…Our selves are dictated to by our memories, or if psychiatrised, by the imposition of others upon them. For many years my life(s) were sculpted primarily by the revisionist lenses of the ICD-10, refracted and turned into a specific kind of sign through lists of symptoms and characteristics. My brain flailed like a trapped animal against the cage, bound by chemical bonds, as if stopping the mental fight by containing it would provide an answer. Initially, reading it through the glass and then feeling my madness change through this lens diminished the fear and pain a mind aflame creates. However, the chemical manacles that resulted from diagnosis were even worse that those forged in the mind. They clamped the senses closed and tethered the imagination to a shrinking selfhood. The drugs cast long shadows into my future; as iatrogenic illness; as addiction; as withdrawal syndromes. But also as modified, mollified memories of existential visions, adrift in the fog. They threw shadows over the past, which they were cast back across by others wearing professional titles, captains of trawlers circling my limbic ocean. Nets of symptoms created pockets of closure which I was lured towards by leading questions hung like bait. Their winch pulled me, writhing, out of the context that made me, replacing stories with signifiers reified into facts. Bipolar. Psychosis. Hallucination. Thought Disorder…
…So it was, and is, that there is still a young man pinned to an acute ward bed, weighed down by the sense that his self can’t contain his experience and visions, and told that those visions and experiences, myths and religion and writing are aberrations of a brain diseased at the level of neurons and neuralgia. The giants and guardians of memory were whittled away – like my shrinking grey matter – by stasis and the pressure of neuroleptics[1]. The self that remained was singular; dumb; alive only when surfing the waves of sensation brought on by sleep deprivation or by turning the body over to drownings in oceans of drugs and unwanted intercourse. These things eclipsed that sorry self but brought no inspiration, and, when the self checked back in, left a residue of something like sadness through the daze…
…Before this squashing subjectification, before the veil of Olanzapine and Zopiclone and Diazepam and Lithium under the harsh yet dim light of the dirty corridors, I lived among faith and giants, guardians and gods and voices that had no clear owners, afraid of and yet embracing the waves of successive darkness and light. My self(ves) spun out into the world; the world spun out from their I/Eyes and fingertips electric with energy and sensation, compass unable to fix locations as if balanced on ore rich rocks. This place was also lonely, as my spiritual and poetic worlds were at this point closed to others, yet it was also a constant conversation or shouting of multiple perspectives and emotions at once, richer with meaning than any of my ‘sane’ moments, with more ‘insight’ than any of those could manage to contain; thoughts fractal outwards into the infinite, guardians and selves in a mental war for control of body and soul…
…What if I could send that memory of meanings a means to weather their stripping away by ‘psy’ interventions, a stripping that left them with only their frames? What if I underwrote the tale of the ICD-10 with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that saved or destroyed so positively a later version of myself? What are the rules that we set for rewriting memory according to texts of profound importance, and who determines the texts by which we have permission to do so? The doctors are free to recast our history using their manuals, often to our detriment, but also have power to declare the mind casting back the profound or prophetic manual as diseased for doing so, even if doing so saves one of us…
…I want to voice a different set of truths in parallel, to unchain that boy from the bed and the catatonic head. So I set Blake back through the limbic system like malware, to re-madden memories made stultified and stale by labels that robbed my multitudes of meaning in the name of containment and healing…
…Rintrah roars like madness re-inserted as colour into memories greyed by the chemical and linguistic bounds that contained them. Sanity is upturned with the assumptions about the ‘virtues of ease’, the ‘just man’ symbolises those in control of our mind as they walk along the ‘vale of death’, and try to shepherd us alongside them…
…My madness before I was brought to this hospital was eating itself, the voices were screaming my evils, a black sun rose every morning over streams and becks of blood. I felt this world unfurling from my mind and feared it, some voices announced me as antichrist. I saw visions of torture in first person and screamed for them to stop, but I was the one creating them. Whatever ‘I’ was encompassed and expanded everything. No one could hear, and I couldn’t express what I felt except for in cuts and tears; the ward may have saved my body from my gradually amassed means of ending that chaos, the knives, benzos and rope that I kept on my desk – my emergency exits. Yet casting back The Marriage makes the experience no less fearful, but it imbibes the madness with meaning, and brings its cacophonous dialogue into conversation with that of the multitude of voices, proverbs and positions represented in the text. Casting the Marriage helps end the questing for endings…
… In sending back this madly read Marriage, for the first time this memory – replayed so often in flashbacks – sedated at points into submission – gains companionship and meaning. My writings that tried to make sense of it back then, taken literally as evidence of disease when shown to the staff, become the felt metaphors and metonyms that rumble through my lungs and ribs again, un-anchoring long held assumptions and selves and revivifying those long dead, propagating their ever-expanding progeny. The symphony of contraries, worn at points down to another’s singular melody, becomes polyphonic again. A spectrum of sounds and colours and concepts ever expanding and impossible to write but as words and aphorisms that weave analogous feelings, feelings brought back by the words of The Marriage but with the addition of shared experience, solidarity stretching back and forth across the centuries…
…what peculiar salvation this text brings to those memories so long disowned as the symptoms of illness. The ‘contraries’ of ‘racing’ or ‘disordered’ thoughts, of conflicting and arguing voices had become paralysing under directives to present some stable self, some act of integrity in meaning that eclipsed the majority of the mind. Yet here is a text suggesting ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence.’ This ‘and’ replacing ‘or’ repositions the expanding madness of ever increasingly complex and diffuse streams of thought as a positive force, the substrate of human existence. The idea that ‘Evil is the active, springing from energy’ recasts the feeling of being part antichrist from one of pure horror to many of more complex, part-positive meanings. The figures of the Guardian/s, explored in my creative work, who take up position in the mind and body at the peaks of my mad experience, are now integrated with the fully human, polyphonic and prophetic mind that The Marriagedemonstrates so well. Not only does this rescue the young man previously pinned to the hospital bed, its rescues the childhoods of mythical significance, the ones which the priests of the ICD-10 reduced to psychopathology…
…The voice of the Devil enters the text, and illuminations in richly mixed colours collide traditions of angels and demons, of heavens and hells, of flames and water together. And the voice is Grandiose, like the parts of ourselves that speak and stand in challenge to assumptions we contradict and thus are locked away from. The idea that energy and desire, those engines of so much mad thinking, are productive; that a heaven can be formed from the Abyss, that Ideas are born in this maddening whorl and that the reason, so preached by the ‘psy’ people, can only be a measuring force, a “ratio of the five senses”, a “vacuum” if bereft of driving desire. All of this squeezes meaning from the boyonthebed’s despair. Though the memory is no less scary for it, it’s restored to a place within humanity, which is some salve…
… What does this passage tell us about ways of writing – about madness and about art in general? The Marriage is polyvoiced, dialogical, unnamed in terms of who is doing the narration. Blake didn’t initial any copies, perhaps as some critics have noted, due to its heretical content, whose risks in Blake’s work in general were heightened by the political landscape of the time. But perhaps Blake felt that attaching the voices of his madness to his name gave less precedence to their independence or multitude, or imposed upon the text his own authorial authority which risked the kind of imposition so much of the text goes on to try and map out ways of avoiding or lessening. For John H. Jones, who’s readings of The Marriage runs close to mine at points, this is the beginning of Blake’s experiments with ‘self annihilation’ that would become more developed in the prophetic works, especially in Milton and Jerusalem: ‘The title page of the marriage is the first of Blake’s title pages that does not list his name as “author” of the work, and it is the only one that does not list his name at all … [Blake is] annihilating his selfhood to avoid imposing his own limited perspective on his readers’[2]…
