Fractal Fantasies of Transformation: William Blake, Michael Moorcock, and the Utilities of Mythographic Shamanism
Carter Kaplan
In a posting to the Q & A page
at the Web site of British fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, I asked about the
operation of personal and group mythographies.
My question has to do . . . with the nature of human thought processes, and my feeling—which I was led to by reading your Second Ether [trilogy]—that the source of much of our woe . . . has to do with our thinking in terms of archetypes and Platonic ideals. We create for ourselves (or they are thrust upon us) whole pantheons (or pandemoniums, as Milton would say) of expectations about ourselves, and we seek to
live our lives according to the dictates and strictures voiced by the gods dwelling in these pantheons, and in the end we come up feeling very sad and very sorry, because our lives do not live up to these ideals. We are in a real fix, moreover, when these pantheons are controlled by corporations who use “our” gods against us. . . .My general question is: My goodness, what’s to be done! My specific question is: Can you reflect upon your reading in Milton and Blake?
Thanks, Carter
Michael
Moorcock answered as follows:
In a way Jerry Cornelius and all the multiverse books are about shifting identities to suit one’s context. Since you’re going to find yourself in
a good many more contexts than you might have a hundred years ago (unless a character in a Victorian long-running adventure serial!) you have to learn to move easily and fluidly between them while maintaining a core identity which provides what you might call public sector virtues—morality, commonality. A mixed psychic economy—the public sector doing what it does best, the private sector doing what it does best.Paradoxically, of course, the “public” involves the most private, the most enduring self. To survive and thrive we don’t necessarily confront our natural enemies—the lumbering dinosaur orthodoxies of big business and big government—we go around and behind them. To live to the full in the modern world, in other words, you have to learn to weave and dodge and drift and take advantage of what the moment offers. This isn’t a particularly new problem for metropolitan working classes. The trick is to choose your masks. To choose your roles. And play them consciously as roles. The old notion of the person of integrity—strike them where you will they ring true—has to be revamped, perhaps. The existential moral being must learn whole sets of roles—Pierrot, Harlequin, Colum bine. On we go. Blake and Milton provide us with models of Law and Chaos, rather than Good and Evil, and that can’t be bad. What a lot of theological abstract fun you can have with that idea. . . .
Best, M
I am not so much interested in the way
William Blake has influenced Michael Moorcock as I am in the way that Michael
Moorcock has influenced my reading of William Blake and John Milton. While I
have reservations concerning what I understand to be Moorcock’s emphasis
regarding Milton and Blake, I am moved by his work—particularly his most
Blakean production, the Second Ether trilogy—to identify my own understanding
of Blake and Milton and to discover in their epics a practice of mythographic
shamanism that is at least as sophisticated, as supple, and as clever as the
more broadly understood shamanistic practices and rituals of archaic and
preliterate peoples. Indeed, the movement of shamanism from preliterate to
literate stages has enriched shamanistic practice and liberated it from the
essentially conservative tendencies of the preliterate mind. At the same time,
however, the advent of written language has created new forms and processes of
orthodoxy. It is the task of the literary mythographer to expose such
orthodoxies and to release the poetic imagination from the tyrannies of custom
and institution. Suggesting the program if not the techniques of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Blake and Moorcock are engaged in a mythographic house cleaning.
Through identifying, exposing, and clearing away conceptual confusion, their
works pattern analytic processes that expose and clarify the complex operation
of the mythologies that define our self-concepts, our social personae, and our
worldviews.
A comparative examination of Blake and Moorcock spotlights
the analytic utilities of Western mythographic shamanism. Moorcock and Blake
are both men of working-class London neighborhoods. Blake’s love for London
together with the distress he felt in beholding the poverty and destitution of
the lower classes are amply described and explored in his work. When removed
from London during his tenure in the village of Felpham, he was a salient
neighborhood fixture. The well-known account of Blake’s arrest in Felpham after
ejecting a soldier
from his garden and the enthusiastic support he received from his neighbors in
court and during his return home are indicative of how the poet was favored by
the people who lived around him. In the 1960s, Moorcock’s home in London’s Ladbroke
Grove was a center for raconteurs, musicians, visionaries, travelers, and other
flamboyant personalities. Many of Moorcock’s realistic fantasies—the Cornelius
tetralogy and novels such as King of the City (2000) and Mother London
(1988)—are built around the descriptions of life in lower-middle-class and
working-class London neighborhoods. It is certainly very possible that the
variability, the variety, the fecundity, the decay, the pace, the rapid rates
of change, and the phantasmagoria of such neighborhood fabrics drive the
complexity and the dynamics of Blake’s and Moorcock’s mythographies.
The activity of giving voice to the
sensibility of these neighborhoods and the role played by the local prophetic
heroes represent a cultural pattern with identifiable historical beginnings in
Civil War London. The weakening of upper-class control in the 1640s coincided
with the rise of a radical publishing underground. In the wake of the Long
Parliament, during the 1640s there was a breakdown of censorship, the collapse
of church courts, and the eclipse of upper-class leadership in En glish
culture. A fierce hostility to the gentry, the aristocracy, and the monarch was
revealed through an explosion of publications advancing the ideas of
antinomians, Arminians, Socinians, Arians, Ranters, libertines, Inde pen
dents, Anabaptists, Quakers, Levelers, and other radicals. By 1646 the
theological scene in London was dominated by the lower and middle classes, who
freely spoke and wrote of new liberty, universal grace, the abrogation of
church law, and the sinfulness of repentance and who denounced the priestly
orders and ministry of the Church of En gland as anti-Christian (Hill 1977,
94). The scene is eulogized by Milton in Areopagitica, where he describes a
city in which “all the Lord’s people are become prophets . . . trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. . . . A nation not
slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent,
subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest
that human capacity can soar to.” In triumph Milton declares: “Behold now this
vast City, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty . . .” (1930, 749).
