Boat Race? Bah! Humbug!

I think one of the fundamental problems with being in Oxford as long as I have (seven and a half years and counting) is that it is very easy for cynicism to sap away at one's naive enthusiasm about the university and its institutions. A case in point, yesterday, an underdog Oxford crew powered to victory over Cambridge in the annual Boat Race.

Prefacing all of this with a caveat: I am of course aware that getting a place in the first boat is a tremendous achievement, requiring a level of commitment, endurance and tenacity that I frankly fail to summon up most days in the library. Similarly, the few Blues rowers that I have met have all been pleasant, nice, and down-to-earth people who have to balance a punishing training regime with all the commitments a degree at Oxford inflicts. I honestly don't know how they manage it. What follows is in fact unconnected to the teams that row in the race.

Putting that aside for a second, though, there are reasons why I can't get as excited about Oxford winning this year's race as I might have done in the past. Firstly, I'm a little uncomfortable at the fact that the boat race is one of the most visible and well-known spectacles that the two universities are involved in. For a great number of people, one of the only concrete images that come to mind when either 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge' is mentioned is the boat race. Sadly, rowing is also seen as one of the more genteel sports, an opinion which is perhaps reinforced by BBC coverage of this year's race which at one point highlighted the fact that Oriel College had ostensibly taken over a Thames-side pub to watch the race. One could argue this is no different to a group of local football supporters all converging on a pub to watch a match. I would counter, however, that very few such groups of supporters would fork out to have a team banner displayed over the front of the building.

Secondly, the very moniker of "the" boat race is somewhat questionable and masks a deep inequality. There isn't just one race. The reserve crews also race, as do the women's crews on the following day. This latter race, however, is not seen, remaining untelevised and largely unsponsored. Thus far, there's nothing here which doesn't mirror the inequality seen in other areas of the sporting world, where womens' sport remains largely ignored and unsupported. What is disturbing, however, is that to buy the equipment and fund the training for the women's boat, the participants themselves have to pay upwards of £1,500 out of their own pocket to make up for the dearth in sponsorship and external revenue sources (this latter point comes to me via anecdotal evidence - I would be delighted if anyone more in the know were able to dispel this evidence!). To put that in context, that's more than a term's rent which the university's elite female rowers have to raise simply so that they may take their place on the team. Whilst alumni, current students and even vaguely interested passers-by flock to the river to catch a glimpse of the men's crews drifting by, the women's boat is supported only by those in the know: friends, relatives and (I would sincerely hope) the men's crews.

The more I continue with this line of argument, the more I re-raise my fears of turning into Blake's miserable Urizen so I won't go any further. Suffice to say that the longer one stays in the same place, the harder it is to retain a sense of optomistic idealism about it. Oxford is no exception. It isn't difficult to unearth examples of the worrying inequalities which pervade this university. The University is constantly castigated in the media for them (occasionally justifiably, occasionally frivolously). The Boat Race is one of the few times when our presence on the nation's TV screens is set apart from such debates as our intake and the progression of academics within the institution. Yet even the University's highest-profile sporting event, if we look hard enough, betrays some of the same disparities which prevent Oxford from being an academic utopia of fairness.

The key lesson here is probably not to look hard, isn't it?

Blake, Urizen and Empire

Blake's depiction of Urizen from the First Book of Urizen, Plate 23, is one of my favourite illustrations in the whole of Blake's illustated prophecies. Luckily, the print is on display in the excellent Romantics exhibition in the Tate Britain gallery in London. Urizen is one of the more tragic figures in Blake. In many ways the character is conceived as a parody of enlightenment, rationalist thinking, being constantly presented in isolation, poring over his books in abject misery. He is also, however, Blake's symbol of repressive legalism and a pastiche of the "creator" God found in such biblical passages as Genesis 2-3. In many of Blake's works, he is cast as the villain of the piece, mercilessly persecuting his adversaries or indeed those under his control (as, memorably, in The Four Zoas). The point Blake is making, is that rationalist thinking, far from liberating humanity through a scientific understanding of the world, actually enslaves through the restriction of imagination and inspiration. That is not to say that reason has no place in Blake's image of redeemed humanity. Rather, Urizen is a tragic figure because his attempts at creation are in essence divine because they are inspired and creative, but become fallen and repressive by Urizen's desire to dominate the other facets of human personality.

For me, this illustration firmly underscores the inherent tragedy in Blake's presentation of Urizen. The red, spiky orb which he carries with him is possibly the world, corrputed by his cold rationalism. Pushing wearily at the edge of the painting, Urizen's eyes behold the lion in the bottom right of the picture. At a number of points, the Lion represents for Blake the notion of empire ("For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease." - America, Plate 6, Line 15). And in The Four Zoas, Urizen creates the oppressive and exploitative "Universal Empire". Yet in this picture, Urizen looks down at the lion, and yet empire simply can't meet his gaze. Urizen's campaign to understand and to rationalise the world alienates him from the very concepts and structures he is responsible for. The life of the rationalist (and, indeed the God of creation) is one doomed to loneliness and isolation.

It's a fairly worrying fate to consider. Especially as I currently write this sitting in the Bodleian library, with books spread out in front of me, and the beautiful sunshine of an Oxford spring day lying frustratingly beyond a closed, blinded window. Is it any wonder that I feel nothing but sympathy for poor Urizen?

Does Divinity = Humanity in Blake?

I think I'm at my first major crossroads in my thinking about Blake (beyond the whole issue of, well, understanding what's going on - a process which is far from complete). I'm putting the finishing touches to a piece of work I have completed on the connections between The Four Zoas and the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22. The basic sift of the material I'm fairly happy with, and it has produced some exciting results, especially when the marginalia and Blake's revisions to the text are taken in to account. Rather, I'm struggling with a problem which is at the heart sentences I have produced like this:

"The successive failures of history and contemporary societal movements to effect apocalypse and redemption lead Blake to emphasise all the more strongly that Jerusalem is to be experienced as a transcendental, divine gift."

One of the most difficult things I'm trying to get my ahead around is whether Blake ever really has a theology of transcendence. In the final stages of the poem's revisions, Blake cites John 17:21-23 on the first page of the poem. These words, on a certain reading, essentially state that due to the connections forged between God, Jesus and the disciples, the three take on one identity, and when humanity makes this leap of faith "they may become completely one", meaning that intra-human divisions will be erased, as well as the distinction between humanity and divinity.

How far, for Blake is the "Divine Body" in every man (E663), or how far is it an objective, external reality (as, arguably, it is in orthodox Christian thinking)? If it's the latter, then sentences like mine above aren't problematic, although they do point to a pessimism on Blake's part vis a vis humanity's ability to ever effect on its own the "Universal Brotherhood" the Four Zoas strives towards. If it is the former, however, then speaking of a "transcendental" gift is surely a nonsense, since Jesus is essentially the paradigmatic example of perfect humanity. The power to become him is in all of us, so to speak.

All of this is fairly important because I would like to present The Four Zoas as reflecting the passivity of the vision in Revelation 21-22. John "sees" the New Jerusalem descending from heaven; he doesn't build it himself (like Richard Brothers tried to do). 

In conclusion: gah.