroys the clinging of Emptiness (pointing to the thorough transcendency that is free from all abiding). Emptiness implies unobtainability or ungraspability . . . like space or the Void, it is not obtainable or graspable.38

And further,

The gist of Hwa Yen philosophy can be summarized in two phases: mutual penetration (or mutual entering [cf. πείρω]), and mutual identity. Mutual identity is almost an equivalent of the Heart Sutra’s dictum that form is Emptiness and Emptiness is form, whereas mutual penetration corresponds to the principle of dependent-arising of the Śūnyatā doctrine which states that no thing, whether concrete or abstract, mundane or transcendental, has an independent or isolated existence, but all things are dependent on one another for their existence and their functions. The mutual penetration of Hwa Yen, however, seems to have gone one step further; it makes the concept of the dependent arising more explicit by proposing the following three graphics phases: simultaneous-mutual-arising, simultaneous-mutual-entering, and simultaneous-mutual-containment.

simultaneous − mutual − arising mutual penetration = { simultaneous − mutual − entering 39 simultaneous − mutual − containment

38. Garma C. C. Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Teaching of Hwa Yen Buddhism (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1971), 100-1. 39. Ibid., 121.

R. Bruce Elder

Unlike other schools of Chinese Buddhism, the Huayan school rejected the idea that the “universal causality of the dharmadhatu (universal principle)” entails its being an Absolute. This rejection, the Huayan school realized, entails that the principle (li) that gives rise to all phenomena is one among other realities in this realm, and so is not exempt from codepenency. In this realm, tathatā (reality “as-it-is,” suchness), is emptiness (Chinese: kong; Sanskrit: sunyata) since it, like all that is, arises codependently. All things participate in a unity—and that whole codependently produces the many. So the many belong to the one at the same time as the one, in its entirety, manifests itself in each and every one of them. The cosmos is “one bright pearl,” the universal reality of Buddhahood. Each phenomenon is like a wave in the sea, originating (codependently) from the sea; and each wave is no different from the sea itself. Huayan Buddhism sometimes expresses this by saying that there are an infinite number of Buddhas and Buddha realms in the universe and they all share the same Buddha body. This doctrine is sometimes known as the teaching of totality.

Frye’s conception of interpenetration is exactly that of Avatamsaka Sutra:

The conception of interpenetration is that of natural inclusion. We are in God. God is in us. Therefore there are two worlds, as at the end of Paradiso, one the other turned inside out. My consciousness of things puts those things inside me, but whatever is conscious puts me inside them. I fell over this years ago dealing with art & nature: in art nature is turned inside out. But I didn’t see it as interpenetration, or an aspect of it. Perhaps this mutuality of awareness is identity.40

He also understands that Blake’s conception of the unfallen cosmos is that of interpenetrating realities. For Blake’s “the human form divine” is the lodestone of his mythology. “That God may be all in one: that’s the text for interpenetration.”41 Denham rightly suggests that this image for “the human form divine,” which in Blake’s works becomes a triumphant poetic and pictorial affirmation of Albion’s capacity to reunite his four Zoas (split-off aspects of the ideal human form); from that emerges a fusion of the finite and infinite that Blake found in the bounded figure of Christ, a fusion which is at once a mode of vision (the “Divine Analogy”) and a mode of existence (loving forgiveness). The image of Christ became the image of finite containing the infinite and the infinite containing the finite—and that became a model for the reality of every existent. Only the idea of interpenetration gives form to this near paradoxical character of reality.

Both McLuhan and Frye understood artworks to be mimetic. According to Frye, Blake believed that God works through the artist to rebuild fallen creation; that is, the artist imitates the divine

40. Northrop Frye The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972, ed. Michael Dolzani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), CW 9:253. This is another approach one might take in considering holism, the theme of Barilli’s essay published in this issue. 41. Northrop Frye, Note 99 in notebook 11e, in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks . . . , CW 13:339.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art natura naturans. I have commented previously that McLuhan drew on Plato’s notion of imitation for his conception of the “put on.” He was more in tune with Aristotle’s idea of imitation.

