And very soon they all stopped together, giving way to another feeling—that of having stopped. I stopped writing the novel and I stopped reading the book. The vessel had succumbed to the rock.
I’ll step away from that metaphor now. I’ll abandon that ship for a minute. What had happened was that the more I read about Milton’s use of the felix culpa idea, the happy sin, or Blake’s complex transformation of the moral imperatives of orthodox doctrine by means of a form of the Ophite heresy—the more I was impressed by Nuttall’s account of Blake and Milton, in short—the more perplexed I found myself to be with relation to my own novel. I worried that I’d got bits of it wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to put them right. In fact, I found myself immobile, held down by a thousand tiny threads.
Putting it another way, I had felt my ankles sinking into a quicksand, and I knew that the only way to avoid sinking altogether was to keep as still as possible.
In other words, I was royally stuck. I was in real difficulties. It seemed that I was writing an examination paper rather than a story, and one that was going to be marked very severely, what’s more, because I hadn’t done nearly enough work in the library. It was a curious state to be in.
What freed me from it was remembering the well-known lines from plate 10 of Jerusalem:
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.
Those are the words of Los—Blake’s fallen angel, the divine aspect of imagination: “in fury & strength.”
Well, I seized on them with gratitude and relief, and repeated them to myself several times like an incantation. And I’d like to think that the delusion that had briefly enslav’d me behaved like the Spectre described in the lines that follow:
…in indignation & burning wrath
Shuddring the Spectre howls. His howlings terrify the night
He stamps around the Anvil, beating blows of stern despair
He curses Heaven & Earth, Day & Night & Sun & Moon
He curses Forest Spring & River, Desart & sandy Waste
Cities & Nations, Families & Peoples, Tongues & Laws
Driven to desperation by Los’s terrors & threatning fears…
I’d like to think it did, as I say, but the delusion that had me in its coils didn’t quite behave like that. Instead it softly and suddenly vanished away, just like the hunter of the Snark that turned out to be a Boojum. As soon as I realised that of course I was creating my own system, and of course my business was to create, and not reason and compare—with one bound I was free.
But it was a nasty moment.
Anyway, with a profound nod of thanks to William Blake, I went on and finished the book.
I should have remembered that Milton had saved me from a similar predicament at the very beginning, when I found myself inexorably—helplessly—bound into the writing of a fantasy, a genre of story I neither enjoyed nor approved of. I didn’t think much of fantasy because most fantasy I’d read seemed to take no interest in human psychology, which for me was the central point of fiction. It was only when I realised that Paradise Lost, a poem I loved and admired more than any other, was itself a sort of fantasy, and that the angels were not simply big-people-with-wings but could also be understood as emblems of psychological states, that I felt free to go ahead with my ideas about dæmons and talking bears and alternative worlds and what have you. I could use the apparatus of fantasy to say something that I thought was truthful and hoped was interesting about what it was like to be a human being.
Milton had showed me that, and now Blake was showing me that I didn’t need to creep around in somebody else’s system trying not to knock things over or make too much noise. I could arrange things exactly as I needed them in my own story, because I was creating my own system.
The relief was immense. I felt rather like the freed slave in Blake’s America:
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Well, something like that.
But that disconcerting experience, and my rescue from it, raises a couple of questions, and I want to think about them now and see if I can come to any conclusion.
The first one is: what is a system?
The second one is: are the only two attitudes possible towards systems—to create them or to be enslav’d by someone else’s?
And there is a third question too, which I’ll come to later.
So, first of all, what do we mean by a system? One large and obvious meaning it could have, in the context of this discussion, is undoubtedly religion. To call oneself a Christian, for example, is to announce your allegiance to a system, and a fertile one too. The Christian religion, which is the one I know about, has provided a system—an account of what the universe means, and of our place in it—that underpins the greatest part of our cultural heritage, including, not least, Paradise Lost. Being a Christian used to mean that you believed certain things and behaved in certain ways, but these days we can’t assume that we know exactly what those things are; any system that can claim the allegiance of both the Reverend Don Cupitt and the Reverend Jerry Falwell is a pretty accommodating one. Christianity, more than other religions perhaps, has been characterised by inveterate fissiparousness. Sect divides from sect, and the more closely they’re related, the more they hate each other. But never mind; there are people who are supremely happy to know that they belong to the only true faith, the Reformed Independent Baptist Exclusive and Particular Redeemed Seventh-Day Rapturous Children of God. Everyone else will go to hell.
