Self-Annihilation Inner Revolution

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Self-Annihilation/Inner Revolution: Blake's "Milton", Buddhism, and EcocriticismAuthor(s): Mark LussierSource: Religion & Literature, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 39-57Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059842 .

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SELF-ANNIHILATION/INNER REVOLUTION: BLAKE'S MILTON, BUDDHISM, AND ECOCRITICISM

"The extinction of self is salvation; the annihilation of self is the condition of

enlightenment." (The Buddha)

"I come in Self-annihilation & the Grandeur of Inspiration." (Blake)

Mark Lussier

I.

The coincidence of these statements within my reading (as a scholar of William Blake and Romantic Studies and as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism) made somewhat inevitable an obvious question to which this essay offers a somewhat abbreviated answer: "Do these two strikingly similar statements from two seemingly disparate spiritual traditions reflect shared affinities regarding the dynamic operations of 'self-annihilation' (whatever that might be), a process in both systems that clearly functions as the privi- leged vehicle by which enlightenment (whatever that might be) is attained?" The answer to this question has admittedly become an obsession of late, given that it cuts across the boundaries of the professional and personal, for self-annihilation functions as literary device and philosophical proce- dure (in my professional study of Blake) yet defines the primary vehicle of psychological transformation and principle of ethical commitment (in my pedagogical and meditative practices). The simple coincidence of the phrase "self-annihilation" points beyond language and encourages psychological action (as does the term "enlightenment"), and this particular "spiritual" act against the "self" (both east and west) manifests, as well, strong affinities with the discourses of contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and physics, a view recently espoused by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso (The Fourteenth

R&L 40.1 (Spring 2008) 39



40 Religion & Literature

Dalai Lama). In any number of contexts, His Holiness has sought to communicate

perceived bridges among these western scientific forms and various Buddhist beliefs and practices. While hosting a group of scientists in India (1987), he asserted his view that "Buddhism, and particularly Mahayana Buddhism, is very close to a scientific approach [in its deployment of 'logical empiricism']" ("Questions" 31), and in another east-west dialogue during the well-known "MindScience" conference at Harvard University Medical School (1991), he proposed that:

Buddhist thinkers. . .find it extremely beneficial to incorporate into their thinking the insights of various scientific fields, such as quantum mechanics and neurobiology, where there are also equally strong elements of uncertainty and essencelessness. (26)

In yet another gathering of western scientists and philosophers (1997), com- monality was found among Buddhist views on mind and matter and 'the role of the observer, randomness, non-locality, and causality in quantum mechanics' ([2004] 17-30). However, perhaps of most significance for this study is a Buddhist monk's response to a physicist quoting William Blake's oft cited opening quatrain for "Auguries of Innocence":1

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour (E493: 1-4)

After the physicist Trinh Thuan offers these lines to suggest shared affinities between western and eastern views of enlightenment, Ricard Matthieu (a Tibetan monk and French translator for The Dalai Lama) exclaims: "I can't help wondering if William Blake had read these texts [of sutra] ! If you consider these thoughts carefully, then you will see that the Buddha's omniscience corresponds exactly to the globed perception [expressed by Blake]" (Matthieu and Thuan 74).

Given these convergences, the epistemic, linguistic and symbolic coincidence of shared vehicles and methods across two millennia evoked by the epigrams could simply not be ignored. Their convergence had the feel of a strong synchronicity or meaningful coincidence (in the sense discussed by Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli), which I have discussed elsewhere, and the impulse to pursue one (the Blakean path) through the other (the Buddhist path) itself gradually grew into a commitment to an integral model for all efforts and all things.2 While grappling with the maddeningly elusive coin-



MARKLUSSIER 41

cidence of terms and concepts in Blake and Buddhism, I was also prepar- ing for lectures at Monash University and the University of Melbourne in Australia, which forced another widening of perspective.3

My reading for those Australian lectures engaged two "old" influences, Fritjof Capra and Gregory Bateson, whose work augmented my analytic obsession with self-annihilation by adding an ecocritical dimension to it. As Capra argues, "The origin of our [current ecological] dilemma lies in our tendency to create the abstractions of separate objects, including a separate self" (208), a state of being that disperses when "we" "overcome our Car- tesian anxiety. . . [and] realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence" (Levin 3). For Bateson "circuit structure" better conceptualizes the fundamental ecological relationship of mind and matter and therein provides "a new way of thinking about what a mind is" (490). Mind is not autonomous from but deeply implicated in its environment, exhibiting "autopoiesis (literally 'self-making')" as an emergent state manifest in a "network" in which "the phenomenon of life has to be understood as a property of the system as a whole" (Capra 10). In this context, mind and matter exist, to fuse terms from David Hartley and Michael Faraday current in Blake's milieu, as a vibrating field comprised on interactive forces (Nimii 1 74).