The whole of Finnegans Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation or private and corporate experience in the “dreaming back.” . . . Creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labyrinth of sensation. . . . The last lines of [Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ] explain the relation of the young artist to the dead: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth, which is traced on the first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition.

Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural processes, whether of making sense via cognition or making a house by following the lines of Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aristotle writes: “Thus, if a house had been a thing made by Nature it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and if things made by nature were made also by art, they would come to be in the same way as by Nature.” Aristotle thus confirms the sacral quality of the cliché or artifact by aligning it with the cosmic forces, just as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny, i.e., knowing and growing are one, which of course is the theme of The Portrait by Joyce.42

Electromorphic art, as Blake’s works evidence, is an art that is mimetic, in the sense of aligning it with cosmic forces—and to do so, the writer-lyricist-and-visual artist had make his art wildly synthetic (that is, had to make it verbi-visual-voco). Frye writes,

It is difficult to convey adequately the sense of the uniqueness of Blake’s achievement in these engraved poems. In the Preface to Jerusalem Blake speaks with pride of having developed a free and unfettered verse, but he hardly seems to notice that he had at the same time perfected a far more difficult and radical form of mixed art, for which there is hardly a parallel in the history of modern culture. The union of musical and poetic ideas in a Wagner opera is a remote analogy; but the poetry is not independent of the music in Wagner as it is of the painting in Blake. Blake seems to have worked on his text and his pictorial ideas simultaneously: this is clear from the manuscript of The Four Zoas, where the pencil sketches in the margins

42. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson “Mimesis, or Making Sense” 146–50, in From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking Books, 1970), here 148–50.

R. Bruce Elder

indicate that Blake did not think in terms of a poem to be written first and decorated afterward, but, from the beginning, in terms of a narrative sequence of plates.43

Northrop Frye observes as well that a return to the synthetic tradition of earlier verse with its pattern of repetition characterizes the work of one of Blake’s most profound readers and advocates (and a poet whose picture McLuhan had on his office wall):

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is usually taken as the turning point towards a neo- Romantic poetry which has been popular in a way hardly known to previous generations. Much of this poetry has turned back to the primitive oral tradition of folk song, with the formulaic units, topical allusions, musical accompaniment, and public presentation that go with that tradition.44

In support of these claims, Frye offers a summary of the Parry–Lord thesis that was the starting point for McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy

When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected and classified at that time. The oral ballad makes a functional use of refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts. The fact that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry. The literary ballads which imitate these characteristics—the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake's Mental Traveller, Keat’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci—come about as close as poetry can come to reproducing

43. Northrop Frye, “Poetry and Design in William Blake,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 10 (1951): 35–42; reprinted 212–20 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, here CW 16: 216. 44. Northrop Frye, “The Renaissance of Books” (1973) Visible Language 8, no. 3 (1974): 225–40; reprinted 140– 55 in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), CW 11:146. The article is partly a critique of McLuhan’s proposal that orality was replacing literacy. But the question whether orality would supplant literacy/visuality, or whether published poetry would become neo-Romantic by taking on the attributes of oral-formulaic poetry and being presented publicly was largely a palace feud within the precincts of the University of Toronto’s English Department (and the view of neither professor on the topic was completely settled). The bigger issue McLuhan and Frye agreed on: the new electric poetry and new Romantic consciousness were mythopoeic through and through. Frye states explicity, in “The Renaissance of Books,” that poetry was changing, “towards the romantic, the fantastic, and the mythopoeic.” And further,

Science fiction . . . has taken on a new importance, and the mythical elements in Pynchon or Vonnegut do not revolve around a realistic centre, as they do in Ulysses. Romance, fantasy, and mythopoeia are the inescapable forms for a society which no longer believes in its own permanence or continuity. (Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, CW11.146–47.)

