March 28, 2025 • 47 mins
William Blake's visionary poetry represents a revolutionary approach to spirituality, offering a third way between rigid religious dogma and cold scientific materialism through the power of imagination as a divine faculty.
• Blake's poem "The Book of Thel" processes the loss of his daughter through miscarriage by imagining conversations with short-lived creatures
• Even the smallest creatures in Blake's poetry understand they are cherished by God, revealing a profound view of divine love
• Blake's concept that "we are put on earth a little space to bear the beams of love" offers a meaningful purpose for existence
• The complementary poems "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" represent two facets of human experience - innocence and experience
• Blake's prophetic imagination anticipated modern problems, including the alienation of industrialization ("dark Satanic mills")
• The 1960s saw a revival of Blake's work through artists like Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and The Doors
• Blake challenges both religious literalism and scientific reductionism by elevating imagination as a spiritual necessity
• The concept that "it's easier to get to the head through the heart than to the heart through the head" captures Blake's approach
• Blake's mythological characters in his longer poems represent psychological states and cosmic forces, similar to modern Marvel characters
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Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
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Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
He's traveled to inner places that we knew
nothing about and returned withexhibits to convince the
skeptical.
The toughest struggle of all isto try and meld the sacred and
the profane, the natural and thesupernatural.
This world and the next Admitto this preoccupation and you're
(00:24):
in deep trouble with yourchurch and your state.
Try to make a record of it, asdid St Augustine or John of the
Cross or William Blake, andyou're scorned and perhaps
imprisoned by yourcontemporaries, even if later
(00:44):
generations regard you, withoutactually reading you, as a
classic.
Alas, I knew not this, andtherefore I did weep.
That God would love a worm Iknew and punish the evil foot
that willfully bruised itshelpless form, but that he
(01:06):
cherished it.
I never knew that, and so Iwept.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Did I hear that correctly?
Exactly, yeah, like reflectingjust to exist in this love, and
this presence is absolutelydelightful and worth all the
pain.
Yes, welcome to the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast.
(01:38):
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
couldn't kill that revelation.
(01:59):
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
It's great entertainment,thrilling entertainment.
(02:19):
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to?
Welcome back to the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast, episode 5.
(02:40):
I'm your host, travis Mullin,and this is part two on William
Blake, with Professor Larry andChastity.
I hope you're enjoying thepodcast.
There's a few ways you caninteract with us.
One is that you can email usquestions, comments or subjects
to subversiveorthodoxy atgmailcom.
You can also reach out and sayhi.
That way we're really enjoyingthe conversations and I'm
(03:03):
hearing from people that it'sreally resonating with them, and
one group in the Northeastactually wants to do a call with
me where we can talk about itand process it.
If you haven't already and youare finding value in the podcast
, please leave us a five-starreview on Spotify or Apple and
that'll help other people thinkit's legit.
And wherever you are finding thepodcast you can do that it's
(03:25):
legit and wherever you arefinding the podcast you can do
that.
Please tell others who youthink would appreciate it.
That'd be amazing.
I do foresee a really cool ideacoming forward of a reading
club of all the books that weare mentioning and creating like
a large checklist, and it mightlead to some book clubs or Zoom
calls where people are gettingto process it together.
If you're interested in that,let us know.
(03:45):
Without any further ado, let'sget back to episode five,
william Blake, part two, wherewe pick up where we left off,
with the professor going aboutto go into the poem called the
Book of Fel, which is Blake'spoem processing his lost
daughter through miscarriage.
This poem really affected meemotionally, as you might be
(04:07):
able to hear in my voice, andthank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
So in the Book of Thel, madame Seraphim takes Thel
down to Earth and lets her meetentities who lived even shorter
lives than human beings do,like the cloud and the water
lily and the rainstorm.
And this unborn child isallowed to talk to the cloud and
(04:41):
the rainstorm and ask them howis it that they can allow
themselves to be created forsuch a short time?
And then they ultimately getdown to the in the ground.
And because it's part of theold saying, you know we're food
for worms.
Well, what do worms say aboutthat are?
(05:06):
Are human beings food for worms?
If so, thank you.
Human beings, we need thenourishment right like us
talking to cows?
and then, after the worms, hetalks to the dirt under the worm
.
And so this is very psychedelic.
(05:28):
But I'll just read you a coupleof the lesser known lines.
And then the famous lines fromthis poem that you may have
heard before, famous lines fromthis poem that you may have
(05:48):
heard before but didn't knowthat it came from Blake, or that
it came from the Book of Thel,which was a meditation on the
loss of his child, child.
(06:26):
So this is the fell talking tothe water lily, and she says oh,
life of this, our spring, whyfades the lotus of the water,
why fade children of the springBorn, but to smile and fall, ah,
fell, as like a watery bow andlike a parting cloud, like a
reflection in a glass.
Now notice the imagery here.
I mean, this is world-classstuff, like Shakespearean,
(06:49):
almost, like shadows in thewater, like dreams of infants,
like a smile upon an infant'sface, like the dove's voice,
like transient day, like musicin the air.
Ah, gentle, may I lay me downand gentle, rest my head, and
(07:12):
gentle, sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice of
him that walketh in the gardenin the evening time.
And then the lily of the valleyanswers and says uh, and that's
very the lily of the valleybreathing in the humble grass,
answered the lovely maid andsaid I am a watery weed and I'm
(07:36):
very small and I love to dwellin lowly veils, so weak, the
gilded butterfly scarce percheson my head.
Yet I am visited from heaven.
And he that smiles on all walksin the valley and each morn
over me spreads his hand sayingRejoice thou, humble grass, thou
(07:59):
newborn lily flower, thoughgentle maid of silent valleys
and of modest brooks, for thoushall be clothed in light and
fed with morning manna tillsummer's heat melts thee beside
the fountains and the springs toflourish in eternal fields.
Then why should Thale complain?
(08:22):
Why should the mistress ofvalils of Har utter a sigh?
And then Thel says well, areyou happy with that, that
destiny to become the food oflambs?
And then the vegetation says oh, yes, you know, there's no
(08:45):
greater honor than to be eatenby the Lamb of God.
But then we get that are hereand then gone.
And then the worm is talking tothe clod of clay, and then this
is the one I thought this kindof famous.
The clod of clay heard theworm's voice and raised her
pitying head.
(09:06):
She bowed over the weepinginfant and her life exhaled In
milky fondness.
Then on fell, she fixed herhumble.
Oh, beauty of the veils of har,we live not for ourselves.
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am.
Indeed.
My bosom of itself is cold andof itself is dark, but he that
(09:30):
loves the lowly pours his oilupon my head and kisses me and
binds his nuptial bonds aroundmy breast and says thou, mother
of my children, I have lovedthee and I have given thee a
crown that none can take away.
But how this is sweet made, Iknow not and cannot know.
(09:54):
I ponder and I cannot know, andyet I live and love the
daughter of beauty, wiping herpitying tears.
Alas, I knew not this, andtherefore I did weep that god
would love a worm, I knew, andpunish the evil foot that
(10:14):
willfully bruised its helplessform, but that he cherished it.
I never knew that, and so Iwept.
And so then the end of the storyis the angel is showing her the
world, because she says she'swilling to be born now, even
(10:37):
though life is transient, and hetakes her and shows her her
grave grave, where she's goingto be buried, and it's so
terrifies her that she runs back.
That's how Blake came to usethe death of his daughter as
poetry, but also use poetry as away of meditating and coming to
(11:00):
grips with the meaning of thedeath of his child.
And coming to grips with themeaning of the death of his
child, wow, and that's greatliterature of a level that it
took 100 years after he died forpeople to take him seriously,
because it seemed too crazy.
We didn't have symbolism yet wedidn't have wasteland.
(11:24):
So that's then.
Then you take once he did thatpoem wait, I'm sorry, pause okay
yeah I'm processing what I justheard.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So the lily and the worm.
It sounds like they'reglorifying god, like they're
saying that this existence, inthis presence and in this love
is worth it.
