Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Thanks to my listeners on this 250th episode. Iago, through ugly sexual insinuations, drives Othello into such a frenzy that he loses control and then faints. Cassio makes cruel fun of Bianca the prostitutes love for him, and Othello from a distance thinks he is talking about a good time with Desdemona. Othello strikes Desdemona in front of Lodovico of Venice.

After Iago tells Othello that Cassio has Desdemona’s handkerchief, the two swear a demonic vow of revenge. Othello tells Desdemona a lie, that the handkerchief is black magic. Emilia says that people are not jealous for a cause. A third woman in the play, Bianca the prostitute.

Within a single scene in the center of the play, Iago turns Othello from loving husband to jealous maniac. The question of faith, in love and religion. Othello demands “ocular proof.” What Iago gives him is “ocular”—images of infidelity planted in his imagination.

The opening of Act 2 seems like the happy ending of a comedy, the enemy destroyed and Othello and Desdemona reunited. Iago’s soliloquy: Coleridge’s famous description of Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” Cassio, made drunk by Iago, disgraces himself at the celebration and is demoted.

At the end of Act 1, Iago counsels Roderigo, “Put money in thy purse.” What motivates Iago? His puzzling soliloquy. Act 2, the Turkish fleet has been scuttled by a storm, and the characters land one at a time on Cyprus. While waiting Iago engages Desdemona in a game of wit and she defends herself spiritedly. This is no passive, victimized Ophelia.

Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, accuses Othello, who recounts how Desdemona fell in love with him listening to his stories of his life. The danger in love of believing stories, of having “faith”—but also the danger of disbelieving. Othello sent to Cyprus to defend against the Turks.

The significance of the full title: the definition of “Moor,” the associations of Venice. Othello as a “domestic” tragedy: an inadequate designation. The play opens in darkness. Desdemona’s father Brabantio is awakened when Roderigo and Iago shout vicious racist and sexist accusations out of the dark.

The murder of MacDuff’s family. MacDuff persuades Malcolm to return from England with English forces. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, washing her hands. Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Macbeth goes down fighting. Can Macbeth be called heroic, or is he merely a “dead butcher”? We admire ambitious men who trample all obstacles in their path, including other people, don’t we? A play for our time.

Macbeth sees Banquo’s Ghost sitting in his chair at the banquet. This drives him back to the witches, who show him three Apparitions that give him three riddling oracles that, once again, he interprets according to what he wants to hear.

Immediately after the horrific murder of Duncan, the startlingly incongruous monologue of the porter too drunk to open the gate. The psychological closeness of terror and laughter. Macbeth hires three murderers, who kill Banquo, but Fleance escapes.

Lady Macbeth goads her husband, telling him to be a man. The theme of being an “instrument.” Duncan and company are put up for the night in Macbeth’s Dunsinane. Murder in the middle of the night.

The witches and their prophecies to both Macbeth and Banquo. Thematic patterns: things occur in 3’s; the word “equivocal.” Duncan declares his son Malcolm heir to the throne, and Macbeth decides upon murder.

Macbeth (1606) is a play about real Scottish history, but is also a drama of the mind, clearly written with James I in mind, who was both Scottish and obsessed with witches. The opening scenes alternate between political and military doings and the dark Otherworld of the blasted heath, with the three witches.

Albion redeemed from his fall into illusion and nihilistic despair by the work of Los. The renunciation of the natural self and “natural religion” for the true Christianity of the imagination. Against illusion, the arts and sciences. Against vengeance and love of war, the forgiveness of sins.

Blake’s culminating epic, on the work of Los, the imagination, to redeem the fall of Albion, the universal divine-human figure. Chapter 1 of 4: the great debate of Los with the Spectre of Urthona, the selfish and despairing part of all of us. The struggle of Los to keep faith in a time of despair like our own has great dramatic power, as it is a struggle within every person.

Milton, inspired by the Bard’s Song, returns and enters Blake, who is thereby united to Los, the imagination, resulting in a vision of nature redeemed by imagination. Then Milton confronts his Selfhood and renounces it, reconciling with his Emanation Ololon, a kind of renewed marriage witnessed by the married couple William and Catherine Blake in their garden.

We begin an overview in four podcasts of Blake’s two final and definitive poems, Milton and Jerusalem. Milton is in two books. In the first, Milton returns to the fallen world to achieve the clarified vision that eluded him in Paradise Lost. He wrestles with Urizen, who tries to oppose him, and enters Blake’s left foot to inspire him.

The lowest point: Orc crucified as serpent by Vala, Urizen Wars with Los, the hermaphroditic form of Satan/Rahab is revealed. But Los, the Spectre of Urthona, and Enitharmon unite to create forms for the Spectres. Night the 9th: the apocalypse.

After the Fall, Urizen explores his dens, bringing the fallen world into being. He follows the powerful heartbeat of the bound Orc, and sits confronting him, writing his books of laws. Orc defies him, then metamorphoses downward into a gigantic serpent. But in the beginning of a counter-movement, Los unites with the Spectre of Urthona and Enitharmon to begin the imagination’s work of redemption.

The effort to brake the Fall, although successful, has driven Lost temporarily mad, and he dances on the mountains. Enitharmon gives birth to Orc, who is chained like Prometheus. Urizen explores his dens, which are the fallen world, following the mighty heartbeat of Orc.

“All deities reside in the human breast,” said Blake. The Zoas are aspects of the fallen Albion’s mind, at odds with one another. They are also alienated from their Emanations or female counterparts, who have become split off and “other.” When that happens, the male is diminished into a Spectre, whose attitude towards what he should love and regard as his other self becomes either possessiveness o...

A quick run-through of the plot elements in the first half of Blake’s The Four Zoas. But then a discussion of why such a synopsis is only a useful fiction or scaffolding. The poem describes a higher order of reality falling into the lower one and becoming it. Things are metamorphosing into their fallen forms, the forms we call ordinary reality. This is a fall from a circumference to an alienated c...

Blake interprets the Fall into our suffering world psychologically and epistemologically rather than morally. The Fall was into the illusion of the subject-object split, or “cloven fiction.” The cosmic being Albion, who united all being and beings, fell, and therefore we are living in an illusion that we take for real. The imagination tries to awaken us, and thereby awaken Albion.

Why bother with the difficulties of this poem? Because Blake is showing us the nightmare we are dreaming right now. The fall of the universal being Albion is into the alienated state of the “cloven fiction,” or subject-object division. But that breeds madness. It breeds delusional “magical thinking,” which breeds strife, violence, terror, despair. We are Albion.

In The Four Zoas, Blake’s vision expands past the fall of Urizen and the conflict with Orc. The original fall was that of Albion, a cosmic being. The four Zoas—Orc/Luvah, Urizen, Los, and Tharmas—are four parts of Albion’s psyche at war. Albion falls by turning from his own emanation, Jerusalem, to Vala, who is other and not part of his own being.