Another thing system might mean is theory. So, for example, you might feel yourself enslav’d by psychoanalytical theory and the need to interpret everything through the glass of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, so you break free of it and create your own system that involves a collective unconscious and archetypes and images from alchemy and Eastern religion. You feel free in this new system; it fits the contours of your mind and your imagination and your temperament; it doesn’t constrict any part of you. In other words, you are Jung breaking away from Freud, and your system is a psychological one.
Or else your system could take a political form. Casting around for a way to explain the injustices and cruelties that press on your consciousness daily, but which most of your fellow citizens don’t even seem to notice, you discover feminist theory. At last! Suddenly a hundred things whose causes and relations were troubling and obscure become linked in a web of crystalline light. Everything is clear, from the smallest example of fatherly disapproval to the furthest reaches of tyranny and despotism. Or else you discover Marxism, with exactly the same result. Or else you become a devotee of the capitalist market system, with exactly the same result. A discovery of that sort would be an example of finding another man’s system in which you felt perfectly at home, and not enslav’d at all; in fact, you could say, and many people do, that it was only through finding this system that you first tasted freedom itself, and the slaves are those who have not yet entered the system with you, and who languish in the ignorance and darkness outside.
Another meaning that system might have is mythology, with a set of stories about characters like Yahweh, or Zeus, or the giant Albion, or Jesus Christ. Mythologies deal with the creation of things, and the appearance of human beings in a world we did not create. I’m not aware of any mythology that says the universe was created by human beings; we always turn up
afterwards, and the relation we have with the place we find ourselves in is part of what gives the system its emotional tone—determines whether it’s tragic, or optimistic, or dramatic, or whatever. Sometimes we are the rebellious children of the great creator; sometimes we are the children made by a sub-creator who rebelled against the first creator, like the creatures of Prometheus; but our presence here is accounted for in the story. We are part of everything that’s going on; even if we don’t fully understand it, we have the sense of coherence somewhere.
Blake’s mythology is a case in point, being endlessly complex and rich enough to sustain many an interpretation, with its gallery of enormous figures emerging from the clouds and the fires to howl their rage and defiance and disappear again into obscure darkness. What makes it great to a sympathetic reader is our awareness that although we can’t always fully understand the precise relations between Los and Urizen, or Rintrah and Palamabron, Blake himself has a clear idea of it all. It’s not like seeing part of a painted landscape through a window and guessing that if you moved a little to one side, you’d see the edge of the painting and the bare wall beyond it; it’s like seeing part of a real landscape through a window, and knowing that however far you moved to one side or another, there would always be more landscape to see. The parts we can’t see, the things we can’t understand, are really there beyond the edge of our vision, and in a proper relationship to one another—it’s just that they’re not easily visible. In other words, Blake’s system is a true system, and not the arbitrary ravings of a lunatic which it seemed to some of his early readers.
So system could mean religion, or it could mean theory, or it could mean mythology. Could it mean science? Or if not science itself, then an attitude to the world that accepts the value and importance of the scientific method, and the truth of what that method discloses?
Undoubtedly science does provide an explanatory narrative about the way things are, and that narrative includes ourselves. The difficulty for many people about the large-scale explanations that some scientists give is that these explanations reduce the importance of the part about us to insignificance. Some of them—the well-known book by Jacques Monod called Chance and Necessity, for example—paint a picture of a universe so bleak and pitiless, so empty of any meaning or consolation, that they demand an unusual degree of courage and resolution from us if we’re to accept them as they stand.
Which raises the question: does a system have to console? Why should a system exist for our benefit? It might have its own meaning and purpose, which are too big and mysterious for us to understand. Nevertheless, I think we could live with that, because of the hope that one day we might understand it; and that would give us the purpose of trying to find out the bigger purpose. I think we could even live with a malign purpose. It might even be bearable to discover that we had been put here to be fattened and eaten by some immense greedy god, in the form of human foie gras, because then we would have the great and noble aim of rebellion and the overthrow of tyranny. But science doesn’t seem to let us have even that savage purpose. The physicist Steven Weinberg says, “The more we understand about the universe, the more it seems to be utterly pointless.” It seems that we need a certain amount of moral fortitude if we’re to live our lives believing in nothing but science. It’s a noble system, no doubt, if it is a system at all, but it’s an austere and demanding one.
Well, I’ve looked at some of the things that might be meant by the word system in Blake’s lines. I want to go on now to my second question, which was about the two alternatives he proposed. “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another man’s,” he said. Are those the only two options, I wonder? Is there another attitude we could take? And remember, I’m talking about urgent practicalities here, about profound and vital questions. I’m not talking about adopting a system as one might take up a hobby, or choose a new tie or a new colour for the bathroom; I’m talking about something that will make it possible to write, or prevent it. I’m talking about what will allow life to flow through you, or what will choke it off and kill it. It’s that important.
