The Arab Spring: The Last Judgment is Here and Now!

Here’s a brief explanation of the Arab Spring, which we discussed briefly in class:

When a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest government corruption, he started a widespread series of uprisings.
http://www.WatchMojo.com tracks the inception and rise of the Arab Spring movement from Tunisia, to Libya, Egypt and beyond.

This video introduction to the Arab Spring helps contextualize the prophetic revolution Blake calls for in Asia in The Song of Los. Blake’s use of polysemic language allows his prophecy to be read for the future, our 21st Century. In the case of the Arab Spring, Orc’s revolution begins in an act of self-annihilation: the Tunisian street vender who burns himself alive as an act of protest against political oppression and capitalist exploitation. Orc’s fires are raging today in North Africa and the Middle East…Blake’s prophetic vision is now here, we are now entering the Last Judgment. Creepy? Strange? Absurd? What do you think?

The Perpetual Fall

In locating his allegorical universe (at least temporarily) in Africa for The Song of Los, Blake’s goal is to emphasize beginnings: the beginning of humanity, the beginning of slavery, the beginning of religion, and the beginning of the empty moral systems and laws that he abhors. He not only makes Adam and Noah contemporaries but also adds Moses, Abram (Abraham), and figures of Eastern religion to the cast of characters. The first four, of course, are Biblical characters whose individual histories are told in the book of Genesis, which means “beginnings.” Adam’s story is that of the Fall, but Blake reminds us that simply because Noah lived many years after Adam does not mean that the two figures’ tales are unrelated.

For the Flood is the symbol of another quasi-Fall, in which nearly the entire world is destroyed because of its sinfulness. Given this event’s proximity to original Creation in the Bible, we should be struck by how quickly humanity incurred the wrath of God. There is salvation for the righteous Noah and his family, but the emergence of the curse of Ham quickly associates sin even with Noah and his descendants – and thus the entire human race. If we consider that, according to Genesis, we are all descended from Noah, then we can conclude that all sin stems not from Adam, but from Noah.

Certainly this line of thinking would have been exploited by supporters of slavery, who twisted Biblical accounts of Ham and Noah to justify the exploitation of Africans but conveniently neglected their faith’s declaration that all men are sinners, perhaps insisting that Noah’s other lines maintained righteousness. Blake’s point is to direct his readers to the discrepancies in this point of view and to remind us that, according to both Adams’s and Noah’s stories, every man is fallen and must rely on God for salvation.

For Blake is working on a both a micro- and a macro- level in this poem. He zooms in to Africa to demonstrate how misinterpretation of the Bible or of God has led to horrors and corruption there, but connects the events on that continent to those in other locations – in the “garden of Eden,” “the mountains of Ararat,” “in the East,” and so on (101). In other words, he argues, the Fall is universal: it has occurred and is occurring everywhere, regardless of one’s religion or race. Time is not relevant in the context of sin and its consequent exploitation, and thus time cannot be a factor for those of us, like Blake, who seek to bring about the revolution that will ultimately end those actions and systems that constitute such corruption.

Los’s Song in the Eternal Mode

In response to the question: 1. Why does Blake deviate from the Biblical account in making Adam and Noah contemporaries? (SoL, Plate 3; 6, 7; p. 109)

I recently looked at Milton’s Paradise Lost in another class this semester. It seems that a divine viewpoint–from Los the Poetic Genius–has been applied to the poem, meaning that past, present, and future can be viewed at the same time. The fact that Adam and Noah along with so many other events across time have been placed on a similar ‘plane’ is the ability of Los to see time and retell a vast history, but to also foresee a prophetic future.

I am assuming that this adoption of a divine vision is Blake’s attempt to give authority to his character, Los, as he reveals his prophecy of the course of humanity and revolution. I am curious to see, though, how much power Blake actually gives to Los, if he believes that he is more powerful than Urizen. Blake structures his Song of Los with Africa (the beginning of humanity) and Asia (the end of humanity). This structure seems to echo God’s quote in Revelations–”I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.”

