Repeating Yourself - Part3

28 Repeating Yourself 3 // Blake’s Poetics of Poiesis I Relief Etching as Radical Methodology “Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words. Nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.” William Blake, From “A Public Address To The Chalcographic Society” “As the seventeeth century moves on the image of clock-work extends, until, with Newton, it has engrossed the universe.” E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” In Blake studies, there is a tendency to treat him as a poet first and an artist second, and, consistent with this, in most print formats, image is subordinate to word — an informational supplement to text. However, Blake’s images resist this hierarchy. As we know, Blake’s his broader aesthetic philosophy cannot be separated from his material practices as a printmaker. Originally aspiring to be a painter, Blake was instead directed at an early age to commercial printing by his father, who considered it to be a more practical vocation. Clinging to the allure of painting, however, the young artist, once he had finished his printmaking apprenticeship, enrolled in the Royal Schools to study painting (Ward 21). However, the experience left Blake somewhat disillusioned, because as Wagenknecht suggests that while “Blake’s [developing] printing method, rather than a technology for distributing copies, was in fact designed to be anti-technological, less ‘reproductive’ and therefore closer to handwork than original printing,” (328) the dominant “English school” pedagogy was increasingly including commercial reproductive practices in its curriculum. These “English school” tendencies showed the same features as Blake’s political and social milieu: a shift towards commercialization from craftsmanship and a shift from originality into reproduction. As a craft, intaglio etching encapsulated the technology of conformity that modulated the conservative economic and political discourse of the time, as we found in the first chapter of the thesis. While the second chapter unearths the mechanical reproduction in the texture of the poem and traces it to a psychic trauma, this chapter is concerned with the manufacture of this poetic texture. Blake’s poem operates on a number of levels, and the superseding level is concerned with escaping this horizon of reproduction. Ultimately, the poem’s meta-textual task is to find an aesthetic theory that accommodates reproduction so that Blake’s method syncs up with his broader artistic and philosophic projects. The Blakean copy must accumulate rather than lose significance with each iteration. Insofar as we can locate Blake’s workshop in the politically and economically charged nexus of the 1790’s — a juncture between commerce and craft, factory facsimile and original work of art, subservience and independence — we can explore the radical potential of the Blakean copy. This chapter will consider Blake’s novel model of engraving, relief etching, against its commercial precursor, intaglio; we will se how this aesthetic form relates to Blake’s philosophical theory; and how this method produces objects resistant to economic notions of space and time. In 1788, Blake invented a technique that came to be known as relief etching. In a 1793 Prospectus, he wrote that it was “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet” (Viscomi 41). This method was the inverse of intaglio etching, the widespread commercial method of the time. In the intaglio process, an acid-resistant mixture of wax and resin would be spread over a copperplate. After hardening the wax with heat, a paper design was laid over, and a needle-like tool called a burin was used to trace the design, cutting through the waxy surface in order to expose the copper beneath. 30 Repeating Yourself Following this, the plate was “bitten” with acid, leaving an indented design. Blake’s method, relief etching, reversed this process. Drawing with a “stop-out” varnish as the ink (a liquid used by etchers to prevent further corrosion after a plate had been sufficiently bitten), Blake would compose the text and design in reverse directly onto the plate. After being treated with acid, the finished plate of relief etching would be left with a raised design (Viscomi 43). An important feature of Blake’s technique was the lack of preliminary drafting required before he wrote and illustrated the poem directly onto the copperplate using a quill and varnish and needing nothing more than the verbal text (Viscomi 47). Thus, with this method, the copperplate becomes a stand-in for a painting canvas, which Blake noted when in a “A Public Address to the Chalocographic Society,” claiming that “Drawing is the Foundation & indeed the Superstructure. It is Drawing on Copper as Painting ought to be Drawing on Canvas” (440). Why was Blake adamant to characterize his craft as drawing rather than etching? We can understand Blake’s resistance to etching by examining the mechanics of intaglio etching, which served as Babbage’s model of the ideal factory, and can be characterized by a mechanical divide between mental conception and material execution. As such, intaglio etching required that the unit of text and design be drafted on paper before being traced by the burin. This is because the burin, unlike the quill, which Blake used to distribute the stop-out ‘ink’ during relief etching, has a very thin