Paradise Lost

Harold Bloom is onto something when he describes how Paradise Lost reads today like science fiction. A lot of that is down to Milton's distinctively monist cosmology. For him, Heaven and Hell are not in separate parallel dimensions. He believed that if you get in a rocket and went past the solar system you will eventually hit the pearly gates. Angels are physical space-faring beings that eat food and excrete through their pores. God is an awesomely powerful alien. Imagine a benevolent Galactus sitting at the top of a giant mountain.

And what's interesting for the purposes of the poem (which the beginning makes clear is to explain the ways of God to men) is that our universe was not created ex nihilo. Rather, God fashions it using pre-existing materials. Philip Pullman may have fixated on these world-building elements because they indicate some limit on God's jurisdiction. The poem personifies Chaos as a grumpy grandpa enduring chunks of his realm being annexed by his more powerful neighbour, who builds Hell and then our world during the course of the narrative (and presumably Heaven as well before the action starts). So what if these materials exist independently of God? What if other awesomely powerful space aliens have built their own worlds?

Since Blake and the Romantics, it has been all too easy to get carried away with Satan and presume some subconscious subversion on Milton's part. On this re-read I did my best to stick to my university training and take Milton at his word, without being seduced by Straussian attempts to read between the lines. Fact is Milton was a deeply pious man trying to explain the problem of evil – an insoluble theological puzzle if ever there was one. What was important for Milton was that God freely chose to create – to share the universe with others. Likewise he left his creation enough freedom to dissent from his overwhelmingly obvious and necessary lordship. Although foreseeing the Fall, he allows it without interfering, preferring devotion that is freely chosen rather than mandated. The link with Milton's political liberalism comes through at the end, where he condemns religious persecution and a politicisation of religion that leads to citizens performing empty rites that do not express their internal convictions. The only royalty Milton submits to is God – kings are but men, and removable if necessary.

All that said, for me there remains an impression of God as a limited figure. He creates angels and then realises he needs the Son as a bridging device that will allow them to more closely identify with him (the Son will later fulfil a similar purpose for humanity). Needless to say, the plan backfires spectacularly. Adam and Eve are created in God's image, but they (like the rebel angels) are in some respects pre-fallen. Eve's pride leaves her open to temptation, like Satan. Milton is at pains to point out that Adam has all the knowledge he could possibly ask for and yet he still eats the forbidden fruit. God does not seem to have a grip on his creation – it spins away from him. His dark materials are wayward elements. There is still a little bit of Chaos in them. We're not too far away here from the atomistic 'mechanical' view of the universe that will become ever more prevalent during the Enlightenment.

All-Star Superman

Realised I haven't written anything on the blog in a while. I have been participating in a few London Graphic Novel Network discussions, which have been a lot of fun. The convo on All-Star Superman was particularly interesting. My contribution is below – mainly fleshing out the stuff I wrote back in 2011, but interesting for spurring this take from David Allison over at the Mindless Ones...

Not sure if Morrison uses the analogy himself, but superheroes have been described as modern myths. Just realised while writing this that the Roger Lancelyn Green retellings of Robin Hood, King Arthur etc I read as a child rather nicely highlight the proto-superheroic nature of the source material – the same cast of characters in the same setting going off to have adventures and coming together in world-historical crossovers. My sense is that Morrison is in that myths and legends headspace. For example the second issue feels to me like a retelling of the Bluebeard fairy-tale (albeit with a benevolent twist). Likewise issue 5 seems to have a Dante's Inferno flex – Kent being shown around hell by a demented Virgil before being carted off by an scary S&M Beatrice (or maybe that's just me seeing things that aren't there).

The point of that simulation in issue 10 was to show that if Superman didn't exist we would have to invent him, and in fact have been inventing different versions of him (e.g. that panel of Nietzsche's Superman) throughout history. The premise being that people create their gods as symbols of what they themselves aspire to be (some more German philosophy about that here). My sense is that there's a religion to science move in the final issue – Lois believes that one day Superman will return, while Leo Quintum goes off to try and solve the problems of the universe on his own. Maybe Quintum isn't just Luthor (first time I've seen that theory and like it a lot!), but the Superman of the future. That is to say: the representation of our collective 21st century aspirations.

I disobeyed because the law was not
The law of Zeus nor the law ordained
By Justice, Justice dwelling deep
Among the gods of the dead. What they decree
Is immemorial and binding for us all.
The proclamation had your force behind it
But it was mortal force, and I, also a mortal,
I chose to disregard it. I abide
By statutes utter and immutable –
Unwritten, original, god-given laws.

Sophocles (trans. Seamus Heaney), Antigone

2001: A Space Odyssey

At the BFI screening I went to, we were provided with the interpretation of a New Jersey teenager called Margaret Stackhouse, written shortly after the film was first released (and available online here). Stanley Kubrick fully endorsed her reading, so it's likely the best place to look if one is searching for a guide to the film's ambiguities. Although Stackhouse builds alternative explanations into her analysis, the transcendent nature of the monolith (the mysterious object driving the plot of the film) is inescapable. Like the god Prometheus, it is there at the "Dawn of Mankind" to give us the tools to improve and murder each other: the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. And at the end, a rapture. Stackhouse allows for either a capricious or a life-sustaining God, but it's some sort of interventionist God alright. In this regard it is worth comparing 2001 to last year's Gravity, in many ways just as visually impressive and innovative (and far more propulsive in a narrative sense) but also fundamentally concerned with the incredible unlikelihood that we have managed to get even this far. Gravity's commitment to our loneliness in the universe makes it the more coherent and admirable film.

It's telling that Kubrick's preferred analysis comes from a 15-year-old. No slight on Stackhouse intended, but there is something adolescent about 2001 in its complete devotion to cosmic musings at the expense of character. In fact, the only moment of human connection comes at the beginning, where space scientist Floyd has a skype conversation with his daughter, whose birthday he will miss. Interestingly, Kubrick used his own daughter Vivian for the scene, and that one slice of (autobiographical?) family life outshines an awful lot of the ponderous mechanics and dizzying lightshows that follow.