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

directly the voice of the creative powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited and yet curiously impersonal as well. This was also the “democratic” voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture. A different but related Canadian tradition is that of the chansonniers, as represented today by Gilles Vigneault.45

The visual art of the electrologic era possesses analogous features. It is synthetic (as Blake’s etchings and watercolors show, it is verbi-voco-visual). As highly idiolexical as it is, it also curiously seems impersonal. It seems elementary (“primitive,” in the sense of not being like the “civilized” work of his contemporary Joshua Reynolds) and to give expression to the creative powers of the mind that lie below consciousness. It makes use of repetition. Blake’s earliest lyrics evince those characteristics, and the later works, including the Prophetic Books retain those characteristics even as they became increasingly synthetic/synthaesthetic. And they remained determinedly democratic.

45. Northrop Frye, “Clair de lune intellectuel,” part 3 of The Modern Century, 48–70 in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, here CW11.56. Gilles Vigneault is a poet and singer-songwriter who belongs in the tradition of Georges Brassens (his recordings and performances have been very popular). He won the Governor-General’s Award in 1965 for his collection of poems, Quand les bateaux s’en vont. Frye was impressed with The Gutenberg Galaxy. As a frequent commentator on Canadian writing, he chaired the jury for the Governor-General’s Awards in Literature for 1962; many people mistook McLuhan’s strangely formed book for an oddball academic study. Frye seems to have recognized that The Gutenberg Galaxy is a highly creative work whose novel form is an expression of its content. In any event, the jury awarded it the prize for non-fiction.

R. Bruce Elder

William Blake, Archangel Gabriel with Adam and Eve (Illustrations for Milton) - Crazy, electromorphic painting

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Lady Jane Halliday - Painting in the sober manner

R. Bruce Elder

Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun – Book of Revelations

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Joshua Reynolds, Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons

Frye presents Blake as a radical ethical reformer dedicated to the centrality of art and imagination. These, Blake’s verse implies, are the agencies that can counter the effects of intellect-crushing rationalism, desire-constricting morality, and human cruelty. Constants that would reappear whenever Frye would present Blake, no matter how different the audience and whatever the level of address, are Blake’s recognition of the powerful psychological drives fueling war, power, and artistic creation (which in Blake’s mythological universe are identified with Ore, Urizen, and Los respectively). Thus, Blake’s work became examples—stunning examples—of interpretative imagination. Further, each element will present itself as a novel concrescent occasion whose relationality matches the novelty of its environment. The imagination that brings forth such work engages in a form of weaving, selecting strands from each of the threads that will be integrated into each concrescent form. Each conscious act of imagination emerges within cosmic creativity itself, which replicates on a grander scale the unconscious dynamics present at the microlevel of the concrescence of the actual occasion. (Self-similarity is characteristic of every level of reality, from

R. Bruce Elder the most minute micro-structure right on up to the all-embracing macro-structure.) There must be a feeling of mutual immanence in the societies’ relation to one another. Concrescence can be seen as have the mutuality characteristic of activities on the plane of immanence: concrescence involves bringing what is outside the emergent actual occasional into the actual occasion. It makes what is distant part of the emergent entity. At the same time, the occasion makes its presence felt in every other location. In visual terms, this means radical centring, as elements have a nisus towards the central element (and axial symmetry is remarkably common in electromorphic visual art). At the same time, this implosion towards the centre is matched by an emanation from the centre, as energy flows out from the flattened body. If, as Hans Hoffmann suggests, push-and-pull relations, in which colours seem to advance from the picture plane or to recede into it, were the key source of tension in late modernist painting, then this tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces are the key source of tension in electromorphic art. Given that centripetal and centrifugal forces are suggested in John Clerk Maxwell’s beautiful equations, this is just exactly what we would expect. Consider William Blake’s Queen Katherine’s Dream, 1825)

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Blake’s extraordinarily synthetic (verbi-voco-visual) work fuses image, sound and literal meaning. Plate 71 of Jerusalem displays such centripedal-centrifugal balance, while the text thematizes the topic.