Did I hear that correctly,exactly?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Like reflecting, just to exist in this love, and this
presence is absolutelydelightful and worth all the
pain.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yes, and let me.
Oh, this is the one that Iwanted to.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I'm sorry Still slow down the okay.
The worm talking made me thinklike it almost takes imagination
to imagine God's love like that.
Oh yes, and that's what Blakeis saying, like because you
can't, even you couldn'texperience all that he just said
(12:21):
with these lowly creatures withsuch a high view of god.
Without an imagination youcouldn't write that, and what
you capture with thatimagination is absolutely,
profoundly, making god's lovemore real than me reading you
out of uh, john 316.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yes, yes, you feel it , it's.
It's emotional, it doesn'tspeak to one dimension of the
mind, it doesn't just speak toreason.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So what?
What is that?
That's what Blake is saying,and what?
What is that difference?
It's like it's the art, the artof life, is necessary to
understand life.
Yes, yes, which is um, which is, which is what he's saying is
imagination, which is, you know,that creative vision, that
creative artistry yes, andbeauty speaks to the soul, it
(13:16):
speaks to um both innocence andexperience.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Because here again that there's the theme of
innocence and experience,because here again there's the
theme of innocence andexperience, the cloud and the
lily are saying you know, weexperience the world, we
experience loss and we can tellyou it's worth it.
Yeah that's so cool and theinnocent don't know that.
(13:39):
They don't know that.
Where is it that he says oh, Isaw the line.
We are well, I think it's.
Maybe it's in the Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, where he says
we are put on earth a littlewhile to bear the beams of love,
and that's kind of what.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
What a vision for life.
That's prophetic right there,because we live in a time where
people have completely lost thatlike, oh yeah, even even even
religious people have lost thatsimple beauty, like just to
exist, just to get to experiencethe love of God itself is the
(14:24):
gift of life.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yes, true that.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And I mean a secular person.
You know what is their view.
It's like life is.
They think I mean most of myfriends who would be, you know,
not of faith, would think lifeis beautiful.
I mean there's a lot of beautyin life.
There's a lot of, you know,know, negative and darkness and
horrible stuff also.
But, like um, to have a, tohave an undergirding ability to
(14:55):
say like this is ultimatelyworth it because of x.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
I don't know if that's there for a lot of people
lasting physical lifechirogenics, you know and the
technological hope that, youknow, someday we'll be able to
(15:33):
tweak our DNA and live foreverphysically is a dream born of
the enlightenment right.
That reason and science willultimately solve, will solve all
our problems through technology, but it doesn't?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I don't.
I don't mean to be crass, butit's kind of like the orgasm of
the enlightenment.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
The climax is leading up to eternal life by through
science.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yes, and but it doesn't it.
It's unimaginative because itcan't imagine the problems that
that would give birth to.
Right, I saw an interview withmother Teresa when she won the
Nobel Peace Prize and they hadher on with a chemist who had
(16:29):
won the, from Canada, who hadwon the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry, and the announcer wastrying to create, you know,
conflict, because that's whatyou do on TV.
The announcer said well, to thechemist, well, you're in your
laboratory and your researchesmay someday make possible
(16:52):
everlasting life, physical,everlasting life.
And yet, Mother Teresa, youbelieve in everlasting life, but
it's not physical, it'sspiritual.
What do you think about thischemist providing us with real,
everlasting life?
(17:12):
And sister, our mother Teresasays I believe in love and
compassion.
I believe in love andcompassion.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That was her answer.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So it's like everlasting life doesn't mean
much if you don't have love andcompassion.
Yeah, the songs of innocenceare great, but I'm grown up
enough to know the songs ofexperience too, and I'm also
enough of a poet to imaginetheir synthesis in the marriage
(17:50):
of heaven and hell as envisionedin the gospels.
How did he put it in thebeginning of Milton Justify the
ways of God to man.
And what Mother Teresa issaying?
You know, it's the classicenlightenment, mysticism or
(18:11):
faith or the human imagination.
I don't think she's saying Ibelieve in God and so therefore
you shouldn't be looking foreverlasting life.
Looking for everlasting life, Ithink she's saying everlasting
life can be good or it can bebad, depending upon if we love
and have compassion.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
I got to interject right now the fact that I
mentioned to you before that CSLewis wrote the Great Divorce in
response to Blake's Marriage.
Marriage of heaven and hell ohyeah, and and cs lewis's
perception in heaven and hell.
It might have been more inagreement with what blake was
saying, because, I mean, maybehe, maybe he was theologically
(18:57):
differentiating himself somewhat, but in the, in the story,
people are getting on a bus froma place that's drab.
It's like suburban, suburbanthat has spread out to where
everyone everyone can't standeach other, yeah, and so they've
moved farther and farther apart, and all they do is continue
whatever their thing was onearth.
(19:19):
So they're still saying,they're still complaining about
their ex-husband, or they'restill complaining about,
complaining about everything thegovernment.
Um, they put us out here onthese lots and they're still
complaining about theirex-husband.
Or they're still complainingabout, complaining about
everything the government.
Um, they put us out here onthese lots and they're getting
farther and farther apart.
But I don't want to be aroundanyone anyway so everyone,
everyone's turning into like amurmuring uh loop.
You know, like a loop.
They can't, they can't get outof it and every day, this bus
(19:40):
picks them up and takes themover to this place, where the
solid people are and the grassthe grass feels like crystals
stabbing their feet and they'relike they can't enjoy it.
Yes, because they're so stuckin hell of their own volition.
Yeah, it related to see it.
One of cs lewis's quotes wasthat hell is hell's doors locked
(20:01):
from the inside so that was oneof his philosophies.
So people in the great divorceare choosing continually to stay
in their own hell.
Yeah, and it's actuallyprobably not that far from the
truth in reality.
Like and that's what blake wasprobably saying when he said he
didn't believe in hell he'sprobably saying hell is what
(20:22):
we're doing to ourselvesliterally all the time and what
mankind does.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Material, physical, everlasting life.
The question is, where are yougoing to spend it?
In heaven or hell?
Right In your locked in roomfrom the inside, or yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
where you kind of hate everyone and everyone
annoys you yeah, but one morething I noticed.
He has a poem called darksatanic mills, uh-huh, and it
says that um blake wrote thisand and it brought the.
It brought the phrase into theenglish language from his poem.
It's often interpreted asreferring to the early
industrial revolution and itsdestruction.
(21:01):
This would be like wendellberry's favorite poet then.
Yeah, and industrialrevolution's, its destruction.
This would be like wendellberry's favorite poet then yeah,
and industrial revolution'sdestruction of nature and human
relationships.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Exactly blake wrote that back in 1700s well, you
know, right around the turn of1800, maybe, yeah, 1791, that
that mill burned by fire.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
It was right, by house.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
And it probably wasn't widely quoted until close
to the end of the 19th century.
In the 20th century, it turnsout he has the words for our
reality.
Now.
I wanted to read this at thebeginning.
I didn't get a chance to.
This is from SubversiveOrthodoxy.
It's a quote from a fellownamed Jim Christie, who wrote a
(21:45):
book called the Long, slow Deathof Jack Kerouac.
We'll probably talk aboutKerouac's Catholicism someday,
but this is what Jim Christiethat I quoted from the beginning
.
He says in this chapter aboutBlake and Garrett the toughest
(22:07):
struggle of all is to try andmeld the sacred and the profane,
the natural and thesupernatural.
This world and the next Admitto this preoccupation and you're
in deep trouble with yourchurch and your state.
Try to make a record of it, asdid St Augustine or John of the
(22:33):
Cross or William Blake, andyou're scorned and perhaps
imprisoned by yourcontemporaries, even if later
generations regard you, withoutactually reading you, as a
classic.
And that pretty much says itall for Blake.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Later generations regard you, usually without
reading you, as a classic.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, but we were going to talk about the 60s beat
, rediscovery of Blake and alittle bit of that.
Do you want to go into that?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, it just kind of relates to his relevance.
I mean, they started to find itagain in the 60s, obviously,
and it probably points to hismadness too, because those were
considered by you know your.
What do you call what in yourgeneration?