In the linked celebration of antinomianism, indepen dent theology, professed
radicalism, and a DIY approach to self-editing and self-publishing, Blake and
Moorcock are heirs to the cultural revolutions of London in the 1640s.
Both Blake and Moorcock pursued careers
as artisans to support their more sophisticated artistic projects, and in this
respect both authors made their commercial work into subjects and themes that
are explored in their more ambitious efforts. Blake, of course, worked as an
illustrator. Moorcock has been an editor, a comic book writer, a paperback
fantasy writer, and a rock musician and composer. Blake and Moorcock have made
their careers a source of material for mythmaking, and their mythography in
this respect focuses not so much on the subject of their commercial work, but
rather on the activity represented by this work: the activity of the creative
process itself. Stories about artisans and artistic creation are central to
their mythographies. Indeed, in every sense of the phrase, Blake and Moorcock
are “poets of artifice.”
This interest in artifice begins with
their approach to language. Following after epic usage, Blake and Moorcock
select language to allegorize, aggrandize, illuminate, theorize, personify,
visualize, valorize, and validate their idiosyncratic mythological systems.
Such words as ad hoc, parodic, and satiric characterize Blake and Moorcock’s
usage. Blake draws upon the Bible, Homer, Milton, and Swedenborg for his
mythological vernacular, while Moorcock parodies Conan the Barbarian, tabloid
news papers, detective magazines, George Meredith, Victorian serial fiction,
Sherlock Holmes, Madison Avenue, H. G. Wells, the Beatles, and James Bond. At
one end, such language is wonderfully humorous and brings a sense of proportion
to the authors’ metaphysical gymnastics, which, if left unbalanced, would grow
cloying and burdensome. At the same time, such language accomplishes the
analytic purposes of satire, adding to the farrago of perspectives and voices
that cannot go too far in providing a full anatomy of the subject at hand. The
complexity of their language builds into the sophistication of their
composition, creating a work that is nearly unintelligible. But rather than
obscurity, the effect of this complexity is itself a source of meaning.
Both Blake and Moorcock combine their
ontological and metaphysical concepts so closely that their philosophies teeter
dangerously at the edge of idealism. For Blake the notion of such a metaphysic
is itself both the result and the cause of a fallen state. For Moorcock the
scientific unification of ontology and metaphysics provides the superstructure for an elaborate
joke. Moorcock
repeatedly portrays characters that use science as a means to hide from the
human condition. An enthusiasm for theoretical science figures among the many
self-deceptions of his heroes, who, possessing incomplete knowledge of
themselves, struggle unsuccessfully against the contours of a hostile and
deforming landscape. It is ironic that Moorcock himself so readily promotes a
scientific theory of his own. In his metaphysical scheme the world exists in a
flux between law and chaos, between order and entropy. There is no good and
evil, but only the interplay of these polarized states of being. Such a
polarization is descried occasionally by Blake, who provides us with images of
a universe laid out between poles of energy and passivity, between poetic
inspiration and acquiescence to the empire of social mediocrity and the
cosmo-mechanical-vegetable mundane. For Moorcock and Blake, good and evil are
not to be found as tending to one or the other of these poles, but rather in
the particular experiences of particular individuals who variously perceive
themselves, or fail to perceive themselves, between the fluctuations of them.
While Moorcock claims this is a mathematical and physical phenomenon, Blake
expresses the dichotomy as a matter of perception. Moorcock’s proposition that
Milton “provide[s] us with models of Law and Chaos, rather than Good and Evil,”
is interesting and attractive, and there is much in Milton that argues for such
a model. Moorcock’s proposition easily dovetails with the contemporary
pseudoscientific critical habits of identifying dichotomies and reading them as
physical forces that drive a dialectical universe, as if our way of seeing, our
way of understanding, our scientific method itself were all simply dialectical.
Milton’s project transcends simple
dichotomies. As I read Milton, the moral drama that unfolds in the universe is
driven not by underlying dialectical energies but by the ability of human
beings to choose to use reason as a tool, and this tool itself is an effect (or
an artifact) of choice; very often that choice is a decision to test strongly
held belief systems, or even to overturn the prevailing worldview. Milton
equates morality with reason, analysis, inspiration, and communication. If
reason is good, then the lack of reason or the denial of reason is evil. Evil
is an absence of good; evil is not itself an active principle. The wild
variables of inspiration, apostasy, and intuition are thus not evil—nor are
they attributes of law or chaos—but rather they work as the arbiters between
the senses and reason. They safeguard human freedom as guarantors of human
judgment. In the development and education of the full person, these principles
are to be cultivated, and poetry is the chief instrument of this cultivation.