The Virgin Spring

The film begins with a prayer to Odin and ends with a prayer to God. Both are answered in their own ambiguous way. This being Bergman, the wronged father begins by procaming how he cannot understand a Creator that allows such evil to befall a good man. But rather than let that condemnation ring out into silence, he leans once again on the Christian imperatives of sin and redemption. And God listens: a stream appears from out of nowhere to baptise the father anew and wash away the step-sister's guilt. It's a more optimistic ending than Bergman will allow himself down the line.

And what of Odin in the beginning: the lusty, dangerous old man in the forest? He also answers prayers, or fulfills curses at least. The potency of the old gods may suggest that religions come and go, but evil and our attempts to deal with it are perennial concerns, both in the 13th century and in 1960. Then there is the title: the journey from innoccence to experience (sexual and moral) superimposed onto the changing of the seasons. The spring is that liminal time between bountiful summer and cruel winter, and the film's setting seems to move between all three. Evil, like weather, is both immutable and unpredictable.

Thankfully, Bergman's existentialist obsessions do not overshadow his real talent for intimate family drama, particularly in portraying the relationship between the sisters. Karin is already sliding towards corruption (dresses, dances and boys), yet her angelic countenance make her the favourite of the family. They also make her dark-haired (and pregnant) step-sister jealous. No sign of an expectant father appears. Did her lover abandon her, or maybe she was raped as well? We don't know, because any anger she may feel is not directed at the true source of her predicament, but serves as fuel for a murderous resentment against the perfect woman she can no longer be. Her confession before her father is the film's most powerful moment – far more so than the miracle with which it ends.

Ghost in the Shell

The anime, which I've loved for a long time, is taut but very dense, and it's difficult to appreciate all its details just in one sitting. That said, its basic theme is easy enough to glean from the title, a riff on the idea of the ghost in the machine, the inner enlivening spirit which separates man from the rest of the mechanical universe. When our cyborg hero, Major Kusanagi, is confronted by an A.I. (the "Puppet Master") who declares itself to be a sentient, rights-bearing life-form, she starts to wonder whether she is any different for having a few brain cells remaining in her cortex. She asks Batou whether she is human simply because of the way she is treated: a social convention that the Puppet Master will undermine.

The manga, which I've read only recently, includes a notes section at the back where the author not only gives background, but explains the ground, since the plotting is even more tangled and inscrutable than in the film. Masamune Shirow is a very frustrating guide to his own creation, coming across as an excitable autodidact who mashes and remixes a heap of memes, but who's ability to synthesise and explain his arguments has gone AWOL. Part of the problem may be that he lives in his world so deeply that he assumes the reader already understands most of it. The notes are fascinating nonetheless, particularly when they leave behind all the talk of "ordinance and equipment" and start to cover the concept of ghosts and the influence of religion on his work:

"I think all things in nature have "ghosts". This is a form of pantheism, and similar to ideas found in Shinto or among believers in the Manitou. Because of the complexity and function, and the physical constraints they have when they appear as a physical phenomenon, it may be impossible to scientifically prove this. There are, after all, humans who act more like robots than robots, and no one can say for certain that they have no ghosts just because they don't act like it. In ancient times, neither air nor the universe were believed to exist."

I've included wikipedia links in the above, and only a brief scan will confirm that these are vastly different traditions Shirow is referencing here. What's clear is that he believes in a kind of cosmic ordering in which spirits can influence our lives. This carries over into the anime: the Major sometimes hears "whispers" in her ghost, a preternatural intuition that tells her which car to tail, for example. All humans have a "ghost line", a baseline piece of information or energy you can "dive" into (read) or hack (write), which separates them from other pieces of software.

The thing about pantheism is that when you push it out enough it starts to look like atheism. Shirow's manga is suffused with his idiosyncratic musings on the way technology and the world of the spirit intermingle, but his inclusion of the idea of a machine that can generate its own ghost introduces a destabalising element to the cosmic order: where do you find Cartesian dualism if everything has its very own ghost, including our computers? Do we not then jettison the spirit world altogether for the sake of simplicity? Shirow is too wedded to his systems and phases to accept this, and he continues to believe in channelers and psychics. The anime, however, is more ambiguous, which is partly why it is one of the rare cases where an adaptation improves on the original.

The actual title of the manga translates as Mobile Armored Riot Police, and the philosophical stuff is definitely a side-order to the main course of running, jumping, shooting and intrigue. The anime chooses the subtitle of the manga as its title, and flips the focus onto the existential crisis of its hero. Its pacing is deliberately slow-fast: kinetic pieces of action are followed by languorous sequences where the Major dreams of her robotic rebirth and then relives that dream by floating on the ocean. The Puppet Master chooses her as his mate because they are alike. "He" is a program used for corporate espionage trying to escape his masters. She is an assassin who's body and soul is owned by the corporation that made it (one that dictates she has to be naked in order for her invisibility to function). In the middle of the film there is an at-first bewilderingly long set-piece where she wanders New Port City, soundtracked by a Japanese choir (borrowing the harrowing vocal tones of Bulgarian folk music). The metropolitan anomie is given a cybernetic gloss as the sequence ends on a shot of shop window mannequins. Kusanagi dreams of a new life beyond the borders of this one, just as the Puppet Master desires a life beyond the networks he traverses.

At the beginning of the film, Kusanagi explains the dangers of specialisation to a new recruit, saying that unpredictability and adaptation are necessary to make the unit stronger. The Puppet Master uses the same arguments at the end to convince Kusanagi into a sexual (in the biological sense) union. Rather than living forever and reproducing endless copies of himself, he desires a dynamic system where death and difference is the norm. The film overlays this fusion with sexual, violent and religious imagery. Sex inevitably entails death, as it is the activity that allows for our replacement. Just before the union is complete, Kusanagi witnesses an angel descending over her, blessing the new bond. The sense is that they have both transitioned into a higher order system, that much closer to the gods. But it is just as easy to read this as the machine not only generating its own ghost, but a sense of the numinous humans have evolved with.

That final showdown between the Major and the tank is not set to a thumping techno soundtrack. Instead, it speeds up the juxtaposition of kinetic and meditative scenes running through the film, and overlays it with mellow flute washes evoking the immemorial past. It is a samurai duel in the 21st century, set against the backdrop of a phylogenetic tree of life, shot to pieces by modern machinery. The symbolic richness on display is characteristic of the film, in which every element – the voice in the lake, the three different cases (which are three different chapters in the manga) – is weaved together in ways only multiple viewings can unravel. That mixture of depth and directness is what makes it a great film.