What did you call the uppitypeople who were like you know?
We would call them preppy or uh, what's that word?
(23:32):
Um, yuppies in the 80s, um,yeah, the non-hippies, the
non-beatniks, what do you callthem in this?
squares, squares squares wouldhave thought oh, they like blake
, because blake's mad too.
Like them, like the beatniksand such.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
yeah, the squares, yeah, the hipsters would be.
Would the hipsters evolved intothe hippies?
But, um, ginsburg, uh kind ofmade.
Uh, well, he, ginsburg made,made Blake famous again.
And also, I think Dillon foundBlake through Ginsburg and the
(24:13):
Beats and the Doors named theirgroup from Blake's line about
the doors of perception.
If the doors of perception werecleansed, you would see, things
would appear as they really areinfinite, and so that became
(24:35):
why the doors picked their nameand so, but Blake actually.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Also one more contemporary reference was U2
named a more recent album, songsof Innocence.
There you go, I just discoveredagain.
I mean, I saw the album titleand I didn't know much about
Blake, so that's obviously areference or an illusion.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, and it'd be interesting to look at that
album whether those are actualsongs of innocence or songs of
the second innocence.
It could be either one.
And then Ginsberg became famouswith his breakout poem Howl
(25:19):
right, and Howl has a section init where he talks about the
reign of Moloch, the monsterthat devoured, the Philistine
monster that devoured children.
That is described in the OldTestament.
(25:41):
They would sacrifice babies tooyeah, which is a direct like
riff on blake right a, abiblical reference, uh, used as
an image of contemporary poetryyeah and and after he became,
you know, everybody wasinterested in.
You know this new oral poetrythat sounded more like music and
(26:05):
rapping well, they didn't callit rapping then but sounding
more like oral poetry and songthan the kind of poetry that
shows up in literary journalsthat you read silently in coffee
shops.
This is a poetry.
You go to coffee shops and theyand they recite it over the
(26:28):
loudspeaker.
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, on the microphone.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
So they asked him where he got it and you know he
he said that he had.
He had been visited by WilliamBlake and his dorm room or I
think it was his dorm room atColumbia where he was writing
poetry, or while he was tryingto write poetry, and Blake's
(26:51):
voice appeared in the room andrecited the Poison Rose, which
was one of the poems in theSongs of Experience.
One of the poems in the Songsof Experience, the Lost Little
(27:12):
Girl, which was also in Songs ofExperience, and one other one.
I don't know what the other onewas now, but he said he
actually heard his voice andthat he had this vision and that
that was what inspired him towrite Howl as a visionary,
(27:33):
prophetic poem of contemporaryAmerica, written with the same
sort of spiritual reach asWilliam Blake did in his
prophetic poems.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
So that's where that came from.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I didn't know that I didn't know that.
He claimed to have heard Blaketalking in his room.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, and he later, ginsberg, wrote music to Songs
of Innocence and Experience andrecorded an album of him singing
it Really and you can go onlineand you can see Ginsberg
singing and reciting Songs ofInnocence and Experience and he
(28:44):
even gives.
After some of the poems he evengives commentary.
Like the two most famous poemsin the Songs of Innocence and
Experience are the signaturepoems the Lamb in Innocence and
the tiger in experience.
And the lamb is a poem in thevoice of a little child who is
playing with a little lamb andis asking the lamb if the lamb
knows who he is.
(29:04):
He is and then, after the lambonly responds with buying, he
explains that he is a divinecreature whom God was made in.
The image of the lamb becomesfamous for being poem.
(29:25):
It's just all questions andthat's the experience poem.
And so the image of the tigeris this image of violence,
carnivorousness, survival,energy, the Survival energy, the
(29:48):
ability to survive, and theselines at the end, when the stars
threw down their spears andwatered heaven with their tears,
did he smile his work to seethat he who made the lamb make
thee Tiger, tiger burning brightin the forest of the night,
(30:13):
what immortal hand or eye dareframe thy fearful symmetry.
So it ends with that, thosepowerful questions about where
evil comes from.
Now, ginsburg I watched himread that the other day because
I knew we were going to talkabout Blake and he says that
(30:41):
that poem you know who Made youis the tiger poem.
The rhythm is different thanthe rhythms in some of the poems
of innocence in that it has atrochaic rhythm soft, soft, hard
, soft, soft, hard.
(31:01):
That da-da-da, da-da da, whichimitates the human heart, and
that the line at the end did hehis smile, his work to see?
Did he who make the lamb, makethee tiger tire burning bright
(31:25):
in the forest of the night?
What immortal hand or eye dareto frame thy fearful symmetry?
Where did this come from?
This kind of energy?
And Blake thinks the humanimagination helps shape that
kind of energy, as well as thehuman imagination help shape the
(31:50):
lamb as a symbol of God.
And so, getting that, boththose poems are showing us two
facets of the human soul.
Showing us two facets of thehuman soul, two capacities we
have, and not necessarilyattributes of God that we know
(32:14):
intellectually, but actuallyattributes we live of.
The divine, was the way Blaketook it, which I thought was
very, very interesting, becauseI had never taken it that way.
(32:34):
I've always, like a lot ofpeople, puzzled over why the
tiger has questions and the lambhas answers, and when he's
talking about immortals, blakeis often talking about human
beings.
For him, the human soul isimmortal.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I'm not sure what you just said, but it triggered a
portion of himself parceling itout to where they have to be in
(33:12):
unity to create the whole byself-sacrificial parceling
himself out into us.
It'd be kind of an amazingmeditation if nothing else.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yes, well, that's what it is it's, if nothing else
, it's a, it's a meditation,it's an imaginary conceit that
is not literally true, but helpsyou understand something about
your relationship to god andother people.
Right, yeah, and it's only ifyou don't.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
That's what imagination does, rather than
staunch literal rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Same with poetry?
You know it's not, do youbelieve the poet?
Well, I believe the poetrythrows light on human experience
.
I don't believe that it'snecessarily literal science,
although it turns out that a lotof the things that Blake said
(34:07):
are closer to the social,political and scientific reality
now than they were when hewrote them.
It's sort of like these thingscatch up with the imagination.
He even views history that waythat history doesn't unfold
logically.
(34:27):
It's a series of imaginativeforces, that sort of rendezvous
with their times and make thingsover in their own image and
then disappear and then arereplaced by other imaginative
images and agendas.
(34:49):
And to understand these things,you know, it would be nice if
you had a science of politics.
That's what Marx was all about.
But he thought the only thingMarx said correctly the Ginsburg
, if that is not Blake was thatreligion could be an opiate of
(35:11):
the masses if it was not seen asa inspiration to a greater
spiritual and liberated life ofequality amongst all creation.
So that's why the, the poetryis, gets hard to understand if
(35:35):
you want it to be literal truth.
But once you realize that thisis a different game that
Dillonin and ginsburg and andblake are playing, uh, and it's
called symbolism, and it'saddressed to your heart, not to
your head, but it's alsoaddressed to your head, um, and
(35:58):
that's why I um, it's sopowerful it's.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
It's probably because these guys knew it's easier to
get to the, to the head, throughthe heart.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
It's very hard to get to the heart through the head.
Exactly Well put.
I just thought of that as yousaid that.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, that's your right.
You get credit for that.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I get to create a quote on brainy quotes, yeah.
You get to, you get to writeyour own proverbs from it's
easier to get to the headthrough the heart than it is to
get to the heart through thehead.
It's probably very true, atruism, so that quote you read
when the stars threw down theirspears, watered heaven with
(36:38):
their tears before words werespoken before eternity.
I don't know if those last lasttwo lines were part of it.
That was from a five ironfrenzy song, a band um two.
Two last stories before we wrapthis up.
Okay, you said blake, a coupleof your notes, blake's
relationship to british radicalsand ravers, antinominalism, oh,
(36:58):
muggle tonian seekers.
And then the thomasne story.
Okay, I mean whatever you thinkis worth it there.
And you also did say someconnection to Marvel Universe of
four Zoas.