R. Bruce Elder

Here is the text from the second verse of that plate:

What is Above is Within, for every-thing in Eternity is translucent: The Circumference is Within, Without is formed the Selfish Center, And the Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity, And the Center has Eternal States; these States we now explore.46

An artist whose work is informed by the electrologic conception of reality will recognize the primacy of energy as characterized by unity, wholeness, and holism—their work will have an organic character, not the character of assembly of parts. It will have no truck with detailed rendering of reality according to the perspectival system. The distinction between figure and ground is eliminated, as all elements everywhere on the canvas take on equal importance. Consequently, electromophic art is an art of flatness, of surface. The third dimension is cancelled. So electromorphic art discards the illusion of depth, enhancing the relevance of surface, of texture. Simplified, flat shapes, without “realistic” chiaroscuro modelling and likely without clear boundaries—but definitely with gradient transitions—constitute the elements of the painting. The shapes of visual elements in their work will follow Faraday’s lines of force, the patterns of electromagnetism.

Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together)

46. William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake: with variant readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 709.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

Furthermore, in an electromorphic work, each detail in the work becomes separately symbolic of the whole argument. This idea might be familiar to readers acquainted with the evolution of McLuhan’s thought. Early in his career, while he was still teaching in St. Louis, McLuhan took note of a parallel between the layout of newspaper pages and modernist writing. A collective view of the news penetrates every story on a newspaper’s front page, so each becomes separately symbolic of the editor’s notion of what stories are of greatest importance. The juxtaposition of one story, or one column, against another suggest a relationship that is never explicitly stated— visual design and literal content interpenetrate one another in way that parallels the manner in which the literal content of juxtaposed stories exchange with one another. Indeed, the exchanges should be seen as intermodal or synaesthetic interactions. Similar techniques can be found in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, especially Cantos 8 and 9 (the first of the Malatesta Cantos, composed in 1922, when Pound discovered how to use quotations from historical documents to blur the distinction between prose and poetry—in essence, this allowed Pound to create a kaleidoscopic shapes and colours based in Sigismondo Malatesta’s life, changing shape and colour, and disappearing. Like all that has been real and become virtual, they arise and disappear; they come and go). Even more radical forms of intermodal, synaesthetic exchanges can be found in Blake’s illustrations for Milton or his “Illustrations to The Book of Job.” Consider for example, “Job’s Evil Dream.”47

47. I refer here to the engraving; there is another version, a watercolour with black ink. The engraving includes text, and it is the synthesis of text and image that I comment on.

R. Bruce Elder

It is a synthetic work in the manner of Diderot’s emblem:48

Thus, there passes into the poet’s speech a spirit which moves and vivifies all the syllables. What is this spirit? I have sometimes felt its presence; but all I know is that it is what makes it possible to have things said and represented at the same time—it makes it possible that at the same moment when the reason comprehends them [the syllables], for the soul to be exalted by them, the imagination to see them, and the ear to hear them and that speech no longer be just a series of energetic terms which reveal thought with strength and nobility. This collection of syllables even comes to resemble a fabric of crowded hieroglyphs that depict the thought. But that it is still a fabric of hieroglyphics piled one on top of the other which paint it. I could say, in this sense, that all poetry is emblematic.49

Blake’s “Illustrations to The Book of Job” defy traditional categorization. They are interpretative at the same time as they are creative. The text and image together offer instruction on how to read The Book of Job and the Bible; yet, at the same time, they are imaginative feats. (Like Verbi- Visual-Voco Explorations, these are works that accomplish the fused task of docere and delectare.) The story of Job is of a good man sorely testing in trying to understand the relationship between the evil of suffering and the existence of God. Blake’s reading of the Book of Job instructs us on Job’s flaw (which the divine will use to edify him): Job’s attended to the letter, rather than the