…In mapping the ways in which ‘we impose upon on another’, The Marriage also unveils the way in which most ‘psy’ disciplines and theory, in myriad methods, attempts to insist, and thus impose, on authorial authority over the minds productions as a marker of sanity, even when discussing the subconscious. Even in the abstract and imaginative realms of analytic psychological practice, often which likes to see itself in opposition to the biomedical understandings of psychiatry, the stated goal is ‘self-actualisation’ rather than ‘self-annihilation’. As the goal in a Jungian concept of self-actualisation is to ‘substitute the self for the ego as the stabilizing center of personality’, selfhood and stabilityis recognised as the ultimate goal, even if at points, for example in The Red Book, Jung seems to communicate a loss of this stability as a creative force. More generally though, a lack of selfhood/ authorial authority in the productions of the mad mind are seen as indicators of its disorder or disarray, and the authority to declare what is sane or insane is transferred to the therapist as a subject, still an ‘alienating figure’ as Foucault suggests, one in which madness and mad people’s thinking is disempowered. ‘psychoanalysis has not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of unreason, nor to decipher in themselves the signs of the madman.’[3] …
…The psychologist the boyonthebed meets calmly reflects back their understanding of his attempts to reproduce the reality of his experience at the black and shining coal face of his current vision; though he doubts himself entirely and hands authority over to the ‘psy’ world, he struggles to understand that magic by which they could possibly grasp the immensity he feels through his trickle of words into their own world, how they could sit there so calmly, so sanely, if they truly understood…
…This kind of authorial authority over thought is also something demanded in academic spaces, one way in which Mad thinking is excluded or denigrated, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the way in which value judgements are passed on such notions as ‘the strength of an argument’. Here, too, The Marriage at once provides what I feel are powerful explorations and insightful engagements with the work of others, while deploying methods that would be excluded from most academic settings. To begin with there is the ‘Argument’ which opens the text, which seems to almost mock the enlightenment idea of an argument, or the Miltonic idea of a guiding prelude to the poem that imposes clear intentions of how the proceeding work should be understood and interpreted. The text opens with an invocation of a mythic figure – Rintrah – a son of Los who signals ‘just wrath’ and ‘revolution’ in Blake’s mythological landscape and is associated with the north point of the compass, itself the place of myth and dark imagination, of Urthona, Vala, the feminine[4]. The roar of Rintrah is an expression of raw emotion, rarely considered the correct grounds for an ‘argument’ in an academic and enlightenment sense, and often, when expressed to excess in this way, a signifier to the ‘psy’ disciplines of disorder or dysregulated emotion. Yet for Blake it is not just the opening of the text’s argument, it is also its closure by means of becoming a refrain. The usurpings of assumptions about just and villainous characters, about ease and peril, about good and evil, that are sandwiched between these refrains, form the body of an argument communicated in the feelings such upending’s create in the mind, as much as in the logic they seemingly override or exceed. It is a prelude to a text in which emotional writing styles; grandiose and polemical; sage and cryptic; narrative and dramatic; personal and abstracted; are all part juxtaposed, part integrated. The effect is dizzying, intoxicating. It might be said to be Maddening. In my encounters with Blake, this is the first text that explores more deeply an idea that Mad modes of thinking might supersede the sane ones. The excess of the Mad mind(s) workings is presented unfettered by a sense that it needs to be decoded into sensibility before it has worth presented as an object of thought and of art. The Argument in The Marriage might also be seen as a departure from the convention of Paradise Lost, in which the Argument outlines the way in which the authorial presence of Milton intends the following epic to be interpreted. Blake’s Argument is voiced by an uncertain presence, and refuses to impose an interpretation, even when the language at points is laden with a biblical, judgemental tone. This confident expression of contraries, the language speaking in ways that clearly outline viewpoints which in logical terms cannot co-exist, is another way in which I feel Blake’s text nods to a confidence in the meaningfulness of this maddening set of experiences and statements…
…The “Proverbs of Hell” are one of the most defiant illustrations of this attitude in Blake’s work, an also one of the most explicitly ‘Mad’ passages of The Marriage. Later on in Blake’s life he would repeat assertions that his “poetic Genius” was something society at large would perceive as Madness, but in The Marriage we have one of the earliest instances of this, even if not on this occasion explicitly in Blake’s voice – rather one of the unnamed voices of the poem. This voice claims to have ‘collected’ the proverbs while ‘walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius: which to Angels look like torment and insanity.’ Mad identity, as now taken up as a positive signifier in the emergent Mad movement, is very similarly rooted initially in the declamations of such experiences by those seen as the just arbiters of what constitutes sanity in our modern age, those who become the ‘thaumaturge’, as Foucault describes, of what is and isn’t correct thought[5]. By collectively and polyvocally engaging in studies and writing, creative and critical, that are ‘madly done’, Mad Studies and the modern Mad movement ‘harbour the potential to unsettle the very way we address the subject of rationality and its alternatives, thereby “Shaking the foundations of the place of reason, academia, the sum of all disciplines”’[6]. By positioning what is decreed to be ‘insanity’ by the voices of reason and rationality as ‘genius’, I contend that the voice in this text is positioning the ‘proverbs of hell’ as explicitly Mad thought, and the wisdom as such that might be derived from them as Mad wisdom, Mad knowledge…
…In her opening to the 2021 National Survivor User Network (NSUN) Conference, Rai Waddingham, a person with lived experience of psychiatrisation, a voice hearer, a vision seer, a leader in the battle for recognition of Mad people and their complex experiences outside a lens of disorder, gave the keynote opening[7]. She spoke movingly about how she has to move carefully in spaces, even spaces as ostensibly friendly to madness as the collective that is NSUN. She talked movingly about the multiple different selves, genders, voices and emotions that reside within her, but that she is at risk of exclusion and sanism if she expresses. She expressed them in a public forum nonetheless, and watching her as a fellow Mad person I felt a huge outpouring of gratitude. It felt as if she was talking about similar experiences to those I find within my self(ves), those simultaneously existing, logically paradoxical yet deeply felt selves, experiences and voices all vying for attention and constructing some kind of meaning. It also saddened me that it is still such a risk for someone to take such a position, to present a wider vision of what truth might exist in madness, so long after Blake attempted it, even in a space supposedly designed for people who think in such ways. I wonder if there would be room in such spaces for Blake, for self-annihilating dialogue. Or whether, in attempting to gain an important voice to fight for people’s rights, organisations such as NSUN have to mollify their madnesses in order for people to listen…
…returning to the first “Memorable Fancy”, and this idea that the “enjoyments of Genius” are perceived by “angels” as “torment and insanity”, I think it is important to understand that “the enjoyments of Genius” as Madness are not the opposite of “torment and insanity”, but rather a different way to tell the story of the same madness. Angels are aligned in The Marriage with priesthood, rationality and reasoned argument, and the erasure of contraries in the effort to present singular truths. But in Madness this mental warfare between the contraries is ever active, the truth, if singular ‘truth’ is an admissible concept at all in madness, is a wide truth that somehow encompasses the ever-evolving productions of the prolific mind, perhaps a truth only able to be expressed to another in the form of art – as the Marriage perhaps sets out to do itself…
