Chapter 2 - Walking through William Blake’s Irregular Bible

Summary

William Blake’s literary prophecies constantly unsettle symmetries, “pulling the rug out” from under the harmony and balance neoclassical readers were trained to expect in a text or a painting. Blake’s prophecies have long been read through the teleological system of Ezekiel’s “merkabah” (chariot) vision. Each biblical allusion in Blake’s work seems to build to a greater whole, or can be explained through the prophetic “system.” However, what if Blake’s prophecies were refracted through Isaiah’s more dim vision? In the multiple versions of Isaiah’s initiation in Blake’s work, we encounter a prophecy of stutter, glitch, and weakness, and a flickering, partial vision. Rather than presenting a single bombastic image as a method to unlock a biblical allegory, Blake offers Isaiah’s prophetic walking as a figure for the interpretation of the difficult, irregular biblical text. From the perspective of the walker, the biblical text is full of hardened surfaces, desolate rocks, and irregular encounters, which must be read “with the feet,” topologically – not typologically – before the poet-prophet-walker can arrive at their destination.