tip. In order to mimic the impression of a solid line from the tracing sheet, the burin makes a variety of three-dimensional cuts rather than etching a single, fluid stroke. Because of these technical constraints, the process necessitates a translation from paper to copper plate, a mediating schema that dictates the movement of the tools. Even at the level of individual steps, intaglio etching is inscribed with a division between conception and execution. Antithetical to intaglio etching is painting, which Blake’s relief method drew its ethos from. It requires no such mediation between conception and execution, no mental sketching or blueprint. In fact, it is only though the bare material processes — the direct application of paintbrush to a canvas — that the metaphysical artistic meaning was realized. As Joseph Viscomi writes of Blake’s ethos, “Invention and execution are organically intertwined” (Essick, “Production of Meaning” 9). As such, the painterly practice is grounded in the overcoming of Cartesian dualism through a unification of mental and physical activity. This is precisely why the direct contact of quill and copper plate forms a critical nexus for Blake’s artistic philosophy. It is the site of inspired activity — activity not indebted to the mechanical reproduction of a static mental model, but that which animates spontaneous desire. It follows that Blake’s style is characterized by “tone subordinate to line” (Viscomi 37) because the unbroken line is the most fluid link between desire and conception. This smooth stroke is also the “bounding line” which contains meaning, but that can be transcended or transgressed when its boundaries are no longer relevant. In a summary of the critical field, Robert N. Essick rehearses Morris Eaves’ counterargument that Blake, to the contrary, foregrounded the mental conception of his artistic production over the material execution. Eaves bases this argument on a statement in Blake’s “Public Address,” reading, “Execution is only the result of Invention,” (Essick, “Production of Meaning” 9) as well as Blake’s hostility to materiality, or 32 Repeating Yourself “nature, the vegetable glass” that other Romantic artists sentimentalized, such as in Wordsworth’s naturalism. However, there are reasons to push back against Eaves’ argument. While Blake distrusted the belief that nature contained inherent metaphysical meaning, he did envision nature as a blank canvas upon which the boundless human imagination could project its self-derived bounding lines; “where man is not, nature is barren.” (MHH, 10:68) Indeed, it is only through this entanglement of mental and physical practice that man fully realizes his creativity. To prioritize conception over execution is to bifurcate a symbiotic process, thereby artificially limiting the creative results of such a relationship and compounding the delusion that “man has [a] body distinct from his soul.” (MHH, 4:1) In fact, the finished product of intaglio etching illustrates the dangers of splitting form from artistic meaning, execution from conception. After all, the acid biting drives the unit of text and design deep within the plate. Like Urizen’s “secrets of wisdom,” the artistic meaning withdraws from the surface into the hidden recesses of the copper plate, structurally withdrawing its wisdom. In short, execution obfuscates conception. Larissy writes that “whereas Blake extrudes design and text, intaglio incises them” (67). With relief etching, after the untreated sections of the plate are bitten away by acid, the waxcoated text and design unit is elevated above peripheral material. More relevant, both text and design are the positive structural result of the corrosion of the acid. The unit of artistic meaning exists, not in spite, but because of the wax-covered design’s exposure to its chemical opposition. Blake characterized this as “the melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” Quite literally, artistic meaning is spatially realized by this interplay of chemical contraries, accruing its soul through the construction of its body. If Blake’s method relies on the spontaneous and fluid entanglement of form and meaning, intaglio etching severs the aesthetic process into a series of discrete parts. Not only does the commercial intaglio method disrupt the relationship between mental and physical activity, it also divides the labor of text and design. According to Viscomi, the text and designs of a conventionally illustrated book were produced separately, even when the two units shared same leaf. After a page was typeset at the printers, it would travel to another design shop where it would be impressed with a pictorial plate, thereby joining together the work of two separate laborers (Viscomi 41). Far from an isolated practice, intaglio etching’s division of a labor is connected to a much larger economic trend in the factory, which was as Ure writes “The principle of the factory system [i.e.] to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and [to] partition … a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans” (20). Beyond disabling the role of a singular craftsman in the modern economy, this transition from artisan labor to factory labor also marked a new model of time — in which intaglio was ultimately enmeshed. To examine what this new industrial time felt like, we must first analyze the workflow of the