I don't know what thatconnection's about.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Well, I thought that if you wanted a way of
understanding the longer poems,like the four Zoas, where he
creates mythological characters,and these mythological
characters stand forpsychological states, right,
(37:34):
okay, so, like your reason isyour reason and represents, you
know, that calculativemeasurement engineering side.
Right, we talked about thatloss.
Los represents the imaginationand and you could sort of see
(37:55):
Marvel characters asrepresenting different kind of
forces in the universe, you know, like Iron man is the
technologist and Spider-Man isthe teenage Avenger and Batman
is the intellectual detective,and then they have these counter
(38:16):
forces which are super villains, like dr octopus and uh, who
represents this eight-armedtechnological uh, uh, leviathan
out to destroy, and you know,and so you can work out, uh,
(38:38):
when, when the marvel comicbooks play their stories out,
they work out these sort ofmythological clashes between,
you know, the teenagerSpider-Man and the corrupt
(38:59):
Octopus man or whatever he was,and it takes on a kind of
symbolic meaning that in thebest comic books or in the best
graphic novels become like theycreate their own mythological
view of our time, right, or ourhistory or what's happening now,
(39:25):
like Black Panther was autopian society that was
revealing the things that arelacking in our society, and
Blake's longer poems do that.
And not all the lines for usmake sense, but occasionally,
(39:49):
you know, you'll hit those lineslike the one that I read, a
couple of the ones that I read,and if you stick with the story
long enough and you pick upwhat's going on, then they're
very powerful, like Dylan'ssongs, like once you get what
(40:10):
that song is about, you get someof the images to it's All Right
, ma, for example.
To it's all right, ma, forexample, um.
Then you the whole thing unfoldsfor you and you just it, you
just feel it on multiple levels.
And if you need help with blakeand I, everybody needs help with
(40:31):
blake there is a blakedictionary, uh, by the guy who
wrote the first great work onBlake, foster Damon, called A
Blake Dictionary, the Ideas andSymbols of William Blake, and
that's you can get that.
And there's another book thatjust came out on William Blake's
(40:54):
biography called William Blakeversus the world, by a guy named
um Higgins I think I'm going tosay that's John Higgs and uh,
that's, that's new.
And and he's got a, a um, someinteresting um descriptions of
(41:18):
the um antinomian riots thattook place by these renegade
Catholic well, not Catholicrenegade Protestant sects that
were rioting against theCatholic king and some of them,
the antinomians.
They believe that once you weresaved, you were free from any
(41:41):
responsibilities to the law atall, which meant that you could
commit any crime, you could doany deed as long as you were
with Jesus.
People would attribute Blake tothose groups, saying that he
(42:15):
was like the bastard child ofthe antinomian groups that
believed that they did not haveto follow any laws because they
had been saved by Jesus in theNew Testament.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
They were like Christian anarchists.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Christian anarchists of an extreme degree, yes, and
(42:56):
in this book they describe how,in their riots, for example,
they would go to sermons ininsults and put downs because
they wanted to show that they'dbeen freed from the law by the
new testament.
And of course, blake is sayingsomething similar.
He's saying well, you're freedfrom the old law and the law,
the side of uh, experience thatthat has no pity, but you're not
(43:20):
free to just do whatever youwant.
This isn't you know.
So he was never an antinomian,even though he got charged by
that by some people because heseemed so crazy or open to
writing these poems about, youknow, creatures that don't
(43:42):
really exist.
But that's fiction in the sameallegorical fiction, in the same
way that CS Lewis wrote hissci-fi stuff.
It told him his fantasy stories.
It's not antinomianism, butthere are some great
(44:03):
descriptions in this book.
William Blake versus the worldof antinom.
(44:23):
Did I say John?
Yeah, john Higgs.
Blake's central argument thatimagination is divine can't be
ruled out or dismissed as easilyas his views on nature and even
(44:45):
reason.
His position is not argued inthe language of his opponent,
with logical proofs andmeasurements of matter.
Instead, he presents his bodyof work and awaits our artistic
reaction.
That work is an illustration ofas a far deeper and more
(45:06):
overwhelming level than most ofus are familiar with.
Like early explorers returningfrom their ocean voyages with
exotic plants and strange beasts, or Apollo astronauts returning
to Earth with a case of fall ofmoon rock, he's traveled to
inner places that we knewnothing about and returned with
(45:28):
exhibits to convince theskeptical.
When we see his images or hearhis words, what exactly attracts
us to them?
They're strange and powerful,and we can't claim to fully
understand them.
Yet they resonate with us as ifthey wake up something inside.
They are not from our world, aswe do not see their light
(45:52):
elsewhere.
It is our reaction to them thatconvinces us that the world
they are said to come from isreal, convinces us that the
world they are said to come fromis real.
After all, haven't we alldipped our toes into the sea of
the imagination.
Should it surprise us thatothers have dived much deeper?
(46:12):
The human mind is the one thingthat emits imagination into our
closed, limited, emitsimagination into our closed,
limited, finite universe.
It's we, and we alone, who arethe source of meaning, purpose,
love and hate in this otherwisecold, dead cloud of matter, if
our eyes have evolved to see thelight of the imagination rather
(46:34):
than sunlight, then we wouldsee ourselves as part of the
constellations of the heavensdown here on earth rather than
up in the night sky.
We are the source of what weperceive.
We are that which we crave.
We might argue about thesemantics of a word like divine
to describe this, but it'scertainly true that many will
(46:58):
reject such a word for deeplyingrained cultural reasons.
But as a rough, so that's,that's as John Higgs, you know,
it's just a year old, so it'skind of interesting to see a guy
who's, you know, one of ourcontemporaries coming to see
Blake with contemporary eyes.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, Well, I think you sold me on Blake and I
really get what he means aboutimagination now a lot better and
how it's actually a spiritualnecessity oh yeah, I don't think
really the church even believesthat currently.
Spiritual necessity oh yeah,yeah, I don't think.
I don't think really the churcheven believes that currently or
(47:46):
or ever really totallyunderstood that, uh.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
but you know that's hard to say because look at the
all, the all, the great art.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
No, I think pre, I think pre Blake's, blake's time.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah, he was trying not to let them lose that and
they, they were losing it quickyeah, post the sciences, and and
these are the figures we'redealing with we're dealing with
the post enlightenment, theenlightenment.
And well, that's why, when weget to gerta, you're going to
see another genius who's sayingwait a minute, this new
(48:22):
enlightenment, as rational andas powerful as it is in sorting
out our false superstitions andour, maybe, use of the
imagination, uh, we stillhaven't had a critique of a of a
(48:42):
mature use of the imaginationin art, literature and
philosophy, and that's that'sgoing to be left to me as the
king of the, the german romanticnaturalists, um, you mean gert
was thinking that you mean yeah,that.
(49:03):
that what he comes up with is,you know, looking at his own
life, it becomes the, theautobiography of a spiritual
psychology of how he, how he,his faith was both challenged
and then renewed, and thenchallenged again and then
(49:24):
renewed again, and all thedifferent phases that he went
into.
That became for him what hecalled the Bildungsroman, which
was the novel of development,which is the novel as spiritual
(49:45):
story or another way of puttingit, the novel as the inner life,
the story of the inner life.
Because the story of the innerlife is not being told in our
culture at large for the mostpart, or if it is, it's being
told in such a reductive,political and moralistic way
(50:10):
that its beauty and its powerand its reach aren't appreciated
so, yeah, these two episodesare going to be focusing on
blake and then, um, as professorwas just alluding, we'll be
moving on to gerta next andfinding, finding what's what
he's got to offer us, which Ithink blake delivered.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
So thank you thank you so much, professor.
Okay, thank you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, adios-bye, and thatconcludes this episode.
I think there may be somethingin here for all of you, each of
you whether you're a skeptic, abeliever or somewhere in between
, on your own deconstructionjourney.
We're going to be exploringwhat it means to live a life of
(50:52):
deep meaning in a world thatoften feels fragmented and
nihilistic, and this revelatoryfaith doesn't seem to come to us
from the expected places.