Well, the first option, to create your own system, certainly worked for Blake. And he wasn’t the only writer to try that method. Another great poet who developed a private mythology was W. B. Yeats—a great admirer of Blake, of course. The use that a writer makes of a private mythology may be quite independent of its merit, by the way. As far as I can understand, Yeats’s system is absolute bunkum; miscellaneous bits and pieces of occult symbolism, numerology, invented ritual from the Order of the Golden Dawn, rubbish about the phases of the moon, and the like. You wouldn’t give tuppence for it if it were sold separately. But without it, Yeats wouldn’t have written those great poems of his final period—some of the most thrilling poetry in our language. The greatness of the poems, though, lies in the language and not in the system that inspired them, and we might—though it is with the greatest possible tentativeness that I advance this view under the auspices of the Blake Society—we might think the same of some of Blake: that the greatness of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, for example, is independent of their setting; even if we’d never heard of the rest of his system, even if we’d never seen his extraordinary illuminations. “The Sick Rose” and “The Tyger” and “The Little Girl Lost” and so many others would work their enchantment over us because of the majestic and magical power of his language. The value of a writer’s system, to the general reader, is not so much that it can be entered and enjoyed and lived in for its own sake, as that it gave rise to the work. No system, no work; or at any rate, much less interesting work.
The alternative to creating your own system—Blake’s alternative—was, you remember, to be enslav’d by another man’s. Well, I described earlier on, with reference to A. D. Nuttall’s book, how I found myself inadvertently enslav’d for a brief spell by a system that I certainly didn’t create; and it’s a profoundly irksome thing. But thinking of this slavery image for a minute, and remembering Blake’s famous words about Milton—that he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell…because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”—the implication of the fetters is that Milton was for some of the time enslav’d by a system that didn’t suit his particular genius.
The sharpness of Blake’s perception here is summed up, for me, in the last three words: Milton was of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.
There have been plenty of writers who did not know where their true talent lay. It’s perfectly possible to be enslav’d by a conception of the right thing to do which is totally at variance with the equipment you have to do it with. Sir Arthur Sullivan thought his duty was to write grand opera, and was impatient with that fellow Gilbert and his silly notions; and yet how many performances of the opera he did write, Ivanhoe, are there for every thousand of The Mikado?
If you’re lucky, you find out where your talent lies before it’s too late. It took me a long time to rid myself of the enslaving notion that the only proper sort of novel to write was a sternly realistic one. You can make yourself work in the shackles of duty for a certain amount of time, but it’s hard and painful; slave’s work, unredeemed, in a phrase of Ruskin’s, or making the will do the work of the imagination, in a phrase of Yeats’s. It’s trying to make cobwebs out of clay. When you discover where your talent genuinely lies, it really does feel like being set free. The enslavement Blake speaks of isn’t always imposed from outside. Mind-forg’d manacles are just as heavy as any other.
So when it comes to systems and our relation to them, you can create a system; you can find yourself enslav’d by one; and you can discover a system or a theory that you didn’t create, but in which at last you feel free, as I described a few minutes ago in the case of the person who is set free by their discovery of feminism, or Marxism, or whatever. Those seem to be the three main options. But earlier on I mentioned two questions I had i
n mind about systems: what is a system, firstly, and secondly, what are the possible attitudes to take towards systems; and I said there was a third question I’d come to later. Well, here is the third question: does a writer need a system at all? Is it possible to have no system? What would it be like to have no system? To be committed to nothing, to be enslav’d by nothing, to be labelled by nothing, to be known as nothing, to be fixed and limited by nothing?
I have to say that of all the ways of being I’ve described so far, my own nature leaps towards that one like a lover. But, of course, it’s not as simple as that.
Because we may be without a system, but we’re certainly not without all sorts of other mental baggage. It might be delightful if we were. In Tove Jansson’s The Exploits of Moominpappa, the young Moomin runs away from the Foundlings’ Home. Having made his escape, he says, “I had nothing to call my own. I knew nothing, but believed a lot. I did nothing by habit. I was extremely happy.” However much we might wish to be back in that condition, it doesn’t last very long. Habits grow quickly; and no one is without a temperament that colours their perceptions of the world, and inclines them to joy or to melancholy, to irritability or to patience; and hazard or sickness or fortune soon begin to make their marks, and those marks are indelible, and they keep coming until our characters are a palimpsest of the graffiti of circumstance; and if all those weren’t enough, we absorb the assumptions and prejudices of our parents and the social class we’re born into so early that they come to seem the only natural way to think and feel; whereas if we’d been born a mile away, with a differently coloured skin, we might have a completely different view of everything around us.
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