William Blake's America, 2010 - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education: Meanwhile, rich Americans plunder the nation, taking all they can get and then diving in for more. The Selfhood is so scared of the future, so isolated and loveless, that it is constantly grasping for security. Its fear makes it almost entirely without conscience. The only thing that might save the Selfhood is to surrender its aggressive individualism and seek solidarity with others through compassion—but this possibility is one that the Self cannot and will not understand. The Self believes that if it could only get to the next rung of wealth, the next tier of society, the next level of recognition and success, then all would be well.
A High Romantic, one might say, is someone who believes passionately in the idea that by joining, sexually and spiritually, with the beloved, one can be transformed into a higher, better version of oneself and help to transform the beloved as well. Blake believed this literally: He tried to make his marriage to Catherine a conjunction of soul mates. He also commits himself to a more complex version of the idea in his poems. There the poet figure is in constant search for the Emanation, the female being who can give him erotic and creative energy.
Love for sale! That is perhaps the greatest oxymoron. Love is never for sale, but sex always has been and will be. The Internet is probably the greatest market for sex without love that has ever existed. Hunger for pornography epitomizes the erotic life of the Selfhood in its current state. Porn is exciting, isolating, and attractive. It uncouples physical desire from the desire of the spirit, denying the very existence of the latter. Someone addicted to porn is someone who has given up on the possibility of a transforming love. Such a love involves risk—the risk of rejection, the risk of shame. The Selfhood is frightened of both these things, so it denies the possibility of erotic renovation and plays it safe.