Golgonooza, City of Imagination
Metadata
- Author: kathleen raine
Highlights
Poets read the same works but for other reasons, principally in search of meaning and wisdom. Blake has not been my ‘subject’ but my Master, in the Indian sense of the word. — location: 44
both Blake and Jung discovered and pursued a tradition that relates to that order—a ‘learning of the Imagination’ — location: 59
That inner world both Blake and Jung affirm, and both appreciated the value of the alchemical symbolism and the alchemical ‘work’ of self-transformation. Blake praises Jacob Boehme above all other spiritual masters whom he had studied, and Boehme affirms that the seeker for God must find the living source within. — location: 74
to know who the Four Zoas are and what their natures, how very familiar and English are these modern embodiments of undying moods — Urizen, ‘aged Ignorance’, blind reason with his heavy books of the law, forever striving to impose his narrow systems and to order the boundless creativity of life, clipping the wings of fiery youth; Vala in her ‘garden’ of nature, Jerusalem, the soul outcast like a ‘beggar in the streets’ of London; Los, spirit of Inspiration, creating and destroying, in his furnaces, with his blacksmith’s hammer and anvil, the productions of Time. — location: 90
to know who the Four Zoas are and what their natures, how very familiar and English are these modern embodiments of undying moods — Urizen, ‘aged Ignorance’, blind reason with his heavy books of the law, forever striving to impose his narrow systems and to order the boundless creativity of life, clipping the wings of fiery youth; Vala in her ‘garden’ of nature, Jerusalem, the soul outcast like a ‘beggar in the streets’ of London; Los, spirit of Inspiration, creating and destroying, in his furnaces, with his blacksmith’s hammer and anvil, the productions of Time. — location: 90
In Eastern civilizations some form of meditation is the norm of spiritual practise. For Blake art was such a practise and the arts are the channels through which visions of these ‘eternal things displayed’ are embodied and disseminated. ‘Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practise of Art’. Prayer is receptive, praise active: the one must precede the other. — location: 108
Imagination, and the vision in which ‘Everything that lives is Holy.’ Imagination is the ladder on which angels forever ascend and descend. — location: 114
mundus imaginalis, the world of the ‘Imaginal’; a — location: 154
What he did question was the premiss, the Cartesian assumption that there are material bodies located in times and spaces external to consciousness; the false premiss which first separated mind from its object and made possible the materialist science which — location: 159
What was for Aristotle a convenient distinction made between mental and phenomenal worlds has proceeded to a denial, by positivist science, of any order other than its own. — location: 172
not the discoveries of science but the premisses of materialism are heretical. — location: 177
and in every allusion to the natural world so brought into apparent existence as an autonomous universe outside Imagination Blake describes it as a region of sorrow, cut off from the divine ground; it is Hell. — location: 181
Blake also looks back to a Paradisal state in which humankind encountered earth and all creatures as living persons and not as lifeless objects; and laments the passing of that state brought about by the rending of the phenomena from the living Imagination in which they ‘live and move and have their being’. — location: 209
All things are living because their ‘place’ and their being participates in the life of the Imagination, the supreme Person. In answer to the poet’s question, ‘what is the material world and is it dead?’, a spirit of vegetation replies, ‘I’ll shew you all alive / The world where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.’ — location: 217
This mundus imaginalis is the ‘place’ of all spiritual events. Corbin writes: ‘Therefore if one deprives all this of its proper domain, which is the active imagination, nothing of all this any longer has a “place” and in consequence cannot “take place”. It is now only the “imaginary” of fiction.’ — location: 229
Imagination is in its nature a world of immortal life; being incorporeal, not located in space or in time, and not therefore subject to change, generation and decay. Blake affirms without doubt that it is the world ‘into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body’. Corbin affirms the same of the Imaginal world: — location: 264
The universe, according to Orphic tradition, is Apollo’s lyre whose harmonies are a divine utterance, a divine communication of meaning and beauty. By banishing the phenomena from the Imagination—the ‘faculty which experiences’ — they are emptied of all significance, retaining only a quantitative existence. — location: 296
