Five Extraordinary Lessons from William Blake
Five out of ∞
Poet. Prophet. Genius. Lunatic. Artist. Mystic. Liar.
William Blake has been called all sorts of things over the last two hundred years and it’s hard to disagree with any of them. Red Dragon is streaming on Netflix which reminded me of all the time I’d spent admiring his visionary art and dissecting his incredible poetry and mythology.
Here are five amazing lines and the lessons I’ve taken from them. Hopefully it inspires you to head over to the Blake Archive and find some gems of your own — or at the very least admire his real art. The images in this post are a pastel and charcoal drawing I did today while watching Red Dragon.
We’ll start with the obvious and move to the obscure.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.
This quote was the first time I encountered William Blake’s work, as the epigraph to Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. I was fifteen and it wasn’t an interest in drugs that drove me to pick up Huxley’s psychedelic starting gun, it was music. There’s a band that borrowed their name from this quote too, maybe you’ve heard of them?
The Doors of Perception is an extremely conservative recollection of an afternoon Huxley spent on mescaline in the presence of his psychiatrist. He fills a novella with recollections of looking at flowers, pondering a chair and taking a ride in the car. Sounds riveting, right? IT IS.
That book and this quote tingled my spider sense that maybe I shouldn’t be so damn certain about all the things I can see, feel and touch. It didn’t give me any answers but it certainly made me skeptical of everyone else who had them. My understanding of the quote has evolved over time.
As a boy I took it literally — that energy can be neither created nor destroyed so no matter what metaphysical ideology governed my consciousness (if any), the energy of my body was forever. In the future I might be part of a screaming comet. Or fuel in one of the giant nuclear forges we call stars. Or a really tight sports bra. After all, I was fifteen.
Twenty years later, I still like that interpretation though my understanding of the quote has changed significantly (connect the dots).
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
Blake valued the human imagination above everything. In his mythology law and reason were the literal stones that built hell and they were anthropomorphized as a compass wielding man named Urizen. The man who weighed and measured the world — google up the illustrations of him because they’re all-time amazing.
It’s good to be reminded that our language and numbers are symbols we created and not absolutes. Sometimes they do an incredible job describing the world and sometimes we accept an illusory description because humans are really uncomfortable with the idea of the incalculable. And what’s even more mind-bending is the notion we might be surrounded by information that we cannot perceive (see above).
Our neurotransmitters evolved to protect our bodies, to keep us breathing. Mother nature doesn’t usually give us things that we don’t need, they wither and disappear so it makes you wonder to what end is our imagination…
What is now proved was once only imagined.
Everything man has ever made once existed first in someone’s mind. The world is the literal manifestation of our imaginations. Sometimes our imagination fails and we suck the blood out of the earth and set it on fire to propel us around when there’s a sun above us. Other times we create chihuahuas. Win some. Lose some.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
Blake found his own world (circa 1800) to be too literal and materialistic, imagine what he would think of today. Embrace that feminine mind he told me — it’s in there somewhere, in all of us, dudes, chicks, people who identify as rabbits. Repeat after me: a tree is more than wood. A tree is more than wood.
I leave you with this:
The Good are attracted by Men’s perceptions
And Think not for themselves
Till Experience teaches them to catch
And to cage the Fairies & Elves
A Letter from the young William Blake in defense of the imagination
All of the illustrations in this (and every) medium post are made by me, they are real, physical pieces of art. Feel free to use these images for whatever you like but please include my website (www.mikewehner.com). Purchase inquiries welcome, prices are reasonable.
