20.12.2001
Faithful son of liberty
William Blake has been expropiated by the Tories, the Womenà¢â¬â¢s Institute, the Church of England, public schools and the establishment in general. In fact, as shown by Mike Marqusee, he was not only an artistic genius but a militant republican and lifelong lover of liberty
William Blake died in 1827, a few months short of his 70th birthday, after a lifetime of quite astonishing artistic achievement, undertaken in almost total obscurity and utterly without any earthly reward.
But in the last few years of his life, he did have the consolation of being discovered by a small group of artists with high ideals. Their preoccupations were mainly artistic and religious, and they really did not have much grasp of Blakeà¢â¬â¢s more political side. Nonetheless, one of the things Blake told these young people repeatedly about himself was that he had always been what he called a à¢â¬Åliberty boyà¢â¬Â; he had always been a faithful son of liberty. The word à¢â¬Ëlibertyà¢â¬â¢ in this context clearly meant the causes and the ideas of the great democratic revolutions of the late 18th century.
Back in 1789, the year of the French revolution, William Blake was 32 years old. Over the next 10 years, the 1790s, he produced an extraordinary flow of poetry, prose, paintings, engravings and what he called illuminated books, which are a kind of mixed-media invention of his own. For me, these works as a whole amount to the most enduring and still hugely inspiring literary legacy of that period and its great revolutions.
Some of Blake is obscure: there is no getting around that. But often Blake is startlingly transparent, particularly in the lyrics of the Songs of experience, which were published roughly in 1793. If he had produced nothing other than famous poems like à¢â¬ËThe chimney sweepà¢â¬â¢, à¢â¬ËLondonà¢â¬â¢, à¢â¬ËHoly Thursdayà¢â¬â¢, à¢â¬ËThe sick roseà¢â¬â¢ and à¢â¬ËThe sunflowerà¢â¬â¢, he would still command the attention of socialists.
Blakeà¢â¬â¢s tone in this revolutionary era is often deliberately confrontational, especially in The marriage of heaven and hell - a book that achieved a total sale in Blakeà¢â¬â¢s lifetime of about 12 copies and was not actually published in full, for the benefit of the general public, until early in the 20th century. In The marriage of heaven and hell Blake transforms himself into the voice of the à¢â¬Ëdevilà¢â¬â¢, and with that voice he challenges received wisdom on every front. He sets himself up against church and state and all other social institutions, and he prophesies total and imminent human liberation from all forms of oppression.
He also celebrates dissent, the spirit of contradiction, as the only means of reaching the truth and states his version of the dialectic very boldly. He says that without à¢â¬Åcontrariesà¢â¬Â there can be no progress. At one point in The marriage of heaven and hell, the prophet Isaiah explains to Blake why he preached to the nations: à¢â¬ÅThe voice of honest indignation is the voice of god. I cared not for consequences, but right.à¢â¬Â That could be an apt motto for Blakeà¢â¬â¢s life as a whole.
Blake found absolutely no shortage of occasion for à¢â¬Åhonest indignationà¢â¬Â. In the 1790s, in his poetry, prose and painting, he took on political tyranny, slavery and war (which he called à¢â¬Åenergy enslavedà¢â¬Â), organised religion, political repression, cruelty to children, cruelty to animals and, in general, he took on the makers and, enforcers of law. He considered law itself to be anti-human and a cruelty. In one of his notes at the time he says: à¢â¬ÅThe prince of darkness is a gentleman, not a man; he is a lord chancellor.à¢â¬Â This is one of several of Blakeà¢â¬â¢s remarks that seem more apposite now than ever before.