For Milton the transformational nature of mythography simply represents a
quality of the tool in its uncultivated state. Cultivation sharpens mythography
into an analytic tool that—in the familiar terms of the scientific
method—allows us to investigate the influences of the observer upon the
experiment; a vital and living mythographic process allows us to peer into the
human brain’s tendency to rationalize ambiguity and establish patterns—often
credulous and fictitious patterns—of cause and effect and of correlation. As
Francis Bacon says, “human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose
the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And
though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it
devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist”
(1620, 50). A fully competent and reflexive mythographic system is keen to
highlight and analyze these illusionary specters of understanding. Although
cognizant of such spectral manifestations and willing to document them in
grotesque and sensational detail, in his larger figure Blake embraces the
process of inspiration, apostasy, and intuition in toto, offering as his
Parnassus-scaling model a kind of hallucinating noble-savage-with-a-pen. From
this heroic perch he casually reduces and rejects even the most sensible
cultivation, characterizing it as merely the prevailing neoclassic cant of his
rivals in the art world of late-eighteenth-century London. In this
consideration Blake is a reactionary antimodernist who uses poetry in a
scientific attempt to “return” people to a unified state with the cosmos. He
sees the transformational nature of myth as the message itself, an esoteric,
pseudoscientific “proof” of epistemic relativism that leaves the world in a
shattered and fractured state—a bright, blistering, and gaudy “ultra-modern”
universe of exotic sensation and psychological distraction—and thus he has been
variously championed, embellished, and imitated by the inhabitants of such
spheres. There is, and make no mistake, a price to be paid for achieving unity
with the cosmos. Ultimately Blake’s follower is left stranded in a Hobbesian
universe whose laws are mechanical, fixed, and inviolable—where the poetical
facility, once so full of promise, is reduced to a simple tool for
food-gathering, conflict, or escape. Milton, on the other hand, is content to
remain alienated and slug it out with existence, so long as observation,
reason, and inspiration accompany him for consolation, for in that
universe—let’s call it a Lockean universe—the human being is liberated from the
mechanism of the cosmos, and rather than being joined with the cosmos is
instead separate and free to discover the secrets of the mechanism in order to
transcend it. It is this Lockean universe to which Moorcock’s elaborate
mythography is tending. It is very possible that Moorcock’s extensive mythic
production, when taken collectively, portrays the transformation from the
Hobbesian worldview to the Lockean.
Chaos theory and complexity science have
many applications in describing the compositional process and the mythological
systems that Blake and Moorcock have conceived. Three notions from chaos theory
are particularly applicable in an examination of their mythologies.
First is the central notion
of chaos theory itself, which is that complex interdepen dent systems pushed
into chaos will undergo a phase transition resulting in new order. Moorcock
uses this principle to drive his plots, where law and chaos become poles in an
epic struggle between supernatural aristocracies of angels and demons, where
the unbridled energies of chaos bring about a transformation of cosmic and
political order that is shaped by the conceptual designs of law. At a more
subtle level, Moorcock explains this dichotomy in terms of form and
consciousness. Form and consciousness, like order and chaos, are not so much
involved in a struggle as a reconciliation, for it is through form that
consciousness survives, and it is through consciousness that form survives.
A second application of chaos theory that can be applied to Blake and
Moorcock involves the way complexity itself can be used as a tool to create
compositional interest. Blake and Moorcock use complexity in their compositions
to make them more interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.
The mea sure of this complexity is called
“organizational depth.” Architecture critic Charles Jencks describes
organizational depth as a sort of ornamentation or elaboration that creates the
“resonance,” “deep character,” and “integrity” we perceive in art (Jencks 1995). A complex narrative can force the reader
into an act of co-creation with the author, where the reader, faced with
compounding confusion, is led to create a parallel personal
narrative in order to superimpose narrative cohesion upon the text. In this way
consciousness can be said to enter and pervade a narrative.
A third aspect of chaos
theory that has its applications in describing our authors is the notion of
self-similarity and fractal scaling. Self-similarity is a concept from chaos
theory that identifies an underlying pattern of order in complex phenomenon.
Best illustrated by the graphic patterns created by the Mandelbrot set formula,
self-similar fractal patterns can be seen in turbulence, clouds, waterfalls,
coastlines, mountain ranges, and in simple organic forms, where one part of the
pattern resembles the whole. Take, for example, a fern plant, in which the
sprays or fronds of the fern are representative of a repeated pattern or image
seen at other scales. The pointy shape of the frond is replicated in the shape
of the leaves on the frond. In turn, the leaves are made up of tapering
leaflets that resemble the leaves; and in turn these leaflets are edged with
thin, pointed serrations that copy the pointed thematic pattern that is
recapitulated throughout the plant at different scale levels: serration,
leaflet, leaf, frond, and so on. According to the aesthetic of self-similarity
and scaling, parts re semble not only each other but the whole as well.
Self-similarity represents a transforming pattern of similarity and not exact
replication. Mathematically self-similar patterns are defined by “strange
attractors,” reference points that establish recurring patterns of form and
movement in a complex system.
In the essay “About My
Multiverse,” Moorcock explains that the concept of self-similarity is central
to his cosmology: “Since the advent of Mandelbrot’s extraordinary observations,
the creation of Chaos Theory and Chaos Mathematics, I have been able to give
further coherence to my notion [of cosmology], by suggesting we perceive each
fresh ‘plane’ of the multiverse as a ‘scale’—that scale alone differentiates
them when so close together. The greater the variance of scales, the greater
the variance of history and personal lives. Mass also changes with scale. We
can also see the multiverse in terms of constantly renewing shoots and
branches, growing more and more complex, each shoot a near-clone of the
mother-branch, that branch in turn belonging to another and that to another
until, a near-infinity of branches away, the trunk is joined. This fits best
with observed reality but is much harder to visualize in linear terms” (1997,
49–50). This “multiversal” metaphysic not only provides an appropriate approach
to understanding and mapping the self-similar features of Moorcock’s work, but
it also suggests new strategies for reading Blake. Indeed, it provides a
template for identifying thematic similarities within the scope of any author’s
work, or within any period, or within a particular genre, and so on.
The grand mythological
systems of Blake and Moorcock, driven as they are by the compositional
techniques employed to create and portray these systems,are particularly well
suited to an analysis that reviews the phenomenon of complexity as both an
operator and a subject within an artistic work. Concepts that can be described
by the vocabulary of complexity include:
1. Organizational
Depth: The “building-in” of complexity through obscurity, vagueness,
superposition (overlaying), and cluttering.
