Foreword

Several great authors have powerfully influenced our culture by creating authentic symbolic constructs of the world. What drives a person to recreate the perception of the world, to breach the human consensus and derive a singular reality? Perhaps it is an intuitive or conscious understanding that what we hold as reality and truth is merely one limited and limiting model of the world determined by a certain cultural environment. What great authors present us with are different models of reality to share. The artist constructs a world, and in that way the artwork offers an alternative to our confinement to a single model of experiencing reality.

Creating symbolic models and para-models: perhaps we ourselves are continuously engaged in that activity. From beforehand we accept the symbolic discourse the present human consensus offers, and we reinvest it with our desire. What is the difference between an artistic construct and an everyday construct? The creative process and the material are the same: flows of desire and dispersion of representative elements. An exploration of what is beyond these symbolic constructs can offer a clearer insight in the process of constructing models of realities.

We can analyze a model of reality through its visible surfaces in order to show the rules of creation that organize such a model. We can explore how these rules function and how they coordinate the processes of our conscious and unconscious behavior. Certainly, this attempt is from beforehand bound to be incomplete and partial, as each of us is caught in epistemological assumptions and intrinsic, invisible frames that organize the mind. Yet, analysis of different models may unearth patterns that make thinking possible. In this work several layers of functioning of the unconscious are explored, without the hope to explain the unconscious, but in effort to describe certain patterns of organization, common to the structuring of the world and the psyche.

To question the rules that allow and regulate existence is an attempt that joins great minds throughout history. It is in the 20 c. that this attempt offered a meeting point to the life sciences, when the mainstream philosophical, psychological and literary approach took up this new trajectory. Questioning the questions, inquiring the rules that make the questions possible, became a significant task of contemporary scholars.

Each shift of perspective brings a fundamental change, where the observer, that which is observed, and their connection change. William Blake explored the human being and its states through the prism of perception, consciousness and creation. He made a shift from the consensual reality, created his own world, embodied it, and in that life-movement he released desire appropriate to challenge and re-create that which conditions human existence. Although he is not the first, the only nor the last one who succeeded in this, although he remained dwelling in and systemizing a single model of reality, the shift inscribed in his work, the span of the movement toward deterritorialization and stratification, enables us to trace the amplitudes of his singular mind, and explore the thresholds he opened, the limits he touched, and the limits he failed to cross.

Many comparative researches have been successfully concluded exploring the symbolic, religious, historical and psychological references of Blake and his literary world, especially of the short poems. Unfortunately, his epic poems, due to their denseness and strangeness, have not become so popular and have been rarely translated in any other language. Still, there is an air of fascination that lingers around Blake’s name, perhaps as an effect of the primordial intensity that shines forth from his paintings and the imagery of his wild worlds of self-created mythology. Blake wrote several longer epics, the Four Zoas being the longest one and the one never finished. The diversity and repetition between his epics, the trajectory Blake wrote with, and the question of the incompleteness of the Zoas, will be examined in Part II. Prior to unfolding the “Four Zoas” as a model of the human mind, we will explore how models of reality are created, their link to the formation of the subject, the patterns and crystallization of the conscious and the unconscious.

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