The prophetic voice doesn'tseem to come from the pulpits or
the seminaries.
It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the
unexpected corners of culture.
(51:13):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy Podcast.
If you found this meaningful,please leave a five-star review,
subscribe and share with anyonewho might resonate with this
conversation.
Adios, shoot like I'm high oncannabis and skip through fields
(51:37):
naked like I wonder if I coulddrift, or if I could drift
through it, dancing throughmoonlight under nighttime skies,
forgetting the world.
This has been a subversiveorthodoxy podcast with Travis
Mullen and Professor Entrosky.
He's traveled to inner places that we knew
nothing about and returned withexhibits to convince the
skeptical.
The toughest struggle of all isto try and meld the sacred and
the profane, the natural and thesupernatural.
This world and the next Admitto this preoccupation and you're
(00:24):
in deep trouble with yourchurch and your state.
Try to make a record of it, asdid St Augustine or John of the
Cross or William Blake, andyou're scorned and perhaps
imprisoned by yourcontemporaries, even if later
(00:44):
generations regard you, withoutactually reading you, as a
classic.
Alas, I knew not this, andtherefore I did weep.
That God would love a worm Iknew and punish the evil foot
that willfully bruised itshelpless form, but that he
(01:06):
cherished it.
I never knew that, and so Iwept.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Did I hear that correctly?
Exactly, yeah, like reflectingjust to exist in this love, and
this presence is absolutelydelightful and worth all the
pain.
Yes, welcome to the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast.
(01:38):
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
couldn't kill that revelation.
(01:59):
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
It's great entertainment,thrilling entertainment.
(02:19):
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to?
Welcome back to the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast, episode 5.
(02:40):
I'm your host, travis Mullin,and this is part two on William
Blake, with Professor Larry andChastity.
I hope you're enjoying thepodcast.
There's a few ways you caninteract with us.
One is that you can email usquestions, comments or subjects
to subversiveorthodoxy atgmailcom.
You can also reach out and sayhi.
That way we're really enjoyingthe conversations and I'm
(03:03):
hearing from people that it'sreally resonating with them, and
one group in the Northeastactually wants to do a call with
me where we can talk about itand process it.
If you haven't already and youare finding value in the podcast
, please leave us a five-starreview on Spotify or Apple and
that'll help other people thinkit's legit.
And wherever you are finding thepodcast you can do that it's
(03:25):
legit and wherever you arefinding the podcast you can do
that.
Please tell others who youthink would appreciate it.
That'd be amazing.
I do foresee a really cool ideacoming forward of a reading
club of all the books that weare mentioning and creating like
a large checklist, and it mightlead to some book clubs or Zoom
calls where people are gettingto process it together.
If you're interested in that,let us know.
(03:45):
Without any further ado, let'sget back to episode five,
william Blake, part two, wherewe pick up where we left off,
with the professor going aboutto go into the poem called the
Book of Fel, which is Blake'spoem processing his lost
daughter through miscarriage.
This poem really affected meemotionally, as you might be
(04:07):
able to hear in my voice, andthank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
So in the Book of Thel, madame Seraphim takes Thel
down to Earth and lets her meetentities who lived even shorter
lives than human beings do,like the cloud and the water
lily and the rainstorm.
And this unborn child isallowed to talk to the cloud and
(04:41):
the rainstorm and ask them howis it that they can allow
themselves to be created forsuch a short time?
And then they ultimately getdown to the in the ground.
And because it's part of theold saying, you know we're food
for worms.
Well, what do worms say aboutthat are?
(05:06):
Are human beings food for worms?
If so, thank you.
Human beings, we need thenourishment right like us
talking to cows?
and then, after the worms, hetalks to the dirt under the worm
.
And so this is very psychedelic.
(05:28):
But I'll just read you a coupleof the lesser known lines.
And then the famous lines fromthis poem that you may have
heard before, famous lines fromthis poem that you may have
(05:48):
heard before but didn't knowthat it came from Blake, or that
it came from the Book of Thel,which was a meditation on the
loss of his child, child.
(06:26):
So this is the fell talking tothe water lily, and she says oh,
life of this, our spring, whyfades the lotus of the water,
why fade children of the springBorn, but to smile and fall, ah,
fell, as like a watery bow andlike a parting cloud, like a
reflection in a glass.
Now notice the imagery here.
I mean, this is world-classstuff, like Shakespearean,
(06:49):
almost, like shadows in thewater, like dreams of infants,
like a smile upon an infant'sface, like the dove's voice,
like transient day, like musicin the air.
Ah, gentle, may I lay me downand gentle, rest my head, and
(07:12):
gentle, sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice of
him that walketh in the gardenin the evening time.
And then the lily of the valleyanswers and says uh, and that's
very the lily of the valleybreathing in the humble grass,
answered the lovely maid andsaid I am a watery weed and I'm
(07:36):
very small and I love to dwellin lowly veils, so weak, the
gilded butterfly scarce percheson my head.
Yet I am visited from heaven.
And he that smiles on all walksin the valley and each morn
over me spreads his hand sayingRejoice thou, humble grass, thou
(07:59):
newborn lily flower, thoughgentle maid of silent valleys
and of modest brooks, for thoushall be clothed in light and
fed with morning manna tillsummer's heat melts thee beside
the fountains and the springs toflourish in eternal fields.
Then why should Thale complain?
(08:22):
Why should the mistress ofvalils of Har utter a sigh?
And then Thel says well, areyou happy with that, that
destiny to become the food oflambs?
And then the vegetation says oh, yes, you know, there's no
(08:45):
greater honor than to be eatenby the Lamb of God.
But then we get that are hereand then gone.
And then the worm is talking tothe clod of clay, and then this
is the one I thought this kindof famous.
The clod of clay heard theworm's voice and raised her
pitying head.
(09:06):
She bowed over the weepinginfant and her life exhaled In
milky fondness.
Then on fell, she fixed herhumble.
Oh, beauty of the veils of har,we live not for ourselves.
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am.
Indeed.
My bosom of itself is cold andof itself is dark, but he that
(09:30):
loves the lowly pours his oilupon my head and kisses me and
binds his nuptial bonds aroundmy breast and says thou, mother
of my children, I have lovedthee and I have given thee a
crown that none can take away.
But how this is sweet made, Iknow not and cannot know.
(09:54):
I ponder and I cannot know, andyet I live and love the
daughter of beauty, wiping herpitying tears.
Alas, I knew not this, andtherefore I did weep that god
would love a worm, I knew, andpunish the evil foot that
(10:14):
willfully bruised its helplessform, but that he cherished it.
I never knew that, and so Iwept.
And so then the end of the storyis the angel is showing her the
world, because she says she'swilling to be born now, even
(10:37):
though life is transient, and hetakes her and shows her her
grave grave, where she's goingto be buried, and it's so
terrifies her that she runs back.
That's how Blake came to usethe death of his daughter as
poetry, but also use poetry as away of meditating and coming to
(11:00):
grips with the meaning of thedeath of his child.
And coming to grips with themeaning of the death of his
child, wow, and that's greatliterature of a level that it
took 100 years after he died forpeople to take him seriously,
because it seemed too crazy.
We didn't have symbolism yet wedidn't have wasteland.
(11:24):
So that's then.
Then you take once he did thatpoem wait, I'm sorry, pause okay
yeah I'm processing what I justheard.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So the lily and the worm.
It sounds like they'reglorifying god, like they're
saying that this existence, inthis presence and in this love
is worth it.
Did I hear that correctly,exactly?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Like reflecting, just to exist in this love, and this
presence is absolutelydelightful and worth all the
pain.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yes, and let me.
Oh, this is the one that Iwanted to.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I'm sorry Still slow down the okay.
The worm talking made me thinklike it almost takes imagination
to imagine God's love like that.
Oh yes, and that's what Blakeis saying, like because you
can't, even you couldn'texperience all that he just said
(12:21):
with these lowly creatures withsuch a high view of god.
Without an imagination youcouldn't write that, and what
you capture with thatimagination is absolutely,
profoundly, making god's lovemore real than me reading you
out of uh, john 316.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yes, yes, you feel it , it's.
