# William Blake Now  ## Metadata - Author: [[John Higgs]] - Full Title: William Blake Now - Category: #books ## Highlights - As the philosopher Chris Bateman wrote in 2010, talking about videogame design, ‘In general terms, you can count on the formula “greater imagination required, smaller number of people attracted”.’ This formula explains the gulf between critical and commercial success in publishing, music, movies and many other fields, but it does not explain Blake. ([Location 52](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=52)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A key idea that Huxley took from Blake was that the brain normally acts as a form of ‘reducing valve’ which limits how much of reality we perceive, and that certain drugs or mystical experiences could allow people to experience reality more fully. As Blake had written in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite./ For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’ ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=149)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In divided Brexit Britain, we usually think of nationalism and internationalism as opposites. Both sides tend to see their opponents in oversimplified or caricatured terms. Remainers portray the Leavers’ love of country as inherently racist, and invariably connected to issues of immigration, cultural purity and about who decides who can be said to ‘belong’ here. Leavers, in contrast, portray that sense of belonging to a place as honest and natural, and a thing to be defended. For Remainers to deny that side of us is to deny human nature, they argue. These opposing positions can appear to be irreconcilable. Blake, however, had a great love of opposites. He saw them as a necessary step in moving forwards. As he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.’ Or more enigmatically, ‘Opposition is true Friendship.’ For Blake, the deep connection to the place around him was the soil in which a larger, spiritual love put down roots and grew to encircle the world. From this perspective, if you don’t have love for your home and neighbours, then any proclamations of love for those further away is suspect. It is like someone who sees themselves as a good person because they express concern for an abstract group such as homeless people or refugees, yet who is a poor friend to the people they know and are in a position to help. And, conversely, if you condemn groups of strangers far away, then how true is your love for your home and neighbours really? Your antipathy to other people has to come from somewhere, and if it has not grown from your experiences with those that you do know, then where has it come from? A sense of connection to your land, it can be argued, is necessary for, not opposed to, a deep respect for people of all cultures and creeds. This position goes past the framing of nationalism and internationalism, or leave and remain, as our primary duality. Instead, it divides the world into those who delight in what they love, and those who focus on what they hate. This, it turns out, can be a far more useful guide to navigating our politics and culture. ([Location 246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=246)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A key factor here is the artist’s ego. By this I’m not referring to the artist’s vanity, but instead to the bundle of opinions, ideas, experiences and perspectives that make up who they are. These are the things that the artist believes are so important that they need to be inflicted on the wider world. Financial reality, which requires the artist to become a distinct ‘brand’ in the eyes of the wider audience, pushes them to strengthen and protect that delicate ego of bundled thoughts. Yet the point of producing and sharing work is the opposite of this. When your opinions, ideas, experiences and perspectives get dissolved into the wider culture, there is no longer the need to cling on to them. That bundle of thoughts gets slowly dissolved into the great ocean of wider culture, and the need for the artist’s ego to protect them falls away. From this perspective, the real goal of an artist is to dissipate into nothing and be forgotten. As Blake wrote in Milton, ‘I come to Self Annihilation / Such are the Laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually/ Annihilate himself for others good’. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=438)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The idea is this: the human imagination is divine. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=457)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Blake recognised that it was imagination, not reason, that was fundamental, because reason was only a product of the imagination. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=461)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Imagination was something different. Imagination was the arrival, from the depths of consciousness, of something genuinely new. True, it might contain things that already exist, but they had now become part of something larger, and unprecedented. Coleridge invented the word ‘esemplastic’ to describe this process, in which separate elements are combined to create something entirely original. Fantasy was just the same old stuff rearranged with a healthy disregard for the real world. Imagination, in contrast, was engaging with existing stuff to produce something never seen before. This, being brand new, had the power to change the world in a way that fantasy did not. Something new now existed, and the world had to adapt around it. ([Location 473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=473)) - Tags: [[blue]] - I wander through each corporate street, Near where the corporate Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear. ([Location 556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=556)) - Tags: [[blue]] - ‘The mind-forged manacles’ is too good a phrase to change, but it could be updated to become more relevant to the emerging twenty-first century culture. The phrase tells us that what is holding us back and constraining others is our thoughts and our established ways of thinking. Generation Z, those born or raised in the twenty-first century, understand this. In their parlance, realising this is to become ‘woke’. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=562)) - Tags: [[blue]] - I think again of the words of Blake: ‘Without Contraries is no progression.’ Staying neutral and placid is not how we advance. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=597)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When academics attempt to label the prevailing attitudes of the world as it is now, they increasingly use the word ‘metamodern’. Metamodernism is, they tell us, what has replaced postmodernism. It refers to the flight to extremes, and in particular to seemingly contradictory extremes, in order to achieve things that a reasoned, centrist, calm negotiation cannot. I mentioned earlier how Blake is seen as both a political radical and a traditionalist, a libertarian and a socialist, a pious Christian and a free-love heretic. His willingness to explore what is useful in seemingly opposite extremes makes him almost a textbook definition of metamodernism, as does his statement that ‘Without Contraries is no progression.’ In this way he is entirely in tune with contemporary times. It has taken us a while, but we are finally catching up with him. ([Location 608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=608)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Blake’s awareness of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that usually bind our thinking helped him to see the injustices of the time clearly. They gave him an extended circle of empathy that left him unable to accept the prevailing societal values. In this, he was very similar to the networked ‘woke’ generation. Like them, he understood the importance of people coming together. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=619)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As Blake described the value of the New Church, founded by followers of the Swedish mystic Swedenborg, ‘The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all.’ What was important and spiritual about the Church, in other words, was not the rituals and ceremonies. It was that the rituals and ceremonies brought people together. As he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.’ We belong with others, in other words. This is entirely in keeping with his belief that closing ourselves off to other people is what creates our own Hell, and it is an idea that this group-minded, connected generation understand far better that the individualistic people of the twentieth century. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=622)) - That this shift from a dull productive island to an island of creativity has largely gone unnoticed is due, in part, to how the hangover of Empire has distorted our sense of ourselves. We have been distracted from who we have become by the mirage of James Bond-style British exceptionalism, which assumes that we are somehow automatically better than other countries. Because we used to have a global empire, the thinking goes, we are still in some way more important than others. Wild delusions like this make it difficult to see who you really are, and also how much you have changed. ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=673)) - Tags: [[Sociology]] - That competitive, antagonistic and obviously wrong view of the world is still being nurtured in exclusive private schools, whose pupils go on to have a disproportionate influence on the worlds of media, politics and academia. Being so far removed from the reality of life as it is experienced by the great majority, they maintain the belief that this island is, at its heart, sensible, noble, dutiful and classy, like the world depicted in Downton Abbey. But as a people, we are absolutely nothing like Downton Abbey. We are so different that it’s a miracle that anyone could fall for this idea. ([Location 677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=677)) - Blake was declaring the importance of deep imagination, and the world beyond our rational models, while his contemporaries were hailing the importance of reason. This put him out of sync with his own times and condemned him to a lifetime of obscurity, but it makes him entirely relevant to the modern world. Because our digital machines are the product of our rationality, they have defined limits. It is the unexplored landscape outside that closed rational territory where our skills are needed. It is the imagination, as Coleridge defined it, where our work ahead lies. ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07TGTZJY1&location=711)) - Tags: [[Philosophy]]