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.

Brian Catling gave a talk to the Blake Society about his relationship to Blake, running a meter over his work to detect splinters of Blakean influence, from his early confusion of Blake and Bunyan, to his use of Blake as a character in his novel, The Erstwhile.

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.