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Elevation without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure." - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The Seventh Seal

Bergman says the knight and squire in the film manifest two attitudes to faith that wrestled within him at the time of making – a remnant of naïve piety and his adult cold rationality. He allows these two to lay out their stalls without conflict, they mostly stay out of each others way. The squire's (very Shakespearian) skepticism is immediate and winning, although the horrors of the medieval world make Gunnar Björnstrand rather bitter: he's more Jaques than Touchstone. Max Von Sydow gives a very intense performance, eyes always trying to pierce the inner significance of things. God's silence is not so much a source of desolation as of frustration. WHY doesn't he answer? And more importantly, if he doesn't exist WHY are we constantly plagued with the idea of his perfection? At the end, his squire says he could have offered his master medicine that would have quenched this thirst. We can live content without the dissatisfaction of forever being separated from the divine, although the knight does not have the opportunity to learn how to do this. Death (or the plague) claims them all.

Well, almost all. The existential musings of the knight and squire is contrasted with what Bergman describes as the holy within humanity, portrayed by a "holy family" of itinerant actors. The father even expresses the hope of his young son being able to work miracles, although only for entertainment purposes. Their act aims to distract and amuse an audience in a village, but their efforts are quashed when a procession of self-flagellating divines interrupt proceedings and whip up the crowd with visions of impending apocalypse. Bergman says the mural-painter in the church is a stand-in for his own attitude to art, in that you make what you are paid for. But the character also talks about how the image of death is far more potent and captivating that that of a bawd. In the middle of the film, the "holy family"supply an alternative sacrament to the company – wild strawberries and milk – much sweeter than the Christian fare. It offers a moment of peace for the knight, but he is drawn back to his game with Death. Distraction for him is momentary, the struggle for answers continues unabated.

Through A Glass Darkly

The DVD includes a little excerpt from Bergman's autobiography where he writes about this film. It's a difficult account to get your head around, perhaps because it's a translation, perhaps because Bergman thinks REALLY deeply and seriously about his work (far more than I have done, goes w/o saying). Leaving aside the rather dull debate about whether this constitutes the first part of a trilogy or not (haven't seen the other two, so what do I care?) What was interesting about Bergman's take is that he regretted including the father-son scene at the end. I find this odd because that coda does tie-up a thread left hanging from the conversation between the father and the husband half-way through the film, where the former says he'll reveal what that hope was that saved him from suicide. That scene was so dense I had to watch it twice, and from it the father does emerge as the most interesting character in the piece, much more than Harriet Andersson or Max von Sydow, who Bergman believes delivered the best performances (and sidebar, just how harsh was he about Lars Passgård!)

Gunnar Björnstrand (the father) had recently converted to Catholicism, and Bergman suggests that this made him deliver his lines in bad faith, as if he wasn't truly invested. Which sounds really strange to me because that's (quite explicity!) what the character is all about! The father's bestselling novels flirt with faith and doubt, but the 'truth' is that these themes are tricks and evasions disguising the 'void' of detached unfeeling that is the core of his being. For the purposes of the film's narrative, this manifests as the temptation to mine his daughter's real-life breakdown for themes to supercharge his fiction and achieve that poetic immortality that has so far eluded him. But in that suicide attempt, something did emerge from the void. A love for his son and daughter, of the kind the husband has. The husband cannot imagine leaving his ill wife, his love traps him, he has no freedom. During the trip to Switzerland, similar feelings have been activated for the father as well.

In that final scene, the father rather soppily puts forward the idea that God cannot be found anywhere but in the human capacity to love. Love, hope and God are bound up together. The hope being that the daughter can recover. The method, love. The malady, the lack of love. The side-effect, the God delusion. What is suggested here is that Karin's schizophrenia is caused by her need for an father-figure. Her real father is unreachable, so she imagines another one. In the climactic scene in the attic, she is waiting for God to step into the room. Her father is framed by the doorway, but paralised with shock and unable to come in.

Bergman's notes on Karin's illness are scattershot, suggesting to me that he developed her character very organically, so I'm not sure how much there is to read into the voices she hears or her seduction of her brother. The siblings both demonstrate greater powers of imagination than their father. The husband is perhaps the least spiritually sensitive of the lot, describing himself as a simple man able to face up to life and the real world. He is a doctor and a scientist, and finds it impossible to pray with his wife in her madness. Karin is frigid with him, but flirtatious with her talanted brother, and her yearning for God (the father) is partly sexual. Her husband is a good soul, but he's also patronising (all those diminuitive pet names, my "little child"), and I want to read her illness as a result of her being trapped, creatively and sexually, in an unfulfilling marriage (just as the husband feels trapped, in fact). This territory is definitely covered in Persona, but I'm not sure if it's anything more than background here.

Bergman dedicated this film to his wife (at the time). He describes the way they fell in love through writing letters to each other, opening each other up that way, and then slowly drifting apart as they lost a common language to communicate in. The only way this feeling makes it into the film is the father's desperate attempt to cover up his detachment from his family. And the film, unlike the marriage, ends on a hopeful note, with a relationship being established between the father and son. It IS a soppy ending, it DOES disperse some of the tension of the previous scenes, but its content is crucial to making sense of what came before. Dramatic heft is sacrificed for thematic clarity, and it's clear (from Persona) that Bergman increasingly preferred not to make that trade-off.

La Dolce Vita

This film defined a certain era of cool even though its overt purpose is to undermine it. Not a surprise, since Fellini, like Marcello, hovers on the edge between gorging himself on the decadence around him and remaining true to a purer conception of the sweet life. It's an ironic title: the free-wheeling hedonism on display is overlaid with Catholic symbols: the moral certainty of a previous age gone haywire. The film opens with a statue of Jesus being flown to the Vatican, with Marcello and his film crew trailing behind distracted by sunbathing women. The flirting is disrupted by distance, noise and the work at hand. At the end of the film, Marcello is on a beach surrounded by revellers marvelling at a grotesue sea-creature. He has joined the orgy, it's a holiday all the time now. From across the estury, the "angelic" waitress calls to him, but he cannot hear her over the sound of the waves. He succumbs completely to the spiral that (as a fellow lost soul predicts) will result in complete depravity in a few years time. The inner voice of conscience, the divine spark, is drowned out by the chaos of the modern world.

