
The man transferred to earth attitudes of domination and control he applied to woman. It still begs the question whether if he feels this of woman and earth, he feels it of himself. This creature must give or have given an account of himself to understand
why we are in the middle of a mass extinction. Because we can lions are poisoned in Kenya with pesticide used in their murder. We can fuel the technology of destructive urges at every turn, scientists loose bees, nurserymen ship ants, exhausts of every combustion. But technology is not the cause, if the means. We explore these
causes below.
Blake's portrayal of animals, like the bestiaries, pictures the negative states of a man as an antinomian of creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Don't be like the tiger. Do be like the ant. Each species as a morality play is not a
thing in itself of wonder. This attitude translates into science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? Not. This morality play will be running with polar ice. Songbirds are good, hawks are bad. There is a cliched pattern of English folklore.
If we take a premise that poets were writing of the coming extinction even when industry revolted and have been in increasing numbers since, then many celebrations of the natural are done prophetically. This prophetic capacity in the negative man preoccupies his own works.That is where we awake to peer deeply into psyche to determine the cause.
If William Blake was the first to celebrate the human toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and since he is the prophet we might seek, finding no better, we might resort to him to explain the man's fear of the animals, his fear of the tree, his fear of the woman, all of which sum simply in his fear of himself. Certainly there are precursors to what Blake thought, but he justifies his point of view by his passion, art and integrity. He was as much a martyr to his cause as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was to his. That is he refused to benefit from evil. Rather he was afflicted by the stance he took against the world of profit. Putting Boehme or Swedenborg aside, but not the Bible that figures so largely in Blake and all of English thought, Blake explains his theory of the Fall. It does little good to argue with his premise. So let's not be distracted by our own disbeliefs, whatever they be. Global warming, tobacco smoke, drug cultures, cell phone cancers, we are good at evading the issue. Blake says the Bible says that man has fallen out of some original state of balance and ever since has been careening wildly on the corporate path that lands us today in the middle of the mass extinction.
Stated simply it sounds like some form of idealism to say that Blake holds that all forms of life were originally part of man himself. These have been separated out, much as Plato says the woman was taken from the man. In Jerusalem Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his might limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews). Blake says this came from the Druids, but that distracts us mightily. We have to pick and choose, mix things from different contexts to document this view. It's not like Blake makes a systematic exposition. In the Four Zoas he says:
"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body"
... where ever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)
This reassumption is his restoration of all that was separated back into himself.
"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (
The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).
This rehumanization reabsorbs all that was separated out back into the man, then the horrific becomes beatific, the tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). We shall have pop groups called the Singing Tigers. This remetamorphosis, "further up and in," says C.S. Lewis in
The Last Battle. Blake's reunification reads like a migration of salmon upstream, except out of division into unity not to separate again. As the animals shed their skins as it were, their skins of the human projection of limitation, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature" ( Baine, 8).

Man's divided state, the result of the fallen world, needs to be further defined as does the motive of his reabsorption of projected outer fears. Every threat he perceives in the outer world from animals, which would include all nature, is simply his own fear caused by his division mirrored back upon him. That is, the savagery of the tiger, greed, cruelty in any exterior form are his own internal states, his spiritual despondancies. In
Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls that the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts," manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of man. Thus the medieval bestiaries are moralities of man, you name them: "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat" and go around the zodiac too and to every cave art to see the divided image of man projected onto the animals. It's not the outward form of the animals the man assumes, but the supposed inward ravening, or sloth, the seven deadly sins for sure, that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body."
This theory of correspondence, as inside is outside, "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally...unless that a Man be born anew," is a nice question in the end whether if the beasts are a picture of the fall in man their removal augers his redemption. Blake did not treat that. It would be an ironic twist we could put on the mass extinction. The notion puts a different light on all the bestiaries and the anti-shrines in the
Faerie Queene such as the Bower of Bliss. All external nature reflects the man.
This reabsorption is the opposite of being absorbed into nature as they say at death, or
I and my Frank round our caldron as I like to say of the underground I inhabit with the mole and if predictions of mortality come to pass, will molder, but in song, will turn to ash, but ash is light, will be gone to come again, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as Wordsworth's
leechgather might have it, "As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie / Couched on the bald top of an eminence." M. H. Abrams says "Blakes' prophetic books narrate various stages of the division and reintegration of the Universal Man" (
Natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature, 257)... the ancient mythical being, the primal Man or Ur-Adam, who falls into fragmentation" (257)...a progressive dissociation of the collective human psyche into alien and conflicting parts" 258) , that is into four parts, and then into four (feminine) emanations, then into spectres. These fractal images divide and subdivide until some end point when they rebound in "resurrection to unity" again. Thus "all things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine Body of the Saviour" (Ninth Night of the FZ )to be reabsorbed:
So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body.