Bateson's "broad conception of the world" was published over thirty years ago and claims, itself, to articulate a summation of research across "the last twenty years" (490), and since then, in a series of studies, the cognitive scientist Francisco J. Varela, as well as numerous colleagues, arrived at similar conclusions:

Moment by moment new experiences happen and are gone. It is a rapidly shifting stream of momentary mental occurrences [where] the shiftiness includes the per- ceiver as much as the perceptions. There is no experiencer, just as Hume noticed, who remains constant to receive experiences, no landing platform for experience. This actual experiential sense of no one home is called selflessness or egolessness. (Varela et al. Embodied 60-1; View 1-15, 95-1 1 1)

Clearly, a consensual view of a sovereign self (often collapsed into ego) as an illusion, a primary yet not primal delusion, has increasingly appeared in the experimental outcomes of western neuroscience and the emergent experiences of eastern mind science. The solitary self becomes, to paraphrase Blake, a 'spectre of selfhood' that impedes inner recognition of the illusory separation of subject/object relations and the dis/ease (both malady and source of discomfort) that emerges from this state. As we will shortly see, re/cognition of this state (realizing the illusion and thereby reconfiguring its operations) imites an inner revolution and leads to a state of consciousness




capable of grasping the ecological state of human subjectivity. The implications of self-annihilation, then, impinge upon the fundamen-

tal relationship of mind and matter, since mental and material processes shape the primary ecological state of the subject. Within the three intertwin- ing discourses of this essay (Blake, Buddhism, Ecocriticism) that relational state can now only be characterized as alienated and fragmented, and these shared practices, then, provide a means for refusing a false divide between arenas of thought and experience in preference for an integral view capable of creating a unified framework for all self-generated actions (that is, to re/ fuse [both to deny a division and to heal it] what seems to me a false, even impossible, divide). The concept of self-annihilation informs the core of both professional and personal commitments and forms the intellectual bridge linking three large critical endeavors I have pursued across the last decade (Lussier, 1999, 2007 and 2008).

Within the analytic discourses of contemporary ecocriticism, the emergence of the sovereign self, a construct associated with 'first-stage' enlightenment thinking (i.e. the Cartesian cogito or Newtonian objectivity) has been seen as the pivotal philosophical development underwriting dualistic thinking that alienated individuals from the natural world in all possible relations (committing culturally to what one neuroscientist has termed "Descartes' error" [Damasio 248]).4 As much criticism in the ecological mode has argued, the reaction of Romantic writers to first-stage enlightenment thought sought to heal both the fissure of subject-object relations at its foundation and the fragmentation as its by-product. The salve offered to affect a 'cure' for the affliction just described within particular currents of Romantic thought and expression was self-annihilation and required a willed confrontation with the illusory nature of an independent, solitary, sovereign subject observing a separate material object, since "the self-positing ego cannot limit itself by positing non-ego opposed to itself," which contradicts "ordinary experience" (Beiser 137).

Although "some English writers, like Blake and in a different way also Wordsworth" attempt this form of "Romantic [inner] rebellion," as Charles Taylor observes, the "idea was much further elaborated in Germany" (368-9). Both Dennis McCort and Kate Rigby amply demonstrate that German epistemology in the wake of Kant was ready to desist its violent clinging "to the illusion of an autonomous self" (McCort 168) and thereby resist "that severing of the natural from the human sciences, matter from spirit, reason from imagination, techne from poeisis" (Rigby 26 1). Indeed, as Rigby argues in another essay, the epistemic view of "interconnectedness. . . qualifies romantic science and Naturphilosophie as a form of ecology avant la letter" (29). The movement beyond opposites, in McCort's apt phrase, was



MARKLUSSIER 43

certainly more prominent in German Romantic thought than elsewhere, and even within Kant's work, as Phillip Olson argues, a way of overcoming selfhood through self-annihilation or "negative consciousness" (37) can be located:

....I am conscious of myself in a twofold sense, both as spatial/temporal phenomenon and as "empty" noumenon, then by becoming aware of the emptiness underlying and supporting my sensible appearance, I become conscious of myself as simultaneously bound by and free from sensible conditions. (38)

Early German Romantic philosophies sought to reintegrate mind and matter beyond dualism, with "their new understanding of nature as a dynamic, living, self-transforming whole" (Rigby TS 24) becoming the shared foundation for both consciousness and cosmos, and when this body of thought encountered analogous views in eastern forms and languages, their fusion ignited, in Friedrich SchlegePs immortal phrase, an "Oriental Renaissance" that allowed him to argue that the 'highest' forms of Romanticism must be sought in the east (Schwab 67-8; Batchelor 252-4). Given this encounter, the later philosophically intense engagements inaugurated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with Buddhism, which only achieved status as a world religion in western sociologies of knowledge across the period of Romanticism (Masuzawa 121-46), achieve the proper context.

