Blake And Jung`s Collective Unconscious

"Improvement makes straight roads, but crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius" : The role of the unconscious in Blake's early work.

In entering the world of Blake's poetry, we enter a world in which there exists no objective reality outside that of the human psyche. The concepts of God and the Devil, good and evil, right and wrong have no universal, unquestionable application beyond the point that they diverge from maintaining an energetic experience of human life in which both the conscious and the unconscious mind must be involved. To live purely in a world of conscious reason in which religious truths are objective absolutes would be, to Blake, the death of imagination and poetry: the true definition of religion. In Blake's work, we navigate not the "straight roads" achieved by "improvement" - the gain of understanding and reason by which the Enlightenment era would define this amelioration of the self - but the "crooked roads" of the ineffable unconscious. Lack of engagement with this tangled web of images that exists deep in the psyche, far from promoting genius, causes, according the psychology of Carl Jung, a limited and sterile experience of life. It is Jung that most significantly illuminates and is illuminated by both the words and the 'illuminations' of Blake's work, because in both we find a "looking glass where two appearances of one reality will seem equally true" . In the truly interior world of human existence, everything has a flip side that is neither better nor worse than itself: Blake's poetry is not a struggle for improvement, but a struggle to understand things as they are.

Blake's controversial views found their roots in his unusually limited formal education, but the catalyst that made them reactionary was his belief that the church still embodied many of the attributes of Deism, or Natural Religion. The theory of the Divine Watchmaker, that God created the world but then renounced all active part in its workings, and left it to run according to the laws of nature is a complete contrary to Blake's deeply personal and subjective view of the Divine, since it implies absolute objectivity: an objective Divine that exists transcendent to and separate from our world, the objective and indifferent laws of nature, and, resultantly, the quest for the "straight road" of 'objective knowledge' as the only "improvement" that has any benefit. Mystic or visionary revelation was rejected as a source of religious experience or knowledge. Although Deism was in decline by the end of the eighteenth-century, Blake despised the passive and unquestioning adherence to dogmatic principles and the somewhat fatalistic belief that the laws of nature could not be altered, and since suffering was natural punishment, there was no use in attempting to alleviate the suffering of the exploited. The "straight roads" of the clean sterility of reasonable religious belief are satirized throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, particularly in the references to Swedenborg:

As a new Heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. (MHH 3.1-3)

Blake, in the year 1790, was thirty-three years old, the age traditionally associated with that of Jesus when he was crucified, and thus his implication here is that he has undergone a bodily resurrection in which he has cast of the shrouds of death and risen into a new and enlightened existence: that of "eternal Hell". Blasphemous though his complex imagery sounds, there is more in it of satire than anything else. The clean, white shrouds of death, in the Bible an image of the casting off of the suffocating Old Testament law, are in Marriage the stiflingly sterile dogma of Swedenborg. "Heaven" and "angels" are the associations of this orthodox 'holiness' and so by rising from the religion of reason and consciousness in favour of energetic imagination Blake is suggesting that by their own dualistic standards this must constitute and acceptance of "eternal hell". It is only blasphemous as far as the orthodox make it so. As Bloom quotes Frye, "Blake attaches two meanings to the word "hell", one real the other ironic". Bloom continues "The real hell is in the fearful obsessions of the Selfhood; the ironic one is.an upsurge of desire whose energetic appearance frightens the Selfhood into the conviction that such intensity must stem from external hell" . Thus, for Blake, enlightened, the grave clothes, the constraint of reason and dogma, is his personal hell, but for the orthodox, it is the breaking of desire through the grave clothes that is their perception of an objective, external hell.

