I described my son's eyes the first time I looked directly into them on returning from Europe as the eyes of a rutting beast still rocked by aftershocks of desire following sexual frenzy, as unbearable eyes that looked as though he were being devoured from within by a ravening beast. What I failed to note and wish to add here was the bottomless grief that was revealed above all else in the yellowish resin luster of those eyes. Reports of my son's unmanageable behavior while I was away and his response to the harmonica I had brought him, not to mention my own travel fatigue, had frayed my nerves and deprived me of the emotional leeway I needed to read and register his grief.
Writing this now it is hard to imagine how as a father I could have failed to see that massive grief in the desolation of my son's eyes. And I can't help feeling that, healing the rift with my son, I became aware of his grief through the agency of a Blake poem, “On Another's Sorrow,” which includes this stanza:
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrows share,
Can a father see his child,
Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.
One of the “Songs of Innocence,” the poem concludes with the following verse:
O! he gives to us his joy,
That our grief he may destroy
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
I was able to read the grief in my son's eyes even more directly, as though it were in my own experience, because I was equipped with a definition of grief that had appeared for just an instant in Mr. H's eyes that day at the bar in the New Delhi airport.
2: A Cold Babe Stands in the Furious Air
“Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance,” Blake wrote. This aphoristic note is appended to one of his epic poems, together with the following, to me not entirely clear but nonetheless appealing, phrase: “Unorganized Innocence, an Impossibility.” I have returned to the poem in question repeatedly at various times but have always skimmed my way through it. Given the nature of Blake's epic poetry, it might be said that anything less attentive than poring over the details is not reading it at all; nevertheless, in my own way I have discovered verses that have inscribed themselves on me. Consider, for example, in the heroic poem usually called The Four Zoas, properly speaking, with “Zoa” signifying “living thing” as in the Greek version of Revelations, “The Four Zoas, or, The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man,” the unforgettable prospect of the dead, at the time of the final judgment, revealing themselves as they were in life, wounds and all, as they stand to accuse:
They shew their wounds they accuse they seize the oppressor howlings began
On the golden palace Songs & joy on the desart the Cold babe
Stands in the furious air he cries the children of six thousand years
Who died in infancy rage furious a mighty multitude rage furious
Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.
When I wrote just now that I “skimmed” these lines, I didn't mean to imply that I could read Blake fluently. On the contrary, it remains difficult for me no matter how often I read and reread the original year after year. In particular, the voluminous poems known as the “Prophecies,” from Blake's middle period, are knotty with passages that impede the foreigner's understanding. Even so, I always imagined that even I could have made my way close to the full meaning of a poem had I taken the time to move carefully through it with the help of a commentary. And I did make it a point to acquire whatever Blake studies and commentaries I found in Western bookstores. I still do. At the same time, since my student days I have had a kind of fear that once I began reading Blake line by line I would come to feel that no amount of time was adequate, no matter how much time I spent. Besides, I wanted to taste whatever I felt moved to read, for example the entire Four Zoas, which is 855 lines long, and so, with a sense of urgency as my guide, I have made a practice of finding my way along the stepping stones of what I am able to understand unaided.
If I were to quote another passage from The Four Zoas that has stayed with me vividly, without reference to the complex narrative of the work or, for that matter, to the premise of God or the godlike person at the center of Blake's unique view of the universe, it would be the following:
That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget, & return
To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.
The first time I read these lines, quite out of context, I was a student in the department of general education in my first year at college. I recall the circumstances clearly, and even my posture as I read, my head thrust forward. I can't have been at college for more than a few weeks. I was sitting in the library that had been there since the days of the Imperial Upper School, on the campus that was apparently of botanical interest for its variety of azaleas (on the way to the library, the azaleas were in full bloom, and I remember having remarked about each and every flower that it couldn't compare to the real azaleas that blossomed on the mountain slopes that rose out of the valley where I was born, not to mention the fact that my azaleas protected the loam on the cliffs with their roots).
I discovered the verse in a folio-sized book that was lying open on the table next to where I was sitting. A number of other Western volumes were bundled in a partially untied silk cloth alongside the book, but there was no one seated in the chair in front of them. Lifting myself out of the chair I had just settled in, I peered over at the opened book and began to read, distracted by the direct and indirect quotation marks at the beginning of each line, the nearer, lower half of the right page. When I came to the lines quoted above, I sensed that I had been handed a decisive prophecy about my own life, only now entering a new phase—in truth, I sat there stunned. Just then, the owner of the book that had been left open—as I think about it, he must have been younger than I am now—a person who appeared despite his youth to be a professor or an assistant professor, returned to his seat. He stared at me unblinkingly, his eyes fastening themselves to me as though with glue, and as the thought flickered across my dazed brain that this was perhaps an area of the library that was reserved for the use of faculty, I left my seat as though to flee. The professor or assistant professor never took his eyes off me, and I wondered uneasily if he might be thinking that I had been trying to steal the Western books that belonged to him (in those days, imported texts were not readily available to students).
As for the verse which had caught my eye, I had not even asked the book's owner to confirm for me whose poetry it was or the work it came from—it had seemed to me to be a dramatic poem—but I was not about to forget lines which had shaken me in this way, and it was my thought that I would certainly be able to track them down again on my own. In those days, I tended to rely on the power of my memory; besides, the lines in question had lodged themselves firmly inside me. I had been sitting near a corner where a large Webster's dictionary had been installed on a high stand, another reason for supposing that I had chosen an area for use by researchers and scholars with special privileges, and had stood up reflexively; cutting diagonally across the vast hall of a reading room, I sat down in the opposite corner, and, without taking out the Gide novel I had been struggling my way through with the help of a dictionary, I cradled my head in my hands and lost myself in thought.
… & return / To the dark valley whence he came—I