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Blake, Hegel, and the Sciences

2019; Temple University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/702581

2640-7310

Tilottama Rajan,

Moravian Church and William Blake

Previous articleNext article FreeBlake, Hegel, and the SciencesTilottama RajanTilottama RajanUniversity of Western Ontario Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel calls nature “the negative of the Idea,” an alien existence where spirit does not find itself. He also describes it as a “frozen” or “petrified intelligence,” attributing the phrase to Schelling (Hegel, Nature 14–15). Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815), posthumously published only in 1861 and so unavailable to Hegel, does indeed begin with a geological unconscious that impedes any progressive narrative of cosmic or human history, as time is locked in a “rotatory movement” that blocks any “true beginning” or “veritable end” (Schelling, Ages 20). However, the text Hegel evokes is not Schelling’s Ages but his earlier System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), and it is Hegel who adds the words “erstarrte [congealed]” and “versteinerte [petrified],” sometimes translated as “fossilized.”1 For in the System Schelling had seen no resistance between matter and spirit, nonliving and living being, envisioning a seamless process that resolves “the whole of nature … into an intelligence” (6). Hegel invokes the Schelling of the Identity philosophy because he too wants an Aufhebung of “the dead and unconscious products of nature” that overcomes the resistance of the inorganic to organization, as life self-organizes towards spirit (Schelling, System 6). Following this program, Alison Stone, in her book of that name, sees “petrified intelligence” as figuring an unconsciously rational activity in nature, whereby, as Hegel moves up the Chain of Being from minerals to man, he forges increasingly tight concept-matter relations that bring the logics of nature and mind into identity. Stone thus sees Hegel as offering a “strong a priori reading” of nature as determined in advance by the structures of consciousness (6, 57–59), rather than as more riskily exposing thought to its immanent entanglement in nature. In her view the Philosophy of Nature successfully enacts the dialectic, as each stage in the Idealist Stufenfolge or Stufengrade—the graduated stages through which nature learns to make man—resolves a contradiction in the previous stage (60–61): or as Coleridge puts it, using a similarly dialectical logic in a fragment on “The Scale of Life” (1825), “problems” exist at a “lower grade” that “find their solution … higher up in the scale” (2: 1194).Yet the word “petrified” recurs in the geology section of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, retrojecting a materiality onto its initial use that impedes the sublation into metaphor necessary for this dialectic. Hegel writes of “petrified wood,” “huge forests … flattened down and buried under masses of debris.” Mixed up with “petrified shell-fish and huge bones” of mammoths, this “confused mass” is a ruin found across all continents, crushing any progressive history or anthropology (280). This congealed existence precedes but affectively coexists with the division of earth into sea and land, continents, Old and New Worlds (278). Returning to a time before Europe and America, Blake’s (First) Book of Urizen likewise opens with the undead, with “forests” that are a “petrific, abominable chaos” (3.23–26; E 71). Against this geo-catastrophic beginning, the Euro-American anthropology by which Blake launches history toward apocalypse in the continental prophecies, like Hegel’s equally chauvinistic Philosophy of History, is no more than a regional project: a project and projectile that Blake figures in The Book of Ahania through the fiery beam of Fuzon that Los, after five hundred years, can do no more than senselessly beat in a “mass” (2.44–48; E 85).Hegel’s petrification of spirit in matter has two aspects. First, it “halt[s]” history, because the earth has no genesis; earth “endures” rather than “produces itself” (Hegel, Nature 279), like Wordsworth’s “woods decaying, never to be decayed,” which the halted traveller of The Prelude can sublimate only through a forced idealism (1805: 6.557). For Hegel the earth is not a “living creature,” whereas in the animal organism that is his increasingly problematic goal “each member is product and also productive” (Nature 278–9). This integration allows events and entities to be produced, but only as what David Krell, discussing German Idealism, calls “botched,” though necessary, “attempts at depicting the absolute” (96–97). Yet it is not that earth has no history, since it contains the sedimented strata of numerous times that have been put under erasure. It is just that the history in question is not a progressive history with a beginning, purpose, and end.Second, the earth Hegel describes is a fossilized