Blake’s experiments with geometry show us a kind of repetition that refuse the binary between distraction and concentration, and between abstraction and apparent organicism. Rule-based iteration is necessary to the construction of geometrical forms, but in its iterations it can produce a sort of guided slippage or dizzying self-replication on a smaller and smaller scale. That is, at least, what it looks like when one looks at a mandala with an eye for constructedness; in the simplest pattern, a line is iteratively subdivided according to a rule. The form, in its iterations, articulates difference. For Blake, abstraction is at its most unproblematically productive when it operates locally.
Informed by this ethos, I attempted, in this short piece for Notes & Queries, to avoid closing off the inquiry that I opened up by demonstrating Blake’s eternal geometer to be performing a rather arcane geometrical proof of conics which was central to Isaac Newton’s formalization of the inverse square law.
In this context we might consider Blakean abstraction as a bridge between his early work, which has always been generally well-received, and his later prophetic work, whose grand systems have always seemed to require elaborate defenses. If Blake found it possible to weave Enlightenment rationalism into a renovated reason, we might find traces of his technique in his flickerings between the apparently rectilinear and the apparently chaotic. We might also see his visual framework as a patching of the early works into the later, as an interrelated collection of experiential forms. As with the way the forms of attention that these patterns demand from us adumbrate our understanding of some of the argument’s central terms, we can see the structures of the different logical orders that ideology so artfully interweaves into an apparent whole; if we are attentive we can also still see the seams and stitches.
