Friday, December 10, 2010

Much Ado About Nothing Chapter 9: Part 2

So we fall into essences, call generalities, and together, Los and Enitharmon, bring forth their family. Orc, the "shadowy female" and Satan himself who like Urizen "refuses form". He is called the Miller of Eternity, and is assigned the qualities of mechanism, and grinding, and the "prince of the Starry Wheels." Again, the notion of machine logic is called Satan by Blake.


M4.1; E97| Beneath the Plow of Rintrah & the harrow of the Almighty
M4.2; E97| In the hands of Palamabron. Where the Starry Mills of Satan
M4.3; E97| Are built beneath the Earth & Waters of the Mundane Shell
M4.4; E97| Here the Three Classes of Men take their Sexual texture Woven
M4.5; E97| The Sexual is Threefold: the Human is Fourfold.


This mirrors the Dogon division of the male aspect being threefold, while the female is fourfold. Here, the sexual, or generative process is threefold, and the human is fourfold. The threefold is aspected as head, heart, and loins. While the fourfold is, Tharmas, Los, Urizen, and Luvah.

For Blake, this process links back to the notion of opposition. We have thesis, anti-thesis, and negation, where the thesis is considered a contrary, like love and hate, and the negation is all that which is not love, a delimiting of the infinite toward the finite. Blake's association of the starry wheels with Satan comes via his disposition toward Newton. The notion that reality could be set under discernible laws was anathema to Blakes antinomian tradition. He imagines it much like a clock, with gears, and cogs, void of humanity, void of soul, void of spirit.

Blake goes on to stipulate that every man's wisdom, being born out of his experience is peculiar to his own shortcomings. Wisdom is thus a strategy, what in Freud is called a negation. It seeks to un-script the experience in order to leave the speaker in a new place which is free of the psychic baggage caused by the experience.

Blake's Satan, is Milton's Messiah, and Newton's Pantocrator (or all-power), the Woof of Locke. Again, Blake's argument is not against the machine, it is against the principality of reason taking over the entire show. We are selling our souls to this amorphous essentialist principality. Logic is a tool, not an end in itself.

Blake goes on to blast the "druidicle proportion" of "length, bredth, and height", contrasting it with "naked beauty" and "flutes, harps, and songs".

The important thing through all this is the association of machine logic with Satan, and the fact that if we reduce ourselves to mere logic, then I will be able to write a piece of code that simulates your machinations.


M5.5; E98| And this is the manner of the Daughters of Albion in their beauty
M5.6; E98| Every one is threefold in Head & Heart & Reins, & every one
M5.7; E98| Has three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine
M5.8; E98| Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins
M5.9; E98| Surrounded with fires unapproachable: but whom they please
M5.10; E98| They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight
M5.11; E98| For the Elect cannot be Redeemd, but Created continually
M5.12; E98| By Offering & Atonement in the crue[l]ties of Moral Law
M5.13; E98| Hence the three Classes of Men take their fix'd destinations
M5.14; E98| They are the Two Contraries & the Reasoning Negative.


The reasoning negative is associated with the "elect". Note that the structure of the heavens is a Hyper-Four (also called a tetration) but its 3^3, so our sense of dimensionality is fourfold but aspected in terms of three.

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