self-enjoyings of self-denial
The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin
That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber: the youth shut up from
The lustful joy shall forget to generate, and create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow …
This passionate cry comes from Oothoon, a character from Daughters of Albion, a poem by London maniac William Blake. Like so much of his "prophetic" poems, it is less lyrical poetry (in the way we traditionally see sonnets and odes and even epics) and more a long series of arguments and conversations by various archetypes and antitypes. Thus, you might have fifty pages of conversation between the Spirit of Liberty and Napoleon on the corrupt nature of the British Church or in this case, Oothoon, a Daughter of Albion (Eden, or in Blake's case, pre-Revolutionary America) and a tyrannical son of Urizen, Theotormon.1 For Blake, Urizen, "Father of Jealousy," "mistaken Demon of heaven," is the physical perversity of the Church's teachings. Accordingly, Urizen binds the Daughters of Albion to amoral and unjust laws, causing them to be little better than prostitutes in the marriage bed.
The Daughters of Albion has been called many things: rambling, Blake's declaration for women's emancipation, a revelation. The point is, I think, that Blake brought up issues two hundred years ago that we in our "enlightened" age still have issues with. Our double-standards when it comes to sexual freedom, say. Kareleen Middleton Murphy (among others) have pointed out that Blake's possible call for free-love in Oothoon's lines "Take thy bliss, O Man!/ And sweet shall be thy taste, & sweet thy infant joys renew" as well as [let me] "catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold;/ I'll lie beside thee on a bank and view their wanton play/ In lovely copulation, bliss on bliss with Theotormon …" simply illustrates the irony of the poem in this modern age.
I have never been comfortable with the callowness, simplicity, narcissism found with many advocates of free-love. If my Women Studies classes taught me one thing, "free love" is rarely love and never free. And yet … yet, I must constantly throw my lot in with our highly problematic sexual liberation since the alternative is the frightening history of rape, violence and ignorance that Theotormon represents; his constant doubt over Oothoon's desires.
So most of the time my energies and desires, all that I show the world in my poetry and writings, are those "amorous" fantasies this youth finds "in the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow." It might be a flawed, unsatisfactory, crude use of my time on many levels, turning night into day and making desire confused at times; however it also does not hurt a single other person and thus is an innocent action. I wonder if the vast number of other people who have felt desire (if they have felt anything at all) can say the same thing?
Clothes tossed to the floor. You throb — throb — with your
left hand you grab the sheets, cry, bite your right
to kill your cry. How these abused bones, poor
old skin, tries to sing! The coo of delight,
hum of the body at play. Once I might
have thought it a cry of pain or anger.
Perhaps … once. Now I make it too. Tonight.
Because no one else is here; no eager
Urizen son; no willing Albion daughter.
Because you are not here to hear me tease
awake my uprooted root; this splendor
that still slumbers. Does this small act displease?
Friend, there is nothing small about this act.
It turns night day, God godless, love abstract.
- Theotormon is a name, Victor Paananen suggests, which might mean "'God -tormented,' one tortured by holding the mistaken vision of God the law -giver rather of the Jesus who preaches 'mutual forgiveness of sins' …" (Twayne Publishers, 1996, page 68) [back]