Jerusalem

“After . . . three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean” (J 3:1)¹ in Felpham (West Sussex), William Blake returned to London with his wife Catherine, and they set up house and printing press in a small cottage just off Oxford Street, the only still extant in London. Here, he reworked The Four Zoas (c.1796-1807), “the greatest abortive masterpiece in English literature” as Northrop Frye called it,² he composed, designed and printed Milton: A Poem in Two Books To Justify the Ways of God to Men (1804-1810), and its conclusion, Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804 - c. 1820). Of his final and most ambitious prophetic book, consisting of nearly five thousand lines and one hundred relief-etched plates, Blake printed five complete copies (three more are posthumous) but coloured (“finish’d”) only one of them, a few months before his death in 1827.³ My photographic series is about this book.

Blake’s “intellectual allegory” ⁴ tells the story “Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through Eternal Death, and of the awaking to Eternal Life!” (J 4:1-2). Albion (Mankind and Britain) banishes his emanation Jerusalem (his union with Jesus), seduced by Vala, Jerusalem’s spectre and embodiment of the natural world, and falls into a spiritual and political sickness. Los, the embodiment of man’s creativity and the epic hero with whom Blake identifies, sets out on a quest “to search the interiors of Albion’s Bosom” (J 45:4) for Jerusalem, a spiritual journey across London: from Finchley, Highgate, Holloway, Hackney, Stratford, Stepney, the Isle of Dogs, the Tower of London, to the London Stone.  The centre of Urizen’s power, Prince of Reason and “mighty architect” of Stonehenge and London (J 66:4-7), is an unremarkable Roman milestone, placed at the door of St Swithin’s Church until it was destroyed in the Blitz, and now safely encased outside an investment bank at 111 Cannon Street.⁵ Then, Los crosses Southwark bridge to Bedlam, the mental asylum (from 1815 to 1930, Imperial War Museum since 1936) and through Westminster Bridge, arrives at “Tyburn’s fatal tree” (J 12:26), that sprouted under Albion’s feet and spreads its roots across London, “endless labyrinth of woe.” (J 28:19) Blake lived one kilometre from the gallows (“Tyburn’s tree” until 1783), now marked by a plate on a splitter island opposite Marble Arch fountains), “I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear / In regions of Humanity, in London’s opening streets.” (J 34:42-3) Here, Los too builds his palace surrounded by “a moat of fire” (J 13:25) and the city of Golgonooza, “the Spiritual Fourfold London—continually building & continually decaying desolate” (J 53:18-9) that guards Divine Vision against chaos. Just as Los is about to be overcome by the evil Covering Cherub, Albion awakens and reunites with Jesus, awaking all Human Forms “into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. / And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem.” (J 99:4-5)

Jerusalem is not the “perfectly mad poem” Blake’s friends believed,⁶ yet “accurate and close reading” did not solve Jerusalem’s structure “problems,” as Harold Bloom predicted.⁷ The book resists interpretation close to the point of unreadability which is integral to the reader’s experience and to Blake’s poetics: “The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act.”⁸ The frontispiece (J 1) only shows Los-Blake dressed like a London night watchman, a “charley,” ⁹ pushing a heavy Gothic door open with his left hand. With the other, he holds a lantern against the opening, low as a setting sun, and peering  in the void, steps resolutely into Ulro. Empty “mind-forged manacles”¹⁰ frame the central motif and each reader is called upon to follow Blake’s writing-drawing-etching across the prophetic book, and Los’ cosmic journey across that visionary city that is Regency London, nightmarish Babylon, utopian Golgonooza, and New Jerusalem:  “I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball: / It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate, / Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” (J 77:1-4).

To enact my performative interpretation, I mapped Jerusalem’s London “between Blackheath & Hounslow, between Norwood & Finchley” (J 42:51) onto a contemporary map of London. Between my home in Shepherds Bush and the London Stone, I designed a classic labyrinth, known from the Middle Ages as “road to Jerusalem,” a 750 kilometres path meandering within a 20 kilometres radius from Charing Cross. Though a precise correspondence with Albion’s awakening cannot be drawn, the narrative and textual references in Jerusalem to the Christian story of salvation seemed to warrant my choice to synchronise the poem’s time with the Western Christian liturgical calendar and have Los’ journey coincide with Lent and Easter. I put my doubts aside and every night from Ash Wednesday (21-22 February 2007) to Easter Eve (7-8 April 2007), I walked the labyrinth in forty-six consecutive legs, carrying an A-Z for “golden thread”¹¹ and a 4x5’’ pinhole camera for my “Machinery.”¹² While I negotiated tracks and roads, rivers and canals, bridges and tunnels, private properties and building sites, “travelling through darkness & horrid solitude” (J 45:39) or bustling nightlife, the walks were inscribing my (interpretation of) Jerusalem on the city and in turn, the city itself was drawing my performance on photographic film with its lights from sodium-vapour lamps, car lights, neon signs and lighting. 