For the remainder of this essay, however, I will argue that the method that activates the emergence of "negative consciousness," self-annihilation, is best viewed in William Blake's Milton because the process of self-annihilation is literally encoded into its "composite" textual state (Mitchell 3-40) at the thematic and textual layers of signification itself. Intriguingly, as suggested above, at the very moment Blake articulated his version of this annihilative process (a path well defined and documented within the Christian mystical traditions of which Blake was aware), an analogous mode for overcoming alienation and fragmentation began to emerge through orientalist research that led to the crystallization of what is now termed "Buddhism" into European consciousness. Compellingly, the coincidence of exact terms for both the end, "enlightenment," and the process, "self-annihilation," point to practical and theoretical, if not historical, affinities; as Walter Truett An- derson has argued: "[The Enlightenment brought] an outburst of scientific discovery, social dissent, and philosophical exploration that at some points produced concepts of personal enlightenment much closer to what we find in Eastern traditions... It isn't entirely coincidental that we use the same word in English - enlightenment - for the eastern concept of liberation from illusion and the Western concept of liberation from ignorance" (21). Self-annihilation functions, in Blake, Buddhism, and Ecocriticism alike, as




the method for inner revolution, an evolutionary state of freedom from the self-victimizing tendencies of the sovereign self. Through this process, all three strains of discourse seek to reunite practice and theory, a position Padmasiri De Silva has strenuously argued to establish: "what is needed today is not a movement from theory to practice, but one from practice to theory, or more truly the art of what Anthony Weston calls 'enabling practice,' that theory and practice should develop together" (27).

II.

The interplay of verbal and visual art in William Blake's Milton provides an exemplary semiotic space within which to chart the presence of the malady described above and to analyze Blake's prescription for its cure. In the poetic narrative, the powerful preceding poet John Milton, pondering Blake's present/presence and his role in shaping it/him from the (advan- tage point of eternity, undertakes a willed act termed "self-annihilation" to overcome "selfhood" as the necessary first step in what can only be termed an apocalypse of the creative imagination leading to an experience of absolute consciousness (E 108: 14.20-2). The textual trajectory, then, maps the "movement of mind from ignorance to wisdom, from crass materialism to the universe as sacred body" (Brown 136). Milton in eternity (a position beyond space-time and thereby outside subject-object relations), moved by poetry (what is conventionally termed "The Bard's Song" but what might equally be described as a Blakean act of autopoiesis), recognizes that the price of identity is, as Judith Butler argues, one of self-victimization, a state of consciousness where "the subject engages in its own self-thwarting, ac- complishes its own subjection, desires and crafts its own shackles, and so turns against a desire that it knows to be - or knew to be - its own" (Butler 24).

Blake clearly expresses his tragic understanding of the subject's plight throughout his work, perhaps no where more powerfully than in "London," where every face the "I" engages reflects the "mind-forg'd manacles" of self-binding (Bandy 1 2-43). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Book of Urizen, albeit in radically different tones and voices, explore the degrees to which our projections of autonomous selves form the basis of our ignorance and become our shared fiction or delirium, a diagnosis offered in Blake's work but more recently theorized by Gilles Deleuze:

we are not threatened by error, rather and much worse, we bathe in delirium... the positing of an identity of the self, requires the intervention of all sorts of fictive uses of relations, and in particular of causality, in conditions where no fiction can



MARK LUSSIER 45

be corrected but where each instead plunges us into other fictions, which all form part of human nature. (43)

Selfhood or a sovereign self, a delusion of separation and alienation, establishes subjectivity within "the Sea of Time and Space," a nightmare realm traversed in Blake's penultimate epic Milton but whose source is unveiled on the plates of the final epic Jerusalem.