…I find humour, satire and sombre truth in the statement, all at once. Blake does not see ‘Genius’ or ‘Insanity’ as something sublime and rising above the conflicts of energies, desires and reasoning; he finds it in the chaos of their conflict as it develops new meaning continuously, opening up new worlds, new God’s, new truths in the minds of humankind, new selves as the old are annihilated. This doesn’t negate the angels view of these processes as ‘torment and insanity’, but means it is incomplete. For there is meaning in said insanity once you open meaning up to belief as well as reason, once the mind stops only accepting the logical world of the angels and accepts the unfolding fires of madness as burning with meaning. Powerful insights can arise from the challenge such a mind throws up to conventions of thought, as “Proverbs of Hell” will go on to demonstrate. For a mind in Madness, such conventions don’t required deconstructing via an effort of intellect, such as in the theoretical texts which have appropriated/colonised Madness – the way in which the world is experienced and felt, the way thoughts rumble in the belly and ideas are tasted on the tip of the tongue make the arguments for their truth by default. Perhaps this is why Blake was so strong in his convictions. Felt or ‘collected’ at the level of received truth and the experience of revelation, not deduced by analytic reasoning or clouded by egocentric notions of intellectual ownership by the ‘self’…
…The voice of the Memorable Fancy, which isn’t to be assumed to be Blake here, but which resonates with his own voice in other texts, “collects” the “proverbs of Hell”; it doesn’t claim to create them. This is in line with something Blake continuously expresses throughout his work – that he in some way receives the ideas that inform his visionary work in a manner more passive than creating them from the poetic ‘selfhood’. Another examples is in the opening address of Jerusalem in which Blake writes about ‘when this verse was first dictated to me’(E145). This could be a device, but given the fact that Blake’s personal history and his encounters with others seems to show a man who was very much living day to day with ‘twofold vision’ – ‘For double the vision my Eyes do see/And a double vision is always with me’ – it seems less likely to me than that he is just telling his truth when suggesting that this is how revelation comes to him[8]. This is not to denigrate Blake the writer or the artist, who puts great emphasis on the effort and craft of representing these thoughts in a communicable form and thus inviting others into the dialogues of his visionary world, but that the sense of some omnipotent ‘authorial’ selfhood asserting a masterly control over content and form is not apparent in the work. Critics, such as Frye and Bloom, who seek to establish through cryptic codification of Blake’s prophetic works some unmad genius at work, are unwittingly sanist. What does it say about our societies fear of true madness that we are so afraid to admit that work, such as Blake’s, that has gained so much cultural currency, might substantially be a product of madness itself made productive, made genius; made successful by Blake because he embraces the inherent meanings of madness, rather than work Blake succeeded in making in spite of madness. Negating the madness in Blake restrains the power of his work as a revolutionary, mad positive body of literature, keeps suppressing the potential of mad people and others oppressed by the lineation in society around what modes of thinking are valid, and which are not…
… “So the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings of garments”… Here I believe (and belief, as the proverbs show, is the engine of truth…) that the voice of the “Memorable Fancy” is placing primacy on the unfettered expression of “infernal wisdom” (which I feel as set out earlier, is a wisdom of madness or ‘insanity’) over any “description” of its outwards appearance. The description will always be an unsatisfactory account of the lived experience of the revelation’s essence. There are parallels here with how the mad movement ascribes meaning to the unfoldings of madness itself, while descriptions that describe the experience from the outside or from a position of distance – whether psychological, pathological, prosaic or poetic – are always representing it from the stronghold of a perspective of sanity. This gives it societally sanctioned valency, but denies the receiver close access to the Madness as experienced in its own present. Contemporary challenges to the dominant mode of treating mental health/distress also emphasise the importance of engaging with madness at the point of its presence, and letting its unfolding, however labyrinthine and seemingly strange it might be, weave its own meanings, which are then set into dialogue with the community the madness unfolds within…
…Open Dialogue is a powerful example of this approach, and seems to be having some success where mainstream services often fail. Pioneered in Western Lapland in the late 20th Century, Open Dialogue marries ideas from systemic therapeutic approaches with a practical application of Bahktin’s ideas of dialogism. Jaako Seikkula, one of the founders of Open Dialogue as a community mental health approach, states: ‘The mind is voices speaking to each other; it is an ongoing process of dialogues instead of looking at one core self. What we name as personality and psychological being takes place in this inner conversation between voices. Voices are the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness […] Instead of speaking of unconsciousness into which those experiences and emotions that we cannot deal with are repressed, it is more accurate to speak of non-conscious experiences. When experiences are formulated into words, they are no longer unconscious’. In Open Dialogue, Wilfred Bion’s notion of encountering people with ‘patience’ without reaching after fact and reason’, itself built on the Keatsian notion of ‘negative capability’ and avoiding ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ is held as a guiding principle by which the meanings of psychotic experiences affecting networks of people are explored.[9] Rather than understanding and naming repression and the unconscious, the psychological theories which focus on repressed memories are actually part of a culture of what is allowed to be spoken and what is not, a culture that leads people to not speak of mad experiences and of trauma, that further pushes them under so they then the proof of psychoanalysis become as self-fulfilling prophecy. By abolishing an individualistic notion of selfhood and instead locating identity in internal and external dialogical polyphonic relations, Open Dialogue makes a strength of experiences often seen as deficiencies due to their challenge to selfhood… …
…Peter Otto talks about Blake inviting a new kind of relationship with difference, one different from the sometimes cynical one emerging from deconstruction which sees it as a primary ontological state, rather seeing those categories by which we perceive difference as products of a fallen imagination, which prophetic work can reorientate us towards. I will return to this in more detail in later sections as I examine the Madness and meanings for madness of the Lambeth Prophecies, which I, like Otto, see as the fullest manifestation of this maddening re-orientation of vision for both writer and readers that Blake lays the groundwork for in The Marriage…
…When the voice of “A Memorable Fancy” returns home, is that home the physical presence of the body named William Blake? That voice, which walks through the fires of hell, being one of the many voices or selves that take up residence in Blake’s mind? And who is the devil “folded in Black clouds” but a vision of Blake the printer himself, become at this point a devil in the series of endless becomings and annihilations of the Mad mind led by its inspiration, and its belief in its meanings. This Devil spun into our present by the burning of representations of its “proverbs” into plates whose productions I read, we read, the cacophony of me’s within my head, the multitude of absent addressees the mind makes and shapes with the pen and the ink, with the keyboard and the code…
…So, head and selves spinning, we descend/ascend into the “Proverbs of Hell”. What can be said about reading these writings madly which the proverbs themselves don’t already say better? Perhaps that, as a Mad person, reading what Bloom describes as “unmatched in literature for their shock value” felt like a homecoming, a place of validation, a tract of Mad kinship[10]. Given the way The Marriage illustrates how to read the bible “in its infernal sense”, how it valorises those who make new meaning from artistic engagement and dialogue as mental warfare; how it criticises those who represent “priesthood” for appropriating the inspired revelations of the visionary and turning them into Dogma…given all of that, it feels like folly to create my own imposition on the proverbs in a dogmatising manner. For me they rather encapsulate the way in which Blake’s writing is felt as instinct and energy, in the gut as much as the head. They open the mind and the senses outwards, collapsing assumed truths and mocking received knowledge. I feel a recognition of my own madness within them, in an adjacent rather than an aligned manner; that is what makes the “proverbs” so powerful to me, they achieve a representation of a mad mind that others can find kinship through the reading and absorbing of…
