“Become One Flesh”: Male and Female in the New Jerusalem

In response to haleyck’s post “Eternal Death and Sexuality,” I’d like to explore further the question of what implications self-annihilation has for the female sex. I would agree wholly with the statement, “The contrary of male and female, then, are not resolved in this one [hermaphroditic] body, but rather are both present, two opposites alongside one another.” Viewing the ultimate reconciliation of gender in this way, rather that arguing that male and female will cease to exist, preserves the contraries to which Blake is so dedicated while also moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between male and female. haleyck’s post succinctly describes this gender ideal of the New Jerusalem in its final line: “People will no longer limit themselves to either male or female.”

This resolution is affirmed in plate 48, lines 29-39 (p. 202) of “Milton: A Poem.” In these lines the virgin Ololon cries, “Is this our Feminine Portion, the Six-fold Miltonic Female? / Terribly this Portion trembles before thee O awful Man” (lines 30-31). Milton’s “emanation,” or his female part/his true self, cowers before the human (and thus the “shadow”) form of Milton. Ololon continues: “Altho’ our Human Power can sustain the severe contentions / Of Friendship, our Sexual cannot: but flies into the Ulro” (lines 32-33). Whatever human elements are present in an emanation – namely, the imagination – they cannot hold up to the male dominance asserted by the shadowy Milton in the context of a sexual union. And such a union is, according to Blake, the pinnacle of desire and the experience of the divine. After Ololon “flies” away, she asks, “Are we Contraries O Milton, Thou & I? / O Immortal! How were we led to War the Wars of Death?” (lines 35-36) Though Ololon is Milton’s emanation, she is nonetheless his female contrary, as well as his spiritual opposite. She and Milton must be enemies in the “Wars of Death,” in which they are pitted against each other and in which one must be annihilated. Of course, it is Milton who ultimately self-annihilates, and Ololon who is preserved. But what ramifications do these results have for the gender makeup of the New Jerusalem?

Ololon’s next query asks, “Is this the Void Outside of Existence, which if enterd into / Becomes a Womb?… / Thou goest to Eternal Death & all must go with thee” (lines 38-39). The “Void Outside of Existence” may be equated with “Eternal Death”: it is the place where one experiences “Eternal Life” (plate 48, line 21). In this sense life is the same as death because self-annihilation, which results in “Eternal Death,” allows for the type of “Eternal Life” Blake sees as resulting from sacrificial self-annihilation. Self-crucifixion is surely Eternal Death of the self, but it makes possible the Eternal Life that is eternity spent communicating with the divine via one’s imagination. This eternity is a “Womb” because it allows for endless creativity, imagination, and production – all of which originates in the female.

This idea of the eternal Womb makes a full circle back to the notion that Milton’s emanation is female and superior to Milton’s male half. Self-annihilation destroys Milton’s male presence in favor of preserving the female emanation. But that male part is not lost forever; rather, it then exists in Eternal Life as the necessary counterpart to the female Womb. For at the beginning of her dialogue, Ololon is described as a “Virgin” (plate 48, line 29). A virgin’s womb cannot reproduce unless it is united with its male counterpart. Thus Milton’s maleness, in the act of self-annihilation, is returned to its true form as part of the female emanation. Milton’s human form is a shadow of his true self because it has rejected its female part. Death to that self-consciousness, in favor of recognizing the importance of the other gender, allows for the ideal union of gender into one body. This is, of course, an unique eternal body that is closer to Blake’s conception of an emanation, though it is a hermaphroditic one in which male and female are perfectly in union and yet perfectly at odds – because each must retain their unique gender in order to be joined together as one: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (The Bible: New International Version, Genesis 2:24).

This post is responding to Blake Lively’s Milton, Selfhood and Communication with the Divine. Blake Lively raised a point that to annihilate oneself is to shift the focus of self-centeredness to God-centeredness.

This is what Blake the character did at the end of Milton. Milton annihilates himself, so does the Virgin Ololon. Thus, Milton became one of the Starry Eight who finally becomes Jesus and the Clouds of Ololon became the vesture dipped in blood written within and without. (“with one accord the Starry Eight became/One Man Jesus the Saviour, wonderful! Round his limbs/ The Clouds of Ololon folded as a Garment dipped in blood/ Written within & without in woven letters, p.203 lines 10-13). At this moment, the Last Judgment happens and Blake goes on describing the scene of the Last Judgment. Elements such as column of fire and trumpets appear.

