Speaker 1: All right, Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William
Speaker 1: Ramsey Investigates on Tonight Show. Have a very special guest.
Speaker 1: He comes to us from the UK. His name is
Speaker 1: John Higgs, and he's just published an excellent book which
Speaker 1: I finished this morning. The title of the book is
Speaker 1: William Blake Versus the World, published May twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: And this is not the author's first book. He also
Speaker 1: wrote back in two thousand and six published I Have
Speaker 1: America Surrounded, a biography of Timothy Leary, which I consider
Speaker 1: would be the best biography of Timothy Leery. I've read
Speaker 1: that and quoted that. He's also written the KLF Chaos, Magic, Music, Money,
Speaker 1: published twenty twelve, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, Making Sense
Speaker 1: of the Twentieth Century published twenty fifteen, Watling Street Travels
Speaker 1: through Britain and It's ever present Past, and also the
Speaker 1: Future Starts Here, published twenty twenty. But we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about this book, William Blake Versus the World. I
Speaker 1: knew a little bit about Blake, but this really increased
Speaker 1: my understanding of him and from a variety of different
Speaker 1: perspective of a very unique, interesting individual. So we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about that. John Higgs, are you there, Yeah, Hi, William.
Speaker 2: Good to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Awesome, Well, thanks for bringing to the interview for people
Speaker 1: maybe who might not have heard of your background. You
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about your interest in William Blake
Speaker 1: and what led you to read write this book, William
Speaker 1: Blakes the World.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean it's My books often seem to be
Speaker 2: a bit of a random hodgepodge to people. I'll write
Speaker 2: a book about there's a band in the UK called
Speaker 2: the KLF in the early nineties, a rave band who
Speaker 2: are probably most notorious for burning a million pounds. And
Speaker 2: I went from that to a history of the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: and I went from that to accounter an old Roman road.
Speaker 2: And they can appear to be sort of strange little hops,
Speaker 2: where every book is an attempt to get out of
Speaker 2: the box that the last one has put you in.
Speaker 2: But when you read them all together there does seem
Speaker 2: to be a bit of a through line. For instance,
Speaker 2: you mentioned my Timothy Leary book, which was the first
Speaker 2: thing I wrote back in two thousand and six. Timothy
Speaker 2: Leary makes quite appearance in my Look at Blake, and
Speaker 2: Blake himself has appeared in many of my other books
Speaker 2: along the Line, Along the Days, you know, And so
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: This book kind of starts out with this very unique character,
Speaker 1: William Blake. Can you talk about where he started up
Speaker 1: in kind of his background and his entry into kind
Speaker 1: of the art really this kind of artistic world, a
Speaker 1: variety of different types of visual and also poetry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, I mean for people who don't know. William
Speaker 2: Blake was an eighteenth century early nineteenth century poet, writer, illustrator, engraver.
Speaker 2: Perhaps more importantly, he was a visionary. He had visions
Speaker 2: throughout his entire life. When he was around the age
Speaker 2: of four, he saw God pressing in through the window
Speaker 2: of his house in the upstairs room and screamed. And
Speaker 2: at the age of eight, he walked from the center
Speaker 2: of London where he lived in Soho, he walked out
Speaker 2: in the countryside to a place called Peckham Rai and
Speaker 2: sat down under a tree and looked at the street
Speaker 2: and there his angels on every bow and that that's
Speaker 2: him at eight. And he had the same level of
Speaker 2: sort of visionary insight until until old age, through his
Speaker 2: entire life, and as a result, he was you know,
Speaker 2: he saw the world very differently to his contemporaries and
Speaker 2: his peers, and he was ignored really for much of
Speaker 2: his life. He was he was he was dismissed and
Speaker 2: mocked and a lot of people just saw him as a madman.