Sylvia is a different kind of divinity - inhumanly tireless, infectiously sensual: a sprite escaped from the lands of Fairie (or is it America?). She's a sort of preternaturally glowing elemental being, a nymph from an earlier pagan culture and mythology. And in that role she annoints Marcello in the Fontana di Trevi. But then the night ends, she is slapped around by her husband, and goes into another day answering inane questions from insect-like reporters, trying to hold the act together. There is a kind of magic that is being fed to the celebrity press machine, but it turns out to be a fabrication, one that ensnares and cages the fabricators.

Religion is hardly put forward as the solution to the corruption of the 1950s. The orgy in the castle ends with morning mass, the sins of the night before washed away. Then there is the miracle of the Madonna sighting gathering huge crowds and television cameras, whipping up the kind of religious hysteria that leads to death. The church, as part of the establishment, is just as implicated in the sensationalisation and meaninglessness of modern life. There is no sweetness to be found here.

Marcello's turbulent (due to his constant philandering) relationship with his partner is contrasted with the serenity of Steiner's family life. It comes as a shock when it is revealed that Steiner kills his two children and himself because there isn't enough love in the universe. Fellini undercuts any notion of the nobility of the act by focusing on the wife, who apparently isn't worth saving from the world's evils. She learns about the destruction of her family surrounded by a pack of reporters crawling around her. Steiner's decision doesn't make any kind of sense, but by this point we are like Marcello: numb to all events around us.

A bit like Persona, can't escape the suspicion that the film is acclaimed partly because it evades a too precise thematic through-line, so you can read what you like into the succession of stories presented to you. The episodes in La Dolce Vita are not united by a singular narrative, neither do they contain within them concrete explanations for the decisions the characters make, or the world in which they live in. We are spectators partly enjoying and partly disapproving of the show, without really understanding what we are seeing. Perhaps that is the point. After all, the film is wrapped up in the concept of not hearing each other, not making that genuine connection to our real selves, that pure inner spirit.

In that light, the film could be compared to the kind of existential listlessness all those French authors fell into when they were confronted with the lack of divine purpose in the world. The religious structure to the universe taken away, what's to stop us from falling into the mire of mindless sensation? The mature response isn't suicide (Steiner) or nihilism (Marcello), but the acceptance of firmer explanations for the structure of our reality, relationships and society.

Cages

Nuff respect Islington Comics Forum for handing me a copy of Dave McKean's giant graphic novel Cages. The convener Joel read it all in one long evening, which I find pretty extraordinary since I've been reading it (and re-reading it) over something like three months. The book has 10 chapters which are quite self contained (I imagine each one took a long time to complete), and it's impressive how many patterns and repetitions stretch out over the whole book – little motifs and characters being set up, abandoned and only picked up much later. It strikes me that this kind of project would have required, if not a great deal of planning, then at least a great deal of focus.

The book rewards a close look into the workings of the comics page rather than character or theme, which if taken on their own are a bit underwhelming (and not especially enlightening). Once the mystery of Jonathan Rush unravels, what you get is an on-the-nose retelling of the trials of Salman Rushdie (clue's in the name, even!) And because McKean's prose talents ain't all that, the short excerpt we get of the persecuted author's book fails to convince as the cause of so much ire and protest.

But the tone saves it. While more outwardly 'realistic' than the superhero comics McKean wanted to escape from, there is always a degree of witching hour midnight magic to the world of Cages. Rush's torturers are outrageous villains, figments of imagination all the characters buy into. We also get resurrected cats, future-revealing clouded windows and talking birds – the kind of whimsical touch of the fantastic McKean's frequent partner Neil Gaiman built a writing career on. McKean unfortunately shares Gaiman's annoying sense of humour (a kind of childish silliness which I find a bit cloying, I'm more of a grim bastard Ellis/Ennis fan). But the craft saves it. McKean's constructions are more sophisticated than Gaiman's. The way he designs his pages is more detailed. In fact, his focus also makes the ideas of the book more pointed. I find Gaiman scattershot and vague in comparison. While both are exploring themes of faith, creativity and death, I think McKean's achievements here surpass those of his friend and collaborator.

In the spirit of the Habibi post, I'm going to note down a couple of things I spotted so they don't disappear in the fogs of my memory:

The building in which Cages is set serves as a metaphor for a cage, or more a kind of menagerie of cages – the individual apartments as closed cells in which the inhabitants harbour their secrets. When we first meet Angel, a musician and prophet, he is out on the fire escape – at the edge of the world looking out into an abyss of sky. The Drawing A Blank chapter makes the significance of this explicit. Scaffolding monsters pull back the tarp to reveal the universe: suggesting a kind of terror at freedom and creation. A blank canvas presents the unknown firmament before the creation. The different Genesis stories at the beginning link in with the personal God we meet at the end – we all create our own narratives and myths.

McKean draws birds flying out into a white sky, a contrast with the psychopathic (and very foul-mouthed) parrot who is kept in a cage, but also a way to segue into Angel playing the black and white keys of the piano. The book spends a lot of time on the expressive and liberating power of music: in one chapter it warps the bodies of two characters falling in love to reveal the inner lives pulsing beneath their composed arranged surface.

The three Strata chapters all start with lines of stacked sheets of paper. Bits of time are compressed and stored in the paintings Leo produces (echoes of panels we've already seen), and the books Jonathan writes. Those lines reappear as rain, the final strata – the pictures and words in the comic becoming the constitutive elements (the pages) of the lives of the characters.

There is a nice panel in one of the Strata chapters where a finger touches a surface of water at the edge of the panel, a kind of reaching out past the confines of the borders of life and reality and into the imagination. The panels are themselves cages, and they are frequently broken when reality starts to get slippery.

