{"id":1181,"date":"2009-09-10T02:00:43","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T06:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2009-09-10T02:00:43","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T06:00:43","slug":"bob-rodgers-recovering-william-blake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/10\/bob-rodgers-recovering-william-blake\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Rodgers: &#8220;Recovering William Blake&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\">\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/08\/fs1-191x300.jpg\" alt=\"fs\" width=\"191\" height=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><em><strong>A memoir of Blake, Frye and the 60s from Bob Rodgers.\u00a0 Bob is a former grad student of Frye&#8217;s who became a documentary filmmaker.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">When I set out for university my motives were not entirely laudable. Movies about universities made their social life look appealing and I wanted a way out of Flin Flon anyway. Also, in the 1950s,\u00a0 if you managed to scrape through matriculation with a B average university was just something you did.\u00a0 Tuition was cheap, summer jobs plentiful and lucrative, so why not? What friends who had gone before me said was: \u201cDon\u2019t take Science or Engineering. They\u2019re hard. Take Arts\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">By second year I was having a splendid time. I played basketball for the University of Manitoba Bisons and endless hands of Bridge in the student union cafeteria. I got fake ID so I could drink at the Pembina beer parlor. I went to movie previews on Academy Road every Thursday, and to curling bees and dances on weekends, and there was a whole residence of pretty girls to date so long as you got them in by eleven. In all of these things I don\u2019t remember being much different from anyone else I knew in Arts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">With one exception. One fellow called Lennie who sat beside me in my poetry course was unlike my basketball friends and my home town friends. He was a Ukrainian from the mysterious \u201cNorth End\u201d, a section of Winnipeg beyond the CPR tracks that was as foreign to me as Bukovina. If a professor assigned a library book and you got round to looking it up it was always gone. I\u2019d find out later Lennie had it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Sitting in the cafeteria one day Lennie said: \u201cWhat do you make of William Blake?\u201d I was circumspect. I remembered reading \u201cThe Tyger\u201d, \u201cAh! Sunflower\u201d,\u00a0 and \u201cThe Chimney Sweep\u201d in High School, and we had all grown up singing Blake\u2019s \u201cJerusalem\u201don occasions of patriotic fervor for the British Empire. I wasn\u2019t ready to admit to him that I had been trying<a name=\"0.1_BM_1_\"><\/a> to read Blake\u2019s epic poem, \u2018Jerusalem\u2019,<em> <\/em>and found it impenetrable. He pushed the book he\u2019d been reading toward me and went for coffee refills. It was<em> The Collected Works of William Blake<\/em>, the Keynes edition of 1956. He knew I fancied Milton, which he didn\u2019t. He left a page open where I read: \u201cThe reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels &amp; God, and at liberty when of Devils &amp; Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil\u2019s party without knowing it.\u201d I read the lines several times, trying to figure out what Blake was saying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">My new friend returned with coffee and sat watching as I skipped through the passages he had flagged in the <em>Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em> section.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Exuberance is beauty. <em>(I liked that idea. For the same reason I preferred Anthony to Octavius.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">How do you know but evr&#8217;y bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, clos&#8217;d by your senses five? <em>(That was the one I couldn\u2019t get my head around at all.) <\/em><\/span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">The cistern contains: the fountain overflows. <em>(Same thing.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. <em>(Whoa there. I was learning about excess in my extra-curricular activities, and thought it more likely they led in the opposite direction.) <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">What is now proved was once only imagined. <em>(Well all right. So you don\u2019t invent or discover anything without having imagination.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">The cut worm forgives the plough. <em>(Is that what they meant when they said you can\u2019t make an omelette without breaking eggs? Not exactly. A worm isn\u2019t like an egg and a plough isn\u2019t like an omelette.) <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.<em> (That was an unsettling one. Like some Nietzsche things I\u2019d been reading it sounded dangerous.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\"><!--more--><\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">I picked my way through these startling lines as if tackling a dish of walnuts with my teeth. Some cracked open right away, others not at all. When I looked up Lennie was watching me as if I were an egg he expected to hatch. I attribute that very moment to the beginning of my transformation from aspiring to become just little Mr. BA to a genuine desire to learn something. I expect that\u2019s what\u2019s supposed to happen when you go to university. Suddenly a world opened up.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">I did two things I had never done before. I began spending time in the library, reading everything I could find on Blake. And I bought my first hard cover\u2013Northrop Frye\u2019s <em>Fearful Symmetry<\/em>. Later I headed for graduate school in Toronto to take Frye\u2019s celebrated course on Symbolism and the next year his course on Blake. They turned out to be pretty much the same thing which was fine with me. I could have taken the course a third time with no fear of boredom.