Speaker 2: But he certainly towards the end of the life, he
Speaker 2: he just he just believed that the visions that he
Speaker 2: had were so worthy and so and they made his
Speaker 2: life so rich. You know, he was rich in every
Speaker 2: single aspect of life that you could imagine, with the
Speaker 2: exception of financially. You know that he he it sort
Speaker 2: of inspired him just to keep working and working, and
Speaker 2: he he produced these extraordinary, illuminated books that appear to
Speaker 2: have been written from a position outside of normal time
Speaker 2: and space that I say didn't make much an impact
Speaker 2: of his time. But two hundred years later, there's just
Speaker 2: been this slow increase in people sort of coming to
Speaker 2: him and recognizing that what he was trying to tell
Speaker 2: as was important and was of a great value.
Speaker 1: And you see, sorry, not good.
Speaker 2: I was just going to say. He became a bit
Speaker 2: of a point of reference. In the nineteen sixties after
Speaker 2: Aldous Huxley wrote a book about mescaline called The Doors
Speaker 2: of Perception, which is one of the first sort of
Speaker 2: intellectual whether that's the right word, sort of looks at
Speaker 2: the impact of a psychedelic drug on the mind. And
Speaker 2: he took the name Doors of Perception from William Blake
Speaker 2: because who else had been talking about those things? And
Speaker 2: then Jim Morrison comes along and calls his bands the
Speaker 2: Doors based on this book, and and and so on,
Speaker 2: so he became a bit of a counterculture icon in
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's somebody who really wasn't The public was
Speaker 1: not aware of him, although he did have recognition from
Speaker 1: maybe some other people in his art community. But he
Speaker 1: didn't He didn't live, he wasn't financially, he didn't seem
Speaker 1: to be interested in commercial success. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2: He was very good at ruining any possibility of commercial work.
Speaker 2: I was at the British Library a few weeks ago
Speaker 2: and seeing these letters he wrote, and there's just two
Speaker 2: letters together that it just it's a it's an absolute
Speaker 2: three act drama, the whole thing. This guy commissioned him
Speaker 2: to produce one specific piece of art, an illustration, and
Speaker 2: he'd been very specific about what he wanted, and then
Speaker 2: Blake had returned with something completely different and sort of
Speaker 2: explained that actually what the Poe I genius wanted was
Speaker 2: for him to do this work, not what you've asked for.
Speaker 2: And then we don't get Blake's response to this, so
Speaker 2: we don't get the response to this letter. But then
Speaker 2: we get Blake's next letter, which sort of begins with, well,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry if I've made you angry, but and then
Speaker 2: he goes on to explain to this guy why he's
Speaker 2: wrong about everything and why his perspective on life is
Speaker 2: just it's just so flawed. And then at the end
Speaker 2: he sort of asked for twelve guineas for the work,
Speaker 2: and obviously he never got it. He was That seems
Speaker 2: to encapsulate a lot about William Blake. He was stubborn,
Speaker 2: but he was driven, but he had utter belief in
Speaker 2: his visions and his work and his own.
Speaker 1: Like a self confidence like his whole life, which is
Speaker 1: very strange without having that real public approbrium or fame
Speaker 1: until after he passed away and went eighteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1: And he's such an interesting figure. And I think you
Speaker 1: really did an excellent job in really trying to take
Speaker 1: apart this fascinating imagine it to character and how he
Speaker 1: saw the world. Can you kind of talk to the
Speaker 1: audience maybe about how William Brake Blake perceived the outside world,
Speaker 1: which is very different than the rationalist and materialist.
Speaker 3: View, absolutely, and at its heart, I think there is
Speaker 3: quite a simple, subtle difference to how his peers and
Speaker 3: indeed most of Western educated society saw the world, which is,
Speaker 3: for Blake, the spiritual.
