ekleksographia Wave Two

World Wool Wind

I so far from being bound down take the world with me in my flights & often it seems lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the wind.
     —William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 11 September 1801¹

I want to follow this line of Blake's, to see where it rolls. This image of the world as a spherical ball, one that might be lifted in the wind, is already textured and material, three-dimensional. Soft. And full of seeming contradictions. Weight and lightness, possible unwinding, set loose. Pull a thread in a tight ball of wool and it eventually slips through fingers. A speed in unravelling, the way the end whips away to nothing—or dense and compact, the unevenness of a ball when wound by hand. Does someone hold it while you wind. Does it roll away. The flow in a line—drawn or written—and the way it takes the world with it. How does it do this.

Blake is talking about abstraction, the lift-off of his imagination and tug of more instrumental demands: labour, 'Duty & Reality', time. He is late getting his work in. The more chained his feet, the heavier the world, the more 'ballast' he lets go, taking off in flight to 'Mountains and Valleys which are not Real'. It does not feel like flight as escape, more a kind of tethered 'Improvidence' in which he can't quite answer the practical realities of making a living—but it is a resistance to what the weight of the world calls out. His work finds its own duration, range. The ball of wool might seem a domesticated analogy for the sphere of the world, but something is bound in to it materially: textile mills, looms, piecework, text in potential making. My mother knitting with her left hand. Is it an image that still holds. The world is like this, but lighter. In the weight of capture is a shrinking of the range of the senses, being refused.

It was a common view, as James Harris had described it in 1750, that the 'vulgar' were so 'merged in Sense from their earliest infancy' that they 'imagine nothing to be real, but what may be tasted, or touched'.² A genetic account, that ascribed a child-like tactile understanding to the mechanicks of the 'laborious multitude', and aesthetic visual discrimination to the upper orders. One could never grow 'up' to be the other. Blake's response, just after the French Revolution: 'How do you know but evr'y Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?'³ The cut of a line of flight, how it is seen to open out spatially for 'Evr'y Bird' to range over a sensual universe. How do you know. Something portable about a world shaken loose, light. Its marks and textures, taste. New kinds of orienting, in which learning and creating through translations of multiple and unimaginable senses might promise diverse topographies 'which are not Real' and yet real and fully inhabited. Against the dominance of particular rationalities of perception and those they serve.

Following Blake is to feel out the force of this transformation and its potential as the line takes it along. Sometimes what might seem a haptic 'turn' today can seem like a turning away, a pathos, almost a mourning, as it was at the time of the Romantics, for a world that is already alienated. The more instrumental and technologically mediated our relation to an exploited world, the more local and intimately ecological a need for its recovery through the senses. Or a symptom of a sympathetic, ethical relation to environments, people, when action seems impossible. Do we consume this too easily. Or a register of loss and forgetting eg. the way that handwriting is currently regarded as an archaism, about the gestural mark of our bodies in an increasingly virtual world—which seems to some a kind of death in the face of email and the internet. But if there is a continual attacking of a narrow and alienated existence in Blake, the place of the haptic seems to offer more.

When his traveller goes down to hear the Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a history unfolds of the 'enlarged & numerous senses' of the ancient Poets in their naming of the world, and their fall.⁴ At an apocalyptic point where things are imagined beginning again, a vision of Blake's own practice as an engraver surfaces:

first the notion that a man has a body
distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this
I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by
corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and me-
-dicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and
displaying the infinite which was hid,
          If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, in-
-finite—
          For man has closed himself up, till he sees
all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.⁵

Those glowing illuminated works, the recording of the making of a hand, integrate the poet, painter and experimenter in technological thresholds and dynamics. 'Not one touch in those Drawings & Pictures but what came from my Head and my Heart in Unison'.⁶ That 'touch' comes through a compositional process of print—'salutary and medicinal'—which for all the flow of the line, moving freely through text and image, also involved the possibility of print on demand, and therefore the precision of writing backwards on the surface of the plate (and the repeated battering out of mistakes) and acute attention to the form the acid would reveal. Not chance, or distraction, here, for a Line ' is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision Strait or Crooked It is Itself'.⁷ Invention and Execution. The integration of the senses into a whole that is greater than we know ('that calld Body is a portion of the Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age'⁸), is the knowledge of the Devil and true poets, for Blake, who sets out to record it.

Following the line: crossing kinds and communities of material making, abstraction, touch and taste. Opening doors without knowing. Compositional labour, translating between. Digital environments, inhabiting the cut of flight. The dynamics of the body in space, its heat, sweat, shit. Delight. Reason as a 'bound or outward circumference of Energy'. Love and anger for the potential of a world, which 'I take with me on my flights'. Argument of the senses. Weight and binding. What is the praxis of the haptic, its inscribing. When the world can seem lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the wind.

Notes:

¹ William Blake to Thomas Butts, 11 September 1801, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V Erdman
² James Harris, Hermes: Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (London: H. Woodfall, printed for J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1751), pp.350-51.
³ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p.7 in William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books, edited by David Bindman (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p.113.
⁴ Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell p.11, in Bindman, p.117.
⁵ Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell p.14, in Bindman, p.120.
⁶ Blake to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, in Erdman
⁷ Blake to George Cumberland, 12 April 1827, in Erdman
⁸ Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell p.4, in Bindman, p.110.

Ekleksographia:
William Blake and the Naked Tea Party

March, 2010

Carol Watts

Carol Watts is dusie.org/watts.html and asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/watts.