Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of William Blake's birth. Probably most of us know little of the man except for the song Jerusalm ("And did those feet ...?") and that he painted watercolours with religious themes and wrote poetry, which we've largely not read. Time to ponder, however briefly, that he had a radical political philosophy that sprang from a mystical bent that revealed itself in him even in childhood. As Terry Eagleton tells it the Guardian, he sounds like an early exponent of Creation spirituality.
"Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. 'If the doors of perception were cleansed,' he claims, 'everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.' Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations."
You can almost hear Matthew Fox cheering (and probably he has in one of his books that I have not read), but wait; perhaps two cheers for we are also told:
"Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem."
Actually there's a lot about Blake, on this showing, I think I like. And I quite like this:
"In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future."
Maybe I don't go with the communist thing: replacing the tyranny of capital with that of state monopolistic capital seems to be a frying pan to fire journey. But a future where people are cared for, treasured and given the means to make the world better than we found it ...
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Terry Eagleton: The original political vision: sex, art and transformation:
Nous like scouse or French -oui? We wee whee all the way ... to mind us a bunch of thunks. Too much information? How could that be?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"
I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...
-
I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything...
-
from: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/online/2012/5/22/1337672561216/Annular-solar-eclipse--008.jpg
-
"'Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell yo...
No comments:
Post a Comment