It's emotional, it doesn'tspeak to one dimension of the
mind, it doesn't just speak toreason.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So what?
What is that?
That's what Blake is saying,and what?
What is that difference?
It's like it's the art, the artof life, is necessary to
understand life.
Yes, yes, which is um, which is, which is what he's saying is
imagination, which is, you know,that creative vision, that
creative artistry yes, andbeauty speaks to the soul, it
(13:16):
speaks to um both innocence andexperience.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Because here again that there's the theme of
innocence and experience,because here again there's the
theme of innocence andexperience, the cloud and the
lily are saying you know, weexperience the world, we
experience loss and we can tellyou it's worth it.
Yeah that's so cool and theinnocent don't know that.
(13:39):
They don't know that.
Where is it that he says oh, Isaw the line.
We are well, I think it's.
Maybe it's in the Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, where he says
we are put on earth a littlewhile to bear the beams of love,
and that's kind of what.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
What a vision for life.
That's prophetic right there,because we live in a time where
people have completely lost thatlike, oh yeah, even even even
religious people have lost thatsimple beauty, like just to
exist, just to get to experiencethe love of God itself is the
(14:24):
gift of life.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yes, true that.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And I mean a secular person.
You know what is their view.
It's like life is.
They think I mean most of myfriends who would be, you know,
not of faith, would think lifeis beautiful.
I mean there's a lot of beautyin life.
There's a lot of, you know,know, negative and darkness and
horrible stuff also.
But, like um, to have a, tohave an undergirding ability to
(14:55):
say like this is ultimatelyworth it because of x.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
I don't know if that's there for a lot of people
lasting physical lifechirogenics, you know and the
technological hope that, youknow, someday we'll be able to
(15:33):
tweak our DNA and live foreverphysically is a dream born of
the enlightenment right.
That reason and science willultimately solve, will solve all
our problems through technology, but it doesn't?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I don't.
I don't mean to be crass, butit's kind of like the orgasm of
the enlightenment.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yes, right.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
The climax is leading up to eternal life by through
science.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Yes, and but it doesn't it.
It's unimaginative because itcan't imagine the problems that
that would give birth to.
Right, I saw an interview withmother Teresa when she won the
Nobel Peace Prize and they hadher on with a chemist who had
(16:29):
won the, from Canada, who hadwon the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry, and the announcer wastrying to create, you know,
conflict, because that's whatyou do on TV.
The announcer said well, to thechemist, well, you're in your
laboratory and your researchesmay someday make possible
(16:52):
everlasting life, physical,everlasting life.
And yet, Mother Teresa, youbelieve in everlasting life, but
it's not physical, it'sspiritual.
What do you think about thischemist providing us with real,
everlasting life?
(17:12):
And sister, our mother Teresasays I believe in love and
compassion.
I believe in love andcompassion.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
That was her answer.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
So it's like everlasting life doesn't mean
much if you don't have love andcompassion.
Yeah, the songs of innocenceare great, but I'm grown up
enough to know the songs ofexperience too, and I'm also
enough of a poet to imaginetheir synthesis in the marriage
(17:50):
of heaven and hell as envisionedin the gospels.
How did he put it in thebeginning of Milton Justify the
ways of God to man.
And what Mother Teresa issaying?
You know, it's the classicenlightenment, mysticism or
(18:11):
faith or the human imagination.
I don't think she's saying Ibelieve in God and so therefore
you shouldn't be looking foreverlasting life.
Looking for everlasting life, Ithink she's saying everlasting
life can be good or it can bebad, depending upon if we love
and have compassion.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
I got to interject right now the fact that I
mentioned to you before that CSLewis wrote the Great Divorce in
response to Blake's Marriage.
Marriage of heaven and hell ohyeah, and and cs lewis's
perception in heaven and hell.
It might have been more inagreement with what blake was
saying, because, I mean, maybehe, maybe he was theologically
(18:57):
differentiating himself somewhat, but in the, in the story,
people are getting on a bus froma place that's drab.
It's like suburban, suburbanthat has spread out to where
everyone everyone can't standeach other, yeah, and so they've
moved farther and farther apart, and all they do is continue
whatever their thing was onearth.
(19:19):
So they're still saying,they're still complaining about
their ex-husband, or they'restill complaining about,
complaining about everything thegovernment.
Um, they put us out here onthese lots and they're still
complaining about theirex-husband.
Or they're still complainingabout, complaining about
everything the government.
Um, they put us out here onthese lots and they're getting
farther and farther apart.
But I don't want to be aroundanyone anyway so everyone,
everyone's turning into like amurmuring uh loop.
You know, like a loop.
They can't, they can't get outof it and every day, this bus
(19:40):
picks them up and takes themover to this place, where the
solid people are and the grassthe grass feels like crystals
stabbing their feet and they'relike they can't enjoy it.
Yes, because they're so stuckin hell of their own volition.
Yeah, it related to see it.
One of cs lewis's quotes wasthat hell is hell's doors locked
(20:01):
from the inside so that was oneof his philosophies.
So people in the great divorceare choosing continually to stay
in their own hell.
Yeah, and it's actuallyprobably not that far from the
truth in reality.
Like and that's what blake wasprobably saying when he said he
didn't believe in hell he'sprobably saying hell is what
(20:22):
we're doing to ourselvesliterally all the time and what
mankind does.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Material, physical, everlasting life.
The question is, where are yougoing to spend it?
In heaven or hell?
Right In your locked in roomfrom the inside, or yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
where you kind of hate everyone and everyone
annoys you yeah, but one morething I noticed.
He has a poem called darksatanic mills, uh-huh, and it
says that um blake wrote thisand and it brought the.
It brought the phrase into theenglish language from his poem.
It's often interpreted asreferring to the early
industrial revolution and itsdestruction.
(21:01):
This would be like wendellberry's favorite poet then.
Yeah, and industrialrevolution's, its destruction.
This would be like wendellberry's favorite poet then yeah,
and industrial revolution'sdestruction of nature and human
relationships.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Exactly blake wrote that back in 1700s well, you
know, right around the turn of1800, maybe, yeah, 1791, that
that mill burned by fire.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
It was right, by house.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
And it probably wasn't widely quoted until close
to the end of the 19th century.
In the 20th century, it turnsout he has the words for our
reality.
Now.
I wanted to read this at thebeginning.
I didn't get a chance to.
This is from SubversiveOrthodoxy.
It's a quote from a fellownamed Jim Christie, who wrote a
(21:45):
book called the Long, slow Deathof Jack Kerouac.
We'll probably talk aboutKerouac's Catholicism someday,
but this is what Jim Christiethat I quoted from the beginning
.
He says in this chapter aboutBlake and Garrett the toughest
(22:07):
struggle of all is to try andmeld the sacred and the profane,
the natural and thesupernatural.
This world and the next Admitto this preoccupation and you're
in deep trouble with yourchurch and your state.
Try to make a record of it, asdid St Augustine or John of the
(22:33):
Cross or William Blake, andyou're scorned and perhaps
imprisoned by yourcontemporaries, even if later
generations regard you, withoutactually reading you, as a
classic.
And that pretty much says itall for Blake.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Later generations regard you, usually without
reading you, as a classic.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, but we were going to talk about the 60s beat
, rediscovery of Blake and alittle bit of that.
Do you want to go into that?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, it just kind of relates to his relevance.
I mean, they started to find itagain in the 60s, obviously,
and it probably points to hismadness too, because those were
considered by you know your.
What do you call what in yourgeneration?
What did you call the uppitypeople who were like you know?
We would call them preppy or uh, what's that word?
(23:32):
Um, yuppies in the 80s, um,yeah, the non-hippies, the
non-beatniks, what do you callthem in this?
squares, squares squares wouldhave thought oh, they like blake
, because blake's mad too.
Like them, like the beatniksand such.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
yeah, the squares, yeah, the hipsters would be.
Would the hipsters evolved intothe hippies?
But, um, ginsburg, uh kind ofmade.
Uh, well, he, ginsburg made,made Blake famous again.