There is also a nice movement in that chapter between a couple getting closer (tied to the completion of a painting one does of the other), and a couple drifting further apart. The latter are caught silhouetted in rain at the end, while Leo sits inside his flat looking out at the rain, shielded from it. The romp through the trees Leo and Karen take (the landscape becoming increasingly impressionistic as the latter's psychoanalysis proceeds) is also linked in with Ellen's memory of trees and how these pleasures have been taken away. The contrasts are subtle (by which I mean I missed a lot of them my first read through) but they are there. It's a superbly crafted issue.

Just as good is Schism. The page divided into two horizons of clouds in the sky and leaves in the gutter, which are flipped as the cat and the man separate. We get alternating panels or the two split points of view. The visions of heaven in this chapter are more revealing than the ending of the book. First we see Jesus crying about wanting his Daddy (boo Christianity!). Then we get an existence full of meaningless sensation without examination or interpretation. Then an existence with all the ambiguities stripped away. The cat refuses a heaven so damn certain of itself, and ends up in an art gallery instead – the best of both and all possible worlds.

Although the next couple of chapters suggest a counter-argument. The fable (told by Karen to Leo's daughter?) of a King building his own Tower of Babel, a work of art to please everyone, leads to disaster. In the end, real life and relationships are more important than work, even if that work is creative. And according to Karen at the end, a full life is one where the patterns and narratives become familiar – surprises become less common and death more acceptable. In the final page, once the cat is done exploring the art gallery it jumps into the frame of a painting and into nothingness.

Crossed

This isn't just a shock-fest. The horror of the crossed is acute, but they are seductive villains because they represent humanity at its most free. One wonders if this is what Nietzsche's reign of the noble would actually look like – a carnival of aesthetic perversity. The contagion isn't explained because it is metaphorical: the decaying flesh shaped into a cross should be an obvious enough symbol. I didn't like what I've read of Ennis's Preacher because its musings on religion didn't strike me as particularly coherent. Crossed achieves much more with less. The story of survivors clinging onto their humanity as they have to make morally impossible decisions is as old as any zombie movie, but Ennis has pushed that bleak survivalism to its absolute limit, as if to completely efface the notion of any kind of transcendent or eternal moral authority. If He exists, God must be a grade-A cocksucker for having created such a screwed-up world. The book ends with a secularised biblical image: a new Adam and Eve walking out of a blood-splattered Eden and ready to face the world with clear eyes, encapsulating the hard-headed journey from innocence to experience which is the book's central theme.

El Topo

Jodorowsky is full of bullshit, but that doesn't mean his work is worthless. I loved The Incal not because it made any kind of sense (because it totally doesn't). It's a journey over destination kinda deal. Seriously. That comic was inspired by the tarot, and it works as a tarot deck – a heap of symbolic images to which YOU supply the meaning. Similarly with this film – you don't watch it, it watches you. El Topo mashes together myth and pulp into these fantastical and allusive scenarios. And (very important, this) it's a compelling watch. Narrative drive is created not through a central mystery or problem, but by a long series of small set-ups and pay-offs confronted by the protagonist, one symbol, challenge or character replacing another.

The jumbled mess that spools out is gathered together at the beginning by the idea of 'The Mole' tunneling through the darkness and being blinded by the light: a version of Plato's allegory of the cave in which the form of the good remains inaccessible to humanity. The film is divided into two halves, like the Bible, and the first half is pretty Old Testament. The Mole and a naked boy (Abe and Isaac?) abandon childish things and walk into a violent world full of freaks and gangsters, where eyes are taken for eyes in silent inevitability. You can't rely on anyone in this state of nature, as the boy finds out. The Mole's superpowers keep his new girlfriend Mara alive, but she wants more – the best. The Mole cheats his way through the challenges and surpasses the master gunslingers, heart turning to metal in the process. Meanwhile, Mara's narcissism, rebuffed, turns into masochism, and The Mole is crucified and abandoned.

Like the New Testament, the second half of the film is more boring and easier to parse. Jodo's use of homosexuality / disability / cross-dressing to suggest deviance in the first half may look suspicious, but the mutant villagers in the second I think show that his attitude towards 'the Other' is one of sympathy and delight rather than disgust. Indeed, the romance between the re-born, resurrected El Topo and his new girlfriend is really quite sweet. The decadence of the village looks to me like shots taken at American culture – racism, religious enthusiasm, middle class hypocrisy. El Topo turns into an angel of death at the end ushering in the apocalypse. But rather than reaching an endpoint, the story starts again – its circularity calling attention to its artificiality. Mankind's spiritual yearnings satisfied by tales told over and over again.

Don't know how much of that was in Jodorowsky's head, but the point is: IT DOESN'T MATTER

The Drowned World

As ever, what interests me most about this is the blasphemy. I love a bit of blasphemy, me. Through some rather unbelievable psychoscience, Ballard constructs a scenario by which modern man finds himself back in prehistoric conditions and memories buried deep within our gene code are awakened. As our protagonist Kerans puts it: 'a point might ultimately be reached where a second Adam and Eve found themselves alone in a new Eden'. That prediction proves correct, Kerans himself becomes 'a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun' at the end of the novel.

Rather than meeting his maker, Kerans reaches a state by which all loyalty to civilisation is stripped away and he becomes the human animal. A bit like the one imagined by Rousseau, a solitary creature. His maker is the natural world, and ultimately, the sun – the sole source of life-nourishing energy on our planet.

So we have our indifferent, impersonal God, but who is the serpent in this little fable? (Beatrice, by way of Dante perhaps, plays the part of Eve.) That would be Strangman, but also, it turns out, Riggs. The rapacious pioneer and empire-builder sanctioned by and sustaining the political powers that be. The crazy root driving our towering achievements is here exposed, but the alternative presented by Ballard is equally absurd and terrifying, although he seems to sympathise with the outcasts and their past-smitten rejection of progress.

Rousseau was categorical that going back was not only impossible but undesirable, and proposed measures to restrain and reverse the imperialist mindset. Ballard is (if it's possible) even less sanguine – the only paradise humanity will know is that of the jungle.