2. Multivalent
Signifiers: Characters, themes, and plots that serve as exponents for a
multiplicity of concepts, all of which are intermittently transforming and
intermittently reflexive.
3. Feedback/Reflexive
Technique: Characters, plots, and themes that serve as exponents for the
processes of artistic creation, reading, and interpretation.
4. Catastrophe/Folding/Landslides/Phase-Transition:
Sudden and disruptive changes in plot, scene, and character.
5. Scaling:
self-similarity and fractal geometry.
The
most significant similarities Blake and Moorcock share are their mythographic
perspectives and procedures, and the useful (and pleasurable) shamanistic
insights that such procedure affords.
What follows are some of the details of
this procedure:
Blake’s and Moorcock’s works exhibit narratological
self-similarity. Utilizing the same characters, Blake tells the same stories
repeatedly in different ways, altering the story either slightly or profoundly
at each retelling. He offers cosmogonies
and cosmological systems; he offers psychological schemes that resemble
metaphysics and metaphysical schemes that resemble psychology; he tells tales
of love, birth, jealousy, hatred, misunderstanding, changing perceptions, and
forgiveness. Following pagan and classical notions of sympathetic magic and the
mythographic patterning of archetypical heroes, gods, and ideas, Blake outlines
simultaneous and parallel actions in the world of people, in the world of myth,
and in the world of the gods.
Moorcock follows the same practices and
patterns, utilizing variations on the same characters and placing these
characters in relations to one another that are repeated frequently in his
novels so that in each successive retelling the fortunes of the characters may
result in different outcomes, but the essential relationships, emotions,
challenges, victories, and failures remain the same. In his Eternal Champion
stories, of which his albino prince Elric of Melniboné is the best-known
example, Moorcock presents a comic-book Armageddon involving the opposed “supernatural”
forces of law and chaos. At the center of each of these tales is the eternal
champion, a Byronic hero—a “Byronsattva,” so to speak—who is reincarnated in
each volume to play a decisive role in the cosmic conflict between law and
chaos. Depending upon the strength and depth of the champion’s character, the
cosmic balance swings to a state of either more or less entropy. The key to the
success of the champion depends upon his or her ability to reveal the
weaknesses of the gods and transcend their influence so that the Byronsattva
can emerge and exercise his or her real power to control the universe. In other
sagas and cycles Moorcock variously portrays the commedia dell’arte, or
harlequinade. In these stories he achieves resolution by unmasking the players.
He redeems his characters by exposing them to the artificiality of the roles
they play.
The practice of telling the same stories
over and over again is enhanced by the bibliographic complexities that are
characteristic of Blake’s and Moorcock’s output. Both Blake and Moorcock are
notorious for their variorum. Blake altered the order of the pages in his
handmade epics; he altered the position of illustrations and sometimes omitted
them entirely; and he colored his illustrations and his texts differently at
each production. Not only are his stories retold in different ways, but his
physical texts are characterized by alteration. Moreover, the illustrations
themselves add still another dimension to this textual variability. When
reading Blake’s illuminated manuscripts the reader is confronted with the
problem of resolving the illustrations to the text. Formulating the narrative
is made complicated because there are many ways to combine the illustrated and
written narratives. Inconsistencies can be read into a comparison of the
illustrations and the text. In formulating the narrative does the reader
privilege the illustrations over the text, or the text over the illustrations?
By providing illustrations to his stories, Blake has compounded the problem of interpreting
his texts; but he has also opened up the possibilities for multiple readings.
By leading his reader to confront these multiple readings (and viewings), he
highlights the dynamics and the mechanics of mythographic practice.
Moorcock has also altered his texts.
During a career that now spans more than fifty years, Moorcock has continued to
revise, alter, and retitle his texts. He has reshuffled the order in which they
appear in collected editions. While these textual alterations and reorderings represent
a daunting challenge to the bibliographer, such practices confirm and enrich
the practices of the mythographer. In effect Blake and Moorcock draw their
readers into an act of co-creation that is absolved and shielded from the
orthodox dictates of the textual Brahmins. The personal revelations of the
reader supersede the text, thus disenfranchising the Urizenic lawgivers and
deauthorizing the ecclesiastical courts of their hermeneutic bishoprics.
Once again, Blake and Moorcock are “poets
of artifice.” As I earlier hinted, in the Western liberal tradition of the
Netherlands, Britain, and America—specifically the Lockean nexus of theological
and political thought that joins Grotius, Cromwell, Milton, the “Good Old
Cause,” the Glorious Revolution, the En glish Bill of Rights, Jefferson, the
Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Act of Religious Freedom, the
American Bill of Rights—the archetype of this politicized intellectual
tradition was patterned in London in the 1640s. The power to create artifice is
not limited to the upper classes but lies within the reach of all the people.
In the Second Ether trilogy, his most
Blakean production, Moorcock tells a group of related stories branching off
from the central human story of love, underscoring his observations with a
circumspect commentary on the role of love in the continuation of culture and
the human species. Turning the facets of his jeweled lens to reveal a
succession of incomplete perspectives, Moorcock explores how culture and nature
use love to control individuals. His main theme in this respect is loss: boy
meets girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy loses girl; boy goes crazy trying
to get girl back. The madness and frustration as well as the hope and
inventiveness that are driven by this loss lead to an examination of the
psychological dynamics of suffering prompted by longing and the problem of
being displaced in both time and space from somewhere you have been and wish to
be again—and from someone you have been with and wish to be with again. In Blood,
the first volume of the trilogy, these questions are considered in the case of
Jack Karaquazian, who must come to terms with his own loss of love by
confronting the mythological beliefs and philosophical assumptions that are
created by his loss and are the cause of his loss. If he can identify the gods
that make up his pantheon of woe and demythologize them, he has a chance of
altering their influences. By understanding the mythographic dynamics of his
suffering, he can redeem himself from his fallen state. But the process is
spiritual as well as mythographic; it is a process of ontological growth as
well as conceptual clarification. The primary tools for affecting Jack’s
transformation are humility, faith, forgiveness, and love.