Blake was at the same time a great singer of human liberation. He was driven by a vision of an alternative society. In the small illuminated book that he entitled America, a prophecy he lauded Tom Paine as one of the makers of the American Revolution and, more importantly, he presents it as a harbinger of a more general social revolution that will encompass the world. He celebrates the joy of that revolution with a marvellous passage:
à¢â¬ÅLet the slave grinding the mill run out into the field; let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air. Let the enchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing, whose face has never seen a smile in 30 weary years, rise and look out, his chains loose, his dungeon doors open; and let his wife and children return from the oppressorà¢â¬â¢s scourge. They look behind at every step and believe it is a dream. Are these the slaves that groaned along the streets of mystery? Where are your bonds and taskmasters? Are these the prisoners? Where are your chains? Where are your tears? Why do you look around? If you are thirsty, there is the river. Go bathe your parched throats. The good of all the land is before you. For mystery is no more.à¢â¬Â
This is the language of religious redemption, but it clearly refers to something actually happening on earth. One of the earthly realities that drove Blake to paroxysms of à¢â¬Åhonest indignationà¢â¬Â was poverty. He is not just sympathetic with the poor: he is angry about poverty itself, which he sees as irrational and unjustifiable. In the great poem called à¢â¬ËHoly Thursdayà¢â¬â¢, he begins by asking: à¢â¬ÅIs this a holy thing to see, in a rich and fruitful land, babes reduced to misery, fed with cold and usurious hand?à¢â¬Â He goes on to observe that this unholy thing, these hungry children, this poverty, must be happening in some other world, and could not possibly be happening in this one, because à¢â¬ÅWhereà¢â¬â¢er the sun does shine, and whereà¢â¬â¢er the rain does fall, babes can never hunger there, nor poverty the mind appal.à¢â¬Â
For Blake the presence of poverty, in a bountiful earth and a prosperous society, is a conundrum, maintained by a deceit. And if the deceit, the à¢â¬Åmysteryà¢â¬Â, is removed, then poverty could be removed along with it: à¢â¬ÅThe good of all the land is before you. For mystery is no more.à¢â¬Â Blake is saying that poverty is not natural; it is a human construction; and the pretence that it is anything else, not least the fault of the poor themselves, is mystification (à¢â¬Åmysteryà¢â¬Â) - what Marxists call false consciousness.
In another work the rich - the à¢â¬Åkings of Asiaà¢â¬Â, as Blake calls them - suddenly find themselves stripped of their powers, stripped of their à¢â¬Ëmysteriesà¢â¬â¢: à¢â¬ÅIn the day of full-feeding prosperity, and the night of delicious songs, shall not the councillor throw his curb of poverty on the laborious to fix the price of labour, to invent allegoric riches?à¢â¬Â - another highly apposite phrase that we could, for example, use in Hackney.
These are amazing lines, coming out of bourgeois democratic revolutions, but anticipating a world we have not yet built. With the phrase à¢â¬Åallegoric richesà¢â¬Â Blake is reaching forward to Marxà¢â¬â¢s ideas about value, labour, fetishisation of commodities, and so forth. In the final verse the kings reveal their true purpose and strategy. They say it is this: à¢â¬ÅTo turn man from his path. To restrain the child from the womb. To cut off the bread from the city, that the remnant may learn to obey.à¢â¬Â
This idea, that poverty is a conspiracy of the rich few against the poor many, that it serves to enforce servility and deference and fear, arises partly from Blakeà¢â¬â¢s own experience and frustrations. He was a worker all his life. He completed some 500 commercial engraving commissions, and these were his principal means of earning a living. The greatest English printmaker of all time lived his life as a à¢â¬Ëjourneymanà¢â¬â¢ - a casual labourer.
Although Blake was very proud of his craft as an engraver and never ashamed of his social origins, he did not actually want to be just an engraver: he wanted to be an artist in the fullest sense of the word. He wanted to be independent; he wanted to be an autonomous public voice. He wanted to address large numbers of people, and he did not want anyone else translating or interpreting his works, standing between him and his public.
That ambition proved his undoing. He fought an endless battle with would-be patrons, and with patronage in general. He hated it, but he had to rely on it. And ironically, the more obscure and heretical his work, the more he needed patronage, because he could not get a foothold in the general marketplace. For a man who loathed deference of any kind, this was a living agony. In a notebook he made this observation about his own situation: à¢â¬ÅThe enquiry in England is not whether a man has talents or is a genius, but whether he is passive, and polite, and a virtuous ass, and obedient to noblemenà¢â¬â¢s opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved.à¢â¬Â
He also resented the division of labour within the artistic process, between design and execution, and reproduction and publication. He felt deeply that his labours were being alienated from him. So he sought to reintegrate the process of artistic production, and to reclaim his labour as his own. He came up with the idea of publishing his own illuminated books, in which the text and illustrations could be printed from a single plate that was etched in relief. Through this process he hoped to achieve two things. First, to assert control over all the elements of the creative process - writing, designing, etching, engraving, printing colouring and so forth - and secondly, to reach a large public with a product offered for sale directly by the artist himself at a fair price.
