Tag: Blake

30 May

Imagination

Amelia Hoskins / Foreshore / / 0 Comments

Blake's image of Newton under the sea being the measuring architect, illustrates all that may be hidden from him, by using measuring alone.

In your bosom you bear your heaven and earth and all you behold; tho'it appears without, it is within, in your imagination'.

'Like many of Blake's statements, this can seem bewildering and mystical at first glance, but when we reread it we see that Blake was being clear and concise.' (John Higgs, Blake vs the World, Ch. 4).

All that exists in the material world started as an idea in someone's imagination.  Now that we live in such a provided-for physically built environment, and since the industrial revolution, its possible to believe in only the material world, things we can see and touch, which are already there.  Blake foresaw the demise of belief in the inner creativity, the mystical, spiritual or creative experiences;  just as the demise of religious dogmas was in the ascendent during the Enlightenment and Newton's physics brought the age of scientism.  In The Book of Urizen Blake illustrates his concern that reasoning and laws of science limit infinite possibility.  [My post on Urizen]

"Spread a Tent, with strong curtains around them

Let cords and stakes bind the void

that Eternals may no more behold them."

They began to weave curtains of darkness

They erected large pillars around the Void

With golden hooks fastened in the pillars

With infinite labour the Eternals

A woof wove, and called it Science

Much of Blake's poetry and artwork is built upon his insight that "without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence."   The very definition of one implies the other exists; described by the 600BC philosopher Lao Tsu:

'Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.'

Further Reading on 'contraries'

Returning to the Essential:   Selected Writings of Jean Bies Chapter 19 : The Harmonics of Unity. '...Antagonisms are complementary, that the entire universe, in its microscopic aspects, is where these never-ending transmutation of a unique energy, of every more complex attractions and repulsions occur.  It results in the unification of the contradictory aspects of Reality: continuous-discontinuous, seperable-insperable, living-nonlivng, permanent-impermanent.  It reveals that all phenomena are of a communicative and interactive nature.' 'At the very heart of the matter recent explorations have revealed other conciliations, such as the one of waves and corpuscles, in which one aspect or another prevails according to the situation. The “inseparability” of phenomena illustrates the fact that although very distant, these phenomena can act among themselves as if there was no distance between them. It makes you wonder whether, at a certain level of the Real, instantaneous relationships exist between all the points in the universe.' [The aspect William Blake refers to is the natural regulation of one aspect being defined by the lack or difference. Warm is only so because it has less cold. Light is only so because it has less dark... etc.]
09 Mar

Blake – Newton – Urizen

Amelia Hoskins / Art, Resonant Art / / 0 Comments

Science and Imagination

'The great French philosopher Voltaire would remark, “we are all now disciples of Newton”. They were all “asleep”, Blake gravely noted, "intent on reducing the divine relationships and character to straight lines, parabolas, and ratios".

The Creation of Light: William Blake and Francisco de Holanda 

Blake accepted the new science and cosmology discovered by Newton.  He even took lessons in mathematics; but thought the age of reason was being too rational, ignoring spiritual aspects of any collective consciousness carried through the ages.  He was probably one of the earliest psychological enquirers.  He knew life is far more than any restrictive organisation into lines and numbers,  to which purpose he created a character 'Urizen' to represent what he sees as the limitations of Newton.

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 2nd October 1800

Book:  'ETERNITY'S SUNRISE' by Leo Damrosch

Chapter ATOMS AND VISIONARY INSIGHT

“Deduct from a rose its redness,” he wrote, “from a lily its whiteness, from a diamond its hardness, from a sponge its softness, from an oak its height, from a daisy its lowness, and rectify everything in nature as the philosophers do, and then we shall return to chaos.”        William BLAKE

From Damrosch:  'Blake understood these implications and utterly despised them.  Damrosch's quote from a modern science historian expresses how in the age of discovery it was feared harmony and creativity would suffer.  We now see in 2022 how this is happening with the march of technocracy.

The world that people had thought themselves living in [before empiricism] a world rich with colour and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals - was now crowded into minute corners of the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.” '

Damrosch: ''Newton wrote:
 "God formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles,” which resemble each other just as much “as the sands on the shore.” Whenever we open our eyes, the stream of particles strikes our retinas and triggers signals in the brain."

In response to Newton's description of the matter, Blake had his own response.  He would not have disagreed with Newton’s description of the ways in which light always behaves (a credible science study); only that it ignores the metaphysical, to wit he explores light in his paintings.  In this respect Blake was more a psychologist and spiritualist with a focus on consciousness.  He wrote a poem about this.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine
Blown back they blind the mocking eye
But still in Israel’s paths they shine
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright

Damrosch:   'He envokes a great symbolic story, the Exodus from bondage to freedom. The light that illuminates that journey is a spiritual force, not a hailstorm of material particles.'

He used a Biblical analogy with Israel which fits with his own preoccupation with Biblical illustrations.  This shows Blake foresaw the reductionist method of science which would in general terms, develop in a way which would divorce humanity from a spiritual or divine existence.    Now in 2022, we see that technology and pharmaceutical science have become reductionist, with no general conversation about the divine and metaphysical life as a backbone to their advances..