world that moves in the opposite direction from any awakening into spirit. The fossil-world speaks of extinction. In it, what was once alive is now (un)dead; what is yet to happen is already over, preserved only as the ruin that Walter Benjamin calls natural history: “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape” without “redemption” (166). Worth noting, as well, is where Hegel’s discussion of geology comes in the Philosophy of Nature. Though Hegel describes the earth as a “mechanical organism” because its “members” do not “contain the life-process within themselves” (Nature 278), he takes up geology in the last division, on “Organics.” This division follows Mechanics and Physics, and moves, in a further triad, from the terrestrial, through the plant, to the animal organism. The earth, in other words, marks a resistance to the concept of organism that is not before organism and organization but within it as its unconscious.The Philosophy of Nature differs from Schelling’s System in two ways, both relevant to the Urizen books, inasmuch as Urizen itself constitutes Blake’s Naturphilosophie, while The Book of Los is the aesthetic this Naturphilosophie dis-spirits or de-generates. First, while the System synchronically parallels nature and spirit,2 Hegel temporalizes this transition as a labor of the negative whose difficult details cast the project in doubt. For as he poignantly concludes, “Nature’s ever-increasing wealth of detail” is “refractory towards the unity of the Notion” (Nature 444). Second, Hegel remediates the Stufenfolge as a Stufenfolge der Wissenschaften. He provides an account not of the graduated stages of nature but of a graduated series of disciplines and fields describing these stages, thus conceding that these evolutionary stages are an intellectual construction.3 The three main divisions of this epistemic Stufenfolge—Mechanics, Physics, and Organics—then enfold subfields like mineralogy, meteorology, cosmology, and pathology. Some, like meteorology, recur in more than one division, as Hegel restlessly views a field of knowledge through different optics, unraveling his attempt at a rigorous succession of disciplines that will demonstrate reason in nature. The various sciences can be compared to the shapes of mind in the Phenomenology. Indeed Hegel borrows the narrative pathos of the Phenomenology in similarly configuring the raw materials of his Jena lectures on nature as a narrative when arranging them for his Encyclopedia, of which the Philosophy of Nature is the second part. Moreover, Hegel’s relation to these sciences, which he cannot arrange in an ascent (after all, he ends with pathology), autobiographically repeats spirit’s relation to nature. For the sciences, he says, are “man’s non-organic nature,” which he must digest and make his own (Nature 276). This self-thematization throws the sciences, as shapes of mind that try to grasp alien material by imposing consciousness onto dark matter, reflexively back on the metaphysical conceit of trying to make nature into “the mirror of ourselves” and thus into “a free reflex of Spirit” (Nature 445).Blake cannot be said to organize the sciences in an ascent, being desperately caught in their consequences. To avoid their impact, in Milton he binds art and science to a conservative metaphysical binary, writing that… in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music,And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man.Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and onlyScience remains thro Mercy: & by means of Science, the ThreeBecome apparent in Time & Space, in the Three ProfessionsPoetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physic & Surgery.(27.55–60; E 125)Here art is a potentiality in eternity that is obscured in “Time & Space,” while science is used in its older sense of systematized knowledge. But in this passage science is metaphysically subordinated so as to protect a transcendental idealism of art, functioning at best as a distorting vehicle for art, but not as a catalyst that might change the very nature of art. So, for example, when music passes through the analytic filter of science it degenerates into law. The case of architecture is revealing. It “is” science because of its mathematical elements, which led Kant to align system with architectonic (690). That it is also clearly an art allows “science” to be redeemed, but only by being harmonized and aestheticized, sublated into a romantic ideology of art.In Urizen, however, Blake feels the trauma of the specific fields we now call sciences: geology, biology, embryology. In his (self-critical) character of the Eternals, Blake therefore demonizes Urizen to close off the metaphysical void of a naturalistic world (3.4; E 70). The poem opens with a world “shut in the deep,” unseen “changes” in “desolate mountains,” “seas,” “thunders,” an “abominable chaos.” (3.10–11, 24–26, 31–4; E 70–71). “Some sa[y]” this abandoned life is Urizen (3.5; E 70), and following