From Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac”:*
It’s the birthday of poet and artist William Blake (books by this author), born in London (1757). He was four years old when he had a vision that God was at his window. A few years later, he went for a walk and saw a tree filled with angels, their wings shining. He had other visions, too: he saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree, and angels walking with farmers making hay.
When Blake was 10 his parents sent him to drawing school, and at the age of 14 he was apprenticed to an engraver. After seven years, he went into business for himself, and a few years later he privately printed his first book, Poetical Sketches (1783). It was a total flop — it wasn’t even mentioned in the index of London’s Monthly Review, a list of every book published that month.
Not long after that, Blake’s beloved brother, Robert, died at the age of 24. Blake spent two sleepless weeks at his deathbed, and when he died, Blake claimed that he saw his brother’s spirit rise through the ceiling, clapping its hands with joy. From then on, Blake had regular conversations with his dead brother. A year later, Robert appeared to William in a vision and taught him a method called “illuminated printing,” which combined text and painting into one. Instead of etching into a copper plate, Blake did the opposite: he designed an image in an acid-resistant liquid, then etched away everything else with acid, leaving a relief image, and he applied color to both the raised and etched parts of the copper plate. Illuminated printing — or as it’s now known, relief etching — was a huge breakthrough in printing. Blake wrote: “First the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged: this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
Blake used this technique for many of his great works, including Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and The Book of Los (1795). Throughout his career, he continued to see visions — in addition to communing with the spirits of relatives and friends, he claimed to be visited by the spirits of many great historical figures, including Alexander the Great, Voltaire, Socrates, Milton, and Mohammed. He talked with them and drew their portraits. He was also visited by angels and once by the ghost of a flea, whose portrait he drew. He wrote: “I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation [..] ‘What,’ it will be Question’d, ‘When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host.”
Blake died at the age of 69. He spent the day of his death working on a series of engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. That evening, he drew a portrait of his wife, and then told her it was his time. A friend of Blake’s who was there at his deathbed wrote: “He died on Sunday night at 6 o’clock in a most glorious manner. […] Just before he died, His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”
At the time of his death, Blake was an obscure figure, best remembered for his engravings of other peoples’ work, or maybe his one famous poem, “The Tyger.” Among those who knew more about his life’s work, the consensus was that Blake was insane. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which he had engraved and painted by hand, had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. It wasn’t until more than 30 years after his death that a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, published a two-volume biography of Blake that firmly established him as a brilliant and important artist.
He said, “Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.”
This entry had to appear today because it is Blake’s birthday.
Blake’s etchings are still the subject of detailed critical examination in an effort to discern how he accomplished these works.
As an undergraduate I studied printmaking for a year but never encountered the evident mysteries in his techniques.
Needless to say, Blake’s illustrated works are infused with an uncommon logic. He is among the artists whose works and life give support to stereotypes about “crazy creatives.”
This is for anyone interested in Blake’s etching techniques.
http://bq.blakearchive.org/9.4.wright
One of two poets I’ve read extensively. The other is Amiri Baraka…how weird is that?
Tyger, tyger, burning bright . . . Perhaps the finest conversation with a beast in all of literature.
It’s common for critics, these days, to defend Blake from accusations that he was stark raving mad and to explain, patiently, that he was a creative genius. But, ofc, he was both.
I had the names of five authors up in wooden letters on the walls of my classroom–my poetic pantheon: Rumi, Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Stevens.
Stark, raving mad, dubious, since he was still living with his wife at the time of his death. Perhaps he walked the line between creativity and schizophrenia, or he was a “medium,” if in fact, such things are real.
I have a fascination with the writings of schizophrenics and with the work of Blake. A lot of stuff in the prophetic books reads to me very much as though it belongs to the genre. And you are, of course, correct. This grab-bag term, schizophrenia, covers a lot of ground, and most who suffer from these conditions cycle in and out of craziness, or alternate seeing. As Thomas Szasz has spent much of his career pointing out, in the old days, we made such people into shamans.
“He’s mad, stark, raving mad.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
I’m teaching with “A Poison Tree” from Songs of Experience on Tuesday. Everything was a symbolic vision to Blake. Blake might have had seizures in the temporal lobes or the limbic system of his brain, like the hippocampus, amygdala, and anterior thalamic nuclei, which take input from all sensory systems, like vision. If someone has seizures in the motor cortex, they experience the muscle twitching known as epilepsy. People who have seizures, however, in the limbic system tend to experience religious visions. Whether the visions are genuine or pathological is a matter of belief. Hey, if you can say “Blake’s brain” five times fast, you win a prize.
Fascinating, Left Coast!
The reference to mental dysfunction brings to mind a naturalist writer my wife discovered somewhere named Opal Whitley. Amazing stuff.
