The Traveller in the Evening

A talk giv­en by Andy Wilson for the Blake Soci­ety at St Luke’s Com­munity Centre, Isling­ton, Lon­don, on 24th Nov 2021, for the res­id­ents around Bunhill Fields, where Blake is buried.

Videos and pod­casts of vari­ous dis­cus­sions. Updated regularly.

While A L Mor­ton thought Blake may have read the work of the Ranter, Abiez­er Coppe, mod­ern his­tor­i­ans say there is no evid­ence of Blake being famil­i­ar with Ranter texts. How much do Blake’s ideas over­lap with The Ranters? I look at the Jus­ti­fic­a­tion of the Mad Crew (1650) to compare.

In Sept 2021, Iain Sin­clair gave an impro­vised talk to the Blake Soci­ety about how Blake’s poem, The Men­tal Trav­el­ler, became the map and mod­el for a life­time of jour­neys and pil­grim­age quests. The Men­tal Trav­el­ler was an awaken­ing, to be exper­i­enced but not yet under­stood. The poem returned at vari­ous points in the years that fol­lowed, until it was acknow­ledged as the secret code for Sin­clair’s most recent book, The Gold Machine, a late-life exped­i­tion to one of the sources of the Amazon, in the foot­steps of his great-grandfather.

Fed up with the whole­some good­ness that pops magic­ally out of the neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion every time you try it? Try Michael Ten­cer­’s affirm­a­tion of the affirm­a­tion instead to exper­i­ence a life crum­bling like your teeth in dreams.

John Higgs recently pub­lished his book, Wil­li­am Blake vs the World—a ‘coun­ter­cul­tur­al’ take on Blake’s work, writ­ten for a non-aca­­dem­ic audi­ence. Here, Con­or Kostick inter­views Andy Wilson about his review of the book and more gen­er­ally about Blake’s rel­ev­ance to the countrculture.

John Higg­s’s new book prom­ises a con­tem­por­ary take on the works of Wil­li­am Blake, mak­ing them rel­ev­ant to a mod­ern audi­ence gen­er­ally, and to the coun­ter­cul­ture in par­tic­u­lar. So, how well does it live up to its promise?

The top­ic of art and revolu­tion deserves a much bet­ter book than John Molyneux’s The Dia­lectics of Art. This crit­ic­al review explains why.

The Fall’s Before the Moon Falls, W.B., Jer­u­s­alem and cre­at­ing a sys­tem of your own

What did Blake meantby say­ing that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of angels singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, and how does it relate to his depic­tion of apocalypse.

The film Blade Run­ner is hugely suc­cess­ful, but what does it mean? As the makers hint, the key is to watch it through the eyes of Wil­li­am Blake and his myth­o­logy of liberation.

Few could deny that Wil­li­am Blake sup­por­ted the rad­ic­al polit­ics of his time, yet revolu­tion­ary ideas were not an adjunct to his vis­ion­ary geni­us, but the liv­ing heart of it as a poet.

In the wake of the attemp­ted QAn­on putsch, and in the run-up to the inaug­ur­a­tion of Joe Biden, when Trump’s sup­port­ers are expec­ted to take to the streets again, Aleks McHugh con­siders QAn­on hys­teria and social media gen­er­ally as incarn­a­tions of Meyrink’s Golem, as por­trayed in the 1920 film by Paul Wegener.

An ana­lys­is of the recently dis­covered engrav­ings by Serge Arnoux illus­trat­ing Wil­li­am Blake’s ‘Pro­verbs of Hell’, with a dis­cus­sion of sur­real­ism and Blake, and the impact of Moravi­an­ism on Blake’s idea of faith, sexu­al­ity, free­dom and religion.

Images from Serge Arnoux’s le sexaphysique du texte, 1981.

Sac­red to Har­po­crates were first fruits of veget­ables, len­tils, and, above all, the peach tree. His moth­er was Isis, of course, and we may note that in the Valentini­an Pler­oma, the prim­al Moth­er, the First Thought of the incom­pre­hens­ible Bythos, is called Sig, ‘silence.’ As the Nag Ham­madi text Eugnos­tos the Blessed relates: “Sophia, his con­sort, who was called ‘Silence,’ because in reflect­ing without a word she per­fec­ted her Greatness.”