the voice of one crying in the wilderness

"The Argument. As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of."


Marginalia:

What looms in the background? What robed figure behind the hands, which the hands might nearly touch? It is like a shrouded corpse propped against the frame. Faceless, it swells at the belly, pregnant, parting those two hard lines (of the robe) that flow from the prophet's palms into the lines that forge the river. An infant is about to birth from the corpse, to be plunged, crying out, into the river and drowned--but never arrives. Will never cry out.

And look at our prophet: his child's face, his delicate adolescent torso, his massive grown-up legs calves crossed in front of him--almost the centaur, though pawed, not hoofed--like his pair of sacrificial animals, his shepherd's herd, his open book, his set of engraved tablets. His golden calves!

And the source of the river? The water breaks like a voice from the seat of the prophet, a laboring font of pre-birth: water, excrement, blood. A river of waste. Much might be made of how this pre-birth wasteland is also the location of ritual cleansing--is also the baptism of the reader drowning in experience and trying her knowledge toward/against the real thing about to reveal itself beyond the frame. Revelation, too, about to arrive, never arrives. All is impending, and looms.

Here I am, reader, attempting to speak, a voice crying out, but the cry cannot sustain the cry. The cry is immediately more water, shit, and blood. More wilderness. So it is: I am the infant in the womb-tomb. As is the prophet. Who is also me.

The voice, the cry, the wilderness. A series of linear progressions, though not quite--for the sequence dissolves, one into another. A series of concentric womb-tomb frames, let us say: wilderness within cry, cry within voice, voice within the Poetic Genius, within me, within the Man-God on the cross, who is within the Baptist, who is within the Prophet Isaiah, who is within Ishmael the child, who is within the Genesis God: let there be, and there was. And back again.

All easily dismissed as the nettle of signification. Yet there is too much body in it to call it mere textual play. This is the problem with Lockean empiricism. It should point me toward the concentric likeness between body and symbol--which in Blake might even be the same thing--but instead it points me towards linearity. In Blake: less metonymy, more metaphor.

Metonymy: this --> that
Metaphor: this = that

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