The visual field in Blake's last prophecies energetically attempts to bring the tragic fate of subject formation into readerly consciousness. The title plate and plate fifteen from Milton image (and thereby imagine) the first two steps in the eternal poet's annihilation of selfhood, while a later design from Jerusalem, plate forty-one, operates meta-critically to unveil the mirrored dynamic at the foundation of the composite text and at the foundation of subject formation alike (illustrations one, two, and three). The illustrations emanate with an 'aura of genius', exude extraordinary power, and manifest impressive detail in their support of the discourse of self-annihilation, providing something like a semiotic dreamscape for the linguistic processes ex/ pressing itself as a singular, solitary subject rather than an interdependent entity (with the latter necessarily functioning as a boundary condition for all Blake's illuminated prophetic books).

Through the dynamic operations of word and design, Blake generates an enriched semiotic textual environment specifically designed to unveil selfhood and stage self-annihilation in its most dramatic way, encoding the conditions for an inner revolution in the narrative and pictorial representation of that revolution; the illuminated prophetic textual state, then, exhibits analytic "post-critique" as a boundary condition for its textual operations, functioning as a form of meta-textuality at a primary layer of expression. Indeed, the inner revolution imagined by Blake and pursued by the titular character of Milton requires a commitment to "self-critique all the way down [i.e. beyond any self]" (Hoy 228). This critical mode dissolves "boundaries of conventional ontology" (Lundeen 61) as a necessary stage for "individual liberation of the mind from ignorance" (Brown 127). Blake's illuminated prophecies achieve their complexities by drawing upon "disparate discourses to create a bricolage" (Mee 5), refracting linguistic and semiotic rays into a spectrum of aesthetic ex/pression (that is, both as representation and as counter-repression), and such artistic labor achieves a fusion that underwrites "a new kind of body" and anticipates "a new kind of being" (Makdisi 262).

S. Foster Damon suggests that "the self or selfhood is the innate selfishness with which we are born" (362), but such a definition does not fit very well with the actual agency this psychological state exhibits in Blake's works.




Both in its incipient forms and its more direct embodiment in the later epics, selfhood functions as the single greatest obstacle to Blake's peculiar view of the last judgment (the overcoming of error by any individual), which itself intersects Buddhist descriptions of enlightenment as liberation from "all [mental] defilements [that] have the false theory of individuality for their root" (Conze [1995] 167). Psychoanalytic, as well as neurological, models point to the instability of an essential self, and the state of being termed "spectre" in William Blake's poem Milton parallels quite well the view of subject formation articulated by Jacques Lacan, where the subject emerges through a "function of the imago''' (Lacan Ecrits 4) and is maintained by "anesthetized" desire (Lacan [1992] 324). The Freudian drives of "innate selfishness" precede the formation of the subject, whereas quite clearly for Blake, the state of selfhood emerges from what can only be termed, follow- ing Lacan, a "mirror-stage" encounter with the "vegetable glass of nature" or what Lacan terms "the intra-organic mirror"(Lacan Ecrits 2, 5-6). The Lacanian subject is constructed by and within "the field of the other," and the imago shaped in the mirror-stage becomes a structuring device for the subject's interactions with the Symbolic and Real realms of experience (Fink 35-48). In this context, Blake's evocative term/state/character "spectre" (whose etymology implicates both the eye and the gaze, as Lacan might say) assumes its full importance to the process herein mapped, since its agency bridges the visual and verbal dimensions of Blake's expression. Like Lacan's imago, Blake's spectre situates itself "between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt...of nature and culture" (Lacan £4, 7) in order to mediate all desire, yet beneath this spectre, only a contingent and constantly shifting self exists.

Blake's mode also seems compatibly interconnected to more recent descriptions of the physics of the mind itself, where the "self-reflective capacity of thought to observe itself" (Zohar 1 79) through the meditative-textual technique of "post-critique" establishes "quantum interconnectedness of our consciousness" (Zohar 185) as the unified ground for all acts in the world. This "quantum self" as described by Danah Zohar very much re- sembles Blake's awakened man, the ecological subject, and the enlightened consciousness of Buddhist practice; this contingent "minimal self" perceives "selfhood [as] an obsolete idea" (Lasch 257) through the recognition (and re/cognition) of "our ongoing dialogue with our own pasts, with our experiences, with the environment, and with others" (Zohar 184).

Of course, before making a commitment to self-annihilation, one must know or have some sense of precisely where to apply the practice, and Blake positions this quandary in the foreground of hermeneutic concerns for Mil- ton. The operations of "Selfhood" and "Spectre" (connected psychological



MARK LUSSIER 47

and neurological states) - traced by Blake for the first time in any depth in this work - thwarts the achievement of inner revolution, striving instead to reify "living in the everyday world conditioned by ignorance and confusion" (Varela Embodied 234).