pre-commercial craftsman, who was the simultaneous conductor and musician in his orchestra of production, performing the entire series of tasks whose unified goal was the realization of a larger design. But during the object’s production, there was no stable mental model to which the craftsman’s labor must conform. Instead, the object could be revised throughout its production, its features modified, compounded, 34 Repeating Yourself or excised — illustrated by Blake’s ability to improvise not only the spatial placement of text and design but their aesthetic features during his process. In what E. P. Thompson calls task-orientation, “the day’s tasks seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the [craftsman’s] eyes” (59). In this orientation, the craftsman and the object were bound together in an intimate relationship, in which the craftsman had the ability to determine the “speed, intensity, rhythm, and flow” of the object’s production (Makdisi 121). The result was an imperfect and inefficient stream of labor with gaps of time unclosed by production, what Ure characterizes as “innumerable short pauses, separately of little account, but great when added together” (7). In short, time was an elastic substance. Thompson demonstrates this temporal fluidity in practice: “Within the general demands of the week’s tasks…the working day might be lengthened or shortened” (71). Factory labor, conversely, sewed up these inefficient gaps by substituting a fixed blueprint for the craftsman in the role of the unifier of production, the common denominator. In order to produce this blueprint as efficiently as possible, a fluid stream of action was broken up into discrete segments, the craftsman demoted to factory worker, his range of movement limited and forced into repetition — in much the same manner as how commercial printing separated text and design into different processes. Spontaneous improvisation in the factory had the potential to throw the production line into chaos, unlike in the craftsman’s process, rendering nonconformity not just unnecessary but dangerous. With this factory narrative no longer accommodating poetic gaps and idiosyncratic rhythms, labor was overlaid with the homogenous beats of the metronome, forcing factory workers into lockstep with the steady ticking of the clock. Thompson notes that “by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings…new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed” (90). Because of this new rigor applied to uniformity of process, the stream of objects produced were evacuated of an individual character. How do we position Blake’s process within this temporal grid? Against Makdisi’s author metaphor and Ure’s formalist analysis, we might interpret the craft of relief etching as a form of production in the Romantic tradition, a poetry of poiesis, if you will — in which spontaneous construction, imperfect form, and primitivism were key features. These “innumerable short pauses” produced by Blake’s task oriented labor, his disruptions in “speed, intensity, rhythm, flow” were not superfluities that had to be excised in the next cycle of reproduction, but were enmeshed in the object’s unique texture, the features which denoted each work’s identity. The Book of Urizen was produced by this irregular method, and post-printing interventions further radicalized the poem’s extreme inter-textual irregularity between its eight extant copies. The final section will position The Book of Urizen as a Blakean copy, a destabilized reproduction that invites new conceptions of time and space. 36 Repeating Yourself Blake’s Poetics of Poiesis II The Book of Urizen’s Radical Physics “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly.” “Absolute space, of its own nature without reference to anything external, always remains homogenous and immovable.” Sir Isaac Newton, A Principia “The lesson of special relativity is, therefore, that there is not time, but times, that these have different rhythms, and that the successive order of events is always an order of succession relative to a given referential.” Pedro M. S. Alves, “Objective Time and the Experience of Time” “Art is a road which leads towards regions which are not governed by time and space.” Marcel Duchamp “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell This final section is an examination of the status of The Book of Urizen’s identity, a project which is hard to formally conceptualize for the simple reason that there is no prototypical3 The Book of Urizen. Of the eight extant copies — each printed from the same set of relief-etched plates between 1794 and 1818 — none share the same plate order; the ten full-page pictorial plates never appear in the same order, or even all together [Appendix, Figure 1]. Copy A and B, both printed in 1794, are the only to contain all 28 plates, while the remaining six contain between 24 to 27 plates. Essick’s scholarship provides a sense of the overwhelming plate differences: Copies D and F have the same number of plates, but both lack plates 4 and 16, the latter a full-page design the absence of which does not affect the narrative sequence. Copy C also lacks plate 16, contains a second impression of plate 2, and is without two text plates, 7 and 8. Both copies B and C contain plates printed in two colors of ink, suggesting that they are composites of two press runs. The