But there was a problem. The process proved so time-consuming that it proved impossible to offer these illuminated books in significant numbers at anything like a saleable price. The fact that often the contents of the book were bafflingly obscure, and they were designed and written in a thoroughly unfashionable style, did not help either.
But Blake did succeed in one of his aims. He reclaimed the processes of mechanical reproduction - engraving, etching and printing - which were the assigned provinces of men of a lower social status, for the purposes of an independent artistic vision. That is what makes him a great printmaker. The tools of the trade were not for him just tools to achieve likeness of a reproducible form: they were tools for individual self-expression. So in one sense Blake made himself into the least alienated labourer in the kingdom. But at that time, of course, he could only do so at the cost of intense poverty and almost complete isolation.
Blake shared the republican and democratic ideals, and many of the political analyses, of the Paineites, and more broadly of what we could call the radical, secular side of the enlightenment. He admired Paine and the Jacobins and their English supporters - people of action and commitment.
But from the outset there were fundamental disagreements. Blake did not come to the radical enlightenment ideas of the French revolution unformed. Far from it. He had already imbibed something of the underground or counter-cultural tradition of radical religious dissent. This tradition descended from an earlier revolution, the English revolution of the 17th century. It stressed the direct access of every human being to god, and the primacy of love and faith over reason, the state and laws of any kind.
So from the beginning Blake not only rejects, but also polemicises against what he sees as the mechanistic, rationalistic, materialistic world view of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Godwin and others. A world view he describes as deism. In The marriage of heaven and hell he addresses these words to the deists: à¢â¬ÅIf the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite. For man has closed himself off till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cabin.à¢â¬Â
Behind this idea, that we have all somehow closed ourselves off from the full richness of existence, that we only see a small spectrum, is Blakeà¢â¬â¢s belief, restated throughout his career up to his dying day, that à¢â¬Åeverything that lives is holyà¢â¬Â. That is one of his great political slogans, and it is not a bad one. It is his rigorous pursuit of this idea to its extreme or logical conclusion that drives an ever deeper wedge between him and the people he calls the deists.
When it came to questions of sex, marriage, prostitution and the role of women, Blake travelled far beyond even the most radical of his contemporaries. He used à¢â¬Ëchastityà¢â¬â¢ and à¢â¬Ëabstinenceà¢â¬â¢ like swearwords throughout his life. He saw organised religion as the enemy of love, repressing and distorting sexual desire. In a wonderful poem in The songs of experience called à¢â¬ËThe garden of loveà¢â¬â¢, he looks to the churchyard, and observes that, à¢â¬ÅPriests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires.à¢â¬Â That is a line that all the ex-catholics I know absolutely love.
In a poem of the early 1790s called à¢â¬ËThe vision of the daughters of Albionà¢â¬â¢, Blake deals with the distortions of female humanity by social institutions, and he wrestles as few men before him and probably not many since with the challenge of female sexual desire. In one amazing passage he describes sexual frustration and masturbation, and he associates them with religion.
The passage reads: à¢â¬ÅThe moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin that pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys in the secret shadows of her chamber. The youth shut up from the lustful joy shall forget to generate, and create an amorous image in the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow. Are not these the places of religion à¢â¬Â¦?à¢â¬Â That is still pretty radical stuff today.
Blakeà¢â¬â¢s account of femininity throughout his life was ambivalent, but on the issue of womenà¢â¬â¢s subordination within the institution of marriage he was unequivocal: à¢â¬ÅShe who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound with spells of law to one she loathes. And must she drag the chain of life in weary lust?à¢â¬Â
For Blake the dark underside and the necessary complement of marriage, as it was seen in his society, was prostitution, which he described in this way: à¢â¬ÅTo catch virgin joy, and brand it with the name of whore, and sell it in the night, in silence, even without a whisperà¢â¬Â. Unlike many of the evangelical christians who throughout the 19th century campaigned against prostitution, Blakeà¢â¬â¢s critique was never puritanical. It was based on just the opposite assumption. He did not see prostitutes as morally stunted; he did not see sex outside marriage as in any way a bad thing. He saw prostitutes as victims and symbols of an inhuman system, a system that commodified human love.