III.

Phrased directly, 'selfhood" emerges through mirror stage dynamics and is the "spectre" or imago of a solitary and self-sufficient "self"; self- consciousness initially reifies this external imago yet subsequently recognizes its fantasy structure, thereby igniting self-examination as a skillful means to achieve "anti-self-consciousness," in Geoffrey Hartman's apt phrase, which reaches a climax in self-annihilation and which leads to Blake's last judgment (Hartman 47-56). Almost every critic drawn to Blake's epic effort to textually embody his transformational ethos attempts to articulate some type of understanding of the convoluted processes that link the state of selfhood (the diagnosed malady of obsessive self-consciousness) and the act of self-annihilation (the salvific antidote to this narcissistic malady). From early respondents like William and Dante Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swin- burne and William Butler Yeats to the vibrant generation of critics currently elaborating the deeply enriched environment of contemporary Blake studies, these concepts stand at the heart of visionary process, providing the acute diagnosis of the human condition and its active antidote, respectively. Blake's elaboration of self-annihilation as a corrective to selfhood and its spectrous mediation re-fuses the division "between the philosophic and spiritualist concepts of developing a view of self"; in such conditions, self manifests "both a set of interior psychological principles and a set of exterior forces manifest in the world of men" (Howard 57), that is a psychosocial being defined by complex complementarities and uncertainties.

Blake, through self annihilation, rejects the sovereign self at the foundation of first-stage enlightenment epistemology, refusing this division, creating con/fusion as the context for understanding, and resisting the split between subject and object so crucial to western enlightenment epistemology, yet so antithetical to eastern approaches to enlightenment slowly emerging into European consciousness across the temporal span of "Romanticism" (c. 1750-1850). Harold Pagliaro persuasively argues that traces of both "selfhood" and "self-annihilation" appear in incipient if not nominal forms as far back as Songs of Innocence and Of Experience (17-33), and aspects of these psychic states also circulate widely through the illuminated works of the 1 790s, including most especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen above all. However, most criticism confirms the late fruition of these concepts, since the actual




terms first achieve linguistic bodies in The Four Zoas-> are first explained in daunting and depressing detail in Milton and, finally, receive the prescribed cure in the visual field of Jerusalem, The emergence of the linked concepts of selfhood and self-annihilation come late in Blake's corpus, because the processes they map (imposed versus willed approaches to the self) need the inflated visionary universe of the late epics and their illuminations to trace their contours and chart their operations. The complex operations of selfhood and self-annihilation across both consciousness and cosmos are best mapped through the epic dimensions of Blake's late poetry, where psyche and phenomena exhibit mutual interdependence (Pagliaro 1 7-34).

For every Blakean subject, the spectre as deluded state haunts self- consciousness and is precisely what must be overcome in any act of self- annihilation, as its first literal appearance in the canon (in the seventh night of The Four £oas) clearly proposes:

. . .Los embracd the Spectre first as a brother Then as another Self; astonishd humanizing & in tears, In Self abasement Giving up his Domineering lust . . .by Self-annihilation back returning To life Eternal. (E 367-8; FZ 85.30-5)

At this stage of the work, Albion continues to fragment and is poised on the abyss of "death and torment" (E 376; FZ 95.4), in danger of collapsing into a subject state Blake terms "non-entity" which always has dire psychological and historical consequences. However, as Peter Otto notes, even at this dark textual moment, "the embrace of the Spectre allows Los to bridge the gap between self and subject, objective world and subjective individual" (244), thereby enacting a "self-annihilation" by which imagination returns to primal unity where any essential understanding of self disappears: "thou art but a form & organ of life & of thyself/ Art nothing being Created Continually" (E 368; FZ 86.1-3). Timothy Morton has discussed this view of self relative to Hegel's reception of Buddhism, especially the mutual states in the renowned "Heart Sutra," which stands at the very center of the prajnaparamita tradition in all forms of Buddhism. Although I will return to this view in my conclusion, this "perfection of wisdom" tradition equates form and emptiness, which renders any "separate self [as] a spurious reality, which can maintain itself only by finding supports, or props, on which to lean, or rely" (Conze 103).

The interlocking nature of "selfhood," the "spectre," and "self-annihilation" reaches a creative crescendo in Milton, where the title character, fol- lowing apprehension of the Bard's song in eternity, pursues through an act



MARK LUSSIER 49

of will "self-annihilation" as the apt process to overcome selfhood (Satan) and redeem his six-fold emanation Ololon:

And Milton said, I go to Eternal Death!