The universe, according to Orphic tradition, is Apollo’s lyre whose harmonies are a divine utterance, a divine communication of meaning and beauty. By banishing the phenomena from the Imagination—the ‘faculty which experiences’ — they are emptied of all significance, retaining only a quantitative existence. — location: 296
In the void of ‘futurity’ and of ever-elusive matter, Reason, with infinite labour, constructs a ‘world of rocky destiny’, ‘Petrifying the Human Imagination into rock and sand.’ — location: 312
It is not in facts but in experience that knowledge consists: knowledge is not separable from life; and Urizen’s universe is constructed ‘outside eternity’ — outside the life of the Imagination. Our world depends not, as Locke had taught, upon the reception of stimuli from a mechanized universe but upon the ‘faculty which experiences’, the mind of the beholder: ‘a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees’: — location: 355
As a man is, So he Sees. As — location: 359
Urizen prided himself upon the unity and immutability of his ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox’; the universe of science is a single universe. The Imagination is a plurality of universes; or, rather, ‘nature’ imposes one object upon many minds; whereas in the world of Imagination the one Mind creates innumerable universes. — location: 402
How easy it is in childhood to make a forest of the grass, or to descend into the fiery caverns of the smouldering coal! It is this gift of ‘reverie’ that initiated Gaston Bachelard into the interior spaces of gems, acorns, the roots of trees, the interior of things; the rapturous ascensions of the soul into the heights of air with the skylark, or descents into underworlds of ocean or within the earth where body cannot accompany thought. — location: 419
How easy it is in childhood to make a forest of the grass, or to descend into the fiery caverns of the smouldering coal! It is this gift of ‘reverie’ that initiated Gaston Bachelard into the interior spaces of gems, acorns, the roots of trees, the interior of things; the rapturous ascensions of the soul into the heights of air with the skylark, or descents into underworlds of ocean or within the earth where body cannot accompany thought. — location: 419
Every creature lives in the total freedom of its Imagination; and Blake concludes his marvellous poetic evocation of the boundless variety of worlds in words that are his answer to Urizen’s One Law for the Lion and Ox: — location: 435
But holiness, in the sense in which Blake declares life to be holy, is inherent in the living Imagination, which is, both by definition and by experience, the ‘divine body’, the ‘holy land’, the temenos, the sanctuary. — location: 453
Blake uses the example of music: science can describe ‘discord and harmony’ for these are quantifiable; but of melody can tell us nothing; for melody can only be experienced in terms of meaning, by the Imagination which responds to the universe as ‘a harp struck by a hand divine’. — location: 466
Blake uses the example of music: science can describe ‘discord and harmony’ for these are quantifiable; but of melody can tell us nothing; for melody can only be experienced in terms of meaning, by the Imagination which responds to the universe as ‘a harp struck by a hand divine’. — location: 466
There is not any greater than I; and all things hang on me, even as precious gems upon a string. I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, invocation in the Veds, sound in the firmament, human nature in mankind, sweetsmelling savour in the earth, glory in the source of light; in all things I am life … (Lecture VIII) — location: 490
There is not any greater than I; and all things hang on me, even as precious gems upon a string. I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, invocation in the Veds, sound in the firmament, human nature in mankind, sweetsmelling savour in the earth, glory in the source of light; in all things I am life … (Lecture VIII) — location: 490
no place but soul or mind, expressly affirming that the soul is not in the world, but the world in the soul. And farther, the place of soul, saith he, is not body, but soul is in mind, and body is in soul. — location: 521
It was Berkeley who broke down the Cartesian distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and argued that not only did colour, scent and the like exist only within the mind, but also space itself, and therefore also matter itself. — location: 559
It was Berkeley who broke down the Cartesian distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and argued that not only did colour, scent and the like exist only within the mind, but also space itself, and therefore also matter itself. — location: 559
Vala’s only reality is as the ‘shadow’ of Jerusalem, a reflection of soul cast in the ‘Vegetable Glass’ of nature. She is therefore called the ‘shadowy female’, who becomes animated with a perverse life of her own. — location: 583
