0.1 Blake's body: marcia brennan and the paradoxical paintings of

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O Human Imagination O Divine Body

William Blake

Elliot Wolfson began his first major monograph on medieval Jewish mysticism, Through a Speculum that Shines (1994), with the Blakean epigraph above. Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. This is how he concluded the same volume: Ibid., 397.

The hermeneutical circle is inscribed in the biblical verse "From my flesh I will see God," that is, from the sign of the covenantengraved on the penis the mystic can imaginatively visualize the divine phallus. The movement of the imagination is from the human body to God and from God backto the human body again.

Thus my path returns to Blake:

The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination.

God Himself

that is

The Divine Body . . .

These Blakean beginnings (and endings) are far more than mere poetic placeholders for Wolfson. Blake is not simply a source ofclever quotes bookending an important first book; in fact, he enters into the theoretical substance and historical content of Wolfson’s entire scholarly,poetic, and artistic corpus, his own postmodern kabbalah.

Not that Blake explains everything about Wolfson; his corpus cannot be fully explicated by a Blakean aesthetics. Elliot is not Will,nor is Will Elliot. Still, both artist-authors arrive at some remarkably similar conclusions about the nature of the religious imagination, about the groundingof myth, symbol, and mystical experience in the human body, about the fundamental centrality of the erotic within all of this, and about theimportance of the poetic in expressing and advancing a truly radical argument. There are many possible reasons for these resonances, foremost among them thehistorical fact that Blake appears to have been deeply influenced by kabbalistic strains of thought, as Sheila Spector has amply demonstrated in such lovingdetail. Sheila Spector, Glorious Incomprehensible: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language (Cranbury, New Jersey: Bucknell University Press, 2001), and Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Myth (Cranbury, New Jersey: Bucknell University Press, 2001). And Wolfson, of course, has read and contemplated in turn his share of Blake's kabbalistic art. Frommedieval Kabbalah to William Blake to Elliot Wolfson and back again, we are caught in something of a hermeneutical circle again.

Or is it a spiral? Much has been added along the way, after all. There is no quantum physics in the Zohar, but there is in Wolfson'swritings on the Zohar. For example, in his reflections on the "timeswerve" of kabbalistic hermeneutics, he explicates the notion through comparisons withcontemporary scientific speculations on space-time and string theory. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being , xvi-xxii, xxiv, 49, 201, 393-394. Similarly, while it is possible but difficult to detect Asian influences in Blake's corpus, it is quite easy to do so inWolfson's. His invocation of Hindu Tantric themes are quite common, and his paradoxical writing style often reads like something straight out of a Zensermon. To take a single text, for example, in Language, Eros, Being , he employs scholarship on Sahajiya Vaisnavaism (262), the yin and yang of Taoist symbolism (107-108), various schools of Buddhism (xvi, 56-58, 441-442),and Hindu Tantrism (79-80, 234, 262, 271). It is probably no accident that Wolfson came very close to studying Zen Buddhism in graduate school beforehe finally opted for Kabbalah—regardless, Buddhism still shadows, informs, deepens his work on Judaism. It is also probably no accident that the Blakeanscholar who has advanced the most robust thesis of an "Asian Blake"—Marsha Keith Schuchard, who sees the poet as an erotic mystic with a fantastically tangledrelationship to Moravian sexual-spiritual vision, Christian Kabbalah, Swedenborgian contemplative sexuality, and Asian Tantra—employs both Wolfson'swork on medieval Kabbalah and my own work on nineteenth-century Bengali Tantra to advance specific details of her astonishing case. Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London: Century, 2006).