…Each time I read through, or scan wildly around the facsimile of Blake’s plates, individual proverbs do stick out, leave the page and enter my eyes as lenses by which I recognise or modify my own histories of visions, voices and thinking. Right now “excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps” leaps at me as particularly pertinent to common experiences of madness among my peers. While the latter part of the statement has cultural currency, a legitimate reaction to weddings, winnings, achievements and more, the former is much harder to express without attracting negative assumptions. Laughing at a funeral, for example, or at footage of warfare on the rolling news, is enough to attract ire or accusations of mental illness. Yet the sound of such laughter is familiar in the ears of the mad, both for me in my ears as one of my most common non-consensus experiences (and one common it seems among peers), but also in the waiting rooms and wards of the psychiatric machine, emitting from the lungs and the lips of fellow travellers trying to survive through a desperate humour…
…This sorrowful laughter also resonates with the way I read irony in The Marriage, Blake’s most obviously satirical work. Humour is found in and even itself asks questions of profound spiritual and existential importance for Blake, and other questions or statements of assumed grand importance are humoured, such as the melodrama with which Blake undermines the puritanical pronouncements of the Angel the voice of the text speaks with in a later fancy: ‘O pitiable foolish young man, O horrible! O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such a career.’ (E41)…
…”one thought, fills immensity” – four words that explain both catatonia and Mad enlightenment equally well (E36)…
…”improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius” – again, there is something about finding something more meaningful in its raw expression rather than in its refined abstraction, its neatly tied up narrative, philosophy or ideology. In disordered thinking that sits with its disorder in its sense-making (E38)…
…“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not believed”(E38). This seems a crucial aspect of whether we give madness currency in the making of meaning. If it is judged by whether it can be understood at the level of logic, reasoning, linearity then it is always denigrated in some way. Yet if we place faith, like Blake, in madness having meaning in and of itself, then everything changes, the Mad are accepted back into the fold as the fold expands outwards to accommodate wider meanings, to the benefit of all who are open to the ensuing revelations…
* * *
…I Opened this section with ‘we are dictated to by our memory’, but who dictates our memory? Recently I searched notebooks in which I had unfolding thinking like this, but from dates a few years ago. It’s common that in doing so, I find other versions of myself ruminating or illuminating similar themes of thinking. This time, though, I shocked myself(/ves): there in the writing was a memory we hadn’t recalled, an account of a past self saved by The Marriage, encountering copy H in the psychiatric ward. I wrote recently about casting The Marriage back as a tool to re-imagine memories of trauma, to re-narrate them in a mad-positive manner, but it seemed the Mad encounter with The Marriage was already extant in the history this older writing spoke about. How to read this? Was there something that led to this memories erasure, was the casting back based on some Bailey’s Beads of a past that escaped this eclipsing shadow? Or was the casting back so successful it upended time’s continuum, not just re-narrating our recollection in the present of a memory, but imprinting itself in that moment on the ward, unfurling its own parallel timeline to the one of the pressed down boy we cast ourselves back to? I have reproduced the mentioned section below in italics…
…a few months have passed in madness, full of meaning, dialogue, self-annihilation-as-growth. It is hard in such places or states to put pen to paper, to voice the experience as a person when you feel so distant from that state. I have felt my body stretch to breaking point when almost catatonic in my bed, pancaked out from whatever constitutes my centre and receiving vision through such expansions, or perhaps just trespassing into the thoughts and worlds of others. It reminds me of the contrariness of Blake’s prophetic works, both the singing of one person in the darkness of of non-recognition, and a vast choir of characters that speak for so many different aspects of the human collective as whole, as Giant, as, perhaps, collective unconsciousness. It is by invoking Blake that I can return, and write, as a being whole enough to hammer my musings through the keys of a computer…
…I have been thinking a lot about madness as an opening into relationship with other forces, feelings and ideas that you don’t try to subsume to the self, and yet are always in danger of doing so. In some ways this is where I left off last time. Diving into Milton or Jerusalem I feel maddened and also reassured about my own madnesses. I feel with each page turned, with each plate I am sucked into, a loosening of the mental chains. But I feel the tug of ‘mind forg’d manacles’ everytime I try to make sense of what the poems mean to me. Sitting to write criticism is like the psychiatric encounter, as you attempt to take the infinity of madness, the impossibility of making it speak in prose and yet feel a need to bind it into some form, some Urizenic impulse. This is a tendency any Mad reading must seek to avoid…
…In Peter Otto’s book Constructive Vision and Visionary Construction, I found the first critical approach to Blake that didn’t klang against my readings and feelings about his work, which didn’t either attempt to construct an overarching framework of interpretation, or to point to the lack of interpretability as a sign of Blake’s failure or madness. Otto draws on post-structuralist philosophy -especially Derrida and Ricouer – and sees in Blake’s prophetic works a violent decentring process of the reader that challenges what he calls a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ fathered by Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, wherein ‘The readers articulation of a text, or the yoking of the readers discourse to that of the text, involves the translation of the text into the constituted world of the self. To articulate what is other into the world of the same.’ This process of subsuming the other into the closeted world of the self means that our perception of freedom can rapidly become an enclosure. Otto goes on to add that ‘Our prejudices, the world that we consciously and unconsciously constitute around us, are the initial framework of any attempt to reach that which has not been constituted by us. At the same time, they are clearly also the ground that hems us in.’ This resonated with realisations I had in my late adolescence that swept the ground from beneath my feet and had me falling into some kind of hell, but one in which valuable thinking took place…
… From a confident and religious young person – one eager to learn and construct a vision of the world from the dogmas inherited or sought out from family, friends, church and school – I experienced a collapse of the self perhaps instigated by the challenge posed to such certainties and prejudices by movement through life and an increasing awareness of flux in the world and its affairs, the people close to me and those strangers I was impelled to come to know. It was/is in one version of my past – distorted by endless replaying in memory like an over used VHS – in one version of one such state of dysphoric vision that I first encountered Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In it I found a text which, instead of fearing such states – a recurring fear which I had traced from The Odyssey through Plato to Eliot’s The Four Quartets – makes meaning of them, and uses them as a challenge to power, as contrary sites of experience from which assemblages of meaning can be made outside our binary defaults…
…the first way I encountered the poem was on the Blake Archive, and since that intense experience of adolescence I have only read the textual poem, but for the purpose of exploring its psychological impact I return to the same copy (H) as back then. Why I chose this copy over others back then now feels like a decision made while using the tarot: the first plates of each copy arranged on the screen like the fanned out cards of the pack. I chose the most vivid, the most fiery, as if doing so might help me understand the intensity of my experiences at the time. Returning now to the self-same webpage also feels a little like a séance or similar, so powerfully does it put me in touch with a self long since discarded, burned up in the fires of my madness. Tears well up in a kind mourning as I remember the snot spattered screen I first used to fall into that vivid world of the frontispiece, and as I read the words a voice from the past narrates them in some kind of haunting, not a booming and authoritative voice which the diction seems to suggest, but a scared and fragile one, a child gradually fading into experience, becoming many; becoming lost over and over…
