Re: Hapworth Revisited

Crap, you couldn't have picked something harder :). The _Marriage_ is
generally read as a satire of Swendenborg, but it's not always clear
where Blake is being satirical and where he's being, well,
straightforward (as much as that word can be applied to Blake).

Blake set up Reason and Energy is opposition in the _Marriage_ (and in
his mythology), associating the principle of Energy with Evil, Satan,
and Hell -- but then, Blake saw these "contraries" (reason and energy)
as necessary to "progression" (see plate 3 of the _Marriage_), so "evil"
(and Satan and Hell) isn't quite configured, in Blake, the way they are
in Christian belief.

It's probably best to read Blake along the lines of Nietzche's _The
Birth of Tragedy_, where the Apollonian (reason) and the Dionysian
(something like the principle of the body or energy, bacchanalia) are
set in opposition, the union of the two being necessary for tragedy.

The quotation is from the "Proverbs of Hell" section (plate 9, or line
57) in the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_.

Blake's punctuation was somewhat idiosyncratic. The line was actually
engraved:

Damn. braces: Bless relaxes.

Since this is a proverb, the lines immediately before and after it don't
really matter as much as contextualizing this individual line within the
entire work.

You shouldn't necessarily read every period as a full stop in Blake;
sometimes they're just pauses, and sometimes they work the way we use
them today, to end a line. I still haven't figured out how Blake uses
the colon, and his capitalization seems either for emphasis, or at random.

So what this all adds up to is that the sentence we're looking at is
pretty hard to figure out, because it's just a good example of Blake's
weird punctuation (the rules weren't hard and fast back then, but Blake
stretched them, such as they were).

If we go ahead and read it the way _Hapworth_ inclines us to read it,
"Damn braces" and "bless relaxes," it makes sense within the context of
the _Marriage_ -- braces, or restraints, would be "damned" in Hell
while "relaxes" (or lack of restraint) would be blessed, Hell being the
principle of energy.

Otherwise, I don't really know how to read it. I'm open to suggestion.

Jim

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Received on Thu Jun 12 14:27:42 2003