Blake had a strong paranoid streak: his writings are loaded with demons of judgement and accusation, with traitors and false witnesses. He saw conspiracies against himself and his genius at work everywhere, including among his closest friends. But just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you. It was the era of revolutionary optimism in London, but it was also of course an era of ferocious state repression. Blake watched its impact - on people he knew well and many others he knew about. He not only saw the persecution of Tom Paine himself, but also Thomas Hardy - not the novelist, but the secretary of the London Corresponding Society, the leading radical and proletarian group in that era, who was a victim of a state-orchestrated vigilante mob. And he knew many others who were arrested, jailed, blacklisted, transported to Australia, which meant almost certain death in those days, or even hanged outright.
The repression of Jacobin dissent is the subject of one of the really great poems in the Songs of experience, called à¢â¬ËThe little boy lostà¢â¬â¢ - an incredibly soppy title for what is a really stark poem. The little boy speaks the first two verses, expressing not Blakeà¢â¬â¢s views, but the views Blake ascribed to the deists: à¢â¬ÅNought loves another as itself, nor venerates another so, nor is it possible a thought greater than itself to know. And, father, how can I love you or any of my brothers more? I love you like the little bird that picks up crumbs around the door.à¢â¬Â In Blakeà¢â¬â¢s view the little boyà¢â¬â¢s words, naive and insipid as they may sound, are completely wrong-headed.
They nonetheless pose a threat to the establishment, and the establishment reacted. The rest of the poem explained how: à¢â¬ÅThe priest sat by and heard the child; in trembling zeal he seized his hair; he led him by his little coat; and all admired the priestly care. And standing on the altar high, à¢â¬ËLo, what a fiend is here!à¢â¬â¢ said he. à¢â¬ËOne who sets reason up for judge of our most holy mystery.à¢â¬â¢
à¢â¬ÅThe weeping child could not be heard; the weeping parents wept in vain. They stripped him to his little shirt, and bound him in an iron chain. And burnt him in a holy place, where many had been burned before. The weeping parents wept in vain. Are such things done on Albionà¢â¬â¢s shore?à¢â¬Â This has got to be one of the greatest political protest poems of all time - such things were done on Albionà¢â¬â¢s shore.
Meanwhile, in the 1790s Blakeà¢â¬â¢s old acquaintance, Tom Paine, was living in France - for part of that time in prison, courtesy of the Jacobin regime. While in the prison he decided that, having attacked British rule and the monarchy in the pamphlet Common sense, having taken on Burke and defended the French Revolution in the pamphlet The rights of man, he would now take on christianity and the Bible. The result was a fabulous book The age of reason, which made Paine even more hated by the establishment than before. In particular what the establishment feared was the impact that Paineà¢â¬â¢s exposure of the bogus claims of biblical authority would have among the poor, who might start thinking.
So the establishment sponsored an absolute torrent of replies to The age of reason, one of the most famous of which was published in 1797 by Richard Watson, who had been rewarded with the title of bishop. By good fortune Blakeà¢â¬â¢s own copy of the bishopà¢â¬â¢s pamphlet survives and in its margin we can read clearly Blakeà¢â¬â¢s responses to the attacks on Paine.
It is sometimes said that you can learn more about an artist by looking at their spontaneous and casual sketches than at the finished paintings. There is a sense in which that is true about Blakeà¢â¬â¢s marginal annotations to many books, including this pamphlet. The annotations are of particular interest because they carry forward Blakeà¢â¬â¢s lifelong dialogue with the ideology of the Paineite radicals and the deists. This dialogue foreshadows the present-day discussion between Marxism and liberation theology.