In the introduction to Blood,
Moorcock claims to be the editor of the work, which he has put together from
fragments of typescript and handmade magazines written by one “Edwin Begg, the
famous Clapham antichrist.” Moorcock explains that he did not know what to make
of the confused collection of material: “It looked like remains of a
psychedelic undergraduate project which very properly had been abandoned. . . .
However, as I worked on the manuscript I began to perceive its coherence. A
complex and intriguing story emerged as all the disparate elements came
together to form an unfamiliar whole” (1994, 1).
Blood opens along the Gulf
Coast and Mississippi River, where Jack Kara quazian and his friend Sam
Oakenhurst are riverboat gamblers. Pools of color have recently been discovered
in the Gulf. Suggesting at once the computer revolution and the crude oil that
drives our plastic civilization, the color is an apparently limitless source of
electronic energy. At a more fundamental level, the pools of color represent
the human brain’s capacity for credulous rationalization, conceptual confusion,
orthodox scientism, and intellectual myth, Greedy prospectors drill into the
color and create an ecological disaster—a metaphysical fault in space-time that
engulfs the region in webs of conceptual distortion. Rivers change course in
midstream, zombie policeman bubble like burning plastic, guns shoot
carcinogenic projectiles, and meat boats steam through phantom dimensions.
Against the backdrop of this distortion, the gambling games Jack and Sam play
take on a multidimensional significance. Do they play with cards? Video games?
Complex fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons? Moorcock
describes Jack and Sam dealing each other subsets of intellectual history and
the trajectories of hypothetical civilizations. According to Moorcock, “whole
universes, species and nations were created, sometimes down to the most
ordinary individual, and then manipulated in a game which sometimes took
decades of subjective time, yet only a few minutes of real time” (1994, 30).
All this is very well, and
Sam and Jack adapt easily to their distorted universe. But then two women come
into their lives: Colinda Dovero and “The Rose.” Colinda offers Jack an
unconditional love that he is not ready to understand or accept, until he loses
her. The Rose brings both men into contact with the Second Ether, the ulterior
mythological cosmos that Sam follows in his collection of handmade illustrated
magazines. These magazines contain the tales of The Corsairs of the Second
Ether.
Chapters from The Corsairs
of the Second Ether are presented in Blood in staggered chronological order.
The beings that inhabit the Second Ether are divided between two competing
groups, the “Singularity” and the “Chaos Engineers.” Captain Billy-Bob Begg,
Fearless Frank Force, Little Rupoldo, Pearl Peru, Professor Pop, Kapitan Kaos,
Manley Mark Male, Little Fanny Fun, Corporal Pork, Karl Kapital, and others
crew the various spaceships that, at different fractal levels, they variously
blend and transform into. These ships go by such names as I Don’t Want to Go to
Chelsea, The Right Choice for Recovery, The Smollettsphere, and Now the Clouds
Have Meaning. Traveling through space and time and scaling up and down through
fractal levels, the ships and their crews resemble mental states, moods,
motivations, passions, and archetypes in a grand confused myth about
self-fulfillment, self-understanding, and the end of the universe.
Jack and Sam “scale up” to
the Second Ether (the Rose flies them there in a Dornier flying boat), where
they assume a central role as both subjects and observers in the so-called Game
of Time, an eternal conflict between the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity.
Jack and Sam are absorbed into the personae of the corsairs—now psychic
archetypes—who arrange themselves into an epic last judgment, an apocalypse of
contraries, syntheses, and metamorphoses that is highly suggestive of Blake’s
mythographic patterns of reconciliation and redemption. Blake’s epics, of
course, were printed and colored by the poet himself. In this light, the
“handmade” magazines devoted to The Corsairs of the Second Ether gain especial
significance. After the corsairs have absorbed Sam and Jack, the corsairs
themselves begin to combine and absorb into each other, until Fearless Frank
Force, representing the Singularity, and Captain Billy-Bob Begg, representing
the Chaos Engineers, are fully sexualized and ready to copulate. Through their
union an enormous cuttlefish named The Spammer Gain—representing after a
fashion St. John the Divine’s vision of the Virgin of the Apocalypse—is saved
from Old Reg, the Original Insect, or Satan. Through their copulation Force and
Begg make it possible for The Spammer Gain to recover her lost fishlings, and
thus the cycle of life continues. In order to achieve the union it had been
necessary for Sam to sacrifice himself in the preliminary moves of this play of
archetypes, or what Blake would call a “mental war.” Sam’s annihilation is at
once an act of love and an act of self-deceit. As he lies dying he judges
himself, confessing that his initial explorations in the Second Ether and his
pursuit of the archetypes he sought to emulate were actually an escape act. He
has been destroyed thus by his own code of conduct, and as he expires his
mythic self reverts, as Moorcock says, “to the ser vices of entropy; to roam
the quasi-infinite, a demigod blessed by death’s eternal simplicities” (1994,
241). At the scale of human existence, Sam’s sacrifice has made it possible for
Jack to recover his lost love, Colinda. Not surprisingly, and again deeply in
the vein of Blake, Jack learns to forgive, trust in himself, and love.