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">It was at the time Frye\u2019s <em>Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> came out, a book being heralded as the greatest work of literary criticism since Aristotle\u2019s <em>Poetics. <\/em>The period of the Smallfrye and the Frydologues began and you had to be careful not to be trampled in the rush to what the categorists began calling \u2018archetypal criticism\u2019. I adopted Nietzsche\u2019s dictum that what begins in the daylight often proceeds at night. After managing to get half way through the first <em>Essay<\/em> I set <em>The Anatomy<\/em> aside until I got older. But that didn\u2019t reduce my esteem for<em> <\/em>Frye<em>. <\/em>When reading my way into the literary critics of the time, my habit was to underline cogent insights in pencil for future reference. By page ten of <em>Fearful Symmetry <\/em>I realized I had underlined everything. That\u2019s when I put my pencil down and decided to consider the entire book underlined. It was the best work of literary criticism I had ever come across.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">By the mid 1960s I had become part of a gang in Winnipeg and another in Toronto who were beginning to see themselves as intellectual insurgents and sansculottes determined to overthrow the existing order with words. Blake was our standard bearer: \u201cHe who desires and acts not breeds pestilence\u201d. Well of course! How better to sum up the counter culture attack on sexual repression so enthusiastically subscribed to by our parents? And yes of course; \u201cPrudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity\u201d and \u201cthose who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.\u201d\u00a0 Blake\u2019s recognition of pious sexual prohibition sounded the right chord: &#8230; \u201cAs the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys\u201d. Blake became the lodestone for our opposition to what we considered the sanctimony and arid moralism of our parents\u2019 generation. <\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Holden Caulfield and James Dean prefigured the changes to come. Then Ginsberg and Kerouac and Mailer. Gurus of all stripes followed, from Marcuse and Illych to Huxley and Laing and Leary. Still it was Blake who best caught our dawning sense (not always induced by Marijuana) of a fresh way of perceiving the world: <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">For\u00a0 man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro\u2019 narrow chinks of his cavern.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">But it wasn\u2019t all sex and drugs. Blake\u2019s social voice carried proportionate weight. \u201cPity could be no more if we did not make someone poor;\u201d \u201cPrisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.\u201d We were at a time of worldwide revolution among the young and we knew it. Alongside our self-directed efforts to cleanse the doors of perception there was a genuine concern for the disenfranchised of the earth, and for the health of the earth itself. <\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Blake\u2019s lyric poems and simpler proverbs were key for us, perhaps because at one level they could be understood by a child. But so were his difficult long poems\u2013<em>America, Europe, Urizen, Ahania, Los, The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem<\/em>, or at least sections of them<em>.<\/em>. We never pretended we could decipher them with confidence but we found passages in them that, with Frye\u2019s help, spoke to us. Besides Blake\u2019s fearsome tigers of wrath there was a sympathy for the suffering of creation. It wasn\u2019t cloying or sentimental. It touched our better side. It was an expression of what we needed to keep our hopes up. <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">To see a god in every wind &amp; a blessing in every blast;<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemy\u2019s house;<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, &amp; the sickness that cuts off his children,<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">While our olive &amp; vine sing &amp; laugh round our door and our children bring <\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">fruits and flowers.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Then the groan &amp; the dolour are quite forgotten, &amp; the slave grinding at the mill,<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">And the captive in chains, &amp; the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">When the shatter\u2019d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/ul>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">And always there were those joyful lines to fall back upon: \u201cThe head sublime, the heart pathos, the genitals beauty, the hands and feet proportion, the human form divine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">What we didn\u2019t realize in our near veneration of Blake was that we were a tiny part of something else, one of the most remarkable recoveries in the history of English Letters in the past two hundred years. Way out there, far beyond our circle, Blake was being rediscovered. You couldn\u2019t say he was being revived. He hadn\u2019t been \u2018vived\u2019 in the first place. His claims of visionary conversations with angelic beings, and the creation in his long poems of a mythological universe of his own making, branded him a mystic, an eccentric, and probably a madman.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">In his lifetime (1757-1837) Blake was best known in London artistic circles as a competent engraver. When he died and for a century thereafter he would never be mentioned in the same breath as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, or later on Tennyson or Browning. Today he is more likely to be found in the pantheon along with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. How so?