And also, I think Dillon foundBlake through Ginsburg and the
(24:13):
Beats and the Doors named theirgroup from Blake's line about
the doors of perception.
If the doors of perception werecleansed, you would see, things
would appear as they really areinfinite, and so that became
(24:35):
why the doors picked their nameand so, but Blake actually.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Also one more contemporary reference was U2
named a more recent album, songsof Innocence.
There you go, I just discoveredagain.
I mean, I saw the album titleand I didn't know much about
Blake, so that's obviously areference or an illusion.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, and it'd be interesting to look at that
album whether those are actualsongs of innocence or songs of
the second innocence.
It could be either one.
And then Ginsberg became famouswith his breakout poem Howl
(25:19):
right, and Howl has a section init where he talks about the
reign of Moloch, the monsterthat devoured, the Philistine
monster that devoured children.
That is described in the OldTestament.
(25:41):
They would sacrifice babies tooyeah, which is a direct like
riff on blake right a, abiblical reference, uh, used as
an image of contemporary poetryyeah and and after he became,
you know, everybody wasinterested in.
You know this new oral poetrythat sounded more like music and
(26:05):
rapping well, they didn't callit rapping then but sounding
more like oral poetry and songthan the kind of poetry that
shows up in literary journalsthat you read silently in coffee
shops.
This is a poetry.
You go to coffee shops and theyand they recite it over the
(26:28):
loudspeaker.
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, on the microphone.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
So they asked him where he got it and you know he
he said that he had.
He had been visited by WilliamBlake and his dorm room or I
think it was his dorm room atColumbia where he was writing
poetry, or while he was tryingto write poetry, and Blake's
(26:51):
voice appeared in the room andrecited the Poison Rose, which
was one of the poems in theSongs of Experience.
One of the poems in the Songsof Experience, the Lost Little
(27:12):
Girl, which was also in Songs ofExperience, and one other one.
I don't know what the other onewas now, but he said he
actually heard his voice andthat he had this vision and that
that was what inspired him towrite Howl as a visionary,
(27:33):
prophetic poem of contemporaryAmerica, written with the same
sort of spiritual reach asWilliam Blake did in his
prophetic poems.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
So that's where that came from.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
I didn't know that I didn't know that.
He claimed to have heard Blaketalking in his room.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, and he later, ginsberg, wrote music to Songs
of Innocence and Experience andrecorded an album of him singing
it Really and you can go onlineand you can see Ginsberg
singing and reciting Songs ofInnocence and Experience and he
(28:44):
even gives.
After some of the poems he evengives commentary.
Like the two most famous poemsin the Songs of Innocence and
Experience are the signaturepoems the Lamb in Innocence and
the tiger in experience.
And the lamb is a poem in thevoice of a little child who is
playing with a little lamb andis asking the lamb if the lamb
knows who he is.
(29:04):
He is and then, after the lambonly responds with buying, he
explains that he is a divinecreature whom God was made in.
The image of the lamb becomesfamous for being poem.
(29:25):
It's just all questions andthat's the experience poem.
And so the image of the tigeris this image of violence,
carnivorousness, survival,energy, the Survival energy, the
(29:48):
ability to survive, and theselines at the end, when the stars
threw down their spears andwatered heaven with their tears,
did he smile his work to seethat he who made the lamb make
thee Tiger, tiger burning brightin the forest of the night,
(30:13):
what immortal hand or eye dareframe thy fearful symmetry.
So it ends with that, thosepowerful questions about where
evil comes from.
Now, ginsburg I watched himread that the other day because
I knew we were going to talkabout Blake and he says that
(30:41):
that poem you know who Made youis the tiger poem.
The rhythm is different thanthe rhythms in some of the poems
of innocence in that it has atrochaic rhythm soft, soft, hard
, soft, soft, hard.
(31:01):
That da-da-da, da-da da, whichimitates the human heart, and
that the line at the end did hehis smile, his work to see?
Did he who make the lamb, makethee tiger tire burning bright
(31:25):
in the forest of the night?
What immortal hand or eye dareto frame thy fearful symmetry?
Where did this come from?
This kind of energy?
And Blake thinks the humanimagination helps shape that
kind of energy, as well as thehuman imagination help shape the
(31:50):
lamb as a symbol of God.
And so, getting that, boththose poems are showing us two
facets of the human soul.
Showing us two facets of thehuman soul, two capacities we
have, and not necessarilyattributes of God that we know
(32:14):
intellectually, but actuallyattributes we live of.
The divine, was the way Blaketook it, which I thought was
very, very interesting, becauseI had never taken it that way.
(32:34):
I've always, like a lot ofpeople, puzzled over why the
tiger has questions and the lambhas answers, and when he's
talking about immortals, blakeis often talking about human
beings.
For him, the human soul isimmortal.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I'm not sure what you just said, but it triggered a
portion of himself parceling itout to where they have to be in
(33:12):
unity to create the whole byself-sacrificial parceling
himself out into us.
It'd be kind of an amazingmeditation if nothing else.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yes, well, that's what it is it's, if nothing else
, it's a, it's a meditation,it's an imaginary conceit that
is not literally true, but helpsyou understand something about
your relationship to god andother people.
Right, yeah, and it's only ifyou don't.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
That's what imagination does, rather than
staunch literal rhetoric.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Same with poetry?
You know it's not, do youbelieve the poet?
Well, I believe the poetrythrows light on human experience
.
I don't believe that it'snecessarily literal science,
although it turns out that a lotof the things that Blake said
(34:07):
are closer to the social,political and scientific reality
now than they were when hewrote them.
It's sort of like these thingscatch up with the imagination.
He even views history that waythat history doesn't unfold
logically.
(34:27):
It's a series of imaginativeforces, that sort of rendezvous
with their times and make thingsover in their own image and
then disappear and then arereplaced by other imaginative
images and agendas.
(34:49):
And to understand these things,you know, it would be nice if
you had a science of politics.
That's what Marx was all about.
But he thought the only thingMarx said correctly the Ginsburg
, if that is not Blake was thatreligion could be an opiate of
(35:11):
the masses if it was not seen asa inspiration to a greater
spiritual and liberated life ofequality amongst all creation.
So that's why the, the poetryis, gets hard to understand if
(35:35):
you want it to be literal truth.
But once you realize that thisis a different game that
Dillonin and ginsburg and andblake are playing, uh, and it's
called symbolism, and it'saddressed to your heart, not to
your head, but it's alsoaddressed to your head, um, and
(35:58):
that's why I um, it's sopowerful it's.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
It's probably because these guys knew it's easier to
get to the, to the head, throughthe heart.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
It's very hard to get to the heart through the head.
Exactly Well put.
I just thought of that as yousaid that.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Yeah, that's your right.
You get credit for that.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
I get to create a quote on brainy quotes, yeah.
You get to, you get to writeyour own proverbs from it's
easier to get to the headthrough the heart than it is to
get to the heart through thehead.
It's probably very true, atruism, so that quote you read
when the stars threw down theirspears, watered heaven with
(36:38):
their tears before words werespoken before eternity.
I don't know if those last lasttwo lines were part of it.
That was from a five ironfrenzy song, a band um two.
Two last stories before we wrapthis up.
Okay, you said blake, a coupleof your notes, blake's
relationship to british radicalsand ravers, antinominalism, oh,
(36:58):
muggle tonian seekers.
And then the thomasne story.
Okay, I mean whatever you thinkis worth it there.
And you also did say someconnection to Marvel Universe of
four Zoas.
I don't know what thatconnection's about.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Well, I thought that if you wanted a way of
understanding the longer poems,like the four Zoas, where he
creates mythological characters,and these mythological
characters stand forpsychological states, right,
(37:34):
okay, so, like your reason isyour reason and represents, you
know, that calculativemeasurement engineering side.
Right, we talked about thatloss.