Throughout the annotations what drives him mad is Watsonà¢â¬â¢s complacency. Blake accuses him of à¢â¬Åpriestly impudenceà¢â¬Â, à¢â¬Åcontemptible falsehood and detractionà¢â¬Â and à¢â¬Åserpentine dissimulationà¢â¬Â. He insists: à¢â¬ÅPaine does not attack christianity. Watson has defended antichristà¢â¬Â. In one of those amazing flashes of radical intellectual revisionism that occur throughout Blakeà¢â¬â¢s work, he says: à¢â¬ÅChrist died an unbeliever. And if the bishops had their will, so would Paine. Let the bishop prove that he has not spoken against the Holy Ghost, who in Paine strives with christendom, as in christ he strove with the jews.à¢â¬Â A pretty enormous claim. It is clear throughout these annotations how much Blake is inspired by and admires Paine. At the very end of the pamphlet he concludes, having digested and pretty much knocked on the head all the bishopà¢â¬â¢s arguments: à¢â¬ÅIt appears to me now that Tom Paine is a better christian than the bishop.à¢â¬Â
In The age of reason Paine had a lot of fun with all the claims in the Bible about the working of miracles. The bishop responded by arguing that the miracles were supported by sound historical evidence. Blake expresses contempt for Watson, but thinks Paine has missed the point: à¢â¬ÅIs it a greater miracle to feed 5,000 men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet? Look over the events of your own life, and if you do not find that you have both done such miracles and lived by such, you do not see as I do. True, I cannot do a miracle through experiment, and to domineer over and prove to others my superior power. As I, neither could christ. But I can and do work such miracles as both astonish and comfort me and mine. How can Paine, the worker of miracles, ever doubt christà¢â¬â¢s, in the above sense of the word à¢â¬Ëmiracleà¢â¬â¢?à¢â¬Â
That is one of my favourite sentences of Blake, because there it contains a world of complex ideas compressed and because it is a wonderful assertion of the existence of the miraculous within history and everyday life, in a sense which I think is entirely consonant with Marxism. When Paine and the bishop argue over whether the prophets in the Bible actually succeeded in predicting or prophesying anything, Blake again loses patience with the two of them. They have got it all wrong. He says: à¢â¬ÅProphets in the modern sense of the word never existed. Every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion on private and public matters.à¢â¬Â
Yet Blake chose not to utter his opinions, or at least not all of them. In contrast, a man named Gilbert Wakefield, who was another religious dissenter and political radical, did publish, in that year, 1798, a defence of Tom Paine against the bishop, in which he said: à¢â¬ÅI see religion employed as a state engine of despotism and murder, by a set of men who are worse than heathens and infidels in their own lives.à¢â¬Â Partly as a result of statements like that, Gilbert Wakefield was imprisoned for sedition in 1798. He died in prison - quite a common occurrence because of the conditions - in 1801. So we can see that Blakeà¢â¬â¢s fear of publishing, and of persecution, was very well founded.
In 1800, at the age of 43, Blake spent a three-year sojourn in rural Sussex. It was the only time in his life that he did not live in London. The experience started out full of hopes and ambitious schemes and, as so often with Blake, it ended in disaster, when he was arrested and charged with sedition, following an argument with a drunken soldier who had entered without permission his private garden. The soldier accused Blake of saying, à¢â¬ÅDamn the king!à¢â¬Â and other things tending to indicate that he was a supporter of the French and Napoleon Bonaparte, a touchy issue in 1803.
Blake ferociously denied the charges. There is no doubt that he did think these things, and at certain times he did say them. In his notebook he attributes his arrest to the fact, as he imagines it, that the state knew about his earlier association with Thomas Paine. Thanks to support from local bigwigs, the fact that Blake was personally well liked and the fact that the soldiers were resented and mistrusted by local people, Blake was acquitted by the jury. But the experience left him even more preoccupied than before with persecution, treachery and false accusation and the power of some to pass judgement on others.
After the trial, and Blakeà¢â¬â¢s return to London in 1803, he entered the most obscure, and probably the most painful part of his life. His attempts to reach a wider public get more and more desperate. They are utterly fruitless and he is left artistically and politically isolated. However, unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge and many others who had been fired by the democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, but later turned reactionary, Blake never gave up on the causes and the hopes of the revolutionary era. He never made any kind of peace with power, money or establishment opinion.
We do not know exactly how Blake lived during the period 1806 to 1820. Since there was no welfare state then it is probable that his wife must have taken some kind of paid work. These days Blake would have to turn up to the job-seekers interview and explain what steps he had taken to procure paid employment in his chosen career as the prophetic conscience of the nation; or else if he wanted to claim incapacity benefit he would have to get a medical certificate and the doctors would have prescribed Prozac and told him to get back to work.