their lead Blake projects a tyrannical and restrictive power to contain the disruptive eco-ontological effects described in the opening through a binary of reason and imagination that does not explain these phenomena. To ground this phantasmology of knowledge, Blake constructs a pantheon that he populates with uncouth names by which he tries to digest the non-organic and make it his own, hysterically piling on more names in further texts. But the human may be only an episode in a pre- and post-human world. So to anthropomorphize this world and locate a power we can fight, Blake attributes this world and its “armies” to Urizen (5.16; E 73), though at this point the part-subject Urizen has yet to emerge. Since Urizen’s genesis comes after what is described as “his” “world,” it is unclear if the subject precedes and commands the predicate, if Urizen is a substance with attributes, or if attributes produce the substantive Urizen as compensation and explanation. And indeed before these changes in which he is hypostatized and disastrously metastasizes, Urizen is described only in negatives, as “unknown,” a “vacuum,” a congealed effect more than a cause: an “obscure separation” (Urizen 3.2, 5–6, 5.40; E 70, 73).Yet in the passage from Milton, Blake does allow science a half-life “thro Mercy.” Even more intriguing, he locates the debased form of painting in “Physic & Surgery.” It is as if he senses in science a potential obscured by his own equation of the sciences with system. Is it possible that science, instead of being the enemy of imagination, might be the condition of possibility for a less transcendental aesthetic, wherein “Physic & Surgery,” rather than being reduced forms of “Painting,” open up new forms of art? Blake did scientific engraving for Basire, and his own engravings bear the impression of medical and scientific illustration (Connolly 34–60). Might his visual plates, particularly in Urizen, be part of a genealogy in which medical and scientific illustration open pathways to new forms of art such as surrealism?The Eternals in Urizen resist such metaphysical and aesthetic climate change with “fury” and “intense indignation” (4.44; E 72). Thereafter they abscond from the world of generation and stand “wide apart” (5.41; E 73). Returning after seven ages of witness protection, they ask that a “tent” be “spread,” which seems also to be a temple with “pillars” (19.2–7; E 78). They weave a “woof” and “call it Science” (19.2–9; E 78). But it is profoundly unclear here what “science” means. Moreover as the figures mutate (from tent, to curtains and pillars, to woof), the referent of “it” is also loosened. Does “it” refer to the tent/woof or to science? The two seem to inhabit the copula of a (non)identity. And does “science” refer to the life sciences that thwart a Hegelian narrative of spirit, which the Eternals must therefore cordon off with a tent? Or is “it” the systematized knowledge that the Eternals impose on this mess to “bind in the Void” opened by these new sciences (19.3; E 78), which tent they “call” science in the older sense of an architectonic system, as they confess through this paleonym the more modern sciences they repress? After all the Eternals are said to weave “curtains of darkness,” aligning them with superstition (19.5; E 78), and the woof they weave may be science as a web of errors or the web of errors they weave in calling “it” science.Equally unclear is the text’s chronology, since the Eternals exile Urizen to the north before they themselves can logically exist (2.3; E 70), given that in eternity there are no entities with defined agency. Thus rather than read the poem as an explanatory history whose diagnosis of things as they are removes our mind-forged manacles, I suggest that it opens in several windows that look onto an impasse: geology in chapter 1, physics in chapter 2, biology and embryology thereafter, and lastly anthropology as the ant-like scattering of the peoples into tribes. Indeed the Lambeth books as a whole can be read nonsequentially, as opening various windows onto this impasse: history and myth in the Continental prophecies, art in The Book of Los, the sciences in Urizen—all paths on which Blake stalls.Both Blake and Hegel want to see matter as self-assembling into organized life, though Blake is far closer to grasping the disaster of an immanence without transcendent guarantees. Hegel’s norm is a body whose essence is expressed in and fully determines its members, an ideal that returns and is also problematized in his Aesthetics and even more brutally disfigured in Blake’s Urizen books, including The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los. Crucial for Hegel is his distinction of “parts” (Teile), which come together only as aggregates, from “members” (Glieder), which contribute to a whole that determines them. Thus the plant cannot “hold its members” together as it spreads and divides, “fall[ing] apart into a number of individuals,” while the animal is a “subjective