Such patterns of sacrifice
are reflected by Blake in his portrayal of judgment scenes, where eternals,
emanations, and more human characters struggle to come to terms with the
psychic fallout of accusation, guilt, possessiveness, jealousy, and pity. Early
in the poem Milton, an Eternal suddenly appears in the midst of the proceedings
and declares, “One must die for another throughout all eternity” (11:18). Blake
revisits and further develops this concept in Milton and again in Jerusalem,
explaining that the struggle between ideas and perspectives is a struggle to
arrive at truth, and that the personified ideas locked in this struggle “fight
and contend for life & not for eternal death” (43:41). “Such are the Laws
of Eternity, that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others’ good” (Milton,
38:35). In respect to Sam Oakenhurst, the sacrifice is not the sacrifice of a
person, but the rejection of an idea as perceived in a mental vision. Ideas are
personified in order to animate them and render them as dynamic and as supple
as the poet’s altering visions and attributions. In the apocalypse portrayed at
the end of Blood, the events that unfold are subject to Jack’s point of view.
The problem is, of course, that Jack—like comparable observers in Blake’s
epics—is not a reliable observer of the events he experiences.
In Blood Jack does succeed
in redeeming himself, but, as Moorcock intimates, Jack is the fictitious
product of an imagination that itself dwells in a fictitious world. Fabulous
Harbours, the second volume in the trilogy, dilates upon this theme of artifice
versus reality. Moorcock anatomizes the interaction of real life and the Second
Ether by recounting a series of related stories—ranging from a commonplace
discussion over lunch with the Clapham antichrist, a scatty and somewhat
destitute priest still trumpeting the 1960s mantra “Love is the answer,” to a
psychedelic swords-and-sorcery yarn that follows in the aftermath of war in
heaven. This latter tale, “The Black Blade’s Summoning”highlights the central
themes and the mechanism of Moorcock’s Second Ether project. The sky suddenly
opens and vomits forth a host of howling angels that perish as they plummet to
Earth. Agents of chaos, the angels become animated and irradiate the landscape
with conceptual distortion. The tale’s protagonist, the albino prince Elric,
the most popular of Moorcock’s creations, escapes from the seductions and
hungers of the fallen angels by hiding in a small temple that is miraculously
impervious to their destructive and distorting influences. Inside the temple he
discovers a gateway opening to the network of silver moonbeam roads that lead
between the infinite worlds making up the multiverse. Elric passes through the
portal, making his escape with a group of refugee children who are described as
having “second sight” and who have been “tutored in the ways of the Multiverse”
(1995, 59). Out on the moonbeam roads they are confronted by an angel with an
insect face who wants to eat the children in the name of law and the
continuation of the human species. Fortunately the fallen angel is repelled,
and the companions are free to take the paths that will lead them to their
respective home worlds. The tale concludes with Elric and his companions
viewing the beauty of the moonbeam roads. The spectacle brings solace and
understanding: “They were free forever of the common bounds of time or space,
of pressing human concerns, free to explore the wonderful abstraction of it
all, the incredible physicality of this suprareality which they could
experience with senses themselves transformed and attuned to the new stimuli.
They became reconciled to the notion that little by little their bodies would
fade and their spirits blend with the stuff of the multiverse, to find true
immortality as a fragment of legend, a hint of myth, a mark made upon our
everlasting cosmic history, which is perhaps the best that most of us will ever
know—to have played a part, no matter how small, in that great game, the
glorious Game of Time . . .” (78). The outcome is Blakean inasmuch as the point
of the fable is the cycle of the myth itself. In “The Birds of the Moon,” the
final story told in Fabulous Harbours, a middle-aged hippie, who had been
separated from his wife and children twenty years before, travels to
Glastonbury, enters a church, and discovers behind the altar a gateway leading
to the moonbeam roads. He enters the portal hoping to be reunited with his
family. Moorcock remains ambiguous on the question of whether or not the
protagonist will be reunited with his family, though the possibilities do seem
to be as numerous as the moonbeam roads themselves: “The paths are reproduced
over and over again, in millions of scales, each slightly different, yet each a
detailed version of the other. They weave the fabric of the multiverse
together. They are the means by which human intercourse is achieved and the soul,
as well as the species, is sustained” (227).
In The War amongst
the Angels, the third volume in the trilogy, Moorcock resumes the story of Jack
Karaquazian, this time intermingling it with parallel subplots that examine the
possibility of recovering a world that we have lost or have been thrown out of
and of once again dwelling with people who, much to our regret, are no longer
part of our lives. The War amongst the Angels begins as an autobiography of
Margaret Rose Moorcock. Rose describes a childhood filled with gypsies,
magicians, scholars, mad uncles, and absurd postwar BBC radio personalities.