Reason’s world is only a ‘stolen’ portion of the inexhaustible universe of the Imagination. — location: 888
Blake’s fly is a Swedenborgian fly, its rich array corresponding with its nature, as all spirits create for themselves their garments, surroundings and landscapes in accordance with their states of Love and Wisdom. But as the perceptive organs close to the eternal worlds, so nature comes to seem fixed and dead: — location: 1129
Blake’s fly is a Swedenborgian fly, its rich array corresponding with its nature, as all spirits create for themselves their garments, surroundings and landscapes in accordance with their states of Love and Wisdom. But as the perceptive organs close to the eternal worlds, so nature comes to seem fixed and dead: — location: 1129
This space is now called ‘Canaan’, the ‘promised land’ into which in course of time the Divine Humanity, ‘Jesus the Imagination’ will be born as the ‘saviour’. It is also, by implication, Plato’s cave, — location: 1173
There is not one image or face of God but an infinity of images, an infinity of faces. The implications are overwhelming for it follows that every human face in the world is, insofar as it is open to the divine influx, one of the myriad faces of God. — location: 1537
What Blake chiefly held against Swedenborg was that he lays excessive stress on moral virtue, placing the virtuous in the heavens and the evil-doers in the hells. Blake himself saw in Divine Humanity as embracing the wholeness of life, both heaven and hell, reason and energy, the darkness and the light in a holiness and a wholeness beyond what humankind calls good and evil in terms of the moral laws of this world. — location: 1581
As the human psyche, so the human city. — location: 1865
for Golgonooza is essentially a ‘work in progress’, the achievement of human imagination triumphant over surrounding non-entity: — location: 1878
for Golgonooza is essentially a ‘work in progress’, the achievement of human imagination triumphant over surrounding non-entity: — location: 1878
As for Plotinus, so for Blake, the souls seek generation in order to perfect both themselves and the world; generation is at once something desired, incurred by some imperfection, and chosen in order to labour towards the perfection of the entire world. — location: 1915
The city of Golgonooza is called the city of human ‘Art and Manufacture’, not in the modem commercial sense but because the human city exists in order to embody human values and realities. — location: 1933
When I.A. Richards wrote that ‘poetry is the house of the soul’ he might have been thinking of Blake, for whom the arts of Imagination are precisely that. Such is the case in the eternal world, but in the world of generation these are replaced by positive activities, which partially reflect and mediate them to those who in this world are spiritually ‘asleep’ in the Platonic sense: — location: 1942
When I.A. Richards wrote that ‘poetry is the house of the soul’ he might have been thinking of Blake, for whom the arts of Imagination are precisely that. Such is the case in the eternal world, but in the world of generation these are replaced by positive activities, which partially reflect and mediate them to those who in this world are spiritually ‘asleep’ in the Platonic sense: — location: 1942
From the cruel laws of nature Imagination is ‘the Saviour’, opening for the soul another order of things. Imaginative art is the language of this other vision, and the great visions of the world have from time immemorial been embodied in the music, painting, poetry, architecture and the other arts of every civilization. — location: 1955
In the City of Imagination there is neither war nor dominion. In the material world if one becomes rich it is at the expense of others who must be poor, since material possessions are divisible. But in the world of Imagination, its regions extend with the number of those who participate —all belongs, not in part, but wholly, to all, like the light of the sun itself. The delight of music of a concert is not divided but multiplied by the number of those who participate in it, and so with the other arts —paintings and poems; the Taj Mahal and the Primavera of Botticelli, and Hamlet and Lear inhabit the minds of thousands without the least diminution of their riches. The inhabitants of Jerusalem are without number, and their treasures are inexhaustible. How can a civilization be measured unless by the wealth and treasuries of the Imagination which it has created? — location: 1963