inclusion of plates 8 and 10 in 3 I am using a dictionary definition of “prototype”: the standard model, a first, typical or preliminary model of something, especially a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied. all but copy C adds a further anomaly, for the text on both these plates begins a chapter headed "IV." Copy E lacks plate 4, three full-page designs, and the final plate, the absence of which might be explained by some accident, or action taken by a binder, that altered the original composition of the volume. The last copy (G) is unique in having 27 plates, with only plate 4 absent. (“Variation” 230) Therefore, to encounter a specific The Book of Urizen is only to glimpse “a performance among several available possibilities” (97). Mitchell’s use of “among” is key: The Book of Urizen asserts no hierarchy of prototype to copy, or even of proper copy to defective copy. Each copy circulates among the others and none can assume authority over the others. Without a governing prototype4, the eight variants of The Book of Urizen will not cohere into a stable text. They run headlong against the Platonic maxim ingrained in our cultural heritage that “we customarily hypothesize a single form in connection with each of the many things to which we apply the same name.” This Platonic hierarchy that places Eternal Form above the increasingly diluted forms of representation (i.e. art is a bastardized third-order representation) is the same hierarchy that indentures lowly reproductions to modeling themselves after their industrial prototypes. Like Plato’s hierarchy of representations, the process of industrial reproduction has a subtractive effect on the quality of the copy, in which, as Babbage writes, “the successive copies become gradually deteriorated” (399). The Book of Urizen rejects this hierarchy by dispersing a striking originality into each of its copies, without at the same time effacing all of their commonalities. The poem, considered as a loose compendium of its eight variant units, demands a new status of 4 I am using it in the first OED definition: “A first, typical or preliminary model of something, especially a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied” 38 Repeating Yourself copy, a Blakean copy, one that is both of sui generis and a species form. Each copy is a part of a species that draws from the same genetic material of the 28 plates, but each copy is also sui generis in that its unique configurations of the 28 plates render its identity unique. Or, to try on yet another discourse, this copy could be understood as Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum: “it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality…it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself...leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models...”(2). It is this lack of room for a hard-and-fast, fixed narrative real that defines The Book of Urizen, a poem whose inter-textual discrepancies are its most crucial openings for interpretation and intervention. By considering these discrepancies, this final section will tease out the thematic implications that various changes have on the poetic narrative, before suggesting how this Blakean copy is irreconcilable with the Newtonian mechanics of fixed time and space, and then finally situating it within a modern conception of physics. A key lacuna to consider is the omission of Plate 4 from five copies (D, E, F, J, G), which has puzzled critics because it cannot be categorized as either error or a strategic choice. The plate features Urizen’s only monologue, which describes the formation of his Brass Books “from the depths of dark solitude,” thereby making Plate 4 an “essential, not peripheral” (Essick, “Variation” 231) segment of text. Essick convincingly argues that for Copy G, the omission was the result of a “simple error in alignment and Blake’s inability to correct it,” (234) suggesting the degree to which accident and chance played a role in Blake’s aesthetics. Helen B. Ellis, conversely, writes that omission of this plate deliberately upset the economy of character, effacing Urizen’s psychological motives and narrative role while strengthening Los’ presence in the poem (103). Either way, the omission creates aporias that would be hard for a cursory reader to resolve. Plate 3’s final phrase, the first line of Chapter II’s third stanza, “Shrill the trumpet: & myriads of Eternity” is followed by Plate 4’s intended continuation of the stanza in Copies A, B, and C [Appendix, Figure 2a]. But to omit Plate 4 requires that the lines be placed before the final two of of Chapter III’s second stanza, creating an eccentric numbering system with two third stanzas in a row, which Blake chose not to correct in Copy D, F, or J (though he did in G), as well as a clunky line structure [Appendix, Figure 2b]. Furthermore, while Essick argues that Copy G’s omission of Plate 4 was a mistake, in Copy A, the earliest copy, the last line of plate 3 and the first two of Plate 5 (in effect Figure 2b’s text) are lightly crossed out, indicating that from the beginning, Blake was at least considering how to efficiently omit Plate 4 without disrupting the narrative. It is therefore a curious coincidence that Blake’s misalignment of Plate 4 in Copy G and its subsequent omission are consistent with his earlier aesthetic impulse. It is this merging of