Visions and Madness: William Blake

"There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." Wordsworth on William Blake

The Romantic poet, artist, and philosopher William Blake will always continue to fascinate me. His life is filled with wonder, but a wonder mixed with some ghastly visions. Blake actually claimed to ‘see’ things in the spiritual world, and his paintings capture the images he claims to have beheld! For example, the dominant model of the universe at the time (straddling the 18th and 19th century) was Newton’s: all events are interlocked with each other, and every event is connected with every other event via cause and effect. An analogy Newton would have loved is that which compares the Universe to a clock. In a clock, ever gear and lever is related to all the others; if one moves, they all move. In the same way, every event in the universe is related to every other via cause and effect: every event can be tracked back in a causal chain beginning with the first event - Newton would have called that event the ‘creation event’.

Blake actually thought that all events were random: his vision revealed that the cogs (the same as my ‘levers’ and ‘gears’) of the universe were all out of joint: that Newton’s universe represented not the state of affairs now, but in Eden - its harmony shattered by the Fall. Which provokes the question: what are these mysterious bizarre visions?

Blake had these visions since he was a child. When he was four, the little Blake was playing around his house. All of a sudden he claims to have seen God put his head up against the window to look at him! Of course, this frightened him and he ran away screaming. A couple of years later, he saw angels perched on the limbs of a tree: they were luminous and the tree shined. Beset by all these visions, Blake began to paint what he saw. In letters, he would write enigmatic things like the following:

“[The town of] Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses. My Wife & Sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace... I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels.”

His philosophy of art was queer and yet it resonates with me. The imagination is the key to spiritual things, the key to knowing the highest things. The Enlightenment milieu would have scoffed at that: they want Reason! Yet for Blake, imagination is more exalted than reason, and art in general is the product of imagination. To give a snippet of Blake’s method, let’s say we want to read Revelations chapter 12 and meditate on it - unless our imagination is kindled the ‘revelation’ remains words on a page. Look up Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (seen as a tattoo on the killer in the movie Red Dragon) to see his vision: or the famous Ancient of Days, which is a meditation on Daniel chapter 7.

His prose are even off the wall. Instead of saying ‘and’, his sentences are loaded with the myriad ‘&’s’. Why?, one wonders. There’s also a choppiness and yet you can detect a flow, but it’s the flow from a stream no one treads. Look at this: “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create." Or, if you want Blake not abiding by the principles of grammar, what about this (dissenting from Newton’s particle theory of light and the parallels it had with the aesthetic sensibilities of the time)?:

“a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job.”

Excuse me? Another otherworldly vision of Blake is represented by The Ghose of a Flea. It’s so strange, and yet shocking, or even astounding, that his imagination had put him in touch with such visions. The thing that makes one pause is this: was he really a madman? What if some of them were, well, true? In the future, I might delve into his poems Songs of Innocence or Songs of Experience, each containing droves of images and metaphors, a literal banquet for the famished imagination.