The Said Symphony: moves 1-5

Several Blake critics have attempted to unravel Blake’s use of term “fourfold vision.” Accoring to Jerome McGann, beings of single vision see the world in absolutes. Life is a prison term that ends in a final, discrete annihilation. Men of twofold vision see the world dialectically, according to contraries. Threefold vision enables one to recognize the contraries and see that they are not absolute, but that the boundaries of good and evil shift according to each individual. In Milton, Blake defines threefold vision as a peaceful state, and he associates it with Beulah:

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep.  (M 30:1-3)

Beulah and threefold vision are identified with sleep, restfulness. But fourfold vision involves activity, not sleep. Fourfold vision is generation and destruction, life and death, or even life in death. Evidently, Blake’s understanding of death is unconventional, to say the least. For Blake, death is considered as part of the creative process, a part of life.

Links claimed:

To the Glass Bead Game: because Hesse writes:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Yin and yang are the opposites of the dialectic, but in the yin-yang symbol or tai-chih we see them alternating and interpentrating in the subtle and fluid play between them (Blake’s threefold vision) from which, in Hesse’s words, “holiness is forever being created” — Blake’s fourth.

To the Said Symphony, because precisely that kind of fluid flowing between one perspective and another is what allows empathy to triumph over opposition, and the “other” to become “brother” — the condition in which alone “the peaceable kingdom” / “peace on earth” can prevail…

Comment:

Blake was the mentor of my own poetic mentor, Kathleen Raine, and my own early published poems appeared in a Penguin volume edited by Michael Horovitz and titled Children of Albion in Blake’s honor.

I am happy to remember such friends in writing this game — and amazed to find in the Blake illustration above, which I only ran across today in O’Gorman’s article, yet another visual precursor to the boards on which my games are played. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 5: Bob Dylan and One Too Many Mornings

Move content:

The Bob Dylan song, One too many mornings.

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

An’ a thousand miles behind

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