NOTES


present event-is precisely the one that is exerting the greatest pressure on the
narrative surface.
 Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty each acknowledge more conservative forms of
what I am calling secondary perspective. Merleau-Ponty, for example, notes: "the
reverse or the underneath side of objects is perceived simultaneously with their
visible aspect" (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 338); and in his analysis of the
prehension of details in an actual occasion Whitehead says: "every occasion is a
synthesis of all eternal objects under the limitation of gradations of actuality, so
every occasion is a synthesis of all occasions under the gradations of types of entry.
Each occasion synthesises the totality of content under its own limitations of
mode." Science and the Modern World: The Lowell Lectures, 1925 (Reprint ed. New
York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 175.
 Tertiary perspective generates a class of ontological fields to which what we have
been calling "Newtonian" belongs: it strives to make unwanted information
utterly vanish; it thrives on a fundamental gap between signifier and signified and
presupposes and yearns for a primordial originating event (the creation, the fall,
and so on) and its corollary, a pre-determined, definitive sequence with pre-
ordained closure. The possibility of the multivalent functions of Blake's Four Zoas
text is grounded directly in these different kinds of perspectives. Primary perspec-
tive is the power to constitute the rules that govern the fields it generates: it is
inherently originative, creative, decisive. Secondary perspective is an accommoda-
tion of degrees and modes of detail to the unfolding narrative in time. Secondary
perspective mediates between primary atomisticc, rule-like) perspective and ter-
tiary perspective-the most restrictive form of perspective-a denial of the inter-
locked narrative field of secondary perspective, the desire to purge unwanted
details, creating a rupture, a void; tertiary perspective reinterprets the sedimented
interplay of included and excluded details in secondary perspective as a necessary
lack of mutual acknowledgment that primary perspectives have as an option with
respect to other primary perspectives. The originary atomistic freedom necessary
to primary perspective reappears (detoured through secondary perspective) as the
oppressive, exclusionary law-like region of tertiary (or Newtonian) perspective.
The fate of tertiary perspective when confronted by a text (such as The Four Zoas)
that radically invokes secondary perspective for the purpose of challenging ter-
tiary (Newtonian) perspective is the subject of this book.


 Region A

 SThe brief epigraph, "Rest before Labour," which comprises the only words on
page two of the manuscript, contrasts with the lengthy epigraph, transcribed in
Greek, from Ephesians vi.12, which hovers over the opening page of the text of
The Four Zoas: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against prin-
cipalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in high places" (King James version). Blake uses this second
epigraph, especially, to call attention to written language itself, to its untranslata-
bility, its graphic and spatial qualities. Similarly, the content of this epigraph
invokes a spiritual struggle against those forces of authority "of this world" that
are too co-optive to manifest their oppressiveness palpably in "flesh and blood."
Rather, they perpetuate social oppression through essentially invisible "powers"
that control consciousness, powers that can themselves become targets only by


Note 1: page 25