I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave. I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks! I will go down to self annihilation and eternal death, Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilate And I be siez'd & giv'n into the hands of my own Selfhood

I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! He is my Spectre! (El 08; 14.14-24)

These lines bring our three crucial terms into mutual interaction, and the anaphoric sequence of the central lines enacts linguistically what the text evokes thematically - identifying the drive for self-annihilation to the "will."

Satan! My Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate

Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee[.] (El 39; 38.35-6)

This leads to the detailed analysis of the condition of selfhood, which must be quoted at length:

There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated always To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-Examination. To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human

I come in Self-Annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion's covering To take .off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness Cast on the Inspired... (E 142; M 40.31-41.9)

The spectre emerges through mirror stage dynamics; the "Reasoning Power in Man" reifies separate existence through "Rational Demonstra- tion," and the necessary "Self-Annihilation" to overturn this state begins




in "Self-Examination" designed "to wash off the Non Human." What is equally somewhat astonishing here - beyond the discrete definitions offered for the spectre, selfhood, self-annihilation, and self-examination - is the textual connection established between "self-annihilation" (which seems like death) and "selfhood" (which seems like life), an expression of Blake's ironic view of existence.

The "Non Human" to be "cast off" remains directly tied to the mechani- cal operations of mind (the vehicle which separates subject and object and gives rise to varied forms of dualism), which Blake here associated with "Bacon, Locke & Newton," and which give rise to his reputed hostility to all science. Blake's opposition to science, however, is more complicated than appearances might indicate. For example, this view should quite likely be read relative to the end of the unpublished epic, The Four £oas (which serves as textual unconscious for both Milton and Jerusalem), when in "Night the Ninth Being The Last Judgment," Blake creates the condition through which "sweet Science reigns" (E 407; 10). The elimination of selfhood or the "Non Human" that occurs in "The Last Judgment" shatters the imago of the sovereign self, thereby creating the conditions through which the "New born Man" returns to the enriched dialogic relationship with all that is other than the human as the primal state of the subject itself: "He walks upon the Eternal Mountains raising his heavenly voice/Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day" (E 406: 138.28, 31).

Jerusalem establishes a similar dynamic operative within and without consciousness, with the additional recognition of "the terrors of annihilation" (E 150; 7.61) experienced by those that cling to an essential self for subjective stability, which acknowledges the problematic nature of a subject self constructed in "the field of the Other." At the mid-point in the text, Blake laments the "narrowed perceptions" that accompany enslavement to "the most powerful Selfhood" and promises a.jouissance when all "arise from Self" (E 1 98, 1 99: 49.2 1 , 30, 45). Blake seeks to cultivate in consciousness the ability to reside at the nexus where imaginary and symbolic states interact but which requires jettisoning the spectre or illusion of a sovereign self. This zone of subjectivity pulses with emergent energies that create a force field of consciousness: this zone of consciousness, like its cosmos, is ruled by uncertainty principles and relativity theories, defined by existential emptiness and mirror stage encounters, and manifests natural symmetries and cultural complementarities. In this state, the subject enters that time and place (to paraphrase Blake) in "every day that Satan cannot find," where enlightenment itself awaits the death of the self as willed act, and through this enacted state, consciousness orchestrates a collision of mind and matter capable of creating the epiphany of epistemology. In Hatsuko



MARK LUSSIER 51

Nimii's insightful words, "the annihilation of self means the unification of various contraries within the self, which is in consequence liberated from those contraries. In the resulting state of fulfillment, all is affirmed without discrimination or limitation" (178), and without such limitations, the self dissolves into its interdependent environments to experience the jouissance of ecological existence.

IV

Turning to the visual field of Milton, especially the title plate and plate fifteen, the method by which Blake built self-annihilation as visionary response to selfhood directly into its textual state becomes more easily discerned than its thematic evocations and operations. The title plate finds a nude Milton stepping further into the depths of the plate, entering a swirling mass of clouds that moves in vortical fashion around him, a clear visual reference to the famous "Vortex" that provides two-way transportation between eternity and generation (E 109: 15.21-35). Of more significance for this essay, the design presents the past poet stepping away from selfhood (positioned at the reader's location relative to the design) and into self-annihilation (positioned as the vanishing point perspective in the depth of the design), with his right hand reaching forward to sunder in half his own name (as well as the work's title), which begins to flow into the vortex. The character Milton and the author of Milton simultaneously perform, on the title page, an act of self-annihilation before the theme, or even the discrete terms themselves, are introduced (a visual practice on Blake's title plates that extend back to Urizen and The Marriage). As seen above, Milton only announces his intention to pursue "self-annihilation" and thereby overcome his "spectre" on plate fourteen and only clearly defines these terms at plate forty, so Blake's title plate places priority on the annihilative process, staging a performance of it by acting simultaneously against two locations in the spectrum of nomi- nalization (character/historical entity, textual title/author).