48. I caution that Diderot’s emblem is nothing like that of the Symbolist or Victorian emblem book. For one thing, the emblem book is moralistic, and instructs one on the moral value of conventional behaviour or helps consolidate a consensus around the usefulness of conventional conceptions of everyday things (cf. bestiaries). That Diderot chose to use the term hieroglyph—which in his time still maintained its etymological meaning of sacred inscription—should indicate how far Diderot’s conception of emblem was from that. I also point out that Diderot’s Lettre sur les sourds et muets, which ruminates on poetry, hieroglyphs, and emblems is fundamentally concerned with the natural order of language and the mind’s parsing text that is sequentially presented. The natural order of language should reflect “the natural order of sensory perception,” that is, the order in which the sensible qualities of an object affect the senses of man. The spiritual escape from time into the simultaneous is a valuable power of poetry; but inversions of the natural order of language in expository prose produces epistemological and ontological confusions. 49. Denis Diderot, « Sur les sourds et les muets » 349–94 in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat and M. Tourneux (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 1.374. This is my poor effort at a translation. My inability to master any foreign languages requires that I give the original, so readers can correct my translation errors for themselves.

Il passe alors dans le discours du poète un esprit qui en meut et vivifie toutes les syllabes. Qu’est ce que cet esprit? J’en ai quelquefois senti la présence; mais tout ce que je sais, c’est que c’est lui qui fait que les choses sont dites et représentées tout à la fois; que dans le même temps que l’entendement les saisit, l’âme en est émue, 1’imagination les voit et l’oreille les entend, et que le discours n’est plus seulement un enchaînement de termes énergiques qui exposent la pensée avec force et noblesse, mais que c’est encore un tissu d’hiéroglyphes entassés les uns sur les autres qui la peignent. Je pourrais dire, en ce sens, que toute poésie est emblématique.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art spirit, of God’s law. The law, as a form of rational oppression, is a Satanic device (Christ came to free us to live by the spirit, not by the law; that is, he encourages to bring forth the domain of Los). So, in following the law Job falls under Satan's spell. His suffering progresses into the horrible vision of a cloven-hoofed demon in the eleventh plate, Job’s Evil Dreams. Job’s friends Elihu and Eliphaz formulate arguments regarding the sin for which Job is being punished. But Job’s faith remains constant. The main text for “Job’s Evil Dreams” Blake drew from chapter seven, verse fourteen of the Book of Job: “Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions.” In putting together “Job’s Evil Dream,” Blake provides an example of how the imagination might read this section of the Bible—it requires the creative act of drawing this passage together with what one has “by heart,” for chapter seven offers no details about substance of Job’s dream. TTo discern (through artmaking) the deeper meaning of Job’s dream, Blake was forced to draw material (imagery and texts) for this engraving from elsewhere in the Bible. For example, “My skin is black upon me and my bones are burned with heat” comes from the chapter thirty of Book of Job. Satan’s luminous visage, seen hovering over Job’s face, drew on Second Corinthians Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse fourteen, which describes Satan transformed into an Angel of Light: “And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” Because mimetic forms arise from nature’s creativity and natural growth, electromorphic art has a tendency to

R. Bruce Elder become phytomorphic—or, more generally, if artists’ creative energies share in that of the divine, then their work will display attributes of natural forms. Consider the shoots and tendrils in Blake’s drawings and watercolours, for example, the flames of Hell beneath Job’s bed in “Job’s Evil Dream,” which echoed in the tendril-like forms in at the edges of the engraving (which also serve to enclose the picture, which contributing to the effect of circular enclosure).

We see something similar in the frontispiece to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Frye likewise, in The Return of Eden, pondered the relationship between energy and form. “Because the true Creator’s activity consists of “releasing energy by creating form,” he points out, we should properly regard creation as a liberating activity: “we ought to revise our conception of creation: it is not so much imposing form on chaos as incorporating energy in form.”50 I have already noted that this incorporation itself is mimetic, but what is imitated is not, as it was in Joshua Reynolds’s work, natura naturata (nature natured or nature made), but the artist themself imitating natura naturans (nature naturing [making nature]): “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; / . . . The force that drives the water through rocks / Drives my red blood.”

50. Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1965), 50, 49; reprinted in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, 35–131, here 69, 68.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

, Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together)

But natural growth seems to have a goal: The Enlightenment rejected the idea of teleology, but the Romantics strived to reinstate it.

