Celebrating William Blake, the Nativity, and the Imagination

The Nativity by Wm. Blake

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
by Wm Blake

I'm commemorating the Nativity with having, on Christmas Eve, finished reading Peter Ackroyd's "thick" biography of William Blake.  What extraordinary work, such intense labor, and I'm not just referring to William Blake, mind you, I'm talking about Ackroyd's bio.  Blake's world, inside and out, was to say the least as sublime as it was penurious.  His visions are repeatedly heartbreaking, fearsome, and although his petulance and at times manic distrust of his friends colors some of his personality throughout, he is still for me, as he has been since I first read him at Queens College many years ago, a standard bearer, one of the horsemen of my own interior apocalypse.  Here is some Blake--


"You ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men.  That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care."

Portrait of Wm Blake by
Thomas Phillips

"I know that This World Is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision.  I see Everything I paint In This World, but Everybody does not see alike.  To the Eyes of Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.  The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way."


"But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.  To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination."




Angel of the Revelation
by Wm Blake

 

 

Blake talked about the notion of "States."  Ackroyd writes

 "His first mention of 'State' comes in the penultimate 'Night' or chapter of the poem in which he declares that it is necessary to know 'The Difference between States and Individuals of those States.'  These states may be of desire, or rage, or longing; they may also be of the material selfhood itself, and the Individual passes through them while retaining an essential spiritual identity.  You can be 'in drink' for a while, but that does not mean you are a 'drunkard.'  ...it was a way of considering the passage of the soul through the world without dwelling upon sin and guilt but rather upon forgiveness and redemption."

 

The Ancient of Days
by Wm Blake

 "Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent;
 that which pitieth:
To a devouring flame;
 and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night...
Then the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,
and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning;
God a tyrant crown'd."



When the Morning Stars
Sang Together by Wm Blake



"The other evening...taking a walk, I came to a meadow and, at the farther corner of it, I saw a fold of lambs.  Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers; and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty.  But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture." [Blake]

 

 

Nebuchadnezzar by Wm Blake
This is one of my favorite prints by Blake.
It's an accurate representation of myself in the morning;
it's why I need coffee, first thing.

 

 

 

"What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath in his house his wife his children

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

And in the witherd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain."

 

[from Vala or The Death and Judgement of the Eternal Man: A Dream of Nine Nights by William Blake]

 

 

 

 

"The imagination is a great disturber of theories..." John Cowper Powys Page entry #8

a selection from Obstinate Cymric by John Cowper Powys

"...the sensations of walking for the sake of the pleasure it gives us is a very different thing from noting the impressions left upon us by what we catch sight of on our way to work.  ...The imagination is a great disturber of theories and we must qualify all our conclusions where poetry is concerned by reminding ourselves that there come moments of inspiration when experience or lack of experience matter little.
 
     "Life at such moments is grasped in planetary perspective and with a peculiar kind of emphasis hard to define, an emphasis neither moral nor cynical, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but so intimately concerned with the unchanging pathos of terrestrial fate that of necessity it appeals to the hand-worker equally with the brain-worker.

     "That is the mysterious emphasis for which the human race has no name but which all men born of women needs must feel."

Huw Menai, 1886-1961

Powys is writing about his admiration for the poetry of Huw Menai, a Welsh coal-miner who wrote poetry which spoke      "...indignantly and wonderfully of all those workers in mine and factory whose reserved, long-seasoned, experienced, and far-sighted revolutionary insight finds it as hard to conceal its contempt for mass-hypnosis and mob-frenzy as for the Machiavellian tricks of the privileged:
     'Once in his cups, he howled aloud
     His true opinion of the crowd.'"


[and from On Seeing Leaves Falling on the Clean-Way--]

"Our hearts are still inexorably weak
For all our conquests of the earth...and late
Tasting our impotence we sadly seek
Some larger scapegoat for the larger Fate;

For we who have the grace to be ashamed
Of our mean actions feel that life would meet
Our prayers half-way if only the nameless named
Had tithe of our pity for the blind and maimed
And the dumb lowlier things about our feet."

"Huw Menai's thoughts [writes Powys] resemble wind-whipt waves breaking one after another on a rocky shore, each particular wave following so hard on the one before it that we might almost say that its choice between breaking into foam and rolling foamlessly forward into the rock pools was conditioned, decided, and predestined by a revolt from, or an imitation of, the choice made by its predecessor.  ...A reader can never be quite certain whether it will be a pagan "Tarot card" or one from the other pack that will turn up next."

(The Simple Vision: Poems by Huw Menai, 1945)

  [The above selections are from Chapter 8: The Simple Vision, Obstinate Cymric, by John Cowper Powys, London: Village Press, 1974.  Chapter 8 ("The Simple Vision") was first published in  1946.]

Page 214: "Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table. ...a bulwark of a wine, yet [he] drank it like it was champagne."

From page  214 of the book:

Between the wine and the delicious food prepared by Gerard's, my whole body became a receptacle for the noise, the conversation, the perfume and the after-shave, the rustle of bodily movements, and the living organism that the party had evolved into.   ...I was looking out for Revenant's best interests and if I could steer someone to him or away from him it could be done by my roving antennae.

  I was, however, unaware of how much he was drinking and that he'd been drinking before he arrived.  Once he'd greeted everyone, Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table.  Farigoule is a bulwark of a wine, made with thyme leaves.  It was too strong for a social occasion, yet Revenant drank it like it was champagne.

Thyme, a central ingredient to Farigoule

  ...In another corner, Owen stood by the hors d'oeuvres table with Mr. Benoit and Mr. Cans.  They were listening to Mr. Perrein pontificate on recent actions in the Chamber of Deputies; this time in English, so that Mr. Cans was lost.  Owen turned and reached for a pitcher of water.  I stuck my hand out to stop him.
    "Remember Lot's wife?" I asked.
    "Yeah," he said.
    "Well, she drank that water," I said, and handed him a bottle of unopened mineral water.
    "Barbaric country," he said, unscrewing the top.

the chamber of deputies

  
  

There's my father. My father is that man. I used to know him. [Reading Richard Ford's new book, Canada.] or [You gotta love Richard Ford, part II]

Excerpts from Ford, Richard.  Canada, New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

   "...and since so much was about to change because of him, I've thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face.  He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be.  He'd simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was.  I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men--homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter.  In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself: There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him." [pp 75-76]

 

A view of Great Falls, MT

 

 

"I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think.  Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today.  And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly--first fast, then hardly passing at all.  Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself.  What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed--caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.
"Who wouldn't want to stop that--if he could?  Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present?  I would.  Only a saint wouldn't."
[p.120]



 



A view of Great Falls, MT