Jerusalem “emanation” of the giant city, “can it be?” (J 27:1)¹³ Blake’s Jerusalem resisted interpretation as much as London resisted my night walks, not only because distances and car-centric design in megacities discourage and endanger walking, but also because my superimposed diagram clashed against urban street orientation and connectivity, privatised public spaces, and pervasive surveillance, increased after the 7/7 bombings. The property-led regeneration of Albion was palpable wherever I went: Heathrow Terminal 5, the New Wembley stadium, Westfield London mall, the Olympic park and village, the high-rise craze, the gentrification of Hackney and beyond, the Overground and the Crossrail. At the centre of Jerusalem’s last plate (J 100), Los standing triumphant between Space (stage left) and Time, with his blacksmith sledgehammer and Urizen’s compass, builds “Jerusalem / In England’s green & pleasant land.”¹⁴

This work was conceived in celebration of Blake’s 250th birthday (he was born 28 November 1757) and presented as a multimedia installation for my masters degree show (Royal College of Art, London). Ten years later, however, I had the opportunity to revisit the work and reflect anew on my experience of Jerusalem and my practice, as Blake himself had done in the book.¹⁵ Soon after graduation, it felt like “cool Britannia” was coming to an end with Tony Blair’s downfall that June and the 2007-2008 financial crisis unravelling later in autumn. Then came the Tories (2010): the 30% arts funding cut (2010), the Riots (2011), and Occupy London (2011-2). On the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, “Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion” (J 54:5) but London itself was less Blakes’ Jerusalem than Johnny’s caravan in Jes Butterworth’s play.¹⁶ During my PhD, tuition fees were raised threefold (academic year 2012-3), my family and friends were priced out of London, and nudged by the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016), I eventually left the country with regret. “What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song / Or wisdom for a dance in the street?”¹⁷

In times of crisis, apocalyptic literature connects the writer’s present with the reader’s present and indeed, Jerusalem“seems like a different poem with each reading”¹⁸ and its last enigmatic plate (J 100) may not be as optimistic as back then I had come to believe.¹⁹ Los is pensive, his eyes downcast, the right arm rests on his hammer, the left holds his thongs as a compass. In the west, Los’ spectre is separating from him, taking the sun away and plunging the Earth another sleep of Ulro. In the east, his emanation is spinning Los’ thoughts: the thread becomes becomes Vala’s “scarlet veil” (J 21:50) covering the moon of love and the waning moon becomes Vala’s cup (J 22:29) from which a blood sacrifice pours on Urizen’s Serpent Temple. The seven stars of the Plough are pointing down: winter has come and Los’ journey is about to begin again.

Notes

¹ All references to Blake's texts are to The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake. Newly Revised Edition. Ed. by David V. Erdman, New York: Anchor Books 1988. References to Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion are given in the text using the abbreviation J followed by plate number and line.

 ² Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry. A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 269.

 ³ All references to images in Jerusalem are to William Blake, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion. “Bentley” Copy E: New Haven, Conn., Yale University, British Art Center (Paul Mellon Collection). Printed by Catherine Blake, London not before 1821 (paper watermark). 100 plates in relief and white-line etching with hand colouring. Image size ranges between 22.7 x 17.1 cm. and 20.1 x 14.0 cm, leaf size 30.5 x 25.4 cm. Electronic edition available at The William Blake Archive, Yale Center for British Art 2004. Accessed 25.4.2024. https://www.blakearchive.org/copy/jerusalem.e?descId=jerusalem.e.illbk.01.   

⁴ Letter to Thomas Butts, 6 July 1803. In Blake, The Complete Prose, 730.

⁵ “London Stone” s.v., in Christopher Hibbert, ‎Ben Weinreb, ‎John Keay, and Julia Keavy, The London Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan 2008, 507.

⁶ Robert Southey quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson, diary entry, 24 July 1811, in Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence. In Three Volumes. Vol. 1. Ed. by Thomas Sadler, London: Macmillan, 1869, 338.

 ⁷ Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 928.

 ⁸ To Henry Trusler, 23 August 1799. In Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 702.

 ⁹ “Blake himself is supposed to have worn a broad-brimmed hat like the one depicted.” W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art. A Study of the Illuminated Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 179.

 ¹⁰ “London,” ln. 1, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, in Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 27.

 ¹¹ Geographers’ A-Z Map Company, A -Z London. 6th ed. London: Collins 2007. As Theseus inside the labyrinth, Jerusalem uses the “golden string” to guide her under the earth at the beginning of Chapter Four “To the Christians” (J 77). At the same time, Jerusalem is removing the silken bonds of Albion’s covering, allowing him “to expand into his radiant "moth" form, see Tilar J. Mazzeo, “William Blake's Golden String: ‘Jerusalem’ and the London Textile Industry.” Studies in Romanticism 52, No. 1 (Spring), 2013, 115-45, 136-7.

