On the clairvoyance of William Blake

Consciousness is not a private possession but the inside of the whole world

Jerusalem is urged by the Daughters of Inspiration to resist the veiling of Vala - to choose the living forms of Westminster Abbey over the formal ratios of St Paul’s Cathedral. Image: William Blake

As an apprentice engraver, William Blake worked in Westminster Abbey. He was tasked with drawing the graves of kings and queens. And the place enchanted him. The gothic architecture was a “living form”, as he put it, the arches were “sacred recollections”. There was no such thing as mere masonry for him as stones speak to one who has ears to hear, eyes to see.

The “livid twilight of past days” that Blake saw in the Abbey provides just one example of a truth for the great poet, prophet and painter. There is no difference between the inside and the outside for Blake. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” he remarked because, whereas the fool sees a green object standing in the way, wise eyes see a living being that might elicit “tears of joy”, as he notes in one of his surviving letters.

Awareness is not a private faculty, if by private is meant confined to my skull or yours. The entire cosmos blazes – sometimes quietly, sometimes demonstratively – because it manifests a presence which Blake variously calls the All, the infinite, the eternal, the divine. His challenge is to recover this “fourfold vision” – to have no need for words like “inside”, “interiority”, and “outside”. They are not guards policing an unbridgeable boundary but signposts to a portal, a threshold, a pathway. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand | And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” That is his invitation.

On the rare occasions that the words “interior” or “inside” appear in his works, the meaning is negative. “Here render’d Deadly within the Life & Interior Vision”, he writes in the poem “Milton” – deadly because interiority typically implies cut off, isolated, and so frozen in “Shadows of Wisdom & Knowledge”, he continues. No. If modern humans need anything, it is to overcome this existential alienation, this spiritual crisis. We are not struggling organisms strangely emerged in an otherwise mechanical universe. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, | Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five” he insists. Open the senses, step into life.

But that is easier said than done. The contemporary worldview doesn’t much aid a consciousness to know itself as part of the inside of the whole world, hence the divide into inside and outside, with the world out there, as we look on. The enclosure was a growing assumption in Blake’s time, which is why he was keen to undo it.

The Georgian period birthed the notion that thoughts and feelings spring from the brain, or perhaps the heart. Figures as diverse as Adam Smith, Jane Austen, David Hume and John Locke were arguing that sympathy is something that one person should have for another, which sounds great – only that was a new meaning of the word. And again, implicit in the shift lay an assumption that we are, at root, cut off from one another. As Adam Smith put it, any amount of feeling for another soul “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person.” As Blake explains: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Such is the modern tragedy.

Previously, sympathy was understood very differently; it was a natural feature that described how the human soul and all souls are influenced by a flow of powers that fills the cosmos. A person who was particularly sympathetic to the energies displayed by the Moon, for example, might exhibit lunatic qualities on occasion. Jovial, saturnine and mercurial sympathies arose from the influence associated with Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury.

Sympathy was a sign that there was no inside or outside. Instead, all bodies – human and non-human, terrestrial and celestial – were living and immersed in life forces. Much premodern religious behaviour, featuring libations and offerings, prayers and spells, was aimed at navigating a safe passageway through this risky terrain and calling on benign spirits for help.

But the emergence of modern science uncoupled humanity from this dynamism. With the corpuscular theories of figures like Isaac Newton, the notion arose that bodies were cut off.

That said, at first, the early modern scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not lose the sense of connection. Francis Bacon, for example, advocated a form of vitalism which pervaded matter and caused it to move according to principles gifted by God. Isaac Newton formulated his groundbreaking law of gravity which works precisely because bodies act on each other at a distance. Historians of science have noted that Newton was fascinated by the ancient experience of daemons, which were living intelligences mediating between entities in the cosmos as creatures of sympathy. The love daemon, Eros, was a key go-between and the likelihood is that Newton’s reading of Plato, who gives a central role to Eros, shaped his conception of a universe flooded with attractions. Newton’s genius was to think through and mathematicise how these connections might work.

The older view had practical implications. For Dante Alighieri, say, love was not primarily a beneficent feeling or a practical duty, experienced at a personal level and called compassion or charity; it was an universal force and a matter for knowledge, integral to the warp and weft of reality. When a human individual loved, they could know that they were aligning with the fundamental vitality that pulses through creation. Sun and stars, mountains and seas, plants and birds, beasts of water and land: each, in their mode of existence, participate in a common movement of love. Hence Dante concludes his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, with a vision of cosmic love. After seeing the worst in hell, and preparing for the best in purgatory, he finally knows that his desire and will are perfectly aligned with the celestial dynamism that is “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”.

The sense of being embedded in such circles of being had been refreshed by the European rediscovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth century. The ancient philosopher’s “unmoved mover”, as he describes God, draws everything to itself via an innate longing in all things for the divine ground and source. Similarly, when a human individual opts for what is good, beautiful or true, they aren’t witnessing to their personal values, held privately in their minds, but are being pulled towards the centre that everything is bound to by love.

Shakespeare, writing 300 years later, could still describe love as independent of human affections, though fundamentally informing them. Sonnet 116 calls love celestial and star-like, unalterable and unbending; “Love’s not Time’s fool” precisely because it is not changed by creaturely impulses and imperfections. “O no! it is an ever-fixed mark | That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

Blake knew angels as intelligences with whom to talk.

But by William Blake’s time that vision was coming undone – morphing into “the discarded image” of the cosmos now pejoratively called medieval, to cite C.S. Lewis’s phrase.

Blake loathed the implications of the reductive view, mostly because he did not experience life in such a way. He was blessed by what is now called clairvoyance – the capacity to see the living dynamics of the world directly, as spirits and angels. I particularly love the remark made by his wife, Catherine, one day. She casually dropped into a conversation: “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and He put His head to the window, and set you screaming.” He literally had the fear of God put into him.

Or there is the famous story of his walk another day on Peckham Rye, just down the road from where I live in South London. “Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” So tells an early biographer, Alexander Gilchrist. The encounter is still remembered in a pub called The Angel Oak and a mural on a nearby building; the memory of an enchanted universe may have faded but has not yet died.

Blake explained how he saw the things that most people nowadays only half believe in, given they do at all. The key is to trust your imagination. Again, like sympathy, the imagination has been made into a personal possession. We say that someone has imagination if they are creative or innovative when, in truth, the imagination has us. Blake went so far as to say, “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” Embrace that and understand that, “This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal.”

In other words, you don’t need odd powers of perception to “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand | And Eternity in an hour.” There is no need to wait for a peak experience, book a psychedelic trip, or trust in the testimony of a Romantically-minded other.

The Sun’s light is lovely because it is of the same light that illuminates your mind. The bird sings beautifully because its feathered intent echoes the divine intelligences that shape the natural world, traditionally called the angels. Love is not a vain hope that an abyssal divide between souls might momentarily be bridged, but a reminder that there is no lasting inside and outside.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” Blake observes. That is the task for today.

This article was first published in the print-only magazine, Jericho Wawa.

Mark Vernon’s new book is Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination is out in the UK (September in the US).

Mark will be speaking at an event in Oxford hosted by Jericho Wawa on Friday (20th June), tickets here.