The physics department at an American university once opposed the appointment of a particular English professor because they were a scholar of Blake. A university, even if in a different department, was no place for that 'mad' critic of the method (Bacon), the underlying philosophy (Locke), and the paradigm-shifting discoveries (Newton) that had fundamentally shaped modernity (and what was then taken for the truth of things)!
Despite subsequent discoveries in physics yet, I think, to be absorbed, this world, linear, sense-bound, material, is the one we broadly inhabit - our briefly conscious minds inhabiting a bag of skin that looks out on an objective world colored in by our projected subjectivities, but always threatening to drain back into grey purposelessness, a threat we postpone by a variety of strategems usually including some form of hopeful consumption - of things or experiences! Or maybe we seek to escape this version of things with the veneer of religion - hoping that if we believe certain things and behave in certain ways, we might be offered a different world after we vacate the said skin and our 'soul' travels elsewhere!
It is precisely this single imprisoning vision that I possibly exaggerate for effect, in both its scientific and religious guises, that Blake sought to liberate us from, and it is the great virtue of Mark Vernon's book to show how and why Blake thought this possible, and how this perspective was built out through a life well-lived bearing fruit not only in a remarkable body of work - the blend of the musical- poetic-visual - but in struggles and complexities navigated through into a peaceable, if still imperfect, last years.
Vernon does this by elaborating a chronology of deepening and widening insight that is both philosophically acute, psychologically probing, and steadily embodied in living practices of art and life. It is a beautiful study of how a person took their originating innocence and sense of wonder and shepherded it into a living system that provided an alternative set of metaphysical foundations and founding mythologies to those current in their age, and as they rose to their now current, depleting dominance.
Blake is having a cultural moment, Vernon attests, precisely because we glimpse that his alternative perspectives offer a more fruitful, liberating account both personally and socially. It is an account rooted in a fundamental intuition that human beings are infinite. Their desire stretches after the All and will not be satisfied without coming to dwell within the All. It is fundamentally St Augustine's intuition that we are restless if we do not rest in God, but the Blakean twist is to see that resting as a dynamic dwelling in nature, seen in all its particulars glimmering, enfolded in eternity. We do not go to God; we discover ourselves dwelling in the divine gifting that is the world. It is a shift in perception that sees imaginatively, that considers the Imagination as the primary way of knowing that allows reason its due but prevents reason from usurping its place in the order of things. It recognises that consciousness is not something we have but something that we are - we live in God's mind, and that mind is fashioning a created order that is filled with energy and delight, where the boundaries of time and space do indeed create the potential for suffering and affliction, but which yet eternity shines through, when seen aright, and makes all things well.
It is a vision that is heterodox to what we currently conceive as scientific orthodoxy, though not to the practice of science itself, and heterodox to many religious orthodoxies as well, for it is fundamentally a mystical vision, one rooted in Christianity, and, as Vernon shows, nourished by a profound reading of the Gita, recently translated into English, and offers a 'religious' life more orientated around practicing joy than arguing beliefs or trying to apply moral precepts without the underlying spiritual practices that might awaken that love of the particulars from which loving and goodness flows. It is one of the virtues of the book that it removes a current pretence in some Blakean commentary that the poet was not fundamentally a Christian one!
It is also a highly political and ecological vision that invites us to work through the consequences of recognizing our fundamental underlying unity, celebrated in a dazzling array of particularities, that can only be meaningfully organized around a living love & truth, not precepts that flatten and coerce, a practical mysticism from a highly practical man. One of the great virtues of Awake is that it takes you through the stages of this journey in ways that invite you to consider practical changes in your own way of being attentive and aware. I especially enjoyed the sections that pondered Blake and our sense of what original innocence and perceptual openness to our world might look like, and how nurtured.
As the Nobel Prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, remarked in his own study of 'modernity', "In the Land of Ulro" that itself is a nod to Blake, all commentary on Blake leaves you dissatisfied against the complexities of his genius, including his own, but some triumph better than others, and Vernon's account is certainly in this higher triumphant category making Blake breathe with a clarity and a challenge to anyone pondering how we might live individually and collectively a life more attuned to Eternity.
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