In the City of Imagination there is neither war nor dominion. In the material world if one becomes rich it is at the expense of others who must be poor, since material possessions are divisible. But in the world of Imagination, its regions extend with the number of those who participate —all belongs, not in part, but wholly, to all, like the light of the sun itself. The delight of music of a concert is not divided but multiplied by the number of those who participate in it, and so with the other arts —paintings and poems; the Taj Mahal and the Primavera of Botticelli, and Hamlet and Lear inhabit the minds of thousands without the least diminution of their riches. The inhabitants of Jerusalem are without number, and their treasures are inexhaustible. How can a civilization be measured unless by the wealth and treasuries of the Imagination which it has created? — location: 1963
The typical city of the materialist civilization may meet a certain ‘standard of living’ in matters of housing, amenities, water-supply, sanitation and the rest, employment, social services, all those things which were the object of Utopian Communism, or of ‘the American way of life’ with its superabundance of material goods. What is notably lacking in cities built without the vision of the ‘heavenly original’ is any trace of beauty, where the eyes can rest and find peace or delight. There may be stupendous works in terms of size, productivity, efficiency, but the soul is starved. We never feel at home in the absence of beauty, we wander the streets (an image to which Blake often returns in writing of the soul’s lot in Babylon) but never find home. All seek to create about ourselves some small expression of that universal city; we need beauty, ‘the bread of sweet thought and the wine of delight’, starved in surroundings where none is to be found, where the buildings and surroundings do not reflect the archetype of the ever-present, never-realized pattern of the sancta civitas, the pattern of the ‘golden builders’ be they architects or poets, painters, or musicians. In the sancta civitas there are no exiles, for no matter whether it be in Rome, Athens, or some little white timber-built town in New England, we feel instantly happy and at ease there. The expressions and styles of this eternal city are various, but whether it be in some ancient Chinese painting, the sculptures of Athens or of Southern India, Gothic or Renaissance, the world of the Imagination is everywhere our native country. — location: 2003
The typical city of the materialist civilization may meet a certain ‘standard of living’ in matters of housing, amenities, water-supply, sanitation and the rest, employment, social services, all those things which were the object of Utopian Communism, or of ‘the American way of life’ with its superabundance of material goods. What is notably lacking in cities built without the vision of the ‘heavenly original’ is any trace of beauty, where the eyes can rest and find peace or delight. There may be stupendous works in terms of size, productivity, efficiency, but the soul is starved. We never feel at home in the absence of beauty, we wander the streets (an image to which Blake often returns in writing of the soul’s lot in Babylon) but never find home. All seek to create about ourselves some small expression of that universal city; we need beauty, ‘the bread of sweet thought and the wine of delight’, starved in surroundings where none is to be found, where the buildings and surroundings do not reflect the archetype of the ever-present, never-realized pattern of the sancta civitas, the pattern of the ‘golden builders’ be they architects or poets, painters, or musicians. In the sancta civitas there are no exiles, for no matter whether it be in Rome, Athens, or some little white timber-built town in New England, we feel instantly happy and at ease there. The expressions and styles of this eternal city are various, but whether it be in some ancient Chinese painting, the sculptures of Athens or of Southern India, Gothic or Renaissance, the world of the Imagination is everywhere our native country. — location: 2003
the visual symbolic depictions of the drama of Job, and the text of the Prophetic Books. Blake’s diagnosis of the sickness and suffering of Job is not different from his diagnosis of the ‘sickness of Albion’ — the spiritual sickness of the English nation under the domination of the materialist philosophy imposed by the rationalist ego, oblivious of spiritual causes. — location: 2104
Our children are dead to us when we cease to love them; we cease to love them when we pass moral judgements upon them, and we pass moral judgments when we live by the letter of the law. — location: 2133
Our children are dead to us when we cease to love them; we cease to love them when we pass moral judgements upon them, and we pass moral judgments when we live by the letter of the law. — location: 2133
This Master teaches a form of yoga ancient in India which consists in listening to the sound of the universe. This is known to all traditions, he told me; ‘some call it the music of the spheres; some call it the wind; others the Holy Spirit’, ‘we call it sound’ —the creative sound to which all is attuned. Wind is an image of the Holy Spirit used in the story of Pentecost. — location: 2340
It is by his presence, not by his pre-eminence, that he reigns. — location: 2485