Growing up among these influences, she learns to enter—literally—the world of Edwardian serial fiction. She
falls in love with masked American cowboys and the En glish highwayman Dick
Turpin. Together with her outlaw lover, Rose preys upon a quasi-Victorian tram
system that radiates across the south of En gland. Inspired by her early love
affairs, Rose becomes an interdimensional Robin Hood, who, beginning at the
convergence of rail lines at Clapham Junction, scales up to the moonbeam roads
to spread truth and justice across all the scales of the multiverse. Enlisting
the aid of characters introduced earlier in the trilogy, Rose embarks upon a
journey of redemption and restoration that involves a trip through the Egyptian
desert to find the legendary university city of Aton, hunting fallen angels
with elephant guns in the American West, a quest for the Holy Grail, and a
starship ride through the Second Ether to once more defend The Spammer Gain,
the archetypical Madonna-cuttlefish. Once more Spammer and her fishlings are
beset by Old Reg. The outcome to this final conflict is altered from what
Moorcock presents in the first volume. This time Jack does not recover his lost
universe. In an act of selfish ferocity Jack sacrifices himself, making it
possible for Sam to gain his heart’s desire, the Rose. Jack assumes the role of
a principle or idea that is rejected in the eternal process of imaginative
warfare. It is difficult to determine whether Jack or Sam represents the
superior principle, as it is difficult to read moral superiority in one or the
other figure, though the Rose is evidently the creative principle—perhaps a
fractal emanation of the great cuttlefish herself—that determines the outcomes
of such engagements. The Rose stated clearly at the end of Blood that she had
hoped at that time that Sam, rather than Jack, would survive as the prevailing
principle. Perhaps it is possible that the first round of the Game depicted in Blood
was a dry run, utilizing Jack’s particular qualities as a player and a gambler
to realize and define the parameters of the Game, while the struggle depicted
at the end of The War amongst the Angels, now with the contours of the Game established,
allowed the Rose to redeem Sam and reject Jack as an obsolete principle that
was no longer needed. Sam is not as complex as Jack, nor as self-serv ing. He
fits better into the human community, and he is thus better fit to be an
accommodating lover, a cooperative husband, and a well-grounded father. In
retrospect, what remains clearest is that the differences between the struggles
depicted at the conclusions of Blood and The War amongst the Angels highlight
the supple and ductile mythographic mechanism represented by the continuum and
the symbol of the Last Judgment itself.
Rather like Professor Pop
broadcasting through his omniphone, Moorcock’s voice dissipates and
concentrates signifier and signified across all the scales of the multiverse.
His language is a meta-academic polyglot of Christian humanism,
transformational mythology, fractal geometry, and generic science fiction that
increases in profundity as it becomes more ridiculous. Moorcock translates
mythography into epiphany. This satiric translation, I should like to suggest,
is Blake’s game as well.
Blake and Moorcock advance
comparable notions of a Last Judgment, and these are closely identifiable with
their mythographic activity. Although Blake and Moorcock are careful to
represent minute particulars with all the detail made possible by language, it
is not actually their plots or their characters that represent the primary
themes of their stories. Rather, what is of importance in the mythographic
activity itself. This is the activity of the Last Judgment. As S. Foster Damon
suggests, for Blake the Last Judgment “occurs whenever an error is recognized
and cast out. . . . Jesus is the principle of Truth, and his appearance puts an
end to all errors” (1988, 235). The primary mechanism of this casting out is
the forgiveness of sins, but incumbent upon this is a mythographic activity
with strong parallels in the procedures of Apophatic theology and
twentieth-century analytic philosophy. These connections are underscored by
Wittgenstein’s explanation of aesthetic process. According to Wittgenstein in
the notes he took while building the famous family house in Vienna: “Perhaps
the most important thing in connection with aesthetics is what might be called
aesthetic reactions, e.g. discontent, disgust, discomfort. The expression of
discontent is not the same as the expression of discomfort. The expression of
discontent says: it higher . . . too low! . . . Do something to this.’” The
Last Judgment is thus an aesthetic process, and it can be located at the end of
the cycle of analysis.
Moorcock’s last judgment is
easily compared to Mircea Eliade’s notion of a “Myth of Eternal Return,” which
takes place at a repeating beginning or end of time, where archetypical actions
and roles are performed in order to set or reinforce the pattern for the next
historical cycle. Moorcock’s last judgment is portrayed, as he variously
describes it, at the conjunction of the spheres, at the end of time, and at the
conjunction of the moonbeam roads, which meet, in fractal terms, at the highest
possible scale of archetypical conception. At this level the principal
characters act out various roles in a choreographed struggle in which they seek
to establish their own version of what the next cycle should be. Archaic and
folk parallels to this struggle can be seen in a variety of forms ranging from
the commedia dell’arte, or harlequinade, to the ritual dances of any number of
preliterate peoples: the Bella Coola culture of the Pacific Northwest Indians,
for example, or the Yoruba people of Nigeria, who dress in the elaborate
costumes of nature spirits to celebrate through dance the patterns of their
cultic cycles. What Moorcock accomplishes, however, is something more than a
mere repetition of established archetypes and cycles; his stories work to
effect an unmasking of the cultic cycles and the archetypes that are otherwise
renewed in such ceremonies. This unmasking represents a humanistic reversal
against the beliefs and the customs that enforce the orthodox and demonic
authority of myth over human beings. In Moorcock’s last judgment, therefore,
archetypes are restored to their proper situation apropos to human beings: they
are restored to the status of a mythographic shorthand that serves the needs of
people. In this way human beings are liberated from the tyranny of their own
customs, their own conceits, and the brain’s susceptibility to conceptual
confusion. This theme is seen repeatedly in mythographic works ranging from Paradise
Lost to 2001: A Space
Odyssey. The greatest tool we employ is our language, and one of the most
curious (second, perhaps, to the language of lovemaking) uses to which this
tool is put is the manipulation of the symbolic abstractions, archetypes, and
myths that we use to understand and manipulate the world. As Milton, Blake,
Kubrick, and Moorcock warn us, we must be vigilant in keeping our tools under
control or they will control us. In addition to the great Western gods that
concern Milton—and in addition to the
corporate, technological, and scientific gods that concern Kubrick—Blake and
Moorcock seem especially interested in the more local myths and deities that
make up our personal worldviews, our self-concepts, and our social identities.
