Decades ago when I was studying the Romantics at uni, I read E. P. Thompson's
Witness Against The Beast, in which he argues that Blake was connected to a Muggletonian sect, and through that sect to a deeper tradition of antinomian thought (antinomian: against Law, against the idea of a rule-bound universe and a law-bound social realm; rejecting the chains of sexual morality in favour of an expansive and cosmic eros). The question which occurred to me at the time was, how can you have an antinomian
tradition? Aren't traditions precisely the sort of institutionalising, time-binding things that antinomianism wants to unbind, recovering both a more intense present and a deeper, mythical time? Isn't there something paradoxical in this idea of a sort of historical transmission of antinomian thought and feeling?
Reading the first few pages of
Death Sweat, I see that the idea of an esoteric tradition, a secret language which traces its lineage back to sunken Atlantis or occulted Eleusis, is again central to the story being told. Similar questions come to me, but the framing is different because znore isn't, like Thompson, writing as an historian: they're making different
kinds of claims. The imagination can conjure a tradition and seek a place for itself within it, without needing to demonstrate that such a thing exists as a matter of archival record. It's about a series of resonances between separate moments, sympathetically rather than causally connected. Geoffrey Hill, in an early poem, writes of William Dunbar (who himself wrote the great
Lament for the Makaris, an elegy for the poets - makers - who had gone before):
To such a mercy few of us attain:
Swans dwell apart like Troilus in his sphere,
And not by sufferings, even, do we gain
Power, such as theirs, to bring the heavens near,
But win our faith from all who knew the clear
Fulness of vision. Here, on Bewdley bridge,
I think of you, as of my heritage.
That closing "as of" clinches the ambiguity: Dunbar cannot be claimed directly as one's heritage. The poem, while gauche, is not gauche enough for that. But the poet may think of him "as of" his heritage: at the same time, in the same moment, with a sense of communication between times and moments. It is a matter of "faith" in a "Fulness of vision" which one has not oneself attained, but which is glimpsed through the moments in which past figures seemed to "bring the heavens near".
It spoils the game to settle too easily into seeing all this as a purely imaginative exercise in canon-formation, as if one were free simply to make it all up, and that was all that was going on. As with synchronicity, which znore also takes to be fateful, the imaginative
charge comes from a compelling sense of non-arbitrariness: things have come together for some purpose, there is a message entailed in their conjuncture. And poetry is very much an art of meaningful accident: what can it mean that these two words rhyme, or jive together in etymology or association? Some of the most compelling poetry sets out to make you believe that things that rhyme on the page must also rhyme metaphysically: "bridge" and "heritage", say, the coincidental rhyme also touching off a set of associations about bridging into the past, or being on a bridge between two banks, at a point of transition or initiation (which an early poem may dramatise as its own condition). For znore,
Finnegans Wake is the ultimate system of such associations, voluminous enough to enfold the world.