"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air – there’s the rub, the task."

Virgil

What price wonderland?

Fetters

I find, while working on my thesis draft, that it is entirely too likely that I will become distracted by things like television shows. My current obsession is Bones. While the show itself is not necessarily complex (it follows the same basic structure of: brief introduction, murder, Booth and Bones finding the site, gross exploration of the corpse, relief when the murderer is found, and some romantic end-cap), I have convinced myself that, because it is a story, it relates in some larger way to my life. Added bonus -- I am not writing. Hence my current predicament.

I think the best advice I have received in the past week for the extolment of writing is to not look at it as a chore. Find something of yourself in your writing, and place a part of yourself in it.

Easier said than done.

Rochester Is Killing Me

Right now I am trying to read Baudrillard -- it's not working too well. This is because I am too deep in the simulacra. I've been watching too much television and not doing enough work. I don't think I'll ever be able to do what I consider to be enough work. It's really quite odd if you stop and think about what Baudrillard is trying to get at; what is "real" or what is just an attempt to create a symbolic real out of something that was never real in the first place. I know this doesn't really make any sense but the big bad scary internet isn't really interested in what I have to say.

Well on a completely separate but not entirely different note; what the past month's events have taught me is that possibly the only thing I can take any semblance of comfort out of is that I really am a nihilist. Not the absolute harshness of nihilist that everyone thinks that Nietzsche wrote about but the one where humanity has killed god through their love of the simulacra. (See not so different) God no longer exists because the real representation or symbol of god is gone and is substituted with an artificial symbol of what we wanted the first symbol to be. The death of god is celebrated everyday because we no longer attempt transcendence. Anyway, the comfort part is that I am a romantic nihilist -- transcendence is possible but can not be found in the culture we live in.

Thesis work

Though I am sure no one is actually reading this I feel that this blog affords me the opportunity to use it as a forum to regurgitate and recapitulate ideas I have on the subject of Blake and Barker. That said this is what I am working on right now:

What interests me most about William Blake and Clive Barker is that they both hold the power of imagination in the highest regard. Through imagination we are able to transcend the restrictions of contemporary culture. Both writers, through the mode of fantastic literature, attempt to redefine humanity in a way that complicates and often eradicates the artificial limits we place on ourselves through various ideologies. They try to break the mind-forged manacles of culture. For me, culture (at least contemporary late-capitalist culture) is perhaps the most detrimental thing that has happened to the human condition. Our culture simultaneously promotes positivist thinking and discredits any discussion of what seems to be explicitly unreal. Better put, our society forces monologic ideologies and tries to discredit any engagement in subversive exploration of the human condition. Example -- Speculative Fiction is apparently not a legitimate academic pursuit.

I feel that Speculative Fiction allows us a unique insight to how culture forces concepts of self-creation/ identity creation to be little more than creations of rather complicated simulacra. What is real when everything around us is in some way tied to the nebulas workings of late capitalism? Both Blake and Barker's literature tries to decenter capitalism's hold on ideologies while replacing it with imagination. Imagination functions a both a subversive and transcendent force for new creations of identity outside cultural ideologies.

What I am trying to do now (in my Master's Thesis) is to look at Baudrillard's concepts of Simulacra and Simulation, Althusser's Ideologies and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Zizek's proletariatization of the Subject and apply it to Blake's work. In Blake's work I am looking at the question of how do we create a self inside culture? And does creation of unopposed ideologies force an apocalypse?

Any ideas?

Clive Barker

I find the horror writer Clive Barker to be a good analogue to William Blake, in part because I am writing my thesis on comparing the literature of the two, but also because Barker cites Blake as being a major influence to his work. Barker is perhaps a better example of revolutionary artist for this class insofar as he is contemporaneous and specifically engages with a fight to decenter ruling class ideologies.

Both Barker and Blake deal with concerns regarding ruling class ideologies and use their artwork and literature to fight against them. Barker's artwork, like his writing attempts to destabilize the white heterosexual male patriarchal society. He does this by privileging women in his novels. More specifically he places the power of the menstruating woman in the center of many of his narratives. (i.e. “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” The Great and Secret Show, and Weaveworld)

Barker also places great importance on imagination both in his images and in his novels . He argues along the same lines as Blake re imagination. Many of Barker's sketches are darkly lined images of monsters, many of them contorted, deformed, anthropomorphous men.

Barker states that the male nude subject is particularly interesting to him because, as a gay male, he enjoys the male human form. What to me seems subversive about this subject of monsters is, if we look at his literature, we see that he views original power as residing in women and monsters. In many of his narratives he explicitly states that men are simply an after product of the copulation between women and demons. (“The Skins of the Fathers,” Imajica) How he emphasizes the male figure subverts the female nude subject. Because he uses the nude male body as a base for many of his pictures the female body is not the object of gaze, instead it is inverted. Furthermore, because the male body is caricatured and morphed into a monster it is no longer an objectified object.

One of the sources that Barker uses to explain the power he places in demons is Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” In this, Blake writes that the Devil, because he symbolizes energy and imagination is a better source for art and inspiration when compared with the tyrannical Christian God. This could explain both men's preoccupations with monsters and devils.

Both Barker and Blake place importance on the transcendent power of imagination. As we can see in many of the above images, Barker often creates imaginative variations of the human body in order to subvert standard artistic forms such as the female nude instead privileging imagination and impassioned energy.

In general, Barker's art utilizes many of Blake's transcendent ideas in order to decenter ruling class ideologies of sex and hegemony. His art can be considered revolutionary because, through his art, Barker begs us to consider different forms of power and different ways to perceive the sexes through image and narrative.