Taking this biblical echo into consideration, it makes more sense why Adam and Noah are placed together, although, in actuality, they are temporally separated. Blake seems to make Los the closest thing to a scriptural conception of God, that he is at  all places all the time. This is a subtle foreshadowing of Los’s ultimate triumph over Urizen and the resurrection of humanity signifying a victory in the formation, of what appears to be, the New Jerusalem–ultimately confirmed by the final line: “Urizen Wept” (112).Do you agree with this? Is Los truly the all-powerful and does he actually overthrow Urizen through revolution?

Tears and Resurrections

The final line of “Asia” simply states, “Urizen Wept” (42). The associated footnote asserts the wording is ironic because of its parallelism to the biblical line, “Jesus wept,” from John 11:35 but fails to explain the reasoning behind this. Immediately preceding the end of “Asia,” Blake portrays the earth in revolution, a state combining the calling forth of the deceased with the liberation of passionate female sexuality. Whether Blake means for this image to be understood as the apocalypse is unclear, but he definitely pinpoints it as a moment in which there is a definite change–what the footnote calls “the resurrection of humanity.”

This word resurrection ties into Blake’s biblical allusion because the verse, “Jesus wept,” occurs before Jesus performs the miracle of raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. After hearing the deceased’s sisters Mary and Martha recount the story of his death, Jesus was emotionally troubled and moved to weep, and he subsequently gave life back to Lazarus. The details of this story provide an interesting comparison to that of Urizen in several ways. First, Jesus literally resurrects Lazarus, much like the end of “Asia” proclaims the bones of the dead will rise (“the shivring clay breathes” (32)), so these images question the uniqueness of earthly life. Second, both highlight the importance of women: Jesus is swayed by the pleadings of Mary and Martha, and Blake concludes “Asia” with a vivid image of a female orgasm, stating, “Her bosom swells with desire” (37). Finally, I feel the editors chose the word “ironic” to describe this allusion because whereas Jesus weeps from empathy with humanity and acts from this emotion, Urizen weeps because humanity and all its imaginary pleasures–the antithesis of his reason–is being resurrected, rendering him powerless to control the direction of the earth any longer.

Greater Implications of Urizen’s Weeping

Blake seems to deviate from a truly anti-reason standpoint in this piece, incorporating contraries that posit doubt as to whether he holds reason strictly in a negative light. In “Asia,” Blake writes: “the darkness was startled/ At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc” (6:5-6:6). The adjective “thought-creating” calls to mind an almost Urizenic image–of course, this reading is one in which “thought” is translated to “logic/reason” as opposed to “imagination.” However, I find that my first definition seems to hold some water due to the paradoxical content Blake strings together. While he seems to negate generational boundaries of time and existence through his conflation of Adam and Noah (two biblical characters who were not, in fact, contemporaries), his “Song of Los” follows a cyclical pattern. Yes, his model of revelation is not Euro-centric, but it follows a cadence: Africa to America to Europe to Asia. This pattern is a clockwise navigation of the world from right to left and back to the right again. This lends a systematic aspect to his tale, which may indicate the intrusion, presumably an unconscious inclusion,  of Urizenic thought and martial law. Considering this interpretation, the conclusion to “Asia” fosters even greater significance. When “The Song of Los” is ended, Urizen’s deceptive intrusion is combatted–his influence ceases. Urizen’s act of weeping suggests his ultimate failure to continue coercion on a subconscious, if not first-person, level. Urizen’s weeping signals hope for humanity, or at least the form of humanity that Blake approves of.

 

Optional Prompt Questions (3/23)

Here are the two optional prompt questions:

1. Why does Blake deviate from the Biblical account in making Adam and Noah contemporaries? (SoL, Plate 3; 6, 7; p. 109)

2. What is the significance of Urizen’s weeping at the end of “Asia”? (Plate 7, line 42; p. 112)