Tropic of Cancer

I started reading Sexual Politics straight after finishing Tropic of Cancer, and immediately skipped forward to the chapter on Henry Miller. I had been ready to look past his objectionable attitude towards women because it was bound up with an objectionable attitude to pretty much everything. Miller's whole project seemed to be about detailing the rank corruption of a twilight zone at the end of all things, from a perspective embedded in, and participating in, that corruption. Miller is describing a civilization eaten away by cancer (hence the title), the hero an embodiment of Nietzsche's brutal individualist master-race. There is a kind of ironic distance between the reader and the protagonist – an 'artist' living a life uninhibited by conventional morality, alluring but repulsive. Van Norden is a caricature aimed to show this up, referring to all women as "cunts" and at one point hysterically exclaiming, "can you imagine what she'd be like if she had any feelings?" Are we supposed to take that at face value, actually ADMIRE this collection of sad, wandering, expat freaks?

Millet doesn't spend much of her time on these ironies and ambivalences, although her discussion of Miller ranges across his entire output, which is far more distasteful and provides much more to disapprove of. It looks to me like after the success (or notoriety) Tropic of Cancer achieved, Miller couldn't help himself and kept producing cruder and cruder variations of the same book. But Millet's most interesting criticism, which applies to everything Miller wrote, is that EVEN IF he was out to cause outrage, that very act nevertheless reinforces anti-female (and anti-human) attitudes. Miller is actually DEPENDENT on the conservative sexual mores he flouts, since that is how he achieves his effects. By exposing the hypocrisy of Victorian politeness, he underlines the 'fact' that there is no possibility for harmony or equality between the sexes.

But SHOULD we take that reading at face value? Once again I think back to Ellen Willis's point about art which is "antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman", but can support your "struggle for liberation". Aggressive exclamations of THIS IS ME I EXIST can have a profound impact whatever their content. Miller's happens to be at a time at the cusp of modernity, where writers and thinkers are adjusting to a life without the certainties of a religious ethic:

"I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself."

Reading Lovecraft for the first time last year, I've become increasingly interested in this collection of writers at the turn of the 20th century dealing with the collapse of a Christian culture, and turning to Nietzsche in order to build out from that ground zero: either exhaling the triumph of the individual, or reveling in the empty meaninglessness of our reality.

Life of Pi

I haven't read the book, because I have an aversion to fables featuring talking animals (maybe George Orwell is to blame). I watched the film solely because Ang Lee was behind it. The technical wizardry everyone is talking about is front-loaded – the credit sequence at the beginning of the film introduces us to the animals in the zoo, which look both real and animated. I suspect that actual footage may have been involved in some of the shots, which was touched up to resemble the animated shots (the most brilliant of which is a monkey flitting about the branches of a tree). It works because the tale isn't supposed to be realistic – it is framed as a story told by a survivor of a shipwreck. I saw the film in 2D, but Mark Kermode may well have given the 3D version a pass because of this distancing (or 'Brechtian alienation', whatever he wants to call it).

Peter Bradshaw is right to focus on the question asked at the very end – the moment the entire film builds towards, the bit where we are all supposed to start believing in God. Bradshaw thinks the exchange is fatuous, and it is: just because one man allegorises the horrific trauma he experienced in order to move on doesn't mean we all have to embrace a religious life. However, I think the film poses a more insidious question: why shouldn't we prefer an imagined reality if it bestows comfort? Why should we privilege an understanding of the world based on the rational investigation of the evidence of our senses? A Dawkins acolyte may respond by stressing the many comforts brought about by science (something the film acknowledges). But another tack might be to question the assumption that people need an imagined reality to feel content – perhaps some are able to find tranquility without it.

The Book of Mormon

The Mormons' trademark shiny happy disposition is a great fit for the toothy smiles and jazz hands of musical theatre. The form's protocols are observed, but the satire cuts through the suffocating good cheer that would normally put me off. The cast have the difficult task of balancing bathos with pathos. Too much of the former and you are left with a simple diatribe against the self-delusions of religion, and anyone can do that. What is more interesting is the way religions actually work. The question that needs answering is WHY people believe these 'fucking weird', even malicious, fabrications. The Book of Mormon attempts an answer, with some success. One of the great ideas in the show is the way Elder Cunningham draws on his pop culture knowledge (Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings) as a resource when adapting the Mormon holy text. This both demonstrates the way narratives are stitched together from previously articulated narratives (whatever is available), and the way religious movements have done this in the past to stay relevant. Arguably Christ used Judaism for his own purposes, as Joseph Smith used Christianity for his.

Following on from the previous post, alarm bells will start ringing whenever privileged writers try to portray less privileged cultures. Trey Stone and Matt Parker are white guys setting much of their story in Uganda, and they ask their cast to speak with African accents. To their credit, they partly get around the difficulty by very blatantly calling it out while the characters are still in America, and they continue to do so: the missionaries chant 'I am Africa!' when they successfully convert the village, and there is even a dig at Bono (who is fair game as far as I'm concerned). Parker and Stone mostly stick to making fun of American attitudes, and if you were being kind you could lump 'maggots in my scrotum' and sex with babies to cure AIDS as part of the same satirical project. However, they do also take a stab at evoking the genuine African experience by giving Nikki M. James a solo where she dreams of living a life less 'shitty'. Again, pathos expertly mixed with bathos. And any worries I had about the imposition of alien attitudes onto an existing culture were blown away by the strength of her performance. The cast as a whole were brilliant, which certainly helps Stone and Parker get away with it.

Habibi

The controversy over the book's 'orientalism' is certainly worth paying attention to. Obviously, Craig Thompson is an American depicting a vaguely Middle Eastern setting and culture, which will inevitably set alarm bells ringing. It doesn't help that the book features a sultan's harem, slavery, and the sexual abuse of children and women. The author certainly doesn't exhibit a sense of superiority. Neither is there a significant amount of 'othering' going on, at least on a conscious level (not like, say, Frank Herbert's concern over the hubris of 'Western man'). If anything, Habibi ends on a distinctly cosmopolitan note. I'm thinking particularly of the third and fourth panel on p.672, where the new family walk into and are lost in a crowd of people – out of the story and into our lives – Thompson is working under the assumption that the characters he is portraying ultimately share the same essence and worth as us, and that condescension or idolization are both to be avoided. The author's intentions are irreproachable in that respect.