***
…Unlike with my previous spiralling into London, I haven’t yet spoken much about the illuminations of The Marriage in my whirling through Mad dialogue with the text. In part this is because I have always been so affected, so captivated and freed, by the way its words weave meaning and emotion that seem to exceed what we generally believe language is capable of. Each aphorism, each voice, each revelatory moment or fancy seems to catch and twang at the level of stomach and sinew, like a fingernail catching and leaving a guitar string shimmering with mandalas, bending time back and forth. But having encountered this past self – entranced by the colouring of copy H, and then attending a meeting of fellow Blakean’s to open up dialogue around the plates, I feel ready to approach the illuminated elements, to explore how they sing to me’s past and present, and to others both external and internal…
…I attend a meeting sporadically online, of people who live by their Blake’s as I live by mine. Many are artists, some are people affected by madness/mental illness (defined according to their own wishes) . In fact I was told some of the member’s first met at a Mad positive mental health support group called ‘Mental Fight Club’ who have created their own systems to escape enslavement by psychiatric ones. I had read extensively about Mental Fight Club before: though geographically and temporally its physical meetings were not possible for me to attend, its values and muses, set out online and in articles by its founder Sarah Wheeler, had and have been one of the things that have given me confidence in using art as a way to understand madness, and the confidence to see madness as meaningful. Explicitly acknowledging the work of William Blake as one of their ‘seven muses’[11], Mental Fight Club ‘strive to value rather than reject the experience of mental illness, viewing it as a means to deepen and define our understanding of mental well-being’.[12] Perhaps to those who mention it as part of their introducing themselves to me it was not particularly important, but it helped me to feel more comfortable in the space, to feel legitimised in weaving my versions of Blake as they shared their own and they all danced and become chimaeras together by way of discussion. This idea of Mental Fight Club – that we should value the experience of mental illness/madness, that we should ‘confront and transform inner horrors as a means to greater understanding the greater potential within human existence and the world – seems to in some way encapsulate the spirit with which the group engage with Blake’s work and with one another’s interpretations of it, celebrating the way it colours our experience and in turn is coloured by our own experiences[13]
…
…We got caught for an hour on the frontispiece, in copy H one of Blake’s most dramatically coloured illuminations, and the one which drew in that past self on the ward. Fires containing souls, angels, forms and fairies seem to generate all energy on the plate from the bottom left, yet also threaten to devour the whole page, as if the printed flames have become corporeal and tear across the print as if that corner was caught on a touchpaper…
…Like with ‘London’, there is a clear split on the page between a hypogeal, chaotic energy and a surface world of paler pastel colours and seeming tranquillity. The figures seems to be completely different in terms of energy depending on the side of the line they fall on. Those among the clearly delineated forms of the top sections -the clear representations of trees, birds and sky – either walk gently among the forms, as with the couple on the left, or perhaps kneel in prayer while mourning the other in the case of the couple on the right. The sky is illuminated in its ‘reasoned’ colour, and the birds are correctly positioned with relation to the trees, the sky, the ground…
…the hypogeal realm is a maelstrom of forms emerging from the fires. Some are fully formed faces, some are bodies, some are areas of colour and detail where the eye might see others, where others might not see. A Rorschach realm where the eyes of the one encountering the plate are invited to contribute to its content…
…It feels as if this cascade of forms and colours is pulled up by, or is feeding somehow, the roots of the tree on the right-hand side of the plate, the one with the body, potentially dead and certainly somehow fallen at its base. I start to think, absorbed by this scene, about Genesis, creation myths and the tree of knowledge, and become convinced that the dead or the fallen person who the other is bowing or pr(a/e)ying over has consumed the fruit formed from all that prolific energy the roots pulled up. The piety of the worshipper on their knee before the fall seems a weak response, but then the pious might always seem so in the face of infernal knowledge. I start to feel as if the design The Marriage positions this tree as one with fruits of hell, not heaven. Is it the consumption of this fiery energy pulled up from the hypogeal hell that has felled the figure beneath the tree? Is the energy of Hell deathly to the heavenly, but generative to the throng of forms that reach and are pulled towards the trees roots. Later on The Marriage speaks of the two classes of men; the prolific and the devourer. Does this image embody their pairing, both reliant on the other, as a revised creation myth?…
* * * *
…On Plate 11, we encounter another one of The Marriage’s un-selved voices, a statement about reification which has the authoritative tone of the priesthood it attacks, and yet has no authority in terms of authorial ownership. The significance of this passage for the memory of the psychiatrized boy we send back the text to save cannot be overstated, for here is the unveiling of that which props up psychiatry and the wider knowledge systems within it is located. The development from individual, poetic, creative responses to objects and their ‘adorning’ with properties and placing ‘under its mental deity’, to the point at which a system ‘abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood’ not only serves as an attack on the use of organised religion as a system of power which distorts its origins in inspired knowledge; it also acts as a parallel critique of ‘psy’ systems which would form generalisations about symptoms, disorders, syndromes or neuroses which abstract people away from their individual experiences of the world in order to more easily classify them, and to then assert a system of knowledge which suggests that they (psychiatrists, priests…) can suggest that Gods, or science, had ‘ordered such things.’ (E38) When we re-recognise Madness, sanity or their contraries as human creations, we can re-assert our ability and right to re-imagine what they are, and what they mean, and in doing so reclaim some power for those voices and people who priesthood or psychiatry might silence or suppress…
… Hidden between the lines of this plate is a scene in miniature, in which a headless figure, with a formless chaos to its right, presents another group of people to its left with a crucifix, to which they kneel in worship. Blake’s illuminations thus present a visceral representation of the power of someone who takes up position between the raw or ‘vulgar’ potentiality and claims to have refined it to a system of understanding or worship that they use as a way to close off access of others to that ‘vulgar’, mad loam. In this way they not only ‘enslav’d’ the ‘vulgar’ itself, but all those who they prevent from accessing it. This is the sad reality past selves of mine, and multitudes of psychiatrised, institutionalised fellow mad people exist within, which Blake, or this voice of The Marriage, can help us break free from…
* * *
