Walking Blake’s London, by Akala and Mr Gee

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Hearing the mind-forged manacles

Take a trip around the place that you live. What do you see? What do you feel?

Over 200 years ago, that’s exactly what William Blake did. What happened on that trip – what did he see? what did he feel? – but most importantly, what did it inspire him to write?

He described these “chartered” streets, and even the river Thames as being chartered – he was expressing the sense of ownership, the fact that the streets are owned by someone. Or a river – when you think of a river, you imagine something that flows freely – but he’s pointing to the fact that the river is also owned by someone.

London at that time was starting to assert itself, it was starting to beat its chest. But Blake just peals the veneer behind that image, and speaks about “Weakness” and “Woe”. These are not adjectives that London would use to describe itself to the world.

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The God of This World, by Albert S. Roe

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The Domination System of Urizenic Hierarchical HyperRationality

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The entrance to the Rockefeller Centre New York draws on Blake’s image of ‘God’, but reversed so that he now divides with his ‘Right’ hand. Presumably Rockefeller didn’t realise that this figure actually represents a dissociated and psychopathic form of hyper-rationality dominating and dividing the world. Or perhaps he did.

 

I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s

In speaking of the basic aims of his art, Blake says: “The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative. This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity. There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.”  Thus art was to him not only a means of communicating his own beliefs to others, but actually a primary source of knowledge concerning the divine plan. He defined poetry, painting, and music as “the three Powers in Man of conversing with Paradise, which the flood did not Sweep away.”

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The Sleep of Albion and the Fall into Division, by Northrop Frye

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How the Sleep of Imagination Produces Dissociation 

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Any attempt to explain Blake’s symbolism will involve explaining his conception of symbolism. To make this clear we need Blake’s own definition of poetry:

Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry; it is also somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato.

The “corporeal understanding”, according to Blake, cannot do more than elucidate the genuine obscurities, the things requiring special knowledge to understand (such as the contemporary allusions in Dante), or the literal mechanics of a poem (meter, structure, general themes etc). The “intellectual powers” go to work rather differently: they start with the hypothesis that the poem in front of them is an imaginative whole, a unique and irreplaceable event, and work out the implications of that hypothesis. The way that poetry is generally taught in schools therefore, by converting it into “corporeal understanding” – into a form of machinery – completely misses its whole point, like explaining a joke or analysing a dead body to find out what makes it tick.

‘Excrement’: John Keating’s apt description of the corporeal understanding’s approach to poetry

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A New Heaven and a New Earth: William Blake and the Everlasting Gospel, by Jackie DiSalvo

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Mysticism: The Highest State of Communism, by Jackie DiSalvo

Blake called his Christianity “The Everlasting Gospel”, and as he articulates in that poem, the affirmation of man’s divinity implies a rejection all inequality and authority:

This is the race that Jesus ran

Humble to God Haughty to Man

Cursing the Rulers before the People

Even to the temples highest Steeple …

If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me

Thou also dwellst in Eternity

Thou art a Man God is no more

Thy own humanity learn to adore.

Blake’s humanistic Christianity has been acknowledged by most critics. What must be understood, in addition, is that his use of the myth of Albion, trinitarian doctrine, and the idea of a “mystical body of Christ” demands that we read The Four Zoas as a myth which is simultaneously psychological and social. “What are the Natures of those Living Creatures [the Zoas],” Blake tells us, “no Individual Knoweth” , for they evoke a social reality lost to fallen man.

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Zen and the Art of Alan Watts

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On Education, Ego, and Prickles and Goo (Left Brainers and Right Brainers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Uu8hmnxRc

Animation of some of Alan Watts’ key ideas, produced by South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone

Alan Watts (1915–1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York, before attending Seabird-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master’s degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Zen Studies.

vac-portrait_of_alan_wattsWatts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area and wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, including The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism, and Psychotherapy East and West (1961), in which he proposed that Buddhism should be thought of as a form of psychotherapy rather than a religion.

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Building Jerusalem: William Blake and the Counterculture, by Richard Holmes

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Radical Agitation, Street Protest and the Poetry of the Underground

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There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated) along a brick wall in Silver Street, Cambridge, England, in 1968. It was not poetry, but prose: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” It sent a strange shiver down my spine, as it did for thousands of other university students in England and America that year.

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The influence of Jacob Boehme on the work of Blake, by Bryan Aubrey

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Blake, Boehme, and Left Brain Verstand 

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Boehme’s influence on Blake, although often acknowledged, is frequently underestimated and has never been comprehensively investigated. Much modern criticism regards Blake’s work as non-transcendental, even secular. This is partly a reaction against earlier criticism, which was more sympathetic to Blake’s connection with the mystical tradition. The argument of this article, however, is that Boehme exerted a continuous and pervasive influence on Blake, and that recognition of this can illumine some of the most difficult and contradictory elements in Blake’s work. These include the attitude to the body and the senses, and the metaphysical status of the selfhood and the created world.

Boehme’s system represents a synthesis of many different currents of thought, including the Dionysian via negativa, the Hermetic tradition, the Kabbalah and the Lutheran faith. It is emphasized, however, that his philosophy arose from intense mystical experience rather than academic study, and that he chose to express it in symbolic and mythological terms rather than rational concepts.

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From Hell: Alan Moore and William Blake, by E.M. Notenboom 

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Psychogeography: Occult London and the City as Psyche

The Ghost of a Flea c.1819-20 William Blake 1757-1827 Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05889

Milton, Blake and Moore are philosophical wanderers who share a tendency to connect history, spirituality, and place in their works through philosophers of the past. They journey horizontally through urban, rural, or spiritual locations and at the same time delve vertically through history. As this article will suggest, their legacy is a transformation of familiar landscapes.

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Purity and Danger, by Mary Douglas

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Holy Orders: The Reason for Religion’s Obsession with Classifying and Dividing

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I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. The more we know about primitive religions the more clearly it appears that in their symbolic structures there is scope for meditation on the great mysteries of religion and philosophy. Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.

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Opening the Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley

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William Blake, Mescaline, and the end of Time

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Huxley cited his fascination with Blake as a primary factor in his decision to take mescaline, which he hoped would help him transcend the self and see the world without the usual filters on reality: “the drug would admit me at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake.” His book of the experience, The Doors of Perception, is itself eye-opening: one of the most careful and precise deconstructions of “normal” perception ever written: “The function of the brain and nervous system is in the main eliminative”, he observed, “leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful”. The drug allowed him to see that what we normally call “reality” is in fact the product of a massive filtering out of reality, a systematic closing of the doors, leaving only the programs of measurement (“ratio-ing”) and utility – reality as it would necessarily appear “to an animal obsessed with survival.”

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