This is not a pleasant, or particularly "spiritual", image to have as wallpaper on one's computer monitor for a week. Showing the figure of a distraught naked man struggling to force his way out of a cave that completely surrounds and engulfs him, it's one of Blake's more claustrophobic images. The caption says, "He struggles into Life," though it could just as easily say, "He struggles against inevitable death and annihilation." The figure could be forcing his way out, or he could be in the process of being crushed.
But I suppose we should take the image in the spirit of the caption: this is a being struggling into, rather than out of, life. For Blake, this shows the peril and herculean labor involved of being born into consciousness, or into imagination. At times, it can feel like being suffocation--such as when the world calls you mad, when you are cut-off and isolated, because of your dedication to the life of the imagination. But it is a birthing process; it is the struggle of the plant to reach the surface; given time, the plant will break through seemingly impenetrable rock to reach the sunlight.
And here, as elsewhere in this book, Blake is writing about breaking out of the vegetative, into the imaginative, life. If we have the patience of the plant, we will transcend plant-like existence.
I also want to remark that Blake is indeed invoking the four elements, as I mentioned in my entry for plate 4. In plate 4, it was water; here it is earth. I realize now that he invokes the four elements in The First Book of Urizen as well; in fact, there are a couple plates (plate 12 and 14) in particular that seem to draw on the emblem design here.
How is my "spiritual reading" going? I still don't feel a strong narrative yet. But then emblem books had their own spiritual uses, emblem books such as Durer's which were so evocative and, in their own way, terrifying--and a great influence on Blake, who had prints by Durer tacked up on his workshop walls.
I need to think more about reading images as opposed to text. I love Blake because he marries the two in such interesting and unique ways, but here the image is clearly ascendant. The text, it is clear, is not going to help me much. I need to find the narrative in the visual rather than the textual here.
Posted by jeb at November 22, 2004 11:58 PM | TrackBackMy favorite plate from "Gates" is "At length for hatching ripe, he breaks the shell." It's significant of course, that "Shell" is the sixth plate, building on the liberative possibilities that are so seemingly denied in the fifth plate. Good to see someone talking about Blake on a web-log.
Posted by: Melvin at November 24, 2004 3:33 PM