Perhaps, however, the most interesting images of sterility are disguised as images of purity in Songs of Innocence, and for that reason are all the more powerfully satirical. The image of "Old John with white hair" in The Echoing Green, reminiscing

'Such, such were the joys When we all, girls and boys, In our youth time were seen On the echoing green'

is a comment on the fallacy of the belief that after innocent youth has expired, there is nothing left to do for the rest of your life but to feel nostalgia. If this is the case, the speaker seems to suggest, after innocence has past, there will remain nothing when "the little ones, weary, / No more can be merry" than the deathly silence of the "darkening green". The shearing of Tom Dacre's "lamb's" hair so that "the soot cannot spoil [his] white hair" in The Chimney Sweeper is a case of proleptic irony for when they die and arise "naked & white" from the suffocating "coffins of black" (the soot that chokes and kills them). His innocence and purity is protected from the squalor of life only by his early death at the hands of the experienced. Similarly, the sentimental observer of Holy Thursday seems not to notice the irony of his chosen imagery: the specifically noted "clean" faces on this holy day suggest the marks of dirt and abuse on any other; the "Grey-headed beadles" with their "wands a white as snow" give the impression of being spectres of death, carrying the instruments of the cruel corporal punishment of the English education system, while the "multitudes of lambs" has connotations not of joy and innocence, but of mass sacrifice. Songs of Innocence appears simplistic at first glance, but Blake's presentation of the 'state of innocence' advocated as the ideal by Orthodox religion, at times poignant, at times acridly satirical, shows the hypocrisy and sterility of Deist belief in natural suffering and reason. Tom Dacre's comforting thought that makes him feel "happy and warm" is of the freedom of death when the "angel" with his "bright key" "opened the coffins and set them all free". The poem explicitly repeats the church's sole justification for the continued exploitation of children: "if he'd be a good boy / He'd have God for his father and never want joy...So if all do their duty they need not fear harm" (19-20 and 24). This statement moves beyond the sterility of a dogmatic life into a political dimension: that if you passively and unquestioningly accept all suffering and exploitation in this life, and live by church doctrine, you will be happy in the next. This, arguably, is a comment by Blake on the power of the religion of reason over the citizens and its ability to use spiritual threat to maintain social order. The road will be "straight" superficially but it will be painful, sterile, and exploitative and the only relief is death; it is a life of objectivity in which the contraries that Blake deemed essential to progression ("without contraries is no progression" (MHH 3.6)) were seen as dichotomies, divided into 'bad' and 'good': Hell and Heaven, darkness and light, imagination and reason, chaos and order, conscious and unconscious. The life of the innocent is cyclical because they know nothing of experience; there are no contraries because their soul is "unsundered" by knowledge, but the life of dogma is static because contraries are known but only the 'good' is allowed. The consequences of the life of 'self-improvement' are explored in Songs of Experience.

To live only by the conscious reason described above does only produce a sterile life, but since the desires and energies of the unconscious are denied a repressed, they cannot be controlled when they inevitably break through the adherence to conscious thought. Walking the "crooked roads without improvement" is a discovery of the part of one's own psyche that you cannot control or improve, because it is part of collective unconscious (Carl Jung), the part of the unconscious that contains archetypal experiences and images shared by all that have human existence. Poems such as London in Songs of Experience show the consequences of denying this desires and energies of the unconscious mind and the act of self-entrapment this process constitutes. The central point of this poem to Blake's philosophy is the fact he choses to note the "marks of weakness" before the "marks of woe". In Marriage, Blake writes "Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained", thus suggesting that the "marks of woe" stem from individuals' inability to realize their own desires. They are trapped only insofar as they bind themselves to reason and deny their own unconscious ("mind-forged manacles"). The prophets of the poem, the outcasts, the "Rintrahs" are the "chimney-sweepers", the "soldiers" and the "harlots". Bloom argues that the word "apals" actually means 'draped in a pall' . but the meaning is ambiguous, but I would argue that the "chimney-sweeper's cry" leads to the draping of the church in a shroud like the grave clothes of Swedenborg's teaching. The sigh the "runs in blood down palace walls" brings to mind the writing on the palace wall of Belshazzar's palace in Daniel 5, a prophetic message of the imminent destruction of Belshazzar and his kingdom for his crimes against God:

But hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified.

These crimes against God are synonymous with crimes against fellow men for Blake, since he believed that the Divine was in the unconscious of all humankind. The denial, therefore, of the unconscious shared by all humans and the persecution of those with prophetic voices eats at the deepest root of human sympathy, since if the collective unconscious is denied then what is there to link humanity together? The repression of sexual passion is perhaps presented as the most significant evil of a 'reasonable', dogmatic society, not only because of the "plagues" (venereal diseases) spread by prostitution but because prostitution is a side effect of the fact that extra-marital sex is socially unacceptable ("brothels [are built] with the bricks of religion" (MHH)). Because people are not allowed to experience their sexuality to its full extent and the church deems marriage to simply be for the begetting of children, it becomes a sterile institution, a "hearse" carrying metaphorical dead to their actual graves. Diana Hume George sums this up neatly, claiming: "the methodological sacrifice of libido.is culture" . The sterility and dogma of the "straight road" of "improvement" denies ones own unconscious and represses the human sympathy found in the collective unconscious.

