William Blake vs the World by John Higgs. Weidenfeld and Nicolson (London 2021). Hbk. 400 pages. £13.99.
Like Blake, I earn my living as a printer (of Sofia, along with other fine publications), so I was intrigued to learn from John Higgs’ new book that this oft-quoted line was inspired by his innovative print engraving technique – an ‘infernal method’ that employed corrosives ‘melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite that was hid’. In his earlier work William Blake Now – Why he Matters more than Ever (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 2019) Higgs puzzles why Blake opted for a (perceptual) door, when a window, which can become dirty and opaque, would have been a more obvious metaphor – his answer being that while we only look through a window we can pass through a door, and in both directions.
But that’s enough quibbling over metaphors – when Blake, aged four, saw the face of God pressing in his window or, aged eight, saw a tree filled with angels, or (in 1801) got into an argument with a thistle, or challenged the archangel Gabriel to prove who he was (‘Oho, you are, are you?’), he was speaking literally. Yet he claimed that all gods, angels and demons were the product of the human mind – leading Higgs to referencing Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where the strange pink cloud from which God is depicted emerging is ‘an exact, anatomically correct cross section of a human brain.’
Notwithstanding his tilt to Renaissance humanism, Michelangelo was called at the time Il Divino (‘the divine one’). Blake, who was home-schooled (primarily with the Bible), viewed himself as a sincere Christian, although Higgs concludes that he would be better described as a ‘divine humanist’. Blake had no love of the Church (at the time undergoing an evangelical revival), particularly when it tried to control the sensual aspect of people’s lives.
Blake would have appreciated the irony of the animated projection of his painting Urizen (aka Satan) on the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, publicising the 2019 retrospective of his work at Tate Britain. Notwithstanding his biblical schooling, Blake referred to God in less than complimentary terms. When asked by his friend Henry Robinson if he believed in the divinity of Jesus, Blake replied ‘He is the only God’, but then added ‘And so am I and so are you’. A direct comparison could be made here with the claim of the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart that every creature is the Logos (word of God) and that ‘my eye and God’s eye are one eye’. Eckhart died before the Inquisition delivered its verdict on this heresy and Robinson couldn’t make up his mind whether Blake was a mystic or a madman.
Blake’s understanding of the human mind was remarkably sophisticated, involving four different kinds of perception. He claimed that the dualism of physical reality and mental imagination was always with him and that to abjure the latter led to ‘Newton’s sleep’, in which only the physicalist perspective was allowed. Blake also invoked a third mode of perception, ‘Beulah’ – a name derived from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – which involved a ‘sweet, moonlit place… a blissful embrace from the whole universe’. But on top of this spiritual balm, there was a fourth modality – a glimpse of the ineffable higher realm that Blake referred to in his epic poem Milton as eternity.
Neither of Higgs’ two books on Blake could be described as biography, his principal concern being how we might achieve Blake’s fourfold vision ourselves. Well versed in the literature of apophatic mysticism, Higgs argues that fourfold perception requires some form of self-annihilation – where the mind becomes so focused as to lose all sense of time, space and ego. Higgs references the work of the neurologist Marcus Raichle on the ‘default mode network’, which generates the (illusion of) self via memories of the past and predictions of future behaviour. ‘When the brain is intensely focused on a task the default network becomes sufficiently quiet for the selfless “flow” state to be experienced.’ To Blake, this came naturally, both on account of his permanent experience of dual consciousness (physical and imaginative reality) and also, perhaps, on account of his intensely-focused day job as an engraver (that required the difficult practice of ‘mirror’ writing).
But what use is all this to us ordinary mortals who don’t see God peering through the window or trees filled with angels? Referencing his book on Timothy Leary, Higgs notes the parallel with the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, but rejects the claim that Blake partook of magic mushrooms. His own preference is Transcendental Meditation, in which the mental repetition of a mantra works to quiet the chattering mind. As the mantra is meaningless (in English), there are no mental associations that would activate the default mode network. Unlike the dramatic epiphany of the spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle, small manageable doses of TM are less likely to lead to years spent grinning idiotically on park benches.
Perhaps there’s one trick that Blake missed. One of the consequences of his biblical home schooling was a lifelong contempt for his classically educated contemporaries. But Blakean ‘divine humanism’ is not that far removed from Plato’s notion of theia mania (‘divine madness’). According to The Symposium and Phaedrus (albeit viewed through the prism of their neo-Platonic commentators) the most effective path from self-obsession to love of the divine Good starts with the love of beautiful bodies and minds, although neither Plato nor Blake believed in free love in the counter-cultural sense.
Blake’s mission was to restore balance to the Four Zoas (divine energies). His preferred approach was to undermine the dominance of Urizen (reason) by promoting Urthona (imagination). However this, according to Blake, means that salvation is only available to poets, painters, musicians and architects. There would be more hope for ordinary mortals like Henry Robinson, who confessed to having ‘no imagination, nor any power beyond logical understanding’, if the emphasis were redirected to Tharmas (body) and Luvah (heart). Higgs acknowledges Blake’s view that sexuality was linked with spirituality and divinity and speculates that this aspect of Blake’s oeuvre may have been committed to the flames by the ‘horrescent pietist’ Frederick Tatham, his self-appointed literary executor.
An interesting modern example of a Blakean approach to consciousness is Dale Wasserman’s retelling of the Don Quixote story in the book/screenplay Man of La Mancha. In Wasserman’s account, Cervantes has been arrested and imprisoned in an underground dungeon and is awaiting interrogation by the Inquisition. In order to keep himself sane, he imagines the character Don Quixote and the adventures described in Cervantes’ novel. Wasserman’s Cervantes/Quixote is possessed of Blake’s dual consciousness and fully aware that the giant waving his arms is really a windmill. The movie version focuses on his relationship with the (imaginary) Dulcinea del Toboso, so all Four Zoas are equally represented. And the theologian Brennan Manning describes Quixote’s love for ‘Dulcinea’ (the peasant prostitute Aldonza Lorenzo) as the highest form of Christian agape/caritas.
Keith Sutherland is the founder and director of Imprint Academic, Exeter, that prints Sofia along with other fine publications.