Not only are the States representative of the heavens, the hells and the purgatories which in their totality comprise every possibility of human experience, but they also suggest a progression. Indeed the painting suggests the Buddhist Wheel of Life; and Blake conceives the spiritual universe rather as a living process than as a static order. The States are eternal, but human beings progress from state to state: — location: 2539
The presence of Jesus the Imagination is with every man at all times present, born with every birth, accompanying every soul throughout life as the ‘saviour’ who releases the man from his present state. — location: 2564
The Holy Grail is not some Bronze Age cooking pot in a museum, not a gold or silver chalice in church or shrine, but a vision that inspired the imagination of many at a certain period of history; and which continues to do so to this day. — location: 2796
The Holy Grail is not some Bronze Age cooking pot in a museum, not a gold or silver chalice in church or shrine, but a vision that inspired the imagination of many at a certain period of history; and which continues to do so to this day. — location: 2796
For Blake the ‘Fall’ is not, as for Milton, a fall into sin through disobedience, but a fall into ‘sleep’ through a closing of consciousness and loss of the ‘divine vision’: — location: 2854
Some drink deeply and their forgetfulness of eternity is complete. Others, who wisely refrain from drinking so deeply, retain some memory of eternal things. These are the philosophers, the lovers and the musical souls. For Blake held Plato’s view that the soul knows everything, and needs only to remember what it already and for ever knows. — location: 2862
Some drink deeply and their forgetfulness of eternity is complete. Others, who wisely refrain from drinking so deeply, retain some memory of eternal things. These are the philosophers, the lovers and the musical souls. For Blake held Plato’s view that the soul knows everything, and needs only to remember what it already and for ever knows. — location: 2862
For Blake the ‘Fall’ is not, as for Milton, a fall into sin through disobedience, but a fall into ‘sleep’ through a closing of consciousness and loss of the ‘divine vision’: — location: 2854
This externalization of the natural universe is illustrated in Plate 25 of Jerusalem where Albion is depicted with sun, moon and stars in his ‘mighty limbs’ from which they are being separated by females representing the agents of natural generation. — location: 2888
This externalization of the natural universe is illustrated in Plate 25 of Jerusalem where Albion is depicted with sun, moon and stars in his ‘mighty limbs’ from which they are being separated by females representing the agents of natural generation. — location: 2888
Milton and the other poets and visionaries who still in dreams behold eternity labour to clothe and build houses for the ‘spectres of the dead’ whose sleep is absolute; until ‘a vast family, wondrous in beauty and love’ is created on earth. So through the infinite labours of love the dead are awakened to life through recollection of eternal things, depicted in works of — location: 2928
Milton and the other poets and visionaries who still in dreams behold eternity labour to clothe and build houses for the ‘spectres of the dead’ whose sleep is absolute; until ‘a vast family, wondrous in beauty and love’ is created on earth. So through the infinite labours of love the dead are awakened to life through recollection of eternal things, depicted in works of art. — location: 2928
Our society is for ever thinking in terms of changing outer circumstances; Blake’s revolution will come about when we change ourselves. From inner awakening outer changes will follow; for we cannot treat a living and holy earth as we would a lifeless mechanism, nor human beings in whom the divine humanity is manifested in all its myriad forms as the ‘mortal worm’ born in a night to perish in a night. — location: 2933
Our society is for ever thinking in terms of changing outer circumstances; Blake’s revolution will come about when we change ourselves. From inner awakening outer changes will follow; for we cannot treat a living and holy earth as we would a lifeless mechanism, nor human beings in whom the divine humanity is manifested in all its myriad forms as the ‘mortal worm’ born in a night to perish in a night. We have created our nightmare world in the image of our ideologies; but with the awakening of our humanity we will see a different world, and create a different world. — location: 2933
When Albion awakens he will find himself in his lost kingdom, restored to its former glory; for the kingdom is in ourselves. In this awakening it is for the poets, painters and musicians to remind Albion—remind the nation—of those higher things he has forgotten. ‘Poetry, Painting & Music, the three Powers in Man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not Sweep away.’ — location: 2937