Speaker 2: World, the immaterial of God's heaven and Hell, demons and
Speaker 2: angels and things like that. We're all internal, there are
Speaker 2: internal states. As he wrote, man forgot that all deities
Speaker 2: reside in the human breast. And it's a perspective that
Speaker 2: is very sort of interesting and useful in more secular
Speaker 2: times now, in the secular twenty first century, because few
Speaker 2: people now genuinely believe that, say, Hell exists, that it's
Speaker 2: a place, a physical place that's somewhere some distance away,
Speaker 2: that you might be sent to at some point. Not
Speaker 2: a lot of people genuinely believe that, but most people
Speaker 2: have probably met someone who at some point in their
Speaker 2: life has been living in Hell. And when you start
Speaker 2: to see hell as an internal state, that sort of
Speaker 2: raises the possibility of someone living in paradise like Blake,
Speaker 2: said he was towards the end of his life. Certainly
Speaker 2: that suddenly becomes possible, and it very much rescues almost,
Speaker 2: you know, centuries of theology into something relevant, the idea
Speaker 2: of yourself having a soul, your sense of a soul.
Speaker 2: Many materialistically minded, sort of scientifically thinking people will just
Speaker 2: dismiss the idea outright. But the quality of your life,
Speaker 2: your one brief life as we go around this rock, however,
Speaker 2: many times, is of immense importance and immense value, and
Speaker 2: it is something you do need to look after. So
Speaker 2: that because and this, this notion that the the immaterial
Speaker 2: is internal comes specifically from the Greeks, from from Greek philosophy,
Speaker 2: from the Pythagoreans originally, but then Plato specifically had this
Speaker 2: idea of forms, where like there was this idealized version
Speaker 2: of chair somewhere off in this idealized sort of space,
Speaker 2: and that all that was was away from you, and
Speaker 2: it was it was you couldn't reach it, you sort
Speaker 2: of couldn't get to it. And this idea that the
Speaker 2: immaterial was away it's very different to say Indian thought
Speaker 2: of vedict philosophy. It's very different to ancient British mythology,
Speaker 2: but it was it was an aspect of Greek thought
Speaker 2: that the early Christian Church sort of ran with because
Speaker 2: it opened the way to their religion being new universal.
Speaker 2: There's a universal aspect to it, and so that became
Speaker 2: embedded in the university system. And this this idea that
Speaker 2: the spiritual is away from you, is a distance, is external.
Speaker 2: It's so deep in the foundation of Western thought that
Speaker 2: we never really think about it, and we never really
Speaker 2: and if you can't see it, you know you can't
Speaker 2: question it, so you just accept it. And that small
Speaker 2: difference is really the key to seeing how Blake understands
Speaker 2: the world, understood the world, and why that was so
Speaker 2: so radically different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean really unique kind of looks. And even
Speaker 1: you brought up his religion, he's I mean, you say
Speaker 1: in the book he thought of himself as a Christian,
Speaker 1: but he would not I think you've been saying the
Speaker 1: book modern Christians would not recognize his outlook. Can you
Speaker 1: talk about that? How that outlook formulated in this Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, it's based on what his definition of suppose christ
Speaker 2: consciousness is the modern term would be, which he completely
Speaker 2: associated with creativity, with the imagination, the imagination was divine.
Speaker 2: The imagination just poured through him. It was if it
Speaker 2: was something new entering the world from elsewhere. It was,
Speaker 2: it was. It was utterly powerful. There's a conversation that
Speaker 2: was recorded. He met a guy called Crab Robinson at
Speaker 2: a party towards the end of his life, and this
Speaker 2: guy was questioning him and asked him about the divinity
Speaker 2: of Jesus, and he said, oh, yes, Jesus, he is
Speaker 2: the only God, and so am I, and so are you.