If I have a problem with the book, it is with Thompson's predilection for over-explaining himself, brought out particularly in the eighth, image-less, chapter. His characters sometimes spend too much time telling the reader the precise reasons behind their emotions or actions. That said, Thompson's sense of precision is also one of the book's great strengths, in that it is put together with extreme care as a visual narrative. He employes a dazzling array of devices (repetitions, contrasts, symbols) in telling the story, to the extent where I get the impression the book could work as a pretty solid primer for the range of possibilities presented by the comics form. In that spirit, I'll note some of the effects I noticed in the first chapter below.

The first panel of a drop of ink is all meta, obv, but the idea as developed in the rest of the page is a bit more subtle than that. Sure, this is the creation of the story as well as the world, but the ink is also a river – a sustainer of life. The book will continue with these transitions between religious myths and lived experience. Indeed, one of its main themes will be the way such bedtime stories layer and make sense of our reality.

The page is divided into a nine-panel grid. Later on, Thompson will explicitly draw attention to the range of patterns that can be worked into these nine squares – the fact that they can be read vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally. This is also brought out on the first page. The middle panels make reference to the water / earth / fire / air idea which will be significant later. There is a certain male-female contrast between the left and right of the page. Finally, panels 3 and 9 foreshadow the very end of the book: where our heroes decide to go up the river, and where Dodola is freed from the predations of a patriarchal society.

On the next two pages there is a cross-page contrast between a hand holding money on the top left corner and a hand holding a pen on top right (which also recalls the very first panel). Dodola appears to be sold for water as well as money – the issue of control and exploitation of natural resources is something the book will continue to explore.

Page 12 is another nine-panel grid, with certain visual repetitions when read vertically. The final panel on that page ('So pure') is called back to on page 14 ('It proves that you were pure') – the veneration suggested by the act of washing the feet contrasted with the subjection of the veil. The image of the veil is carried on to the next page, where it symbolises people's separation from the divine essence – the separation of reality and storytelling. The implication being that writing can lift that veil.

The next couple of pages map out a progression from literacy to knowledge and corruption – an orthodox reading of the fall of man as a journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. Page 19 literally draws a religious frame around the events portrayed in page 22.

The 'River Map' of the chapter's title refers to the nine-square maths problem which stops the flooding in Dodola's story, but also serves as a metaphor for the imposition of order on an unpredictable world. Taking that a bit further in a meta direction, comics are also a way of imposing order on reality – magic charms that will protect us against devils and make us braver when faced with the unknown. The story will go on to explore other themes, and this first chapter almost serves as an introduction to the methodology Thompson will use to do so. For me, this internal logic makes it the strongest of the lot.

The Death of the Author

In keeping with my snide attempts to play down the philosophical innovations of canonical enemies of positivism, I'm going to attempt to demonstrate the way the implications of Roland Barthes's famous essay do not (as far as I can tell) actually amount to a grand departure from traditional literary criticism.

Barthes begins with the contention that "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself ... the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins". We may ask how watertight this distinction is, whether narrative really does not act with a view to effect reality (understood as broadly as possible). Although this is exactly what Barthes wants to get away from, I am left wondering what can motivate 'intransitive' writing? Are writers satisfied merely with the playful reproduction of symbols? More on this below.

Barthes provides a sweeping historical survey of the rise of the author, suggesting that narratives were originally 'performed' by 'mediators' (perhaps the oral tradition which produced the works of Homer is an example of this). "The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual". It is "logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author". Broad strokes, obviously, and I am compelled to put forward the fact that anti-capitalist theories and experiments have been formulated within a positivist framework, an interjection spurred by my commitment to the notion that any critique of current relations of production has to be couched in an empirical understanding of the world.

Barthes goes on to use the French symbolist poet Mallarmé as an example of the "essentially verbal condition of literature", where "only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'". Easy to say about symbolist poetry perhaps, but Proust is a more difficult fit. According to Barthes, the author of In Search of Lost Time "blurs writer and characters": Charlus does not imitate his real-life inspiration Montesquiou. As I understand it, Barthes is saying that Charlus is the original way Proust saw Montesquiou, and the real person behind the character is only a 'secondary fragment'. Again, not territory Barthes is interested in, but this leaves us bereft of an exploration of the way the character of Charlus was created by his author.

Barthes suggests that "the author is never more than the instance of writing" – "there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now" – an "enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered". I am not capable of fully engaging with this argument, since I'm not familiar with the linguistic theories Barthes is appealing to. As I understand it, the basic point being made is that language is not tied down to the task of representing a universally understood reality. But from this, Barthes goes on to argue that "the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin ... no other origin than language itself." In this light, authors merely regurgitate the language they have internalised. Their thoughts and emotions are already encoded in the language they are familiar with, so the act of writing is the manipulation of these codes into new forms. The text is therefore qualitatively different from those original emotions and thoughts. Fair enough, although it would be well to remember that authors are not merely unconscious language reproduction machines. They make conscious choices about the language they use, and these choices are to some degree recoverable.

For Barthes, a text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash ... a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ... "the book is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred". In other words, writers do not express feelings, but repackage existing quotations. Language develops over time independently of the reality in which it is used. However, we should not forget that we use language to do things like communicate our understanding of reality to each other (both in very direct ways such as recipes and indirect ways such as fairy tales). Therefore, you can argue that certain writings are intended to be understood by others as a record of the author's understanding of reality. Their meanings are to some extent recoverable and we can have some sense of the person behind the writing they have produced. Leaving that aside, there is also the very simple point that even if we wish to describe works as a collection of quotations (thoughts and emotions encoded in enunciations previously uttered), these quotations can still be traced, and the way they are assembled by the author can be recovered and explained by the critic.

Barthes does not see the point in doing this: "to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing". Once the author and their "hypostases" (society, history, psyche, liberty) are discovered, the critic claims victory. Barthes describes this as an act of tyranny: instead, "to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law". I can only understand this point through Nietzsche, who identifies a religious impulse in the practitioners of the scientific method – their need to explain reality through the collection and comparison of empirical data is a manifestation of a hunger for a single transcendent truth by which to order that reality. Rejecting such an impulse is indeed a radical move: the individual reader has complete liberty to read the text in whatever way they want. But is such individualism desirable? I do not think it is when it comes to throwing away useful things like reason, science and law, but what about traditional literary criticism? Ultimately, what is to be gained from a complete understanding of the author of a text? This is perhaps the most probing and unsettling question Barthes leaves us with, and one I'm not sure I can answer yet, but notably, Barthes doesn't really provide an answer to it either. It appears that for him, liberty from considerations of authorship is self-evidently preferable.