Blake’s conception of vision includes telos: the oak tree is the unconscious vision of the acorn; the eternal city and garden are the conscious vision of man, the reason or bounding outline of his desire. Although Ore appears to be smothered under the world of Urizen, the real power that keeps him chained is Los, who has the task of articulating human vision, and so of restoring the Golden Age, as Blake says of his own art. Such an achieved vision, the total form of art, prophecy, and imagination in this world, is the central aspect of Blake’s Beulah, which has also a symbolic structure parallel to the others.51

Frye points also points out there that human desire must fulfill itself. The consequences of not doing so is the theme of Blake’s early song of experience, “The Poison Tree.”

51. Northrop Frye, “Notes for a Commentary on Milton”; reprinted in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, 257. George Grant analyzes the cost of the Enlightenment’s expulsion of the concept of teleology from its science in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969). Marshall McLuhan and company, in the essays collected by Eric McLuhan in Media and Formal Cause (Victoria: NeoPoiesis Press, 2011) tried to revive the Aristotelian ideas of the four causes and entelechy—entelechy is simply the idea that basic to the nature of any thing is the telos it is fitted to serve or the end it is destined to become. (Renato Barilli could well have examined McLuhan’s holism through this lens.)

R. Bruce Elder

But, as Blake’s Job’s Evil Dream and A Poison Tree show, phytomorphism is really a consequence of conceiving every point in the space of the picture, and by implication, beyond its edges, as exerting a pull on every other point, a conception that produced tropes of what (using a term I took from jazz criticism) I call infinite plasticity. In this sense, every point in space contains every other, so is simultaneously everywhere at once, affected by and affecting all other points in space. Furthermore, as I have suggested, being simultaneously everywhere at once is a defining feature of electric technologies, and when everything is everywhere at once, time and space are eliminated. What is more, electricity is information, and so artwork becomes an entity that is as much spiritual as it is material: a new, monist ontology is required, in which any distinction between mind and matter is eliminated. Like the Avatamsaka Sutra, Blake’s writings, lyrics, and visual art (the categories are not really distinct) propose a panpsychic conception of reality. The idea that reality is information implies that reality is dynamism and the field effects within it are compositions of fast and slow speeds. Field effects art capacities for affecting and being affected on the plane of immanence.52 So it hardly surprising that Blake would have been interested in Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and seen then as parallels to his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

In an electromorphic work every region in the piece seems to contain the whole. Consider “Milton’s Mysterious Dream” in Blake Milton: *** INCLUDE IMAGE *** the etching is organized around one person gazing into another’s sleeping face, while across the canvas the motive of gazing at one another/coupling is repeated time and again in variant forms. The vortical energy that seems to create the macro-form and to be the meaning of the whole is repeated in miniature in each of them. (This is example of self-similar constructions in Blake’s work. Accompanying the watercolour are lines written in ink; the first twelve are from Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” lines 139–40, 145–54:

52. Digital cinema is the exemplary medium for displaying that reality is dynamism and the field effects within it are compositions of fast and slow speeds. It is the new electric art, par excellence.

William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art

There in close Covert by lorne Brook When no profaner Eye may look With such concert as they keep Entice the dewy featherd Sleep And let some strange mysterious dream Wave on his Wings in airy stream Of liveliest Portraiture displayd. On my Sleeping eyelids laid And as I wake sweet Music breathe Above; about: or underneath Sent by some Spirit to Mortals good Or the unseen Genius of the Wood Milton Sleeping on a Bank. Sleep descending with a Strange Mysterious dream upon his Wings of Scrolls & Nets & Webs unfolded by Spirits in the Air & in the Brook around Milton are Six Spirits or Fairies hovering on the Air with Instruments of Music.

Finally, there is the response of the viewer: electromophic artworks produce their response through electromagnetic induction: the viewer becomes another set of relations in the field that created by the circulation of energy through the artwork

(All Flesh Shall See It Together)