Tag: Blake

30 May

Imagination

Amelia Hoskins / Foreshore / / 0 Comments
St Peter, St. James, Beatrice and Dante, St. John Descending - Tate Britain Exhibition 2020 - photograph by writer.

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."  

"...contraries and oppositions - love and hate, expansion and contraction, opaqueness and translucence, reason and energy, attraction and repulsion, these are the poles of his world, where 'Without Contraries is no progression'. He establishes pairs and couples within his poetry and his art; his painted objects are often placed in symmetry with each other, just as his epic verse is heavily imbued with parallelism and antithesis. In his greatest work he creates giant forms that contain his own contradictory impulses and private oppositions; he establishes a 'bounding line of art or poetry that does not unite contraries but allows them to exist in harmony beside each other."

[Blake Vs The World. Find page]page]

 The very definition of one aspect of being 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.'

Any concept has its own accompanying concept to define the degrees of either.  Mathematica Universalis (http://heurist.org) works with conjugates, listing abstracts such as 'actuality and possibility', 'enfold/unfold' amongst many.   In the context of their extensions into humanity, he further describes them as having depth as the 'male' agency of focus and action, and the wider scope, the 'female' societal integration.  Depth and scope are tangential to each other.

The Philosophy of Anaxagoras - 500BC - c.428BC

Blake's 'contraries' were expressed as the harmony of the relationship of opposites; a yin-yang balance of conditions.  e.g. hot/cold, near/far.  The terms are not opposites, but conjugates; one aspect of a condition, always being in a certain proportion to another aspect.  Abstractly, any proportion of an experienced or observed condition, will have a counterpart which is less or more of its conjugate.  They are not always in balance, rarely, as their very definition is bound by their distance from their conjugate.  Anaxagoras understood the interrelation of all things, by their having elements of their counterpart.  "Anaxagoras apparently realized those opposites not as "qualities," but as things as things of spatial extensiveness.’"

Whilst imagination is the root of everything, within all developed civilizations, a development which harms humanity sometimes happens. British philosopher Owen Barfield (worked with C S Lewis and J R R Tolkein), said we must take responsibility with imagination. In modern times responsibility is only now being taken by individuals into the evils which science has imagined and now is being meshed with us:  imaginative ideas of mad scientists, biotechtopian plans for a technofied humanity with no sensible control.

Further Reading on the imagination and '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".

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

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, and was justifiably concerned it would lead to humanity's downfall.   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 a fourfold vision I 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, Extract from letter to Thomas Butts, 2nd October 1800

Physicist Werner Heisenberg quotes appear to correspond with Blake's idea of "Newton's sleep".

"The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct “actuality” of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however."

"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning"

Measuring in a traditional way won't get the answers at the atomic level.  Blake would have understood Heisenberg's insight to a 'method of questioning' [when only using reductionist materialist science].

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

This is very insightful about the identity and meaning of things.

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.

Damrosch:  'Blake understood these implications and utterly despised them.'

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 fascinating reasoning on energy and metaphysics.

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

Blake was more a psychologist and spiritualist with a focus on consciousness.

[Add Links for this to his 4-fold story with Beulah etc.]

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 sees the poem as depicting a spiritual light force, rather than a 'hailstorm of particles'. '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'

Whilst Blake's Biblical analogy fits with his own preoccupation with Biblical illustrations, he may have had even more insightful vision beyond that simple poetic meaning; one of a future where reductionist science would dominate in a way which would divorce humanity from a spiritual or divine existence.

Now in 2022 [now 2023], we see that technology and pharmaceutical science have become reductionist, with no bars on  advances in genetic engineering, and when AI will control things, with NO humane feeling whatsoever.  An incidental fact is that many of the new science-tech and pharma-biotech companies are Jewish run or owned, which brings a heavy salience to a different reading we could impose on Blake's 'atoms of Democritus' and 'Newton's particles of light' being 'sands upon the red sea shore'.  In fact Netanahu contracted with Pfizer to use his entire population for data study, the majority of them being vaccinated against C.19.  Some times Blake's writing is almost like Nostradamus; and who can say whether there have not been people who could see the future.

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; whether many were aware the direction science was taking.  We can though determine that Blake was a modern thinking man: he didn't need rigid church dogmas when he had his own spiritualist insights, akin to quantum physics, and much of his writing explored the psyche.

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.”

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”. [check quotes]

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

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.  We can imagine Blake today would be ranting about biotechnology and technocracy.

Many inspiring articles on Blake in TheHumanDivine blog

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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