But what he was actually doing during this fantastically productive period was writing, drawing, designing, engraving, printing and hand-colouring for his largest illuminated book, his longest epic poem, the 100 plates that make up the work called Jerusalem, the emanation of the giant Albion. It is hard to know how to categorise this amazing book. Much of Jerusalem was written in obscure language. However, it is a unique and awe-inspiring human document, well worth time and study. It is the testimony of a lifetimeà¢â¬â¢s struggle for independence and integrity. It is full of magnificent words and images, sometimes hard to put in order.
There is a view, especially among academic scholars, that Jerusalem represents some kind of retreat by Blake into political passivity, even christian orthodoxy: a drift away from the earlier radicalism. It is true that a lot of Jerusalem is inward-looking; a lot is preoccupied with Blakeà¢â¬â¢s own psychological struggles - in particular his efforts to deal with his own all-consuming sense of rejection and betrayal; and it is also true that it is more explicitly christian in its rhetoric than his works of the 1790s. Nonetheless it is also absolutely clear that it is founded solidly on Blakeà¢â¬â¢s social radicalism, and a vision uncompromisingly of social revolution. A lot of the poem has to do with the titanic struggles to save, redeem or reinstate Jerusalem - not so much a place as a state of being - which is embodied in a female character and has somehow been lost or hidden from the other main characters in the poem.
Blake devotes an entire plate to an illustration of the female figure, with a large motto written very clearly in large letters in his own hand, spelling out in plain terms just what Jerusalem symbolises. The motto says: à¢â¬ÅJerusalem is named à¢â¬ËLibertyà¢â¬â¢ among the sons of Albion.à¢â¬Â This liberty, by any reasonable reading of the poem, is clearly social liberty. It is the liberty not merely of Blake as an artist, but also of all human beings. It is a liberty that Blake still insists requires the removal of poverty, and indeed the removal of economic coercion of any kind. Jerusalem, he says, is the annihilation of the present state, where à¢â¬Åman is by nature the enemy of manà¢â¬Â. Jerusalem is the dialectical opposite of that.
In Jerusalem Blake continues to rage against war, as the most extreme perversion of human life and skill and creativity. He evokes the horror of the press gang: à¢â¬ÅWe were carried away in thousands from London, and in tens of thousands from Westminster, and Marylebone, in ships closed up. Chained hand and foot, compelled to fight under the iron whips of our captors. Fearing our officers more than the enemy.à¢â¬Â A wonderfully prescient passage about war in general.
He continues to rage against poverty, still seeing it as being sustained by a system of deceit. He writes: à¢â¬ÅThe oppressors of Albion in every city and village mock at the labourerà¢â¬â¢s limbs. They mock at his starved children, they buy his daughters, that they may have power to sell his sons. They compel the poor to live upon a crust of bread, by soft, mild arts. They reduce the man to want, then give with pomp and ceremony.à¢â¬Â The last two lines of this could act as a motto for Tony Blair.
Blake is still asking, even in old age, and having utterly given up on finding any larger audience or making any money, shocking questions that go to the root of what passes for morality in a society whose very structure is corrupt. What is a wife, and what is a harlot? What is a church, and what is a theatre? Are they two and not one? Can they exist separately? Is not religion and politics the same thing?
Blake remains indignant over the commodification of sexuality through marriage and prostitution. He talks about à¢â¬Åthe sexual death, living on accusation of sin and judgement, to freeze love and innocence into the gold and silver of the merchantà¢â¬Â. His vision of social transformation still clearly includes a form of sexual liberation, because social revolution will end sexual condemnation, sexual secrecy and sexual hypocrisy: à¢â¬ÅMan in the resurrection changes his sexual garments at will. Every harlot was a virgin onceà¢â¬Â - a slogan that Blake repeats several times throughout his work.