randomness and precision, error and accuracy through which we can read The Book of Urizen. Moving from the assumption that Plate 4’s omission implies an action somewhere between a partaking of both the intentional and circumstantial, it is important to consider the effect it produces. Most strikingly, Plate 4’s omission obscures the reader’s dialectical vantage points of Urizen: the hyper-articulate character who masters the four elements and searches for a “solid without fluctuation” in Plate 4, but also the “unorganiz’d” Urizen whom the Eternals call “a clod of clay” and who is “rifted with direful changes” in Plates 6 and 7. Removing Urizen’s despotic monologue (which introduces the Brass Books and their “secrets of wisdom”) makes the Eternals’ immediate severance from him 40 Repeating Yourself a preemptive rather than retributive move. In the copies lacking Plate 4, it is only the muted utterance of “Urizen, so nam’d / That solitary one in Immensity” (3: 42-43) which triggers the sublime “sundr’ing, dark’ning, thund’ring!” of the Eternals’ cleavage from Urizen, rather than Plate 4’s equally magnificent “Words articulate, bursting in thunders / That roll’d on tops of his mountains” (4:4-5). In short, the omission of Plate 4 warps the balance of action between Urizen and Eternals, disrupting their reactive symmetry. This symmetry constructed by Plate 4 effectively aligns Urizen’s cataclysmic words with the Eternals’ apocalyptic fissure, thereby granting words the agency of consequential action. Without Plate 4, however, the poem, “self balanc’d stretch’d o’er the void,” loses its equilibrium; its textual parts dislocate from each other, further fracturing the poem’s logical continuity. To understand why a poem would dare disturb its narrative equilibrium, one must command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law” (4:38-40). Ault suggests that these Brass Books resemble the philosophy of Newton who “was arguing for a single unified proto-philosophy and religion” (277). Like Newton’s A Principia, Urizen’s intellectual project is to transcribe “a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation” (4:10-11) — in short, to find a universal, stabilizing theory of knowledge. Yet the accompanying images of the Brass Books subvert this project. After all, in each copy of Plate 5, which depicts the open leaves of the Brass Books, a different chaotic morass of knowledge is pictured: serpentine hieroglyphs (G), proto-Abstract Expressionism (A), pointillist blobs of pigment which have not yet coalesced into shapes (D), and layers of the above, as if exposing the sedimentary stratification that knowledge is built atop (B) — all of which are aesthetically contradictory to Blake’s clearly-delineated illustration style.5 Masked by a deceptive unity, Urizen’s theory of knowledge is in fact a murky and chaotic system that scribbles over, trespasses, conceals and distorts. But insofar as the Brass Books are the epistemological linchpin of Urizen’s universe, their omission has implications for the physics of that universe. A theory of knowledge that imposes “One Law” upon all universal forces is the Urizenic equivalent of the Newtonian theory of absolute space and time — both systems providing an inflexible frame of reference that affixes events to objective and stable coordinates. While Urizen’s law situates events in absolute moral dimensions, and Newton’s within physical and temporal dimensions, they both maintain a type of knowledge that is reducible to a single truth. Though Newton’s absolute time and space are imperceptible to the flawed human eye, Urizen’s universe of knowledge is practiced in the industrially reproduced book. Every copy’s narrative traverses an identical temporal and spatial structure; perspective is confined to a single vantage point that emerges from its Urizenic author, and as such, meaning is stabilized under “One Law.” The stable book, reproduced ad infinitum, engineers a Newtonian mechanics at the level of narrative, by nature of its own formal fixity. By erasing the Urizenic law that dictates this (namely Plate 4 and its Brass Books) each individual copy of The Book of Urizen is able to present the narrative at a temporal pace and spatial placement unique to itself. The most striking example of this is in Copy E (which sold in 1999 to an anonymous buyer for over $2.5 million). In it, the Preludium Blake wrote in his 1809 exhibition catalogue: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling.” 5 42 Repeating Yourself is anomalously placed between the fourth and sixth pages — the only variant to alter the Preludium’s placement from the second page immediately following the title plate. After all, the Preludium is unilaterally a beginning. The plate features a floating horizontal female figure in flowing garb with her arm outstretched to a small child, interspaced between the title, “Preludium to The Book of Urizen.” The text underneath is an invocation to the Eternals by the poet-narrator, reading: “Preludium to The Book of Urizen: Of the primeval Priests absum’d power, When Eternals spurn’d back his religion: And gave him a place in the North Obscure shadowy void solitary, Eternals I hear your call gladly Dictate swift winged words & fear not To unfold your dark visions of torment.” (2:5-7) In Copy E, Blake lifts this opening plate and places it after Plates 5 and 9. Plate 5 