<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Many hands brought about his becoming recognized as one of the greatest of English poets, none more instrumentally than Northrop Frye in <em>Fearful Symmetry (1947).<\/em> This was the skeleton key that opened the door into Blake\u2019s astonishing imagination. Scholars like Harold Bloom, Hazard Adams, David Erdman, and a host of others broadened the frontier. Still the most eloquent prose summation of Blake\u2019s vision remains for me a passage from Frye\u2019s<em> Fearful Symmetry: <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">What we see in nature is our own body turned inside out. From our natural perspective we cannot see this for the same reason that a fly crawling on a fresco cannot see the picture: we are too small, too close, too unintelligent, and have naturally the wrong kind of eye. But the imagination sees that the labyrinthine intricacies of the movements of heavenly bodies reflect the labyrinth of our brains. It sees that lakes and pools reflect the passive mirror of the eye. It sees that the revolving and warming sun is the beating and flaming heart of the fallen Albion and it is reproduced in the \u201cGlobe of Blood\u201d within our own bodies, our heart. It sees that the tide flows and ebbs in the rhythm of Albion\u2019s fallen lungs. It sees that the ridges of mountains across the world are Albion\u2019s fractured spine. It sees that the natural circulation of water is a human circulation of blood. It sees that nature is the fossilized form of a God-Man who has, unlike other fossils, the power to come to life again. It sees that what vibration-frequencies are to colour, what a prosodic analysis is to a poem, what an anatomized cadaver is to a body, so the physical world is to the mental one, the seamy side of its reality. And it sees all this because it realizes that when we see ourselves as imprisoned in a huge concave vault of sky we are seeing from the point of view of a head that is imprisoned in a concave vault of bone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">As the 1970s descended on our small circle of would-be reformers we were not alone as our hopes for a radically transformed world faded. But Blake never deserted us. Bad as things got\u2013life as commodity, the money greed, the endless wars, the genocides\u2013Blake kept us believing that our aspirations were worth it:<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Permanent, &amp; not lost not lost or vanish\u2019d &amp; every little act,<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Word, work &amp; wish, that has existed, all remaining still &#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, mere possibilities<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">But to those who enter into them they seem the only substances.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">In time I learned to come to terms with that once troubling line: \u201cBetter to murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.\u201d The key word is \u2018nurse\u2019. Blake is not advocating infanticide. Long before Freud he is identifying the sickness that can be brought on by repressed desire. In Blake\u2019s world desire is<em> <\/em>the creator of joy<em>, <\/em>a newborn thing. To foster suppression is symbolically to smother a child..<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">As for that other symbolic creature, the \u2018bird that cuts the airy way\u2019, I remain uncertain. In condensed form the passage implies an entire epistemology. \u201cReality is in the eye of the beholder&#8230;. The eye altering alters all &#8230;.\u00a0 I see not with my eye but through my eye\u201d. Blake says these things elsewhere. What we know about his life confirms the idea. He did not just have occasional intimations of immortality like Wordsworth. He saw eternity in a grain of sand day in and day out. Perception was not the result of outside objects impressing themselves on his mind. His mind\u2019s eye created what he saw and what he saw regularly was an apocalyptic land of the heart\u2019s desire called Jerusalem. It was this that made him a true visionary.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Among the tyrannies and terrors that stalk the world today Blake remains a voice of liberation. His lifelong campaign against all forms of oppression of the human enterprise, what he calls \u201cThe Mental War\u201d, remains even more relevant than ever before.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\">Some of us from that old crop of Frye students went on to academe. Most of us pursued careers that left little time for sustained engagement in the Blakean universe. Four of us from this second group got together recently to reminisce. On one thing we were unanimous: that time we spent with Frye and Blake was the most important time of our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;font-size: small\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 A memoir of Blake, Frye and the 60s from Bob Rodgers.\u00a0 Bob is a former grad student of Frye&#8217;s who became a documentary filmmaker. When I set out for university my motives were not entirely laudable. Movies about universities made their social life look appealing and I wanted a way out of Flin Flon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,47,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blake","category-fearful-symmetry","category-memoir"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Bob Rodgers: &quot;Recovering William Blake&quot; - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/10\/bob-rodgers-recovering-william-blake\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bob Rodgers: &quot;Recovering William Blake&quot; - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u00a0 A memoir of Blake, Frye and the 60s from Bob Rodgers.\u00a0 Bob is a former grad student of Frye&#8217;s who became a documentary filmmaker. 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