William Blake vs The World (2022)
This book makes William Blake a cypher through which to view mysticism, psychedelia and the limit-experience generally (not to mention, revolution, heresy, and madness). It is likewise made clear that William Blake was a self-published crackpot who never made a dime; sounds familiar. But Blake had a vision; literally, and many of them. As a child he saw a tree full of angels. He told his parents about the encounter and his father beat him for it. These visions were persistent and Blake was ecstatic and totally convicted. He was consistent to this vision unto his dying breath and the London art-world thought he was a heretic, a fool and crazy. He died a pauper and a joke. So it goes.
But the question he asked resounds to this day: Who can paint an angel? This is the essential dilemma of all psychonauts and all mystics. To put the question more broadly how do you communicate to other people a visionary limit-experience that takes place far off the coast of the symbolic? To many of us the random accounts of these experiences just sounds like someone telling a vibrant and yet boring dream; the meaning does not transmit. Blake spent his whole life trying to transmit the meaning of his own dream. At the time everyone dismissed him as mad. Now he sells out the Tate.
The local high-school in my home town of Grand Marais MN had a mural in the hallway depicting Blake’s god character Urizen (along with a Vikings football helmet) that was seared in my head at very young age. (see image below); it is a curious choice and the school probably did not know what he meant. This character is loosely based on the myopic demiurge of the Gnostics and the Yahweh of the bible but that is imbued with a kind of buffoonery that is specific to Blake. This god Urizen—who is also known, hilariously, as Nobodaddy—is the “father of jealousy” and he likes to hang out in clouds of smoke of his own making. “For old Nobodaddy aloft / Farted & belchd & coughd…/ said he: I love hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.” Nobodaddy likewise is the god of law, language and architecture, of domination and authority. In Blake’s weird cosmology this god and his domain prohibit the imagination and the visionary: as such Nobodaddy becomes a kind of Satan and lord of the bottomless pit. That Father God is Satan makes sense to anyone who thinks about it long enough but for the Christian society of London it was too much; they regarded Blake a heretic; he did not care.
While his conviction in his own weird vision insulated him from public scorn, it likewise alienated his audience and it would not be until the romantic poets reappropriated him as their own godfather poet Nobodaddy that he would emerge as the mythic figure that he remains to this day. But the romantics were wealthy leisure-class poets and Blake was poor and always on the hustle; he was buried in an unmarked grave.
It is probably the case that psychedelics have therapeutic potential because of the strong conviction that follows the experience. The psychedelic experience, like the mystical experience, becomes a dynamo of ecstatic meaning that can quickly organize itself into something to live for. Blake’s conviction following his lifelong ecstatic visions of the spirit world powered an aesthetic arc that is still releasing generative content.
The central thesis of this arc is as simple as it is profound: the divine exists within the human. The human imagination is the divine; Blake: “men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.” This is antithetical and even heretical to the traditional Christian/platonic viewpoint that the divine is outside of the human and beyond the planet. In an era of ecological collapse and immanent catastrophe this transcendent view of divinity is no longer tolerable and is probably the reason why we got into this jackpot to begin with: the toxic theology that despises the body and the earth as fallen and depraved: so much better to destroy it
Blake’s occult conviction by contrast was directed towards divinity in the here and now. As such he worshipped sex and the body and the earth. The body and its libido powers the ecstatic imagination (Freud said as much) ;it is the embodied imagination that makes our reality. This imagination is mystical because it is indifferent to reason, language and society. We humans conceive our own cosmos in the sense that we make it as we apprehend it. Meaning does not arrive from without, but is conjured from within.
“Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonished at me yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not from my great task, to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes of man inwards, into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of god, the human imagination.”
Jerusalem, 1820, William Blake