The "crooked roads" of the unconscious were to Blake "roads of genius" because only by experiencing the ineffable Poetic Genius, his name for Jesus, through imagination and energy could one come close to understanding the nature of the divine. It is not an understanding that can be explained or rationalized and indeed, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, although written with words, is predominantly a collection of startlingly vivid images, both actual and imaginary. It is a world in which everything has a contrary, but nothing is a negation. For example, in orthodox doctrine darkness is an absence of light, evil an absence of good, chaos and absence of reason. In Blake, however, everything has its value. In June Singer's Jungian commentary on Marriage, she compares this equality of contraries to Jung's analysis of parts of the psyche, in particular that of the persona and the shadow, and the animus and anima. The persona, the constructed façade with which humans survive life in society could be equated to reason, the shadow, the darker, irrational counterpart, with desire and energy. Jung argued that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness-or perhaps because of this-the shadow is the seat of creativity" and that as such it "represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar" . It is easy to see how the shadow, associated by Jung with darkness and irrationality, could be seen by the reasonable orthodox Christian as a hellish chaos or uncontrolled passion, but for Jung, the shadow was an essential part of achieving individuation of the psyche, and for Blake, the means by which he could see the Divine. It was through a continual acceptance of the clash between contraries and "endless imaginative negotiation between conflicting mental impulses," that the "momentary clarity of vision" at the heart of Blake's Religion of Jesus could be achieved. "Blake's Satan is not the malevolent supernatural power of Christian tradition who tempts human beings into sin. It is the name he gives to the self-destructive and anti-social instincts that exist within every individual and stand in the way of imaginative health and psychic integration" , otherwise called individuation. Perhaps the most significant instance of these "self destructive and anti-social instincts" is in Blake's vision of the monkeys and baboons that represent the 'Satanic' instincts of the church:

`Here,` said I, `is your lot, in this space, if space it may be call`d.` Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open`d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me, soon we saw seven houses of brick; one we enter`d; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chain`d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains: however, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with, & then devour`d, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour`d too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail.

This is the most shocking and revolting episode in Marriage, in which all the basest instincts of restrained beasts are displayed: exploitation of the weak, cannibalism, torture, mutilation, sexual fetishism, incest and the self-destructive image of the monkey eating its own tail. This, Blake appears to be saying, is an image of Satan and of evil, rather than the surrender to the desires and healthy energies of the unconscious mind. With this visionary representation of the Deistic church without humanity of social feeling, Blake depicts the dangers of chaining the mind into reasonable religion rather than embracing the darker, but not evil, side of the psyche.

The aim of Blake's early work, which he then expanded on in his later prophetic epics, was the exposure of the fallacy of objective reason and dogmatic Christian belief, an objective Divine and an objective worldview. Since God made man, and man was his greatest creation, Blake believed that God is man, and man is God. The divine is found within the human unconscious, in "the immense world of delight, closed by your sense five"(MHH 7), and the only way in which we can look beyond the restriction of our sensory world is by delving into and accepting the chaotic and "crooked roads" of the part of our psyche we can neither understand nor improve, but into which we can achieve glimpses of clarity if we are able to accept the contradictions and mirror images without applying the orthodox stigma of 'good' and 'evil'.

Bibliography

George, Diana Hume Blake and Freud (Cornell; Ithica and London 1980)

Ryan, Robert Blake and Religion from The Cambridge Companion to William Blake ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge 2003)

Jung C.G Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London 1983)

Jung, C.G. Mysterium Coniunctionis

Blake, William The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose ed. David Fuller (Pearson, 2008)

Singer, June Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious (Nicholas Hayes 2000)

The Cambridge Companion to William Blake ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge 2003)

Beer, John The Romantic Consciousness (Palgrave)