The Holy Grail can be taken
as a symbol of Moorcock’s insight into mythographic operation and Last
Judgment. In Moorcock’s conception, the Holy Grail is like the initial or
master pattern produced by the Mandelbrot set. All the moonbeam roads running
between the myriad dimensions of existence can be glimpsed as a whole, and
their collective shape, viewed from a distance, is cup-shaped. To drink from
the cup is to gain knowledge of the connectivity and integration of all our
lives and times; to drink from the cup is to comprehend how our own ghosts and
demons, operating at cross-purposes, can lead to confusion, doubt, and
suffering. A broader view encompassing the connectivity and integration of
people and life can lead to faith, understanding, and healing.
Moorcock’s Holy Grail can
in this respect be compared to Blake’s notion of Eternity, a sort of mental
theater where archetypes are free to play out their changing roles unencumbered
and without interruption. Of course interruptions do occur: it is these
interruptions, caused by hate, jealousy, selfishness, and repression, that lead
to the intercourse between human beings and the archetypes they themselves have
placed in (and have drawn down from) Eternity.
Moorcock’s cosmology in
respect to the Holy Grail closely resembles Blake’s cosmology in respect to
Jesus, and their respective mythographies are parallel structures. Moorcock
presents a three-tiered cosmology. At the first level is the material world in
which we dwell. At this level real men and real women live and work, raise
children, and die. Here Moorcock himself dwells, and from this perspective he
claims to be the editor of the novels he introduces. Then there is the First
Ether, or the world in which characters such as Jack and Sam dwell. At this
level people are portrayed in a state of interaction and reflection with the
mythographies that they have created. Finally, in the Second Ether, we
encounter a realm of eternal mythology, a realm in which personified ideas in
various anthropomorphic
and demonic forms engage in an eternal dialogue, a Game of Time, a war amongst
angels. Here we see the Corsairs of the Second Ether traveling up and down the
scales of the multiverse to seek, struggle, and combine with the main
archetypes who hold sway over the structure and functions of the cosmos. In
Moorcock’s scheme these three levels are unified by the moonbeam roads.
Moorcock’s three levels—the
material world, the First Ether, and the Second Ether—correspond to Blake’s
notions of Ulro, or the material world; Beulah, the world of poetic conception;
and Eternity, the world of unified space and time. Life in Eternity—represented
by the four Zoas—is perfectly integrated sexually and is unified in the form of
Jesus Christ. According to Blake, when seen up close the four Zoas appear as a
multitude of individuals. From further back they appear in the forms of Urizen,
Tharmas, Urthona, and Luvah. From still further back they appear unified in the
form of Jesus.
Blake’s and Moorcock’s
characters are by nature dynamic and transformative. These characters enter
into one another, or break apart, or project themselves into new characters, or
are formed from the residues of others. Ultimately they find resolution and
redemption through combining with one another, until combining at still higher
and higher levels they resemble the four Zoas, and, at the highest level, the
Son of God.
Along these lines, the
mythographic significance of Blake’s and Moorcock’s characters are subject to
transformation. Sometimes their characters are to be considered as cosmic
archetypes, sometimes as exotic characterizations of hu man beings locked in
emotional turmoil, and at other times as flesh-and-blood people. The entering
and blending into one another that these characters undergo can be compared to
the activity of ordinary people reading about characters in a book. Readers
move in and out of the characters they are reading about by variously
identifying with them and comparing their own situations and experiences to
those of the characters. A reader with a book can be de scribed as a
consciousness seeking to identify itself in the form of a narrative. The
implications of the relationship between consciousness and form are astounding:
we can see how human beings move in and out of the characters that are created
by the expectations that we and others have created for ourselves. These
characterized expectations are like figures in a poem or a myth. They are
creatures of artifice—our own artifice and the artifice of others.
To what end is this
mythographic shamanism? What emerges is a concept of selfhood and human
identity that is subject to alteration, revision, and redemption. Blake and
Moorcock offer what might be described as a Wittgensteinian ontology, where the
contours of human self-perception and social identity are to be located in the
activities of human beings in unique and particularized settings in the stream
of life. Blake and Moorcock are telling stories about people encountering and
confronting the orthodoxies of their personal mythologies. In Zettel 464
Wittgenstein (1967, para. 464) defines his “pedigree of psychological concept”
as a function of his philosophical insight and procedure, declaring, “I strive
not after exactness, but after a synoptic view” Blake and Moorcock follow this
procedure, providing analyses of the complex relationships and
interdependencies that are revealed in the portrayal, in the examination, and
in the analysis of language, poetic conception, conceptual confusion,
philosophical credulity, illusion, neurosis, and the industrialized and
capitalized mythographic manipulations of individuals and society.
Bibliography
Blake, William. The Complete Writings of William
Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Random House, 1957.
Bacon, Francis. 1620. Novum Organum. New York: Liberal
Arts Press, 1960.
Damon, S. Foster. 1988. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas
and Symbols of William Blake. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. Cosmos and History: The Myth of
the Eternal Return. New York: Harper and Row.
Hill, Christopher. 1977. Milton and the En glish
Revolution. New York: Viking.
Jencks, Charles. 1995. The Architecture of the Jumping
Universe: A Polemic: How Complexity Science Is Changing Architecture and
Culture. London: Academy Editions.
Milton, John. 1930. Areopagitica. In The Student’s
Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson. New York: Crofts.
Moorcock, Michael. 1994. Blood: A Southern Fantasy.
London: Millennium.
———. 1997. “About My Multiverse.” In Tales from the
Texas Woods, 49–50. Austin: Mojo.
———. 1995. Fabulous Harbours. New York: Avon.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.
© 2008 University of South Carolina. Excerpted with permission from New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, published by the University of South Carolina Press.
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