However, Barthes has quite an unusual concept of what a 'reader' of a text is: "he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted" – "the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost". We may ask how a reader would be able to know more about a work's sources than the author, but it is clear that for Barthes, the reader is no longer a person. Rather, he is "without history, biography, psychology". I can only understand this to be an unreachable ideal – a vantage point that gives access to every single linguistic experience and stimulus the author of a work has ever had. Obviously, this is not possible, but ironically enough, it is generally the vantage point that literary critics work towards. Crudely put, the critic who finds and "disentangles" the most "quotations" can claim victory – only a minor modification in the understanding of the methodology Barthes is arguing against.

William Blake

Spent some time yesterday evening with All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, two series of philosophical aphorisms by William Blake written around a decade after the publication of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. What surprised me about Blake's pieces was how closely he follows the methodology of the empiricists, even though he proclaims to feel contempt and abhorrence for the ideas of Locke and Bacon. Blake must have decided that the best way to pour scorn on this tradition is to undermine it from the inside – use empiricism against itself. However, I hope to show that the gains of such a strategy were probably more limited than what Blake was hoping for.

The 'Argument' of All Religions are One is a stringent declaration of scientific principals. But 'Principal 1' proceeds with what Hume would consider the 'unphilosophical' claim that 'the forms of all things are derived from their genius'. I encountered the use of the word 'genius' in a natural religion context when researching my MA dissertation, it crops up in William Derham's work as an analogue for 'telos' – the purpose or end for each and every object in the universe. Blake's proposition that all objects have a purpose is a teleological one. As Hume had shown, such propositions cannot be empirically substantiated.

Blake goes on to suggest that as men all look alike (even in their variety), so are they all in possession of the same intrinsic 'genius', our minds (even in their variety) all work in the same basic way. 'Principal 4' is very interesting because it makes the very Humean point that men are everywhere the same.

'Principal 4' also puts forward the suggestion elsewhere elaborated as 'Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness'. And yet our 'Poetic Genius', or the 'Spirit of Prophesy', nevertheless compels us to imagine the stuff we cannot encompass with our senses. This drive is the source of all human religions. Ironically enough, Hume would have no quarrel with Blake's conclusion that religion is the product of the imagination. He would just feel queasy about privileging it over the philosophical (or scientific) method, as it is a pretty unstable source of moral and political values.

The above describes the source of religion in a very naturalistic way, which may make There is No Natural Religion quite a confusing title for the second series of philosophical aphorisms. 'Natural Religion' is a slippery term. It is usually contrasted with revealed religion, the most important source for which is scripture, but what it actually is depends on who you ask. Some Enlightenment thinkers posited the existence of a innate moral sense which invariably led people to an awareness of God. Blake rejects such a reading on empirical grounds, arguing that you cannot perceive something your senses cannot. However, he acknowledges that men use their 'reasoning power' to compare and judge what they have perceived. Our senses can be educated to understand more than our surroundings, but when they are 'untaught', or 'organic', they only perceive and desire immediate objects already familiar to the senses. Thus, the natural man lacks a natural religion.

[Apparently, it has been suggested that the above argument is ironic, and is contradicted by the second part of the piece. I disagree, because I think Blake has too little to gain from pointing out the fatuousness of the suggestion that men cannot deduce ideas beyond those immediately perceivable by their senses (which empiricist argues that exactly??). Fact is, 1.II indicates the way humans put perceptions together to form ideas using their 'reasoning power', and this is taken up in part 2.]

Men can perceive more than their senses reveal, because the accumulation and comparison of sensory data eventually indicates the existence of certain natural laws governing our reality that cannot be perceived, yet which we accept (gravity being the big one in the 18th century). New discoveries (such as Newton's) change the 'ratio of all we have already known'.

The third proposition doesn't survive, but I think the rest is still explicable: the bounds of knowledge become loathed by those who possess them – they find the mechanical clockwork universe unsatisfactory. If the many objects of the universe are rendered the same as the few observable objects by the laws of physics, we are still left yearning for more: 'less than all cannot satisfy Man'. We strive to fill the gaps left by science, but are incapable of satisfaction.

Here Blake's teleology comes back in. If mankind's nature is to desire the infinite, they must be capable of possessing it, because the forms of all things are derived from their genius. The philosophic and experimental can only halt at the ratio of all things, unable to go beyond it. The poetic and prophetic, on the other hand, can see the infinite in all things. But poetry and prophesy is irrational, sourced from the imagination. Thus men are only truly fulfilled when they let their imaginations complete their understanding of the universe. To come back to the title, religion is not a natural mechanical result of the senses, but the result of a striving to possess knowledge of the infinite.

In response to this, Hume need only repeat his contention that teleological arguments are 'unphilosophical'. In practical terms, his cheerful skepticism undercuts Blake's notion that humans absolutely have to construct imaginary solutions to plug the gaps in our understanding and gain fulfillment. But Hume was a rare case in the 18th century. His close friend Adam Smith knew as much, and told him so. Smith had more time for the Stoic notion (revived in Scotland by Shaftesbury) of the melancholy produced by skepticism. And he so much as confirmed Blake's point that the imagination provides a salve for these disappointments in religion.

But these comforts are still imaginary, and for Enlightenment thinkers like Hume and Smith, suspect. Blake noted in 1800 that morality is a product of philosophy: 'the poet is independent and wicked, the philosopher is dependent and good'. I guess what this means is that the philosopher is dependent on a rational understanding of the universe, and is bound by the need to delineate moral rules by which to govern society. The poet is free from such burdens of responsibility, their job is to 'excuse vice, and show its reason and necessary purgation'. Poets provide an imagined structure by which to fill reality with meaning and assist people to grasp the infinite. They also provide an understanding of the emotional drives which produce evil, and in so doing, purge it. It is a much expanded role for the imagination, but it is nevertheless surprising how many of Blake's Romantic conclusions are shared with his contemporaries on the side of the Enlightenment.