VALA-5
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- Author: Unknown
Highlights
Blake implies that we can cultivate friendship with each aspect of the universe by entering its vortex and knowing it intimately in the imagination. This idea resonates with the conclusion of Jerusalem, where all the creatures and aspects of the earth ‘Humanize’: ‘All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone’ — location: 139
It seems that language itself too must also possess such vortices. If each word conceals an entire inner world into which we can enter and explore, then such investigations enrich our understanding of those words and the uses to which they can be put. — location: 152
This is a view of the world that sees it as a zero-sum competition, where gain for one involves loss for another, where authentic sharing makes little sense, where every supposed ‘free genrous gift’ entails a debt. — location: 202
but for Blake, wisdom consists of dynamic action and creativity, not mere agreement or disagreement with abstract categories. — location: 209
One answer is to begin by learning to ‘hold’ — to consider — the world differently, as something infinite. We must be caring but also protective, fierce, and brave when need be. We must join together the modes of activity illustrated by the Daughters of Beulah and by Los. Such action is concealed in the word ‘hold’, in the ways it denotes both attitude and deed. — location: 229
For Blake, God is the active human imagination and its engagement with a dynamic, infinite universe. The worship of God is the practice of creative arts. There is no reason that an atheist — someone who lacks belief in a transcendent supernatural supreme being — could not fully endorse Blake’s ideas. — location: 241
Just as Blake’s Milton remains in Beulah while traveling at the same time through the vortex of Albion’s heart into the fallen world, we too, as travellers through Eternity, can be at once both inside a vortex and outside it. — location: 249
We all are already travellers through Eternity, Blake suggests. We cannot help immersing ourselves in the inner world of every person, action, feeling, object, or word we encounter. We are exploring the interior of these things in our seemingly ‘fallen’ world, and — simultaneously — we are, from the standpoint of Eternity, already redeemed. — location: 254
In fact, we ourselves have been God from the very beginning. And on our path, there are ever more opportunities to engage creatively with the dynamic potential of all things. Our imagination, in its highest sense, is the very stuff through which we move and live and have our being. There is no Eternity apart from our experience of the universe in the here and now. We simply have to hold infinity in the palm of our hands. — location: 262
Like so much of Blake’s visual art, Nebuchadnezzar isn’t simply trying to say something but to do something, to enact a change of perception, consciousness, and/or behaviour. — location: 460
Blake’s icons activate symbols lodged deep within us, challenging us to perceive those symbols in new ways, and empowering us to continually recreate our psychic, mental, physical and historical realities according to those visionary insights. I did survive my ‘night at the museum’, but not as the same person. — location: 518
we are not spiritual beings trapped in a world of matter, we are poor, lovely, broken, physical beings trapped in a universe of terrible ideas. Terrible ideas like good versus evil, black versus white, master versus slave, male versus female, masculine versus feminine, active versus passive — all these binaries which I think have a lot to do with the master/slave duality, under which human beings have made themselves live for no good reason. — location: 652
Interestingly, the word ‘nihilism’, which is the conviction that there is no intrinsic meaning to life because the world runs on embedded code and blind processes, was coined during Blake’s lifetime, as if the culture saw the ramifications of the mechanical philosophy coming. — location: 1067
by which he means a lifeworld forgetful of the divine imagination and corrosive of the perception that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ (Marriage, pl. 27, E45). Instead, everything that lives is struggling, transient, tragic, at best protected by abstract rights; at worst, instrumentalised. — location: 1071
Rather, Blakean Selfhood is the conviction that the individual is cut off, adrift, without imaginative resources beyond limited faculties such as empirical testing and narrow reasoning. — location: 1134
Jung clearly suggests that addiction is the search for spirit in the wrong place, showing how addiction is the symptom that expresses this struggle with rational materialism. — location: 1375
return to a participatory relationship with the whole, finding at the end of the road of excess the palace of wisdom; the wisdom to know the difference between the finite event and the implied love of the creative whole behind it; from Blake’s point of view, you, me and us all as participants in a whole becoming. — location: 1418
The child and lamb are explicitly in what Martin Buber, a twentieth century Jewish philosopher, would call an I-Thou relationship. Many people and nations are in what Buber calls I-It relations with others, treating people, nations, and the environment as objects, resources to exploit and/or control. Sometimes we lapse into narcissism, an I-I relationship, where we expect others to conform to our values. — location: 1723
A ‘War of Love’ destroys Selfhood, not individual identity, because Selfhood actually stifles identity, for it represses imagination and love. — location: 1800
118 VALA What Does God Look Like? George Harding In 2010 I made a series of paintings titled What does God look like?, playfully exploring questions about divinity, humanity, and the nature of psychosis. One of the paintings, ‘Leaving the Rave’, is an absurd portrayal of God as an alien invasion, merging spirituality, altered consciousness, and the contrast between joy and tragedy. The figure dancing through a field of poppies evokes a connection to the tragic history of war, possibly suggesting a reconciliation of past traumas or a reflection on the aftermath of an apocalypse. Blake explored spiritual concepts through his characters. I see him as a genius, olden-day comic book artist, making mythologies not unlike the superheroes of today. His work transports you by its otherworldliness and fantastical nature. He believed in the power of the imagination to access spiritual truth. The world he visualised and put into his poetry channelled his mind in a profoundly positive manner. I also love writing poetry and find it a cathartic and interesting way to process thoughts and feelings that feed into my art. I affiliate with Blake’s fight to put the imagination and creativity at the centre of being human. These qualities, which make us able to manifest ourselves — location: 1929
affiliate with Blake’s fight to put the imagination and creativity at the centre of being human. — location: 1938