¹² “. . . I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted) I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will, the Time it has taken in writing was thus renderd Non Existent. & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all producd without La­bour or Study.” (To Thomas Butts, 25 April 1803. In Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 728-9).

If divine dictation is Blake's ideal of poetry, that of painting is copying from imagination. “His creation already existed in eternity, and the conscious coalescence of present sensation was only to facilitate a presentation of that creation in concrete form. The form in its smallest unit is the image; more complicated and more complete it is the symbol; totally unified it is the poem. At this point the perceptive imagination becomes creative.” (Robert F. Gleckner,  “Blake's Religion of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 14, No. 3, Mar., 1956, 359-369, 362) In “Annotations to the Works of Joshua Reynolds,” Blake comments: “The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great Deal: The Good one Really Does Copy a Great Deal” (Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 645) In the “Fourth Discourse on Art,” Reynolds wrote of Invention that “whenever a story is related, every man forms a picture in his mind of the action and expression of the persons employed. The power of representing this mental picture on canvas is what we call invention in a Painter.” (Joshua Reynolds, Discourses. Ed. with an Introduction by Helen Zimmern. London: Walter Scott 1880, 40). Copying takes Reynolds’ definition of invention to the extreme, a creative act that flows from seeing “As the Eye— Such the Object” (Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 645) into executing with the least possible mediation.

For Blake, printmaking constantly aspires towards the condition of painting, and the “machinery” he developed for printing his illuminated books from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (composed 1790), approached that condition. First, rather than transferring a design prepared in a different medium to the copper, Blake could compose directly on the plate using a brush loaded with acid-resistant fluid. Second, relief etching enabled him to integrate text and image, by writing in reverse with a quill dipped in stop-out varnish, and printing both together rather than having separate pulls for etched images and engraved text. Third, Blake could apply black ink to the countours and coloured inks to raised areas of plate at the same time, achieving the stunning colour intensity and depth of Jerusalem Bentley copy (on Blake’s printmaking process, see Robert N. Essick. William Blake, Printmaker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; Joseph Viscomi, “Illuminated Printing.” In The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. by Morris Eaves, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 37-62; Michael Phillips, “‘Printing in the infernal method’: William Blake’s method of ‘Illuminated Printing’”, Interfaces 39, 2018, 67-89).

Because Blake’s machinery is as integral to Jerusalem as the text and images it integrates, the project required “to find the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original can be awakened in it.” (Steven Rendall, “Translation of ‘The Translator’s Task’ by Walter Benjamin.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10, no. 2, 1997, 151-65, 159) Pinhole photography echoes Blake’s principles of faithful copy and immediate execution, as it drastically reduces the photographer’s control over composition and exposure time is so extended at night that only street lights are bright enough to be recorded: the light trails are traces of the camera movements during the walk, and the city labyrinth it follows is immediately executed on the photographic negative.

 ¹³ “The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was already one when I asserted that the Photograph was an image without code—even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it—the realists do not take the photograph for a "copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000, 88).

 ¹⁴ Milton: A Poem 1:15-6. In Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 95..

 ¹⁵ Relief etching facilitated alterations within each copy of Jerusalem and between copies, emphasising Blake’s creative process over the book object:    “His pages are not copies, more or less faded or derivative versions of the designs originally etched on the plate, but rather are re-visions and renewals of those images. Each addition undermines the primacy of the original design, its privileged position as the prototype of all later prints. . . . Blake's pages are palimpsests, bearing many levels of script over script. These layers of alterations indicate that creation and representation are ongoing, open-ended processes.” Stephen Leo Carr, “William Blake's Print-Making Process in Jerusalem.” ELH 47, No. 3 (Autumn), 1980, 520-41, 537.

 ¹⁶ Jerusalem, 2009. Dir. by Ian Rickson, written by Jez Butterworth, with Mark Rylance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron and Mackenzie Crook as Ginger. Jerwood Theatre of the Royal Court Theatre, London, 15 July 2009. Published as Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem. London: Nick Hern Books, 2011.

 ¹⁷ Four Zoas, II:11-2. In Blake, Complete Prose and Poetry, 326.

 ¹⁸ Paul Youngquist, “Reading the Apocalypse: The Narrativity of Blake's ‘Jerusalem’.” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 4 (Winter), 1993, 601-25, 610.

 ¹⁹ The interpretation of Plate 100 as the beginning of a new cycle is supported by Susanne M. Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2011, 248-50. Compared to Copy A (British Museum, London), Blake adds in Copy E the thread connecting the spindle and the veil (see David V. Erdman, “The Suppressed and Altered Passages in Blake's ‘Jerusalem’.” Studies in Bibliography 17 (1964), 1-54, 39) and four stars to complete the Plough.

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