pictures Urizen grasping his vast Brass Books [Appendix, Figure 3], with text below that describes how the Eternals “rent [themselves] away with a terrible crash,” (5:4) and enclosed Urizen in a “roof vast petrific around, / on all sides” (5:28-29). Plate 5 is succeeded by the full pictorial Plate 9 [Appendix, Figure 4], which depicts a solitary Urizen against a background of black-and-white rectangular shapes. Because of this placement, the Preludium — which introduces the narrative framing of “The Book of Urizen” — suggests that the text that follows are the contents of Urizen’s book pictured in Plate 5. By introducing this mise en abyme amid an unbroken narrative, Copy E falls into a recursive self-reflexivity. For just as the poem records the enclosure of Urizen within the bounded form of a body, the text simultaneously divides itself into a text within a text. From here, Plate 5’s image of Urizen perched at the precipice of his book transforms from an image of Newtonian authority who has ordered/authored the universe into the image of an “eternal mind, bounded” within the leaves of a book. In the full plate design that follows, Plate 9, the blocky shapes that surround and confine a forlorn Urizen can be viewed as the telescoped black-and-white type of a “sentence” — a word that in the context of Urizen’s involuntary enclosure absorbs its secondary legal definition. By exposing the poem’s margins and showing the narrative of Urizen’s embodiment to be transcribed, written “dark visions of torment,” rather than unmediated reality, the text denatures its immediate potency, forcing the reader to consider the architecture of language and form that determines any given narrative. The “swift winged words” unloaded upon the narrator are indeed winged — able to fling themselves into radical new contortions and alignments — though they will often masquerade as the inflexible font of Urizen’s “Iron Laws.” In short, Copy E engineers a narrative fault line within itself in such a way as to suggest that there may be other fault lines in other seemingly iron-clad texts. Linguistic sentences have not the iron-clad fixity of legal sentences. Taken as a whole, the variation among the copies of The Book of Urizen advances a profoundly different model of reproduction from that of the stable factory copy. When the poem’s symbolic centerpiece (the epistemologically air-tight Brass Books) vanishes in five of the copies, because of actions somewhere between predetermined and random, we experience its omission as a ghostly void in the other three. And beyond this, in various iterations of the poem, beginnings may be transformed into middles (and vice versa), destabilizing linear temporal priority; chapters occur twice, degrading objective authority; and full text plates appear and disappear, effacing structural logic — thereby remodeling a book with contained, orderly meaning into an experiment with what we 44 Repeating Yourself now call chaos theory. Specifically, this references the first essential feature of chaotic systems, identified by Robert L. Devaney, which suggests chaotic systems are exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions, in that slight variations have profound reverberations in the system’s development. Reading the eight variant plate orders as the initial conditions for eight different systems, we can theorize that eight different textual identities arise from their respective environments. It is this simultaneous absence-presence of infinite aesthetic possibilities that defines The Book of Urizen, which taken as a compendium of eight textual identities, stitches together variant perspectives, not in order to reconcile them, but to present a different model of space-time in which multiple apprehensions of reality — that refract, contradict, and supplement each other — are equally valid. What this suggests is a revision of Newtonian mechanics that Blake himself would have endorsed, with Ault explaining that “Blake saw that this doctrine of the ‘one true system’ required, at the level of explanation, the rejection, suppression, and ruling out of massive aspects of human experience” (277). To summarize: Newton’s theory of absolute space and time, which posits space and time as two invariant and separate dimensions, was replaced in 1905 after Einstein reworked the Lorentz transformations, from which he developed his theory of special relativity. The theory of special relativity considers the speed of light to be fixed, meaning time and space must be able to change relative to the speed of their reference frame6 in order to keep the speed of light constant. The implications read like riddles: moving clocks slow down; moving rulers shrink; moving objects gain mass. And in an 1908 lecture, Einstein’s student Hermann Minowski 6 These phenomena are called time dilation and Lorentz contractions, respectively. delivered the most phenomenologically important implication, “From now on, the concepts of space per se and time per se should completely plunge into shadow, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve autonomy.” Space and time per se, vestiges of “commonsense Newtonianism,” as Pedro M. S. Alves writes, were to be united in Minowski’s four-dimensional conception of space-time. Alves describes the relativity of simultaneity: The lesson of special relativity is, therefore, that there is not time, but