William Blake, Politics, Esotericism and Surrealism

Videos and Podcasts

Videos and podcasts of various discussions. Updated regularly.

Blake and the Mad Crew: The Ranters and the Historians

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.

Video Interview with Andy Wilson re. William Blake vs the World

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.

Blake in Beulah: A Review of John Higgs’s ‘William Blake vs The World’

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?

Conor Kostick: Art and Revolution — A Review of John Molyneux’s Dialectics of Art

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 and William Blake: Before the Moon Falls

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

Blake’s Annihilation by the Eye of Ra: On Snakes, Seraphim and the Solar YHWH

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.

Blade Runner’s Fallen Angels

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.

William Blake as a Revolutionary Poet

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.

Aleks McHugh: The Golem Returns

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.

Serge Arnoux’s Mirror of Blake

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.

Serge Arnoux: le sexaphysique du texte

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

Peachy

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.”

Link’s Strategy Guide for Ghosts

Hauntology is a dying art. Haha. I’m not familiar with the social theory of the hauntologist. I just like the atmosphere. I wonder if to study haunting, really study it, one has to be a ghost oneself. Study haunting first-hand. Like
seeing from the future. A ghost in the cobweb-filled corridors. Play on the old piano, rattle some armor. Know all the
secret passageways, where lost treasures are waiting

Bronowski on Blake and Industry

Although Blake’s knowledge of industry was uncertain, his vision of it was not. It is an astonishing vision — Jacob Bronowski on Blake and Industry, and Blake on Jerusalem and Liberty.

Milton’s L’Allegro on Blake’s Day

To celebrate Blake’s birthday, here is one of his illustrations for Milton’s L’Allegro, along with the poem itself, which seems suited to the mood fo the day.

Reflections on William Blake, radical theology, politics and surrealism.

Welcome to The Traveller in the Evening, a site focused on the work of William Blake. But it is a loose focus, because, in the right mouths, the discussion of Blake quickly turns to the discussion of surrealism, revolution, esotericism and radical theology. Blake himself easily combined all of these things, well in advance of his age—and ours.

It is… proper to state that Blake never had, strictly speaking, any influence and that it is extremely probable that he never will. The reason is that in Blake we behold not so much a fountain, a source, as a mountaintop.
Phillippe Soupault

The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening is an engraving by Blake from 1793, as part of his early collection, For the Sexes. Blake’s image shows his traveller pacing his way toward some unknown destination. Morton Paley shortened the title to The Traveller in the Evening for his book about Blake’s later works (after Jerusalem). I borrowed Paley’s title for the blog because it reflects my own situation with respect to Blake, and our collective situation more generally.

I’ve been reading Blake for years, quietly taking notes. My dream was to find the time and space one day to write a book about what I learned from him. Right now, it doesn’t seem that day is getting any closer. At the same time, the world has taken a dark and threatening turn, with the rise of far-right globally and of authoritarian governments bent on marching us headlong toward an environmental catastrophe we set in train a long time ago. Some days it feels like it is evening everywhere.

The old world is dying, and the old left, in the form of communism and social democracy, has perhaps run its course, because it was based too closely on an idealisation of production’s ‘Satanic mills’. The environmental movement is urgently relevant, but struggles to paint a coherent picture of any alternative. Social movements against oppression tackle the world’s abuses without being able to attack them at the root.To do so would mean coming to a very different picture of who we are in relation to our world. I believe Blake can help point us toward the reversal of perspectives needed, to fan the flames of solidarity and help to wake us from our long collective sleep. The ramifications of his thought would overturn our deepest assumptions—hence the need to present this new, and unheard Blake: a profound esoteric thinker and a thoroughgoing surrealist militant.

Author: Andy Wilson

Andy Wilson lived in Seaham Harbour, Peterlee, Hartlepool, Kings Lynn, Coventry, Torpoint, Eastleigh, Lee-on-Solent, Portland, Weymouth, Loughborough, York and Liverpool before finally putting down anchor in Hackney, London. He served as an Avionics Artificer in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm from 1976 to 1982. Andy studied at the Co-operative College, York University and Middlesex University. Since then he has worked as a political full-timer, a lecturer in FE and in the Workers Educational Association, as a computer programmer, and finally as an engineering manager, CEO and a Director of a number of companies. He has authored books on the group Faust (‘Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970–75’), the Romanian Spectral / Acousmatic composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram (‘Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram’), and he created a series of psychedelic-fanzine illustrations to the work of Blake (‘The Brilliant New Hercules: A Blake Reader’). His main interests lie with Blake, radical theology and Surrealism.