…Atheism and Deism are both rare things on the psychiatric ward. That boy still somewhere stuck to the thin mattressed bed is upset at the number of lights on the ceiling, four one more than the three needed, like holy music, for trinity. His closest acquaintance in the locked ward brims with the blood of Vikings, the Viking strength helps him roll away the stone from Christ’s tomb, usurping the angels place in the pantheon of his own infernal bible. Mad people engage actively with religion, are there in its making, and make of it active meanings. Blake’s (or rather the Fancy’s voices) memorable meal with Isaiah and Ezekiel seems to me to be a blueprint of just how this process unfolds. It finds mirrors in the experiences of many – whether its mystics, prophets and poets throughout history or those subjected to the contemporary reckonings and subjectifications of psychiatry and who rail against its dogma and in doing so, rail against our cultures inherent sanism. Wouter Kusters, a Dutch philosopher and psychiatric survivor, writes from these dual perspectives in his book A Philosophy of Madness. His conclusion, if it can be called such a thing, is that Madness exceeds Philosophy in its weaving through meaningfulness. It brings us into ever-evolving dialogue with itself and with other mad people. Throughout the book, he moves from outlining his musings on Madness from the perspective of an academic philosopher towards someone who might be called a mad mystic, one who aligns with Blake’s ideas in The Marriage at many points. He uses the image of a whirlpool or vortex [how does this relate to vortex in Blake?] to describe the way that madness pulls you in – ‘It’s as if you had been given infinite power to swim underwater, to dive under the ice. They are all standing above you, shouting and gesturing in order to hold you back, to pull you out, but you know you have to go deeper, underneath.’[14] And yet he describes what might be analogous to the ‘twofold vision’ in Blake when emerging from the other side – ‘After the whirlpool, you find yourself among the deep-sea divers on dry land, the king’s children without a kingdom, the illuminati by daylight. Which means you are related to those who preceded us in the night, who did not “rage against the dying of the light” but against the lighting of the darkness. And you renew contact with the “fellow sufferers”, with seers and fools and those who don’t really exist. You live in the miracle of two worlds in one.’[15] Like when I read Blake, when I read Kousters writing, which might be considered obtuse, labyrinthine or impenetrable from the perspective of sanity, I feel kinship, as if reading the words of a peer, a “fellow sufferer”. Kousters, too, speaks like Blake of a ‘Fourfold vision’ in Madness that exceeds the 3, the trinity, which organised religion obsesses over. ‘Three is the golden mean, harmony, medium or synthesis. With three we are complete, and “we” consists of a first, second and third person. But true wisdom – which is also madness – reveals itself only in the pattern of four. The fourth person is the mysterious power by which the foundation of the three is formatted. Four is implicit and concealed, and when this four is made explicit – or is exploited (and exploded!) – then Insight appears.’[16]. Can Kousters, too, be the salvation that squashed boy seeks in the ceiling lights, of which there are one too many for trinity and yet which, fourfold, reflect the emerging madness in his mind that, denied, is making him sick; that, if embraced might create a horde of joyous lunatics…
…often those experiencing and espousing prophecy in our age are labelled Mad, and specifically with the ‘symptom’ of ‘grandiose delusions’, believing they are specially connected with God or Gods’, that they or/and their thoughts have bearings on the wider world beyond their personal sphere, that they have insights that others don’t. All these experiences might be said to appear within Blake’s oeuvre at points, and my readings of Blake and his madness don’t necessarily object to calling these experiences and opinions grandiose, but rather want to open up a wider meaning of what grandiose means. For when we think that our thoughts influence the world, that we are receiving messages from God’s, when we believe we are experiencing crucial insights that have bearings of importance beyond just our personal sphere, we mean it. What we don’t mean though, and what is often assumed we that do by those professions operating to care for or control the mad, is that the external world, the external voices and influences, are the same thing as the ‘objective reality’ in which most ‘sane’ people feel they exist. Rather, the Mad mind is more honest in acknowledging every mind’s operations on our perceptions of the external, that we can’t be passive observers. This runs counter to the Enlightenment epistemology that dominated thinking in Blake’s age, including both Dualism and Newtonian models of physics, yet it sit’s closer to our contemporary understandings of physics. Arkady Plotnisky suggests that Blake’s idea of Contrariety ‘is close to [Niels Bohr’s concept of] complementarity insofar as the latter entails the necessity of operating with conflicting modes of description – “contraries”, as Blake calls them – without synthesis’[17]. Other critics have related Blake to Quantum Physics – even suggesting he prophesied the participatory multiverse – and to the philosophy of physics and perceptionIbid. As someone who’s own Mad thinking has often been fruitfully interpreted or propped up by later encounters with contemporary physics and philosophy, I find this unsurprising. However, rather than assuming that Blake had some prescient foresight enabling him to arrive at complex scientific conclusions in a field in which he never showed any aptitude, is it not easier to accept that in his mad states, his multiple folds of vision, such realities just made themselves known to him, were received by him in visions that he was not consciously controlling in the way someone constructing a theoretical understanding from science might. Madness by its nature deconstructs monological understandings into a heterological ones without the need for the mad person to parse data or construct experiments for meanings to emerge…
…returning to the Memorable Fancy in which a voice of The Marriage dines with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel can help us to understand how the Ur-reason (more of which Blake unfolds in The Book of Urizen which we shall encounter later) of enlightenment thinking, which Blake rails against for its ideological domination, which in his eyes is ‘dark religion’ (E407) as much as it is the science it claims holds up its laws, can also be replicated in or replicate prophecy’s domineering aspects. This Memorable Fancy also helps us understand the risks of any inspirational or poetic thought leaning towards the part of its necessary grandiosity which might become dogma – the part in which the imposition – inherent in visionary worldviews which do not exhibit doubt as a defining feature – upon the other eclipses contrarieties. The voice of the segment asks the prophets about this right at the opening with the question ‘How they dared so roundly assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition’ The misunderstanding that the voice of the fancy speaks is that similar to that which is encountered by the mad persons grandiose idea when it butts up against society/psychiatry – in which the non-consensus worldview is seen as a negation of the consensus reality, rather than another adjacent to it. Yet when socialised into human societies which across millenia have tended to reify not just science but vision into dogma, as we saw in the preceding passage of The Marriage, the prophet/poet/mad person is not immune to the tendency towards it, especially when visionary thinking is driven by ‘firm perswasion’…
…The necessity of ‘firm perswasion’ in the power of visionary states, and perhaps as an element of mad states, is made clear by Isaiah, as is the problem with not being able to cultivate one. ‘In ages of imagination this firm perswasion moved mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.’(E39-40). For Isaiah this state of ‘firm perswasion’ is discovered through the senses perceiving ‘the infinite in everything’ which leads him to a conviction that ‘the vioice of honest indignation is the voice of God’ meaning that he writes his challenging prophetic (mad?) poetry with no fear of consequences (E39). This element seems to chime with a theme we can trace across Blake, with the Poetic Genius, whether manifested in Isaiah, in the figure of Los, or in Blake himself seen as oppositional to domineering forces – the ‘Prophet Against Empire’ of Erdman or ‘Witness Against the Beast’ of E. P. Thompson. There is no doubting that this conception of the Poetic Genius is central to Blake’s vision at numerous points, from his earliest statements of it in There is No Natural Religion – ‘If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round again and again’ to its culmination in the figure of Los building Golganooza (E3). Yet that danger inherent in such strong convictions – that they themselves become a force of subjugation as we saw on Plate 11 where ‘Priesthood’ chose ‘forms of worship from poetic tales’ – is illustrated powerfully by the conversation with Ezekiel. When the principle of the ‘Poetic Genius’ is elevated to God status by Israel to the exclusion of all other gods and principles we end up with a scenario in which ‘all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be.’ The way in which the visionary ‘firm perswasion’ can become a imposition is a theme which continues throughout the marriage: the angel in a subsequent memorable fancy states ‘thy phantasy has imposed on me’(E42). However, the extent to which these visions are impositions seems to be in part due to conceptions of them via analytics – ‘It is lost time to converse with those whose works are only analytics’ – which can’t hold the two opposing strong convictions in a productive union that doesn’t seek to reconcile them, in the manner of ‘opposition is true friendship’ (E42)…