Los represents the imaginationand and you could sort of see
(37:55):
Marvel characters asrepresenting different kind of
forces in the universe, you know, like Iron man is the
technologist and Spider-Man isthe teenage Avenger and Batman
is the intellectual detective,and then they have these counter
(38:16):
forces which are super villains, like dr octopus and uh, who
represents this eight-armedtechnological uh, uh, leviathan
out to destroy, and you know,and so you can work out, uh,
(38:38):
when, when the marvel comicbooks play their stories out,
they work out these sort ofmythological clashes between,
you know, the teenagerSpider-Man and the corrupt
(38:59):
Octopus man or whatever he was,and it takes on a kind of
symbolic meaning that in thebest comic books or in the best
graphic novels become like theycreate their own mythological
view of our time, right, or ourhistory or what's happening now,
(39:25):
like Black Panther was autopian society that was
revealing the things that arelacking in our society, and
Blake's longer poems do that.
And not all the lines for usmake sense, but occasionally,
(39:49):
you know, you'll hit those lineslike the one that I read, a
couple of the ones that I read,and if you stick with the story
long enough and you pick upwhat's going on, then they're
very powerful, like Dylan'ssongs, like once you get what
(40:10):
that song is about, you get someof the images to it's All Right
, ma, for example.
To it's all right, ma, forexample, um.
Then you the whole thing unfoldsfor you and you just it, you
just feel it on multiple levels.
And if you need help with blakeand I, everybody needs help with
(40:31):
blake there is a blakedictionary, uh, by the guy who
wrote the first great work onBlake, foster Damon, called A
Blake Dictionary, the Ideas andSymbols of William Blake, and
that's you can get that.
And there's another book thatjust came out on William Blake's
(40:54):
biography called William Blakeversus the world, by a guy named
um Higgins I think I'm going tosay that's John Higgs and uh,
that's, that's new.
And and he's got a, a um, someinteresting um descriptions of
(41:18):
the um antinomian riots thattook place by these renegade
Catholic well, not Catholicrenegade Protestant sects that
were rioting against theCatholic king and some of them,
the antinomians.
They believe that once you weresaved, you were free from any
(41:41):
responsibilities to the law atall, which meant that you could
commit any crime, you could doany deed as long as you were
with Jesus.
People would attribute Blake tothose groups, saying that he
(42:15):
was like the bastard child ofthe antinomian groups that
believed that they did not haveto follow any laws because they
had been saved by Jesus in theNew Testament.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
They were like Christian anarchists.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Christian anarchists of an extreme degree, yes, and
(42:56):
in this book they describe how,in their riots, for example,
they would go to sermons ininsults and put downs because
they wanted to show that they'dbeen freed from the law by the
new testament.
And of course, blake is sayingsomething similar.
He's saying well, you're freedfrom the old law and the law,
the side of uh, experience thatthat has no pity, but you're not
(43:20):
free to just do whatever youwant.
This isn't you know.
So he was never an antinomian,even though he got charged by
that by some people because heseemed so crazy or open to
writing these poems about, youknow, creatures that don't
(43:42):
really exist.
But that's fiction in the sameallegorical fiction, in the same
way that CS Lewis wrote hissci-fi stuff.
It told him his fantasy stories.
It's not antinomianism, butthere are some great
(44:03):
descriptions in this book.
William Blake versus the worldof antinom.
(44:23):
Did I say John?
Yeah, john Higgs.
Blake's central argument thatimagination is divine can't be
ruled out or dismissed as easilyas his views on nature and even
(44:45):
reason.
His position is not argued inthe language of his opponent,
with logical proofs andmeasurements of matter.
Instead, he presents his bodyof work and awaits our artistic
reaction.
That work is an illustration ofas a far deeper and more
(45:06):
overwhelming level than most ofus are familiar with.
Like early explorers returningfrom their ocean voyages with
exotic plants and strange beasts, or Apollo astronauts returning
to Earth with a case of fall ofmoon rock, he's traveled to
inner places that we knewnothing about and returned with
(45:28):
exhibits to convince theskeptical.
When we see his images or hearhis words, what exactly attracts
us to them?
They're strange and powerful,and we can't claim to fully
understand them.
Yet they resonate with us as ifthey wake up something inside.
They are not from our world, aswe do not see their light
(45:52):
elsewhere.
It is our reaction to them thatconvinces us that the world
they are said to come from isreal, convinces us that the
world they are said to come fromis real.
After all, haven't we alldipped our toes into the sea of
the imagination.
Should it surprise us thatothers have dived much deeper?
(46:12):
The human mind is the one thingthat emits imagination into our
closed, limited, emitsimagination into our closed,
limited, finite universe.
It's we, and we alone, who arethe source of meaning, purpose,
love and hate in this otherwisecold, dead cloud of matter, if
our eyes have evolved to see thelight of the imagination rather
(46:34):
than sunlight, then we wouldsee ourselves as part of the
constellations of the heavensdown here on earth rather than
up in the night sky.
We are the source of what weperceive.
We are that which we crave.
We might argue about thesemantics of a word like divine
to describe this, but it'scertainly true that many will
(46:58):
reject such a word for deeplyingrained cultural reasons.
But as a rough, so that's,that's as John Higgs, you know,
it's just a year old, so it'skind of interesting to see a guy
who's, you know, one of ourcontemporaries coming to see
Blake with contemporary eyes.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, Well, I think you sold me on Blake and I
really get what he means aboutimagination now a lot better and
how it's actually a spiritualnecessity oh yeah, I don't think
really the church even believesthat currently.
Spiritual necessity oh yeah,yeah, I don't think.
I don't think really the churcheven believes that currently or
(47:46):
or ever really totallyunderstood that, uh.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
but you know that's hard to say because look at the
all, the all, the great art.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
No, I think pre, I think pre Blake's, blake's time.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah, he was trying not to let them lose that and
they, they were losing it quickyeah, post the sciences, and and
these are the figures we'redealing with we're dealing with
the post enlightenment, theenlightenment.
And well, that's why, when weget to gerta, you're going to
see another genius who's sayingwait a minute, this new
(48:22):
enlightenment, as rational andas powerful as it is in sorting
out our false superstitions andour, maybe, use of the
imagination, uh, we stillhaven't had a critique of a of a
(48:42):
mature use of the imaginationin art, literature and
philosophy, and that's that'sgoing to be left to me as the
king of the, the german romanticnaturalists, um, you mean gert
was thinking that you mean yeah,that.
(49:03):
that what he comes up with is,you know, looking at his own
life, it becomes the, theautobiography of a spiritual
psychology of how he, how he,his faith was both challenged
and then renewed, and thenchallenged again and then
(49:24):
renewed again, and all thedifferent phases that he went
into.
That became for him what hecalled the Bildungsroman, which
was the novel of development,which is the novel as spiritual
(49:45):
story or another way of puttingit, the novel as the inner life,
the story of the inner life.
Because the story of the innerlife is not being told in our
culture at large for the mostpart, or if it is, it's being
told in such a reductive,political and moralistic way
(50:10):
that its beauty and its powerand its reach aren't appreciated
so, yeah, these two episodesare going to be focusing on
blake and then, um, as professorwas just alluding, we'll be
moving on to gerta next andfinding, finding what's what
he's got to offer us, which Ithink blake delivered.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
So thank you thank you so much, professor.
Okay, thank you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, adios-bye, and thatconcludes this episode.
I think there may be somethingin here for all of you, each of
you whether you're a skeptic, abeliever or somewhere in between
, on your own deconstructionjourney.
We're going to be exploringwhat it means to live a life of
(50:52):
deep meaning in a world thatoften feels fragmented and
nihilistic, and this revelatoryfaith doesn't seem to come to us
from the expected places.
The prophetic voice doesn'tseem to come from the pulpits or
the seminaries.
It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the
unexpected corners of culture.
(51:13):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy Podcast.
If you found this meaningful,please leave a five-star review,
subscribe and share with anyonewho might resonate with this
conversation.
Adios, shoot like I'm high oncannabis and skip through fields
(51:37):
naked like I wonder if I coulddrift, or if I could drift
through it, dancing throughmoonlight under nighttime skies,
forgetting the world.
This has been a subversiveorthodoxy podcast with Travis
Mullen and Professor Entrosky.
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