The final chapter of Jerusalem is addressed to the christians. Blake rejects the otherworldly, or merely passive, form of christianity as self-serving hypocrisy. He says: à¢â¬ÅI know of no other form of christianity, and no other gospel, than the liberty of both body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination. The labours of art and science are alone the labours of the gospel. To labour in knowledge is to build up Jerusalem. And to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders. Let every christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the building up of Jerusalem.à¢â¬Â
This is the phrase that recurs throughout. The à¢â¬Åbuilding up of Jerusalemà¢â¬Â, the idea that social liberty and what I think we can fairly call socialism, is not a final state, but a progressive and a collective act. It is a process. Most importantly, throughout the poem, the recovery and embrace of Jerusalem is seen as the result of collective effort and debate, including Blakeà¢â¬â¢s own debate with the deists, which is seen as an essential stepping stone to that.
Blake sees deism - the rationalist, empiricist world view - as an ideological facet of a system of dominance, and he links it directly to the exploitation of labour through industrialisation, as he makes clear in this passage from Jerusalem: à¢â¬ÅI turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe à¢â¬Â¦ Black the cloth and heavy wreaths folds over every nation. Cruel works of many wheels I view. Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, moved by compulsion. Not as those in Eden, which wheel within wheel in freedom revolve through harmony and peace.à¢â¬Â
For Blake the deists do not go far enough. They remain wedded to the gods of this world, the logic of power and money and, if you like, of commodity production. They remain wedded to an analysis in which human beings exist merely as calculations in each otherà¢â¬â¢s heads. Blake believes that the deistsà¢â¬â¢ understanding of the human heart, of human motivation, is incomplete and mechanistic. He believes they have replaced living, breathing, sinful humanity with an abstraction; and that, in so doing, they reinvent the old oppressions and mystifications: not least they invent a new justification for property, and therefore for poverty.
Behind the behavioural or environmental psychology of deism and enlightenment rationals in general, there is the idea of the perfectibility of human beings. One of the reasons that Blake stayed true to his radical faith, when so many others fell by the wayside, was that he never shared this illusion. Just the opposite. He believed that the basis of human solidarity was our shared fallibility and weakness, our frailty, just as he believed that the possibility of change was rooted in the human capacity for love and imaginative labour. Where the deists see human beings as more or less interchangeable cogs in a social and economic machine, Blake stresses both the infinite diversity, and the essential oneness, of human experience.
The à¢â¬Åhuman imaginationà¢â¬Â that he celebrates is both unique to each individual and irreplaceable - hence the sanctity of each individual human life. But it is also collective, shared, and exists only in intercourse with the entire human family. It is only capable of being fulfilled in a social setting. To put it in Blakeà¢â¬â¢s terms, the deists fail to understand that, à¢â¬ÅWithout contraries there can be no progressionà¢â¬Â. To put it in Marxist terms, they fail to understand that the relationship between the individual and the collective, the environment and consciousness, the past and the present, the educators and those they would educate, is dialectical.
Blake believed that consciousness determines being, whereas Marxists of course see it the other way round. But Marxists do agree with Blake on the important point that consciousness is real, and is not merely a passive mirror of objectively existing reality. Blake believed that what others call à¢â¬Ånaturalà¢â¬Â - the existence of rich and poor, or kings and priests, or marriage, or laws of any kind - are actually the mental constructions of human beings. The famous à¢â¬Åmind-forged manaclesà¢â¬Â that he refers to in the poem à¢â¬ËLondonà¢â¬â¢ are both metaphorical and real. But the point Blake is making is that they are forged in the mind. They are the creations of human beings, and they can therefore be reforged into something else.
Blake offers many gifts to socialists and activists in the 21st century. First, there is the magnificent intransigence of the man. His absolute refusal to compromise with or surrender in any way to a system of death. Second, there is his insistence that inside the system of death there exists the perpetual miracle of human life, love and creativity, and that this miracle is the basis for a challenge to the system of death and for a new way of organising human society. Third, there is Blakeà¢â¬â¢s huge, daring, lifelong effort to imagine the new world, a world without oppression. And at the same time his reminder that it is we, the products of a rotten, fallen, corrupt, contradictory world, with all the distortions it involved, that will make the new world.
There is a line from Blake that has being going around my head over recent months, probably because of my experience of leaving the Labour Party and joining the Socialist Alliance. But also because I think it is a great line and relevant to almost everything:
à¢â¬ÅThe pangs of eternal birth are better than the pangs of eternal death.