…this image from the plate that follows the discussion with Isaiah and Ezekiel brings me back to the boy(s) lying prone on the hospital bed. The consuming fire of The Marriage, cast back across the gulf of memory, now starts to burn the selfhood that holds him there, unleashing elemental energies that free the analytics pinning him down, and now he, we, us are the figure rising/risen from the flames, soaring on the thermals of the unleashed madness – the madness that allows such flames to keep burning without the extinguishing force of analytics, labelling, dogma and drugs. The religion that pinned him as antichrist for his hellish visions, the science that modified similar ideological process to make him ill, the societal stigma that refused his expanding and collapsing selfhood as disorder; all are forged in the vision of flames into something more than their sum, and the mental fight that threatened to end the boy instead becomes a marriage of eternal war and love between contraries. Ideas that threaten the self are no longer repressed, dialogue between mad voices blossoms instead of threatens, or blossoms though sometimes threatening. The senses and the imagination open up to admit everything, and infinity sings as loudly as the flames weave heat into energy…
…I return to The Marriage now led by one of those revivified boys from the ward, the apotheosis of his madness now reimbued with meaning, leading my present mind through the fourth memorable fancy. He unveils the face of the angel ‘O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thoa art preparing for thyself to all eternity’ – and as the angel speaks these words I realise they are spoken from the hospital wards interview room. I realise resonances with the pronouncements placed upon the boy, recorded in Insight notes as discussions despite the absence of any conversation[18]. This is the way religion erases the dialogue – it speaks in pronouncements; it cannot pose the grandiosity of vision as a question. It cannot admit the mad voice as an equal other…
…the resonances stretch further than an angel dressed in the disarming tweed and flowery tie, the counterpoint to the law backed imposition of his will. They also emerge in the common themes that the voice of the fancy assumes have meaning. The shining black sun that rose over becks of blood is here in Blake ‘Black but shining’ over a ‘cataract of blood mixed with fire’(E41). The visions convincing the boy that he was antichrist, the ‘terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption’, the ‘black tempest’ that seems to eclipse the sight of anything else, but then births a monster are seen as the manifestations of the laws that seek to deny them, a monster of religions creation(E41) . As I sit here in the present, trying to write something to be judged by the laws of the sane, the boy makes plain that I’m risking an imposition equal to those I try to act against, an accidental reconciliation that ‘destroys existence’ (E40). The leviathan is the endgame psychiatry, like the angel, threatens us with becoming if we deviate from their religion, if we resist or refuse to comply with ‘treatment’. Yet it is also a consequence of their treatment, their lore. And its fury, its spiritual existence, also contains its opposition. As the Angel/doctor leaves the boy alone, he becomes the harper to my present I, singing his warning about ‘The man who nevers alter his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.’ (E42). A perfect proverb of Hell, or Mad proverb – spoken with grandiose authority of a pronouncement, and simultaneously running counter to its certain tone in its content. The voice of the harper, the voice of the fancy, the voice of the boy reaching forwards to us from the past. They are what extracts us from the Abyss psychiatry weaves and tells us it might save us from. The Angel – surprised – is the doctor, and the parts of us who embody the message of his discipline. What we were meant to avoid colluding with – to save the boy from madness – has saved us from sanity. He shows us via his retelling of The Marriage that the terrifying visions that he/I’s body was shut away for/from in the ward are the underbelly of a sick society, not the mind of one sick and depraved creating unspeakable horrors, but the mind of the mad person seeing as vision the horrors that sustain that society. The visions of cruelty, war and torture, the devouring machines and beings that we try to hide away but fuel and sustain our power. The voice of the fancies ‘monkeys, baboons’ which, chained in one of the Bible’s houses, rape and devour each other in accordance with strength and power are the skeleton of ‘Aristotle’s Analytics’, the mechanisms of logic which uncoupled from imagination and dialogue become the monological monsters of religion, ideology, psy-chiatry/chology. But in these visions in which they are manifested in imaginative forms, we can converse with their meanings in ways that free them and us, the mental fight enacted …
…That (un)self with freedom to think as a result of the voice of the fancy/The harper/the boy on the ward/the visionary engagement that tore apart the monological dogma and opened up meaning in madness again can also maintain a creative dialogue with the dialogues of others. One such figure who themselves promotes dialogue is the critic John H. Jones in his readings of Blake’s work in conversation with Bakhtin a century later. What is key about the flaws in the angel’s abyss, according to Jones, is that it represent a finalized version of the future extrapolated from a finalized version of the past. By building a future that itself is built on the monological passage of the church the Angel represents from the ‘Stable’ of the nativity to the ‘mill of logic’, the Angel creates an eternity that cannot accommodate discussion that might change its path, or create news paths that exist in parallel[19]. By suggesting ‘that the issue is up for debate: ‘We will contemplate on it together”’ Jones in turn suggests that the voice of the fancy ‘turns the Angel’s monologic assertion into an unfinalizable utterance in dialogue’.[20] My present voice in turn wants to make the link here with Open Dialogue as an approach to mental health, bringing voices from that world to converse with those in Blake’s work and with John H. Jones so that they may learn from each other. They sit around a table in my mind, putting forward their ideas as parallel truths, the polyphony of their conversation creating new truths in the ways in which they harmonize and also in their dissonances. Open Dialogue as a model is warned not to become a religion, excluding the dialogue with others in its eagerness to change the world according to its vision, which in itself is based on the tolerance of uncertainty as a principle: the voice of the fancy says we need to tolerate certainty too, as a part of dialogue – we cannot not impose on each other, but we can impose without silencing and thus keep on singing as a chorus of meanings. Jones never properly acknowledges value in the ‘torments of insanity’ by keeping his concepts of self-annihilation anchored in his application of Bakhtin’s dialogism as a rational philosophy, not a call to foreground the perspectives of the mad, the ‘carnivalesque’. Jones is never himself around the table with Bakhtin and Blake, and so misses the key aspect of The Marriage’s madness; the Angel is just as much a part of the voice of the fancy as its ‘I’; the fancies model a universe of conversations arising in madness when we let it run its fanciful, sometimes terrifying course; a course that is as full of self-consuming and chained baboons as it is inspiration and insight; as full of repressive, controlling, imposing voices as it is those that doubt, challenge, inspire. To interact with Blake’s text as I feel he intends, we must allow the text not only to represent the annihilation of its own selfhood, or rather the selfhood of the artistic force behind it. Reading it madly also requires that we annihilate the selfhood with which we read, something Blake goes on to express in ever stronger invocations to the reader in Milton and Jerusalem especially. Jones tracks this development in Blake, but in applying a detached, academic style of writing to his analysis of Blake via Bakhtin, Jones uses a ‘centripetal’ force of language that, though discussing heteroglossia, limits it in language and conventions such as the ‘preface’, ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’. The openness to dialogue that on one level Jones seems to advocate for in his conclusion is undermined by a stylistics that seems to claim authority for his texts voice over others: ‘The dialogical Ideal for which Blake strives, then, is an inclusive one, even if some of the included voices seem to impose their truth upon others. For the dialogic ideal to exist, it must include the very elements that seek to stifle it. The resistance to exclusionary domination can only be maintained by continuous self-annihilation’[21]. This is a pull towards centralisation it feels like Blake resists in his texts, yet also an enactment of the necessary grandiosity of maintaining a worldview not governed by doubt, even when expressing a maxim governed by it. For John H. Jones, who sees the Marriage as a Mennippean Satire, this is self-annihilation as irony. Yet naming self-annihilation as primarily an ironic mode locks out its madness, and the ability of mad thinking to hold both sincerity and irony at once. It saves Jones having to abandon societies Sanist assumptions about its (Madness’s) (lack of) meaning, both in relation Blake and our reception of his work, but also in relation to his own selfhood, which throughout his book is never annihilated as a stable voice itself…