When Jesus comes to Felpham’s Vale, Blake begins his own self-annihilation. “Thou goest to Eternal Death & all must go with thee” (p.202). This sentence highlights the spirit of self-annihilation: one must take the action himself because no one, no matter that’s Jesus or Milton, can do it for you. “I stood at that immortal sound/ My bones trembled. I fell outstretchd upon the path/ A moment, & my Soul returned into its mortal state/ To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body” (Plate 49 lines 24-27, p.203). I read this as Blake returns to his body and the mortal state to start self-annihilation, which is the resurrection and judgment.

“is this the Death Couch of Albion?/ Thou goest to Eternal Death & all must go with thee”

This Comment is in response to kathcal’s “The Necessity of Going Down.” This comment serves to add more support in terms of textual evidence to her argument. The passage that was assigned is in sync with kathcal’s statements on the sacrifice of autonomy in order to obtain oneness with God.

Milton, in his opening statements of the passage refers to the sacrifice of autonomy: “This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood which must be put off.” Milton wishes to cast off his self-hood in order to become one with God–only attained through self-annihilation. He wishes to, in essence, be the impetus for a greater movement towards self-annihilation, to  start a chain-reaction. He wishes to “to take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination.” In the passage he speaks to address a large scale of people that seem to shun his view of Imagination–he seeks to purify, to reveal.

It seems to Blake that the individual forms that we currently occupy–our self-hood–has made us quite…selfish (ha). He is calling for a global cleansing on the scale of the Last Judgment in order to bring about the New Jerusalem. Blake, through Milton, fears that the current generation is too corrupt and tainted–too concerned with false figures, rather than pure Imagination–to bring about the New Jerusalem: “These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers/ Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life.” And connecting back to kathcal’s post, it ties closely with the spiritual calling others down to the river. His call for rebirth indeed mimics baptism–a “Regeneration.”

Milton, Selfhood, and Communication with the Divine

Milton’s proclamation that he must “go down to self annihilation and eternal death” is accompanied by the threat “Lest the Last Judgment come & find me unannihilate / And I be siez’d & giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood” (Plate 15, lines 23-24). Self annihilation in this sense refers not to physical destruction but to the mental, emotional, and spiritual crucifixion of the self: the destruction of the old, entrenched ways of living in favor of the new. The overarching message of “Milton: A Poem” is Blake’s version of Jesus’s admonition in Matthew 16:25: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

“Losing one’s life” in the context of this verse and of “Milton” is to destroy the power of the self over the spiritual state in order to gain the power of God over one’s soul. Blake’s interpretation of the Fall posits that Man severed his relationship to God, in which the divine was in direct communication with the mortal, in favor of an entirely human-centered focus. Blake does not dismiss the power or importance of the human element of faith, but he does affirm his belief in the importance of looking to the divine as the focus of one’s life. Only opening one’s mind and spirit to the power and methods of the divine (this is, of course, encapsulated in Blake’s idea of the “poetic genius”) can free the soul from the bonds of human-constructed laws and systems that proscribe the inspiration and creation of the imagination. “Dying to self” is thus the tenet by which Blake would have every person live: he affirms a mortal life that is nonetheless centered on the divine and anticipates the ultimate communication with God throughout eternity.

The consequence of failing to “self-annihilate” is to be condemned to Hell at the Last Judgment, or the final coming of Christ. To Blake, Hell, or eternal suffering, is encapsulated in the idea of “Selfhood”: an almost independent entity that, when given full reign over a person’s consciousness, places him in a state of constant self-awareness. Given the dominance of moral law, specifically that of the all-powerful Church, over an individual’s conscience, self-awareness in this life leads to a constant examination and condemnation of one’s “sinful” motives. For Blake is focusing primarily on the differences between the moral state propounded by the Church and that which he believes is the one truly in line with Christ’s life on Earth and the power of the divine present in humanity. According to Blake, mortal systems for regulating the conduct of one’s life emphasize constant evaluation of the self and one’s actions in place of a God-centered faith in which the divine is expressed via human creation and art.

To Blake, a constant focus on one’s own self – one’s thoughts, actions, and motivations – allows self-centeredness to become the compass of an individual soul. Every thought and event is evaluated in relation to the self. Conversely, a God-centeredness opens the door for the type of artistic imagination and production of which Blake is a staunch proponent.