All things proceed from the one man and are reabsorbed into him! There has been lots written of these two men. You can be left to your own resources to sort it out. It can be said that two "contraries" fight it out to produce consciousness, progression, an upward sloping line, and while there is lots more in Blake of sexual subdivision and social politics, his future united man makes a system of unity. Blake did not write The City of God. He didn't write Paradise Lost. Though Abrams rhapsodizes the Universal Proposition, what ancient, what unity couldn't be cited? from
Schelling, Hegel or if you like some orgy of occultism, Brahmin's lives, wheels within wheels where "all natural objects not only become human themselves, but reunite, without loss of individuation, into the Human Form Divine" (264) from which they had fallen. Who says poets and critics aren't religious! All this gains credence from its position and image at the end of Jerusalem where Albion, the unity man, and Jerusalem, his emanation, get married. These takes are parabolic upon the essential New Testament.
All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth, and Stone; all
Human Forms identified, living, going forth and returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days and Hours; reposing,
And then awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
And I heard the Name of their Emanations: they are named Jerusalem.
Viewed as a cosmology there are plenty of modern contexts too, from the planetary lives of Edith Sitwell to the...well it's better left unsaid isn't it? Pan-creatism, to coin a phrase, is so infectious a disease, to compass the problem in so easy a matter as cycle and recycle, projection and return. Is there nothing more to it than that? They said Pythagoras lived five lives. Maybe it was seven. In the old days they said he needed three virtuous lives to be immortal.
So if, to take it up, Momaday returns the bear to himself, he becomes the bear, or some such, and God comes to man, as Blake has it, these reincarnations of form all practice unities. Blake thinks that thinking makes it so. No external agent implied. That's why fantasy is so compelling, but it's not what Donne meant when he called out to the scattered bodies. So who's to say these two titans are contrary:
HOLY SONNET VII
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
III. Chimeric Splicing
In the midst of these mass extinctions why not give these pataphysical solutions to a problem the elders do not acknowledge, imaginary solutions to imaginary problems.
Chimeric Splicing1) The mutation implicit in the loose ends of two or more species put together.
2) Things, not beings' patched up parts, not wholes constructed. No knowledge of collateral effect.
3)
garbage patches, of monsterism. Multiple sociopathic murder and dementia inflicted on the social politic.
4) Obesities. Sexual confusion.Pesticides in runoff cause an increase in stress hormones that leads to immuno-suppression in frogs. Atrazine (Hayes), a common agricultural chemical, causes genetically male frogs to develop as females and produce eggs.
5)
Reproductive abnormalities, sex reversing, the loss of the genetic male and elimination of the female chromosome.
And this comment from Maimonides on the mixing of species:
"when one species is grafted upon another, the branch which is to be grafted must be in the hand of a beautiful damsel, whilst a male person has disgraceful and unnatural sexual intercourse with her; during that intercourse the woman grafts the branch into the tree...The Law, therefore, prohibits us to mix different species together, ie., to graft one tree into another, becasue we must keep away from the opinions of idolaters and the abominations of their unnatural sexual intercourse. In order to guard against the grafting of trees, we are forbidden to sow any two kinds of seed together or near each other" (Guide of the Perplexed, III, 180).
Now we know what all those scientists are doing in their laboratories.
Bestaries have slandered the animal as philsophers have done. The last paragraph of
MaCaffery's interview "distingushes an animal voice (a voice of soniccontinuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation)...The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity. In Hegel’s scheme “every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self.” By intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being. To me this signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human.." (46)
I'm not worthy to criticize these high figures, only following a trail, but it seems to me if this is representative that it is the problem of extinction translated from the commerical to the philsophical, as if Hegel never left his house to walk in the woods for it is not the voice of death in the song bird or elk, it is the joy of life. So it says somewhere that everything that has breath praises. This praise is the tongue of animal speech and it is the tongue of life not death. You can see though why I'm drawn to the notion of the two voices, considering another trail I follow of the Inner Voice maybe we can call it, or at least of the in and the out language of Boehme, but McCaffery says, "This idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate) obtains almost a’pataphysical excellence!" On the same page he says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme." "Poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation.
And if the poet is passive it is not from speaking the voice of death, but of the transfiguring life which you should know in its essence and if not email me. If voice is "the originary place of negativity" that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (
Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed, the thought goes, then "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security,
115). The language of the universe, as if to say become the thought or failing that be language itself. The Word of God! Voice here means author. The death of the author (
Barthes) of all this forfeit is the anvil of simple speech. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat the philosophers would write bestiaries of themselves.