…The Mad movement, and figures within it, provide examples of both how damaging trying to monologically reign over the heteroglossia of our madnesses, our array of voices can be, and how to use such madness to our advantage. The Marriage in its memorable fancies, in which antagonists, whether prophets, angels or devils, face of in debates within the mind of the fancys’ voices, themselves the many voiced creation of Blake’s visionary madness, remind me of one such example. Peter Bullimore is a foundational figure in the Hearing Voices Movement in the UK, who now trains people in an approach to voice hearing which is about helping people come into dialogue with their voices and their meanings called The Maastricht interview. He states ‘It was only when he came off the medication and met people who share his experience that he was able to stop being so afraid of the voices and actually start listening to them’[22], and found meaning in his madness that directly helped him through difficult periods where he had become stuck in life. In a film he made with Rosie Yates – Away with Voices – he describes moving past deep feelings of guilt he was trapped within for years in psychiatric services in what appears to be his own ‘Memorable Fancy’ in which he put himself on trial in court and found himself not guilty[23]. Like Mary O’Hagan, he found meaning not in spite of his madness, but through it. “I wouldn’t want to get rid of my voices now, they’re part of me”.[24] I undertook Maastricht Interview training with Peter myself as part of my work within mental health services. In the process of the interview there is never any questioning of the voices reality for the person concerned, nor is there any doubt as to the fact that the voices have meaning. The interviewer and the interviewee work together to explore the voices journalistically, asking and answering questions about when they started, what they say, whether they have names…this is all undertaken alongside a person, and while they talk through their life story in relation to the voices. During the training Peter discussed a man who had heard voices telling him to kill himself over and over again while he was homeless, despairing and misusing alcohol in a harmful way. Using the interview he was able to understand the voices were telling him to end the life of a selfhood that “was going nowhere”, but that his physical body need not end with it. It struck me that he was a living and breathing example of the both the value of attentiveness to the messages in madness, and the power of self-annihilation as a way to overcome mental and societal barriers. However, this was not rooted in a romantic notion of madness as the flipside of genius; it was a story of almost intolerable pain of who’s mechanism madness was both part of and also the key to its succour. Madness is not then a force for good or bad, but a loam of voices who heteroglossia resists monological meaning making and enacts the polyphony of truth in a sustainable way, however painful that truth may be at times to exist within in the infinite flux of its lived reality, the cacophony of its presence…
…that boy seems to have annihilated himself entirely, but his body rises up from his selfhoods ashes with bright eyes and burning flames of hair to guide me through the final memorable fancy. He is the Angel consumed in fire and become an Elijah, a prophet of the saviour – Madness – that stalks behind these words and behind these thoughts. Like the Devil’s Christ, he breaks the mind forg’d manacles of the Ten Commandments and like the Devil and the Angel of the fancy, we sit now – mind in mind – to read the infernal Bible of Hell – in this case The Marriage itself. Imposing on me like a haunting, yet in turn a haunting I imposed upon to save him from the Angels of instruction on the ward. We switch and swerve between the pressure of doubts that seizes our heart into panic, and the flames of inspiration in which we joyfully, painfully, productively lay our selves like kindling. And we weep, because madness hurts…
…It is this weeping the voice of “A song of liberty” calls for, the counter to the ‘sick silent’ coast of Albion, to warm the “shadows of prophecy” from their ‘Shiver[ing]”(E44). A weeping which John H. Jones describes as ‘an anguished but healing utterance that breaks through and overwhelms the oppressive silence’.[25]The song seems to mark the arrival of Blake’s later mythology; a prelude as a conclusion which fits with the spirit of The Marriage’s topsy-turvy landscape. ‘The jealous king’ who ‘promulgates his ten commands’ seems to be a precursor to Urizen, Blake’s later amalgamation of imperial, industrial, rational, empirical and ideological thinking into a monstrous Ur-father masquerading as Godhead of his own closeted world mistaken for totality. ‘The son of fire’ could be Orc, sharing his position in the east and rising to stamp ‘the stony law to dust’. As The Marriage ends, Blake appears to be establishing a future for the ‘Unnam’d Forms’ that reside in the fifth chamber of his printing house in Hell, and receiving them in the form of figures that will populate ‘the forms’ of books that set out to explore the meaning of his visionary madness, that lay a blueprint for others to do the same without having to make the vision sane (E40). The dangers and the necessity of the elements of madness; of imposition, of grandiosity and ‘firm perswasion’(E39); of the ‘enjoyments of genius’ which are at another level ‘torments and insanity’(E35); of angels and devils and minds which can hold them both in their flights or “fancies”; of maxims which undermine the notion of maxims and are still asserted with sincerity as well as irony…all these are explored and open to dialogue with his readers and critics own imaginations, and if they let them open up, with their madnesses. And the selves that those readers carry with them are changed and revivified, rewritten out of stony certainty into active energy by the minds that hold them in the present, which in turn are influenced by the past selves they bring to bear. In turn, the selves and annihilations that seek to make themselves felt in madness find outlets in words; our hands, as Blake would have wanted, turn to the pen – our sword in the eternal mental fight, flowing out not to limit meanings but rather, as a chorus, to make them sing…
[1] Chen et al, ‘A real world observation of anti-psychotic effects of brain volumes and intrinsic brain activity in schizophrenia’ Frontiers In Neuroscience < https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.749316/full> [accessed 31/03/2022]
[2] John H Jones, Blake on Language, Power and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p. 92
[3] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (London: Routledge Classics, 2001) p. 264
[4] S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown University Press, 1988) p. 381.
[5] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (Oxford: Routledge, 2001) p. 262
[6] Robert Menzies, Brenda A. Le François, Geoffrey Reaume, ‘Introducing Mad Studies’ in Mad Matters ed. Brenda A. Le François, Robert Menzies, Geoffrey Reaume (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012)
[7] Rai Waddingham, Opening Keynote – NSUN Members’ Event and AGM 2021 – Youtube < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrczyZtOnw&list=PLSccL5ZOPdobLXvo9X0BIhzQopHf41OL4&index=2> [accessed 5/2/2022]
[8] William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802 in The Complete Poetry and Prose Of William Blake ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988) p. 721
[9] Nick Putman, “What is Open Dialogue” in Open Dialogue for Psychosis ed. Nick Putman and Brian Martindale (Oxford: Routledge, 2021) p. 23
[10] Harold Bloom, ‘Introduction’ in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) p. 3
[11] < https://www.facebook.com/Mental-Fight-Club-350291898335971/> [accessed 31/3/2022]
[12] Sarah Wheeler, ‘Fighting the good mental fight’, Journal of Public Health, Vol. 4 Iss. 2 (Brighton, June 2005) p. 8
[13] Ibid p. 8
[14] Wouter Kousters, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020) p. 656
[15] Ibid p. 658
[16] Ibid p. 650
[17] Mark Lussier, “Blake and Science Studies” in William Blake Studies ed. Nicholas M. Williams (New York: Palgrave, 2006) p. 190
Ibid p. 192
[18] Insight is the electronic record keeping system used by the health trust who I was a client/patient of. Ironically these notes, in the language in which they kept and their focus on symptomology and risk management, contained little insight to the reader as to who the I in the hospital ward was, as I later discovered when I requested to read them.
[19] John H Jones, Blake on Language, Power and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p. 77
[20] Ibid p 76
[21] John H Jones, Blake on Language, Power and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p. 216
[22] Peter Bullimore and Anna Sexton < https://mentalhealthrecovery.omeka.net/exhibits/show/peter-bullimore> [accessed 19/3/2022]
[23] Find reference here
[24] Peter Bullimore and Anna Sexton < https://mentalhealthrecovery.omeka.net/exhibits/show/peter-bullimore> [accessed 19/3/2022]
[25] John H Jones, Blake on Language, Power and Self-Annihilation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p. 80
Benjamin Dorey 