Can a person wired in the great middle do anything out on the edges? Perhaps we need the mentally dysfunctional to show us the way out, stuck as we ae in our practicality.
The similarities I see are a) the emphasis on creation of a complete, system of the universe unique to him, on making connections, often fantastic connections and pattern-making of the kind that psychologists refer to as apophenia or, for visual patterns, pareidolia; b) the visions; c) the elaborate pantheon of perceived entities reifying and hypostatizing human attributes, especially attributes of persons who have played major roles in his or her personal life; d) the massive, feverishly produced output; e) the drivenness and intensity of the expression; f) the use of elaborate nonconventional symbol systems (personal symbols); g) the denial of the arbitrary or accidental nature of at least parts of symbols (a very ancient phenomenon, the belief, for example, that names of beings are literally evocative of or can be used to control those beings).
But if Blake’s work is at times the production of a madman, more of that madness! I really don’t care. His madness or lack thereof aren’t important concerns, at least to me, and I’m sorry I mentioned this. Blake was one of the greatest artists of all time. Here was a breathtakingly powerful poet who used his sublime art in the service of the poor, of human rights, of the rights of women, of freedom, of rebellion against economic and political tyranny and against the Contemptus Mundi of The Church, which split everything down the middle, into the spiritual and the physical, with its rejection of the world, of the body, and of human sexuality in particular, something that Blake emphatically (well, he was emphatic about most everything) rejected.
I agree. I remember my favorite professor telling the story of Martin Luther riding his horse into a lightning storm and coming away with visions of God — the lightning bolt that changed the world. Scientists might point to electricity causing a neurological seizure event. Believers might ask Who caused the lightning? In the case of William Blake’s poetry, I don’t care what caused it; his poetry was about divine peace and the easing of affliction. When he wrote “A Poison Tree”, he was calling on the French to put away their guillotines and stop murdering aristocrats. I agree.
The Freudians blamed the Reformation on Luther’s constipation. He was so bottled up that he couldn’t make himself right enough for the Lord to take Holy Orders. And if he couldn’t do it, then, darn it, no one could! But I must say that I like the “thunderstruck on the road to Erfurt” story.
My prof would rightly admonish me for discussing neurology without a medical degree, and rightly so. I apologize. He often lamented — and this was in the early ‘90s —that people, especially in education, who are not medical doctors often claim to understand how the human brain works. I remember a representative from a company called Sopris West trying to sell a reading intervention program to me by trying to explain what happens to Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas of the temporal lobe if the corpus callosum is severed. She got everything all wrong and mispronounced ‘Wernicke’.
I’m looking at you, Bill Gates. I’m looking at you, David Coleman. Close reading nonsense! I’m looking at you, Carol Dweck. I still can’t believe Dweck just invented a word, “brainology”, to cover up the fact that her theory of the brain being like a muscle was not neuroscience. It was ridiculous. If you engage a muscle in repetitive motion, it builds mass and strength, but if you engage the brain in repetitive thought, it’s a pathological disorder. People get lots of money for playing a doctor on tv. It’s a problem. I apologize. I do not know what caused William Blake’s genius.
Fascinating, again, LeftCoast! Good to keep that BS detector operational!
Thank you. The most important BS detector I have is the one I turn on myself.
Wow. That, LCT, is a moving statement. Doffing my cap to you.
“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer’d, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing.” –William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
“[W]hen the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!'” –William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment
“Jerusalem,” from Milton, by William Blake
AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Different time, different place, different context, same title, same sentiment:
Oh my Lord, GregB. Thank you. That was magnificent.
A Very Short Story | Bob Shepherd
The all-but-weeping faces hovered above the bed. In the last moment, he reached hesitantly for the edge of the little table that held the Vital Signs Monitor. The moment his rice paper-covered finger touched the edge of this, it seemed as though electricity shot up his arm. “My God, my God,” he said. “It’s alive. It’s all alive.” Then, it was done.
for William Blake
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
Breathtaking still, isn’t it? Imagine being the person who coined the phrase “mind-forged manacles”!!!! Or crafted the synesthesia of the soldier’s cry running in blood down Palace walls! To have been the first to have done this thing, now a stock feature of horror films. And this breathtaking creativity in the service of protest against the evils of his day–the child abuse, the abuse of the poor, the war-mongering elite, the “respectable gentlemen” frequenting the brothels. And all in perfectly crafted verse. Amazing.
and the shock of not the marriage bed or the marriage coach but “the Marriage hearse” Wow
That sigh running in blood–how perfectly crafted is that!!! The “sigh” suggests resignation in the face of the juggernaut of the State–nothing to be done by this poor lad. Bu those palace walls, see for real, as what they are–running in blood.
Beautiful. The things we humans deny—and worse, call madness—are in actually, the workings of a greater mind, of a mind so advanced that we can’t fathom it to be real. Thank you for the lovely post.