IMAGINING WILLIAM BLAKE, A WORLD APART

William Blake (1757-1827) was considered to be deranged in his day and treated as a social outcast. This suited him very well, as it conformed to his distaste for neighbors, rejection of social pressures, and personal stands against war, slavery, and the conformities of organized religion. Of course, this consigned him to a life of poverty and obscurity, a life which he devoted to his art. His is no romantic story of the artist sequestered in a tower toiling away at his craft. He struggled against the tides of the day, threw up insults to those he felt were compromised in their actions, and generally snarled at the world. And he was a visionary who to this day is not well understood or appreciated. But it seems to me that he offers us a different way to view the turmoil and confusion we see all around us at the beginning of the 21^st century. If nothing else, his life is worth exploring because of his own efforts to deal with a society that he found exceedingly banal and manipulating.

Viewed now from our perch in time he would be considered an artist of “outsider” art, a wholly intact genre of art that celebrates elemental aspects of craft and often appears primitive in its motifs, media, and styles of creativity. Blake had been apprenticed to a printmaker early in his life but developed his own styles and presentations for the body of his creative work. He combined his visual art with his prose and poetry, often adding narrative to his prints. His work must have emerged from his world view, as he was totally committed to it all his life. It is said that he was a mystic but that detaches him from the influences of the world in which he lived. He was not interested in transcendent experiences. I don't think he could have created his own world without being deeply embedded in all the causes and events he so detested. His work is in that sense a reaction to the world's convictions and prejudices and follies. He is instead more a visionary than a mystic.

Blake was convinced that it is from the particularities of life that we draw inspiration and apply that to our creativity. His was a bottom-up and organic approach to life. He saw stasis and frozen symbols in the generalities of religion and most organized institutions of his day. His approach was to activate creativity with imagination. He believed that imagination represented man as an acting and perceiving being. The development of imagination was a process of synthesis and syncretism, an attempt to reconcile different beliefs. He could not have constructed his allegorical world without pushing against all that he saw around him and creating an ordered cosmos that he could live within, a world apart from the one that gave him the fierce energy to rebel.

Blake's world, both visual and written, was allegorical. Of course, when viewed from what we think of as the world, his world is one of fiction and fantasy. His world became a reality for him. His characters spoke for him and were able to say things that he found no audience for (the capitalizations of names for virtues and vices personified them in his stories). In this regard, his work is no different from the work of the writer of fiction or the puppeteer who could insult the king without losing his head. It is all about creating from the imagination characters who think and act within a differently constructed world. They are symbolic figures that convey hidden or complex meanings woven from moral, spiritual, or political threads. For him, the Devil was truly in the details.

Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, The Bible, and the French and American revolutions (especially the writings of Thomas Paine). He studied Michelangelo and Raphael and found there the heroic and idealized human proportions he included in his own prints. He was drawn to rebellion and those who demonstrated it in their own lives. His allegorical structure echoes the work of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, works of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, Orwell's The Animal Farm, Malory's Arthurian Legends, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps even J. K Rowling's Harry Potter series. What all of them seem to suggest is that there is an attempt to create a world apart, a world ordered differently from the one most of us live in every day.

What do I make of this? Why has William Blake captured my attention over the years? I have tried, and tried repeatedly, to decipher his hidden codes and to learn his secrets. I have taken my anthology of his poetry off the shelf, read a few poems, then put the book back, returned to the few poems I thought I understood, only to discover that I had missed the point. What was the point after all? His world seemed so far separated from the one in which I had any connection. And perhaps that is the point after all. Perhaps it is his genius at constructing a different world that I had missed because my world was full of interruptions and distractions he filtered out of his. If one views all the work he produced and look back at his motives for creating it, perhaps it is possible to understand why they came to be in the first place. And could this not be a motivation for us to appreciate the creative works that have come to us in the same way—responses to a world fraught with confusion and contradictions and riddles that seem impenetrable. And isn't this a way for us to find a sense of order that helps us navigate the shoals of that teeming world?

If one thinks that worlds apart, worlds of the imagination, are responses to this world of ours, then are we not open to limitless possibilities of how that world apart might look? It is said that all works of fiction are built on just a few universal themes and everything else is a version of them. Perhaps that is also true of allegories. Are there not personifications of Good and Evil, of Heaven and Hell, of Prudence and Patience, of Lust and Greed, for instance, in most of them, dressed up differently for each era's particular manifestations of human behavior? Do we not have our own era's figures and events that we could shape into an allegory? Would it do us some good to do this? Would the narrative help defuse the inherent angst that presently occupies corners of our minds? Could we imagine a new and different narrative about our lives that isn't dystopic or apocalyptic? Could such an allegory emerge from our minds as we sit in meditation? Doesn't this happen already as we characterize certain people in stereotypical ways in our daily lives? If we do this, can we imagine a world apart from them? Could an alternate world offer us respite from the problematic human behavior that now troubles us?

I imagine the world in which Blake felt most comfortable, given his peevishness about his external reality, was the one of Innocence (one of his allegorical figures in Innocence and Experience), of childhood. Childhood was a world of imagining and creativity, aspects of character given up when we grow up and gain Experience. Blake lived in one world of detested authority and dogma but returned repeatedly to the simplicity, fantasies, and allegories of a world apart where he could create the forces of good and have them defeat the forces of evil. This world is one of union and synthesis and entirely of his own making. Innocence is about unfettered belief and the experience of adulthood is about doubt. In this world of the imagination he created the particularities that made life comprehensible. It isn't a mystery to see why Blake was a dominant influence on the work of Maurice Sendak in our own times. Even Sendak's drawings of humans have a heroic quality to them that give them authority in the world of the child. And Sendak, too, dealt with nightmarish realities in his own personal life. He was haunted all his life with the specter of the losses of many family members in the Holocaust. His stories of childhood are complicated and not always the romantic versions others might have written. But, all the same, they were his efforts to find a simpler path through life. In doing so, he, like Blake, perhaps achieved a degree of clarity of vision.

For most of us, a return to childhood is a dream and a fund of memories. But, in fact, what we work at in our meditation practice is to return repeatedly to a mental state in which we get to choose the characters in our own allegory. We aspire to a state of greater simplicity in which we can leave the noise of the external world and all its tensions and confusion and enter a place (like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) where the wonders and awe of childhood can be nourished. This childhood place is also where the disenfranchised (aren't children in this category?) can speak truth to power in ways children are not allowed to speak to adults in their world of experience. It is here, too, that we can find respite and peace, if not enlightenment.

Blake was able to create a world of innocence and dwell there off and on his entire life. I think he was able to do this successfully because he had a good idea about the exigencies and vicissitudes of the world he was leaving behind. He was an angry rebel but he was also a realist about the world of experience and a perpetual beginner in the world of innocence. Aren't we like this,too, when we meditate? Aren't we hoping to give up the constraints of adult experience for the freshness of childhood innocence? Aren't we hoping to bring greater simplicity and clarity to our thoughts? And aren't we hoping to concentrate our attention in ways that open up different ways of seeing and being? Can we bring innocence and experience closer together in our lives? Do we blur the line between fiction and reality? Are we open to what children have to teach us? What creations would William Blake give us today? How do we find this path through the thicket of tangled times?