Plate fifteen, I argue, depicts Milton's second step in his movement against selfhood through the pursuit of self-annihilation (illustration two), and the plate, read from foot to head (i.e. bottom to top), shows the subject striving against selfhood beyond which dance five figures representing the liberated senses. Once again, processes of signification are broken, this time at the foot of the plate by Milton's right foot, which literally splits "Self-hood" even as the design defines it: "To Annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit & False Forgiveness" (E 1 10). While the right foot led on the title plate, the left foot now steps deeper into the design and, with both hands extended, grapples with an Urizenic figure derived from that work's title plate. However, here the figure leans away from the poet, falling backwards and thereby splitting




the twin tablets of the Decalogue, an act against what Lacan termed the Symbolic Order. Like Urizen in Blake's myth, this Lacanian order lurks in the reified reflections of a solitary self (the imago) reinforced ideologically by empowered forms of cultural semiosis seeking primarily to control and thereby promote conformity to encoded behavior. In the background, five female figures dance on top of the hill behind Urizen and play musical in- struments, representing the experience of liberation or freedom experienced by the senses upon completing the inner revolution inaugurated through self-annihilation. Some would describe this end as a form of enlightenment, and Robert Thurman's description of Buddhist practice fits quite well with the processes mapped by Blake on the title plate and plate fifteen of Milton: "The experience of selflessness as freedom from alienated ego-addiction is a revolution in the deepest heart of the individual" (98).

The primary function of the spectre seems to be that of cleaving the individual into subject/object and of bridging that abyss, an absence, with the assertion of a sovereign self, which merely gives an image to a psychic desire for individuality. In other words, Blake seems to have recognized the dangers inherent in Lacanian mirror stage dynamics well before Lacan put pen to paper, and beginning in Milton, Blake begins to produce an occasional passage or line in mirrored writing (that is, he inscribed the plate so printed words were reversed). In Milton, this occurs at a crucial place, the passage from "Book the First" to "Book the Second" to offer a necessary corrective to Blake's earlier theory of contraries discussed in The Marriage ("Contraries are Positive/A Negation is Not a Contrary" [E 129]), since the diagnosed dis/ease of the spectre and selfhood only found its cure in Milton's passage through self-examination and self-annihilation. Mirrored writing also occurs in several places in the last epic, Jerusalem, but the first, plate forty-one, specifically continues the meta-textual and thematic interplay by providing the most pithy Blakean statement on spectre, selfhood, and self-annihilation.

As mentioned above, Blake's most precise statement on the malady (selfhood) and its cure (self-annihilation through self-examination) occurs on plate forty-one of Jerusalem in a half-plate design, where readers encounter Albion sound asleep and in serious need of awakening (illustration three). The head of Albion, Blake's everyman (yet particular country) figure, has collapsed in slumber on a scrolled text draped across his knees. On the left side of the visual field, an impish figure (most often identified directly with Blake as the voice of the work's four "addresses" to particular audiences) rests on left margin on the curled leaves of the scroll with quill in hand, reclining after a meta-textual act of inspired mirrored writing:



MARK LUSSIER 53

Each Man is in his Spectre's power Untill the arrival of that hour. When his Humanity awake [s] And cast his Spectre into the Lake. (El 38; 41)

As I have elsewhere argued, reading is among the most influential and paradigmatic mirror stage encounters experienced in the semiosis of the Symbolic Order (Lussier "Vortext" 48-50). The initial mirror stage in its Lacanian (and I suggest Blakean) form becomes a recurring structural situ- ation by which the unsteady self maintains the illusion of its sovereignty (Green 187-90), one where participants in subjectivity relentlessly are driven to "become what they behold" (E 1 78, 1 87: 30.50 & 39.32). When we adopt the spectre of the imago, we indeed become what we behold, assuming an image of totality and self-sufficiency, but Blake clearly strives to cultivate, in readers attuned to the visual field in the later illuminated works, the ability to shatter this mirror at will.