Freedom through Death and Rebirth

In response to kathcal and singerofinnocence,

I agree that there are strong connections between Milton and slave spirituals, and especially the link to Blake’s disapproval of the mental enslavement by Urizen’s reason. When re-reading this plate, I was reminded of part of a poem by the Muslim mystic poet, Rumi, in which the speaker invokes the voice of G-d:

I would love to kiss you.

The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Both in Rumi’s poem and Blake’s work, the idea of abandoning life on earth in order to connect with G-d is the only way for a person to achieve the level of oneness they desire. Without death, and the self-annihilation of the current state of existence, mankind will be deprived of the of the greater significance and connection for which they yearn, forever trapped in their own “Selfhood.”

One aspect of the picture on page 167 that I also noticed was the shape of the muscles depicted on Milton’s back as he pushes against Urizen. There seems to be a small, angular opening in his lower back that reminded me of the vaginal imagery we discussed in earlier works that is a symbol for Christ’s wound, as well as a path through which one can experience the poetic genius. Because of this, Blake perpetuates the link between self-annihilation and rebirth that ultimately brings man closer to Christ through an exertion of poetic genius and uninhibited sexuality.

Slavery as a Component of Milton

In response to kathcal,

I think that your connection between Milton and slave spirituals is not tenuous at all but, rather, quite an adept recognition. In fact, I would further argue that Milton: Book the First explores another form of slavery to which Blake frequently alludes: mental enslavement. Just as Blake disapproves of the institution of slavery, as is evident in many of his works, he also disapproves of the binding moral and logic-based laws of Urizen; such disapproval led him to put forward the idea of self-annihilation as a way of creating distance from the rational, systematized part of oneself. I’m curious about your claim that self-annihilation involves the abandonment, or sacrifice as you referred to it, of autonomy. Quite contrarily, I would argue that the act of self-annihilation enables one to become autonomous, The act of self-annihilation in and of itself is destructive but it doesn’t degrade the part of oneself that is intrinsically your own. Self-annihilation is a way of freeing oneself from Urizen’s ties and, on a more conceptual level, it is not the separating of the self into two parts, it is the final freeing of the self from a counterpart to which it was unceremoniously attached–Urizenic law.

Considering Milton in the context of slavery commentary, the engraving on Pg. 126 (shown below) takes on a double entendre of sorts. Milton’s personage, a sinewy character lunging forward and attacking Urizen dually suggests a break from his previous state of self and, more generally, from a state of subjugation and powerlessness. Certainly, the image of Milton is one of a man who has toiled laboriously, with brawny and defined muscles. One may even be as bold as to say that some of the markings on the back of Milton could be interpreted as scars from lashings by a whip. Thus, Milton gains a powerful, implicit jab at the slavery movement of the time while he furthers his contention imagistically that the self must be freed from Urizenic law to truly be capable of entering the “Kingdom of Heaven.”.

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Is Blake unconsciously patriarchal?

In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, we learned that Blake takes similar stand with feminist at his time. However, Blake still stayed within a restricted feminism. His feministic arguments are more inclined to free women from the traditional moral cage rather than treating men and women equally. In Milton, Milton was freed by his “Sixfold Emanation”, his three wives and three daughters (p. 149). These six women symbolize Milton’s suppressed feminine desire and his spiritual form of self.

On one hand, women are powerless victims and forced to reluctantly reproduce. Oothoon reproduces Leutha’s trap to the girls while being a victim herself (p.64). The shadowy female in Europe a Prophecy is powerless and can only complain about the vicious reproduction she has to take on doing (p.98-99). Enitharmon, the character that suppress Orc and Los, put men into her eighteen hundred years of female dream (p.101). On the other hand, women are symbols of sexual liberation and free desire. Oothoon calls for “free love” constantly in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. In Moravian tradition, Jesus is feminine. In the image of Milton strangling Urizen, we also see his Sixfold Emanation above him. His Sixfold Emanation is artistic and joyful. These are all images that Blake truly praises.

Nevertheless, women are never the revolutionary in Blake’s work. They don’t strangle Urizen. They don’t bring revolution like Orc and Los. One can definitely argue that Blake portrays the oppressed situation of female to call for changes. But can we also argue that Blake never put female as revolutionary characters in the center of his system is being unconsciously patriarchal? In the New Jerusalem, what will the gender system be?