William Blake and the Fossilization of the Imagination

William Blake was born in 1757, smack dab in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, and he was not happy about it. While the picture to the left implies an even-temparment stereotyped to the 18th century gentleman, with his mind, Blake was storming the streets of London, leading a war against apathy.

You might say he was a bit of a hippie.

The idea that the world’s metaphor had become a machine instead of a plant worried him. As a poet, an artist, his first duty was to the purity of society’s mind and soul, and London was thick with literal and metaphorical smog.

Ironically, Romantics such as Blake were not off in their fears; we see them manifested in today’s cultural makeup.

In his work, Blake blatantly addresses the chronic apathy weighing down London’s society. His fellow humans seemed to have adopted a robotic lifestyle; reason became shackles to their creative minds and empathetic souls. Suddenly life was about progress, but what progress? There wasn’t a clear goal how machinery could better the human heart. And this haunted Blake.

In his poem “London,” he writes, “And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe . . . In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”

Weariness was a state that acted as soot, airborne and staining. Once it touched even the simplest of tasks, it would permeate every aspect of one’s life (educational, relational, moral, spiritual, etc.), creating a life of not caring. Institutions create a habit which turn into a mechanical motion which then gives way to not feeling or seeing the surrounding environmental stimuli.

Blake attributed this unshakeable weariness to the implementation of systems. They are built on logic as a means to seize truth of reality, thus they are all, essentially, the same. He saw them as dangerous because they fossilize so quickly, becoming a paralytic instead of an accelerant. The pursuit of convention led to a dullness which prevented any kind of appreciation, even in the form of tradition.

As a university student, I do not have to look far to encounter the kind of weight and indifference Blake feared and warned against. When you ask how someone is, everyone is “Fine, tired”.

And thus the passive lifestyle we are all living perpetuates as if we‘re listening to a metronome, thinking it’s music.

We live in a world overflowing with information, ambition, and industry. These traits very much characterized the world Blake lived in. In fact, our world is the same as his a few rotations down the road. Blake believed the one thing that could unify the fragmented systems and heal the perpetual lethargy of mind, body, and soul was to enter the world through the vision of a child and advocate innocence and wonder.

His solution was imagination.

But how can one advocate for imagination without logic or in a world where logic rules humans who are not completely logical beings? In order for any imagining to work or attempt to be relevant it must have a structure in order to exist: any science fiction story attests to that just as anyone in a marriage can attest to the relevancy of illogical feelings.

Thus we encounter the relationship of opposites, the great balance we have been at war for our entire existence.

In plate 3 of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake explains: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.”

We as humans embody these contradictions within our nature, but we can’t reconcile them. We must label and categorize in order to know how to think or feel about a certain thing. It is happy or it it is sad; beautiful or ugly; good or evil. It can’t be a combination. Yet in order to reveal something’s complete nature, we must approach it seeing both. However, we spend our lives putting things on different shelves based on their respective definitions, moving them out of our way instead of walking around them to view all angles from where it stands — not where we put it.

For example, if someone tells you “abortion is wrong” and you disagree, your immediate reaction is to discount him or her as a whole; the rationale does not align with yours so it must be kept at bay (unless you’ve trained yourself to engage in critical thought). This ends a conversation, and in fact, a relationship.

Institutions were designed to bring humanity together, but the habit of categorizing (as systems do) separates. If we engage, or actually allow ourselves to disengage by conforming to a system of thought — even our own, we don’t create unity within our species, but destroy the possibility.

A conversation over disagreement is more dynamic and unifying than a silent, understood agreement because it demands conversation and “traded energy between minds.” It evokes imagination, emotion, stirring our hearts and thoughts, and without knowing it, we’ve alleviated the problem of boredom and conformity.

Blake proposes comparing contrasts in order to wonder, to challenge, to progress. He sees our instinct to categorize as a trap of the mind and soul and demands we live in an uncomfortable in-between space when considering ideas.

With his demand for imagination and ban of accepting the way things are or are becoming, he asks: is truth found in the struggle between opposing forces?

William Blake also believed in objective morality, taking many views from the Old and New Testament, which demands a right answer, a categorization of sorts. This poses an interesting opposition to his above call to compare things as equally possible. As we decided, structures are necessary to exist. It is a matter of constantly challenging them to ensure they are the correct ones.

Thus we arrive back at the issue of good and evil, the ultimate comparison. How do you tell which is which? How do you understand evil without indulging it? And how can you believe in a wholly good God in a world where evil things occur?

I think Blake and I will leave that question with you. It was not his goal to tell you what to think, but to challenge you to think in the first place.

As we approach our own society, still blackened with the soot of Blake’s fears and warnings, we must ponder the meeting of active and passive, imagination and reason, good and evil in our own lives. We should question which conventions detract from our engagement with life even if they are convenient. And we need to reflect that perhaps the presence of evil in this world allows for a better observation of good.

Further, we must acknowledge that while contraries lead to better understanding, better systems, and better lives, somethings are objective. Somethings, though encouraged to be disputed come out on top. Those are the things worth believing and the things that make the struggle to understand worthwhile.