Blake reinforces this view of the shaping power of mirrored dynamics by unveiling, in the mirrored writing itself, his own process of textual production (inverse inscription on copper plates) at the foundation of the composite text. Once Albion either secures or becomes a mirror, he will encounter a seemingly straightforward lesson at the literal, symbolic and imaginary layers of the plate's complex semiosis, namely the process mapped throughout this essay. Once the subject self overturns its "World in which Man is by his Nature the Enemy of Man,/In pride of Selfhood" (E 185: 38.52-3), the asserted outcome of the act of casting the spectre back into the lake (mirrored mind) from which it emerges, the Blakean apocalypse, is realized for "whenever any individual rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual" (E 562). When this process is completed in Milton, the identities of Milton (as character), Los (as the zoa of imagination and the author) and Blake lose their stability and flow into one another.

Blake's view of the last judgment sounds similar to, but strikes a dia- metrically opposed stance against, enlightenment claims for the pursuit of truth, and by the time Blake virtually closes his epic efforts (c. 1810), the strongest theme across the canon, brought to its climax with the concept of selfhood, struggles against "Enlightenment mentality" in an effort to unveil its operations as "a persistent, psychocultural cause underlying the destruc- tive... assaults on the environment" (Wei-ming 21). Blake's representation of mental apocalypse certainly has significance for the formative ecology of the mind/matter force field, as the previously evoked "The Last Judgment" section of The Four £oas indicates and which will be here quoted at greater




length (406: 20-31).

The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds One Earth one sea beneath nor Erring Globes wander but Stars Of fire rise up nightly from the Ocean & one Sun Each morning like a New born Man issues with songs & Joy Galling the Plowman to his Labour & the Shepherd to his rest He walks upon the Eternal Mountains raising his heavenly voice Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day That risen from the Sea of fire renewd walk oer the Earth. (E406; 138.25-32)

This description of an interconnected subject beyond selfhood undergoes further expansion at the conclusion to Jerusalem, where "All Human Forms" experience freedom ("Jerusalem Thy Name is Liberty"), identify with mate- riality (healing the Cartesian fissure), shatter the projective imagination that strives to possess the world (overcoming the imago or spectre), and experience enlightenment (the ability to expand and contract perception at will): "for contracting our infinite senses/We behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one,/As One Man all the Universal Family" (E 180: 34. 1 7-9). Here Blake approaches as close to eastern forms of enlightenment as any western poet or writer. Inner revolution radically transforms the state of subjectivity that leads to an energized re-engagement with the world in all its complexities, rather than a retreat from it. In such states, opposition becomes true friendship, a bonding (rather than boundary) condition for consciousness where "Bacon & Newton & Locke [converse with] Milton & Shakespear [sic] & Chaucer" through "Visionary forms dramatic" (E 257: 98: 9, 28).

like other sacred theologies, Blake's mythic treatment of mind and matter in the epics also functions as a sacred ecology, since "worldviews and beliefs" figure prominently in its construction and since it manifests "an ethic of nondominant, respectful human-nature relationship [s]" (Berkes 163). Not surprisingly, Blake's process of self-annihilation as the vehicle for inner revolution just as clearly intersects with Buddhist ecological thinking as well, since both recognize that "the distinction between 'self and 'other' is purely illusory" and acknowledge that "the idea of a solid reality has dominated Western philosophical, religious, and scientific thought for over two thousand years" (Matthieu and Thuan 13). However, against Blake's linguistic resistance to the "Satanic mills" of cultural consumption, the sovereign self continues to dominate within and without, and as the three



MARKLUSSIER 55

interactive discourses pursued here (Blake, Buddhism, and Ecocriticism) agree, much to our collective peril.

Arizona State University

NOTES

1 . Unless otherwise indicated, all citations for Blake come from the Erdman edition (abbreviated E) and refer to the page number followed by plate /page and line number.

2. Jung descnbes this "event as follows: Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have selected the term 'synchronicity' to designate a hypothetical factor

equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation" (19). 3. 1 thank with all gratitude the wondrous Kate Rigby (who arranged the Monash lecture

and class, who took me into her household, and who revealed to me the wonders of southern

Australia) and the courteous Peter Otto (who arranged the Melbourne lecture and offered a splendid dinner and even better conversation at the end of the trip).

4. 1 he term first-stage enlightenment epistemology is designed to foreground a sig- nificant shift in precisely how western enlightenment epistemology defines self as Romantic writers swerved from the material and mechanistic views of "Bacon, Locke & Newton" (E 142: 41.4) and sought to elaborate an "implicate multiverse" of dynamic interaction and

energetic exchange. This shift also coincides rather well with the emergence of Buddhism into European consciousness.

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