The Traveller in the Evening

Con­or Kostick and Andy Wilson dis­cuss Bod Dylan and music­al epi­phanies. What hap­pens when you start to like music you pre­vi­ously did­n’t care for?

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.”

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

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.

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.

Excerp­ted from the book Faust: Stretch Out Time, an essay about how great music helps us escape Urizen­ic time, dead time. “Out of time, into space” (Wil­li­am Burroughs)