unity of members” (Nature 276–77, 303). The body that has made its parts and qualities its properties and taken possession of itself is also a model for the integrity of knowledge. Kant had used this body as the co-inherence of parts and whole to figure science architectonically as a system from which there can be no subtractions or contingent additions, no mutilations or transplants (690). Immersing Kant’s figure in the actual materiality of bodies—where an animal, unlike a polypus, cannot lose a limb without suffering—Hegel writes proactively that the sciences must become a particular kind of body: an “organism,” not an “aggregate” (Nature 6, 444). Yet not only does the Philosophy of Nature not hold its members together. For it grew over twenty-six years through additions that exceeded Hegel’s constant attempts at schematizing and reschematizing it. Moreover, in the middle of this process, when Hegel absorbed his earlier Jena material into the Encyclopedia and organized it as a Stufenfolge der Wissenschaften, he also narrativized the Philosophy of Nature as a phenomenology of spirit that struggles with the labor of the negative—something he did not do with the other two parts of the Encyclopedia.4 So not only does the Philosophy of Nature, like Hegel’s larger corpus, not hold its members together, failing to self-organize as it experiences the “accident[s]”5 of its additions and the pathos of its narrative alongside the logic of its schema(s). Its various sciences, though organized in what seems an ascending pattern, also present a series of mirror-stages in which spirit repeatedly fails to find itself, as sciences are transferred into and recur in one another, troubling any clear ascent.In theory the progression through the major stages, or Divisions, has as its goal the living, self-determining body as the telos of nature and confirmation of Hegel’s system. As Hegel’s early follower Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79) explains it, Mechanics is the science of “matter in general,” Physics deals with matter’s “specialization … through its specific force,” and Organics with “the individualizing of matter through Life” (133; trans. mine). Physics is thus the connecting link between dead and living, embodied matter,6 but in the second Division on “Physics,” forces like light, heat, and sound are diffused and have not yet taken form in a self-determining body. These forces, like Shelley’s “shape all light” in The Triumph of Life, annihilate their matter rather than reveal themselves in their parts. By the end of the Physics we reach an example of matter spontaneously organizing and arranging itself in the planets (Hegel, Nature 104). Yet the planets fall short in being a plurality of merely external relationships. “It is only in life,” Hegel says, “that we meet with subjectivity and the counter to” this “externality” (18). But as we move inside life in the Division on Organics, it does not necessarily yield the shape or teleology Hegel wants for the organic (275). The earth’s members are internally connected, but inertly; the earth is only an “implicit organism” (278), a practico-inert of the unconscious. Then, in the next section the plant ramifies into individuals; but relapsing from the planets in the previous Division, they are parts, not wholes, as the scale of disciplines fails to support the notion of progression.The animal is indeed an integrity. But curiously in the third subsection of “Organics,” on the animal organism, having staked his claim to the unity of the animal body against the rhizomatic vegetable body, Hegel gives considerable prominence to disease and death. Disease is the member’s withdrawal into a resistant negativity (428), but since the animal body is a unity, its very integration means that a disintegration that was superficial in the plant “derange[s]” the whole animal organism, as “one wheel … ma[kes] itself the centre” (433). Moreover, it is in this subsection that Hegel takes up physiology in onto-psychic ways, though in his immediately preceding account of the functions of the animal organism, the assimilation of food, rather than being approached pragmatically and descriptively, had already seemed a site of disease.7In the further journey into the interior of physiology that Hegel then undertakes, the tangled structures abjected onto the plant resurface in the networks of the body’s internal systems of ganglia and nerve-threads (364–65). Nor can Hegel cleanly separate inorganic from organic sciences, so as to leave lower sciences behind. Anatomy is a struggle with mechanics; bones are wood, he says (361), trying to allegorize them in terms of consciousness, but conceding thereby a resistance of matter to spirit at the heart of the body. And physiology is full of chemistry in the accounts of the digestive and nervous systems and the phenomena of sensibility and irritability. For Hegel chemistry is the death of the organism’s very Concept: it “applies only to what is lifeless,” and “animal processes,” as living, “always sublate the chemical” (394). But if life is thoroughly chemical, as Hegel also says (269), sublation may have to mean not that we overcome the chemical but that we find organic significance in it, for instance as the psychosomatic. The psychosomatic is an interzone that is throughout this section in the body’s irritable-sensible chemistry, which unlike the chemical process in minerals, is imbued with affect. This animalization or vitalization of chemistry also inflects Blake’s texts, whose characters respond through affect rather than intellection. That the human is only a subset of the animal for both writers, that it is studied by science under the animal, is a further problem, making it as difficult to move from nature to spirit as from the nonliving to the living.In short, the organism, in the metaphysical sense Hegel wants, eludes him as he grapples with science’s ever-increasing “wealth of detail” (Nature 444). Blake’s Urizen, as we have said, opens in several windows that face inward into the darkness of this detail, as it too is concerned with the making of a body/corpus.8 Chapter 1 stalls in the petrified world of geology that, though outside human life, intersects with the human when Los in The Book of Los attacks a “vast solid without fluctuation” that seems both inside and outside him, by madly unleashing flames on marble or rock (4.3–9; E 91). The same phrase had been used in Urizen (4.11; E 71), intervaginating the two texts. Chapter 2 of Urizen, on the Eternals, unfolds in Physics: what Hegel sees as a Dynamic physics, rather than the mechanics- and mathematics-based physics of Newton, about whom Hegel, like Blake, is deeply critical (Hegel, “De Orbis” 2–4, 8). Thus in Urizen “Earth [is] not” and bodies fuse into each other (3.36; E 71). Here there is light, heat, and sound but no gravity, and thus no cohesion or shape; qualities exist, unattached, as affects without subjectivity. Blake idealizes this condition, but in Ahania the fiery beam of Fuzon never consolidates into anything. And in Urizen, when the Eternals as pure, shapeless force unleash their flames, Eternity opens back into the geoscape of chapter 1, thwarting their prophetic fury as fires, oceans, and mountains are all “ruinously” mixed up (4.44–5.12; E 72–73). Thereafter Urizen emerges over seven ages as a body in bits and pieces that frustrates any evolutionary reading of epigenesis: a spine in the first age, freezing over the nerves; then, in the second age, what may be a heart “shooting out ten thousand branches,” in a zone between plant and animal that allows psychiatry to leak into anatomy; then, in the third age, the brain, a “nervous brain,” not a mind, which again “shoots branches / Round the branches of [the] heart” as veins and plants are confused; still in the third age, eyes “fixed in two little caves”; and then in the remaining four ages, ears, nostrils, throat, arms and feet in the seventh age, but no head or other body parts (10.37–13.19; E 75–76). Not only does this body not hold its members together; the process of animalization, as the science of Blake’s time calls it, is mixed up with vegetable structures, thwarting any progression up the chain of being. Before this long attempt at evolution, the so-called Urizen had framed a “roof” that was also a “womb” in which he himself is born, in a metaphysical prolapsis of cause and effect (5.28–29; E 73). After Urizen’s emergence through seven ages, as Los tries to hammer him into shape with “bellows and hammer,” we again revert to the globule/embryo that is the globe or world: a “round globe of blood,” “Wand’ring wide on the bosom of night” and “Trembling upon the void” (13.37, 57–60; E 77). In Urizen’s last two chapters we leave this convolution of embryology and evolutionary biology for a more linear anthropology that includes the emergence of continents and races and the formation of cities. But if this is an anthropology in the sense of an account of man, it is in no sense humanistic, as Urizen “in darkness clos’d, view[s] all his race” (23.22; E 81).The Book of Los is a further window onto this disaster, involving art. Taking up the contemporary life sciences’ pervasive concern with organization, a term central to Blake, and paralleling Idealism’s desire to see nature as self-organizing into spirit, Urizen traces the emergence of organized life from matter, but as a question about whether the process can even occur. When matter fails to immanently self-organize into spirit, The Book of Los then becomes a supplement that turns to art to impose form on matter. The poems share a disastrous narrative about geo-biological organization, and disorganize the sequence Hegel will try to build in his Encyclopedia, which is based on Herder’s model of natural history leading to the history of man. For in Urizen, unlike the Philosophy of Nature, we jump from the formation of the earth to the animal, with the vegetable being a lacuna covered over and returning