Klüver Form-constants

This chapter aims to restore the ‘visions’ to Blake’s ‘visionary’ art by introducing a novel method for assigning the incidence in his paintings and illuminated books of the presence of one specific type of visual hallucination, the four form-constants of hallucinatory patterns identified by experimental psychologist Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979). They are the most likely phenomenological candidates for the most easily traceable examples of Blake’s originating visual ‘visions.’ As Klüver summarized them in 1942, ‘The author’s analysis of the hallucinatory phenomena … yielded the following form-constants: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. Many [hallucinatory] phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms.’ As discussed in the Introduction, Klüver’s discoveries were eventually confirmed by tracing the origins of the four hallucinatory patterns back to the neural architecture of V1, demonstrated in two stages by Ermentrout and Cowan (1979) and Bressloff and Cowan, et al., (2001). Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations, with their distinctive geometric shapes, can be found located in the compositional choices Blake made in his visual art, and sometimes in his poetics, making them amenable to easy identification. These patterns were seen by Blake on his retina, signalled from V1, self-luminous within his visual field, eyes open or eyes closed and always in these same four configurations (although, as Klüver commented, sometimes in overlapping amalgamation). What remains in his visual art are the outline traces of these shapes or, as he put it in The Ghost of Abel (1822), ‘Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has’ (E 270). Not least, their repetition in Klüver’s stable configurations, what Blake described as ‘ever Existent Images,’ resulted in a long-term preference for symmetrical composition discussed in Chap. 8 (E 555).