times, that these have different rhythms, and that the successive order of events is always an order of succession relative to a given referential. Thus, from no point of view is it possible to speak about a unified and single time of the world as a universal reference frame for all events, i.e., about an absolute time in the three senses mentioned above (215). While my argument does not to attempt to read The Book of Urizen through special relativity, it suggests how a 20th-century model of time and space, which revises Newtonian mechanics, can be seen as an extension of the same type of thinking Blake was engaging in with The Book of Urizen. Jason Snart writes that “Newtonianism became the set of keys — even the key — that would reveal the logic of action at a distance, light, alchemy, and the Bible” (45). We can position The Book of Urizen’s strategy against this absolutist Newtonianism — viewing its eight variant copies together as a survey of the various rhythms and configurations that an event may take on, in effect, becoming an art-object impossible to reconcile with the Newtonian rigidity of absolute time and space, a Blakean copy. If The Book of Urizen destabilizes every claim it makes as soon as it stakes it, undermines its own authority, and sabotages its uniform circulation by remodeling every copy into a unique artifact, how can one read it? What I have attempted to do in this last 46 Repeating Yourself chapter is suggest how the variants of The Book of Urizen are experimental reproductions, objects incommensurable with each other. If factory labor is always oriented towards producing a single form, ad infinitum, Blake’s labor aims to produce a vast swath of experiential forms. The Blakean copy instinctively knows that as soon as it has crossed the lip of any lived experience it must implode itself and begin its production anew. If in the early Industrial Revolution, all surplus time had to be contracted to productive production, Blake’s poiesis shakes loose these rigid demarcations so that time and space are free to repeat and repeat and repeat outside of the logic of economic progression. To read and re-read The Book of Urizen is to suspend a notion of temporal and spatial linearity, and to submerge oneself in the excessive ebb and flow of regenerative recursion. Excessiveness is the lynchpin of this artistic practice. In the penultimate chapter of the The Book of Urizen, Urizen casts a binding net over the psyches of his generations, a web that compresses the human brain into a coiled knot that cannot budge from a fixed ontology. But the radical excessiveness of Blake’s aesthetic is the counterpoint to this. If the Urizenic web keeps the brain in rigid lockstep, The Book of Urizen orchestrates its exit from such conditions by reimagining and refiguring its narrative identity with such freewheeling and spontaneous energy that it combusts any containment. Repetition is unburdened from its mechanical pacing and transformed into an exuberant practice of recombination and reorientation. To repeat, as the Blakean copy does, is to not re-find the same lessons or refine the old wisdom, but to construct manifold possibilities from a fixed set. It is to open up past experiences to new passages of discovery. With this model of apprehension, we might view the world as Blake does in the opening lines of Auguries of Innocence, which is: “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.” (Auguries of Innocence, 1-4) processes. Yet, this process might also work in the other direction, with cognition implanting itself into its environment through language, thereby transforming external spaces into physical extensions of a brain’s structure. For example, one could argue that the Brass Books were linguistic agents that expanded Urizen’s internal ontology to include the psyches of his inhabitants. In the poem, words build worlds. William Blake wrote that “Where man is not, nature is barren,” indicating that his artistic economy presupposed that imagination, a cognitive process, had a physical impact on the environment. If that is the case, The Book of Urizen contains germane ground for teasing out the line between identity and environment. Not only does its narrative provide eight different “cases” of cognitive extension into the physical world, it also offers, on a textual level, the creation of eight textual identities, which generate eight various ontologies. Because each ontology progresses from the other, I could trace the genealogy of such thought and tease out a linear narrative of Blake’s aesthetic development. But knowing the extent of Blake’s creativity, it would be more fruitful to read the eight copies as clustered environments that produce active and continuous engagements with the cognition of each others. Examining the texts in conversation with each other, I might be able to find thematic sites of cognitive activity, such as Plate 4, that expose systematic fault lines and opportunities for rapid-growth. Instead of treating the poem as a homogeneous unit, I might consider The Book of Urizen as a multicellular organism, teeming with autonomous parts which move with a ‘mind’ of their own, yet still maintain a connection to a larger structure. By exploring the entanglements and relationships of the eight variations, we might stretch further the definition of a “reproduction” until it finally snaps.