inside the animal. Going back to Urizen and The Book of Los, the visual plates that frontally assault us in the former with “dark visions of torment” (2.7; E 70) likewise serve as accompaniment to the much barer Book of Los, which elaborates on many of these plates.9 The texts, in other words, are conjoined twins, like Los himself and Urizen, who is rent from Los’s side. But in The Book of Los, Blake develops Los into an artist, a role that was less foregrounded in Urizen. At the same time Los’s art is hardly Hegel’s classical art as the “adequate embodiment of the idea” (Aesthetics 1.77), which parallels Hegel’s concept of a body that is fully expressed in and determines its members. Los’s manic and tortured struggle with recalcitrant material comes closer to what Hegel calls “symbolic” art: an art that is pre-art, premature, but which, if we take it seriously, calls in question the whole notion of aesthetics as what Baumgarten calls the art of thinking beautifully (167). While Hegel feels bound to dismiss such art, he is also clearly drawn to it, referring to its “sublime preliminary experiments” (Aesthetics 1.317). In symbolic art, the idea is still “indeterminate,” and not yet “inwardly clear to itself” (1.76, 352). Hence the artist “staggers around,” “adapting to the meaning sought the shapes that forever remain alien,” as his art “distorts and stretches” “natural shapes,” positing itself “as the inherently deficient” (1.76–77, 317–19). Any binding of this chaos only results in a “bad and untrue determinacy” (1.76).Foretelling his role as artist, the earlier Song of Los ends with an image of Los as blacksmith hammering into shape a globe or orb of fire, an orb that, in Urizen, luridly degenerates into a globe of blood and a womb. In the final visual plate of the Song, Los stands above this globe of matter and forces, though the actual poem’s attempt to organize itself falls into bits and pieces. But in the surreal, internal cinematography of the Book of Los, it is not clear with what material Los works, and whether he is inside or outside it. Los wrestles with marble at the outset (4.4–10, 22; E 91–92). But at the same time he seems to be a blacksmith working in furnaces and with bellows that become his own lungs, as Urizen, whom he beats into shape, takes form inside him, in a collapsing boundary between masculine labor and female, embryological labor. As such, the text deranges aesthetics as the discipline of either the beautiful or sublime, as Los, as much a victim as Urizen of Blake’s knowledge of embryology, sinks into the amniotic fluid of the sciences, a “stifling black fluid,” that he struggles to get out of only to sink back again (4.54–70; E 93).In chapter 1 Los works at his furnace, but the fires yield no “light” or “heat,” only “Coldness, darkness, obstruction, a Solid / Without fluctuation” that is “Black as marble of Egypt; impenetrable” (3.49, 4.46; E 91). Working on this petrified intelligence as unprocessed psychic material, Los’s art consists less in sculpting matter into form, than in battering forms of inorganic, resistant matter that break into pieces, revealing the psychic void at the heart of imagination. For when the solid breaks into “numberless fragments,” it is not clear whether this solid, “crumbling with bursting sobs,” is the material with which Los is struggling or Los himself as his psychic defenses and internal barriers collapse (4:19–21; E 92). Given the enjambed syntax in which participles lack a clear subject and may refer backward or forward, it is impossible to separate Los and what he works on. Nor can we distinguish Los and the disastrous environment in, through, and as which he emerges, struggling upon the “Spawn of waters,” as his lungs, which are also the lungs of his bellows, “heave incessant” in the drowning waters (4:70, 54–55; E 93).The first two chapters of Los replay those of Urizen: the marble, object of aesthetic work, becomes primal rock, bringing back the earlier text’s geological unconscious. And the waste land opened up when the myth of Eternity in Urizen “roll[s] wide apart” (5.5; E 73) similarly appears in The Book of Los when this rock “crack[s] across into numberless fragments” under Los’s fury, creating a “vacuum” that becomes “element”: a “vast world of waters,” winds, “furious torrents.” (4:18–25, 51, 66–67; E 92–93). Simultaneously Los falls back in time, and through “Many ages of groans” a body emerges in “Branchy forms,” its organs “like roots / Shooting out from the seed” (4:27–33, 43–44, 64–65; E 92–93). And given the suppression of proper names we also struggle to distinguish Los and Urizen, the artist and his object, the process and product. For not only is Los “born” in chapter 2, after already existing in chapter 1; while Urizen emerges as an outgrowth of Los and is abortively organized, Los’s falling mind also “labour[s] / Organizing itself,” being born from inside himself, as the bellows of the furnace become his own lungs, and the unseparated cosmi