Blake explained how spiritual light is not just a matter of material particles; that it was not correct to describe everything in reductionist form.  He welcomed the move away from religious orthodoxy, but did not want that to mean the loss of all meanings.  We cannot nowadays know exactly how the new 'scientific' mindset of 1700s was affecting people's outlook on their future.

To see the world in a grain of sand,
and heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.

He may have been inspired by 17th century German mystic, Jacob Boehme, who wrote:

“When I take up a stone or clod of earth and look upon it, then I see that which is above and that which is below; yea, I see the whole world therein.”

Damrosch:  That kind of mysticism is very different from the kind that dismisses the visible world as mere illusion.  Once, leafing through Constable’s sketchbook, Blake commented on a drawing of trees, “Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration.” “I never knew it before,” Constable replied, no doubt with a smile. “I meant it for drawing".

Eternity, likewise, is present in each moment of lived experience; it is the river of time in which we are continuously immersed. He coined a memorable term for it. “The Eternal Now”

Eternity is in love with the productions of time

Blake - ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.

Note:  Some writers of their day - thoughts on Newtonian Physics:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.                      Alexander Pope.
Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.        William Wordsworth

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.      William Blake

Urizen misunderstood

To promote the Blake retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 2019, his last artwork was projected on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral:  an image of 'creator God' but also man as 'Urizen' the measurer and controller of all things.  The latter seems fitting these days when all things; political health and media are under more and more control.  Visionary and prophetic Blake would be up in arms about how things are going today, and be saying 'I warned you..!'

Blake's outlook on the rationally measured world was a recurrent theme pursued in his character URIZEN until his death.  Even though science has advanced civilization by technology, in 2020's we see just how far 'rational' science has come, all the way to nuclear weapons, bioweapons and biotech modifications; towards the planned alteration of humans. Medicine was hijacked by big oil.  We can imagine Blake today would be ranting about biotechnology and technocracy.

02 Mar

Visionary Light Painters

Amelia Hoskins / Art, Cosmos, Resonance / / 0 Comments

Blake and Francisco de Holanda

One of the greatest achievements of artists is to show the knowledge, understanding and consciousness of their own era.  Holanda's geometric vision of cosmic creation, which must have been ‘out of this world’ in 1545, shows the great interest in science, whilst still including 'God the creator'.

The First Day of Creation, by Francisco de Holanda (1545)

Holanda uses spectacular overlapping triangles of light leading into a vortex, creating the world with atmosphere.   Now we know the universe is electric, it makes perfect sense.  Holando's work was only discovered in mid-20th century in an obscure notebook in National Library of Spain. Its clear he was profoundly influenced by visionary contemporary philosopher Jacob Boehme; whom Blake also revered.

Light as Life Force

Holanda combines the human figure as ethereal God with power of light in 'Light of Creation' with Alpha and Omega at his fingertips; a purist Biblical vision, but combining the advancing knowledge of physics.  We can interpret this image today as a fine depiction of the electric universe, which science is still catching up with. The figure of 'God' is neither here nor there in being either correct or incorrect: it serves as a symbol of divine creation.

Both Blake and Holanda were visionary painters of both human and cosmic energy, aware of developments in cosmology and mathematics in attempting to understand the creation of the universe.

Blake (with his knowledge of modern politics and Freemasons even in 1800s ) takes the idea of the Sun as God (Pagan origins worldwide) in 'Satan In His Original Glory'  1805; Subtitled 'Thou Wast Perfect in Thy Ways from the Day That Thou Was Created, Till Iniquity Was Found in Thee”  as the outcome of total rationalisation The sun is beautifully depicted by a body in golden light, but around it are humanity being tossed about in the Sun's power.  Despite the worship of the Sun throughout mankind's history, as life giver, Blake saw the weakness in single minded cults, and was right to be concerned, now we know science has run amok which is far removed from the natural environment Blake so revered in his poetry.

Blake is aware of the 'Luciferian' god of light of the Illuminati Order, known to Blake through his knowledge of Freemasonry, with lineage from Zoroastrian and Babylonian 'sun god'.  For Blake, focusing on 'light' as a divinity is a mistaken frame of mind, which has been used to control mankind for all time.  The Sun-Satan holds the royal orb and sceptre of control, with all of human activity floating in its wake, after the French Revolution. Blake reverses the hands holding the orb and sceptre, indicating the fall of Christianity and Kings: easily relatable to British vs America war.

Today we could interpret Blake's painting as the disguise of bio-techno-Satanists introducing genetic modification for their idea of a great new future of Luciferian transhumanism, with the people as flotsam and jetsom surviving under the controls of technocracy which holds all the controls over science.  Blake's work was moving towards consciousness of human spirit.

Both Blake and Holanda depict a dark red background orb, the heat of energy or the sun, as seen similarly in Blake's Ancient of Days,  which also depicts geometric ordering, or measuring.  The architect's tool is again forming the triangle.

Photo author's own from Blake exhibition Tate Gallery, London 2020, shows accurate colours.

Referenced from Blog TheHumanDivine To be continued....

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