Speaker 2: And this guy just couldn't understand what on earth he
Speaker 2: was trying to say, because it was the idea was
Speaker 2: so outside of you know, eighteenth central or nineteenth century
Speaker 2: thought that it just made no sense, and he wrote
Speaker 2: it down in his dawn. We still have it. But
Speaker 2: it's when you get to know Blake you realize that
Speaker 2: for him, the divinity of Jesus, which he was, he
Speaker 2: was utterly important to him. You know. He loved the
Speaker 2: Bible and the the sort of an entirely inspad, creative
Speaker 2: and wonderful sort of text was U was an artistic thing,
Speaker 2: was a creative thing. He would he talked about a
Speaker 2: man who is not a painter and an architect, an
Speaker 2: artist or anything like this is not a Christian The
Speaker 2: two to to create, to channel that sort of divine
Speaker 2: force through his mind something new for him. That was
Speaker 2: the heart of Christianity was as he sort of defined it. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's very different to you know, what your local church
Speaker 2: may may say.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about one of the fascinating things. I
Speaker 1: didn't know, but I'm not surprised when I read it
Speaker 1: in your book, was the influence about Swedenborg? Like, can
Speaker 1: you touch a little bit on that?
Speaker 2: Sure? Well for people who don't know. Emmanuel Swedenborg was
Speaker 2: a Swedish mystic eighteenth century mystic who'd for most of
Speaker 2: his life been a very respectable, very wealthy, a sort
Speaker 2: of proto engineer. I guess he was. He was in
Speaker 2: charge of Swedish minds, and he wrote lots of books
Speaker 2: about mineralogy and and and and things like that. He
Speaker 2: was very materially minded up and past his middle age,
Speaker 2: at which point he started to have his dreams just
Speaker 2: started to get richer and richer and richer, until they
Speaker 2: suddenly overwhelmed him and overwhelmed his life, and he found himself,
Speaker 2: you know, as a visionary sort of traveling to heaven
Speaker 2: and hell and alien worlds and meeting angels and things
Speaker 2: like that, and he wrote all these these books about
Speaker 2: what happened to him, Heaven and Hell being the most
Speaker 2: most well known, I think. And you know, there's lots
Speaker 2: of great stories about about Swedenburg being asked question. I mean,
Speaker 2: there was the Queen of Sweden. Her brother had died,
Speaker 2: and so she said to him, you know, could you
Speaker 2: ask my brother on the other side about this letter
Speaker 2: I sent to him? And he came back the next
Speaker 2: day and he said, yes, I spoke to your brother
Speaker 2: and he and then Swedenborg whispered something into the Queen's ear,
Speaker 2: and no one knows what it was, but all the
Speaker 2: courtiers around heard it, and she was going, No one
Speaker 2: but God knows the secret. There's all these sort of lovely,
Speaker 2: little sort of spiritualist tales associated with Swedenborg. And there
Speaker 2: was an attempt to build what they called the New Church,
Speaker 2: a religion based on his books in Blake's time, and
Speaker 2: he was very interested in it. And because it was
Speaker 2: there were both vision reason there's a lot of overlap.
Speaker 2: But as he as he read deep in deeper into
Speaker 2: Swedenburgh's work, he began to see a lot of things
Speaker 2: that he disagreed with, and so he wrote this extraordinary
Speaker 2: illuminated book called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in
Speaker 2: contrast to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, which is really a
Speaker 2: little bit of a literary spat. This was him explaining
Speaker 2: why Swedenburg was wrong. And it's it's so brilliant that
Speaker 2: he did, because it's one of the clearest statements of
Speaker 2: how Blake saw the world and and how and what
Speaker 2: Blake's metaphysics and theology was. Yeah, so's It was definitely
Speaker 2: a massive influence, but one that the the the younger
Speaker 2: pupil as it were, turned against and and and surpassed,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: And I mean it shows also how complex like he
Speaker 1: You right, there's a theme in your book of this
Speaker 1: uniting of kind of differences. So oppositions are important in
Speaker 1: Blake's worldview. But can you talk about how it's very
Speaker 1: how complex Blake and unique he was, and he would
Speaker 1: use these kind of personages us in lows or to
Speaker 1: encapsulate concepts for sure.
Speaker 2: I mean, he very quickly as a writer moved away
Speaker 2: from I guess the established mythologies that most writers used
Speaker 2: at the time, which was Biblical or Greek myths, those
Speaker 2: sort of figures that we used a lot, and he
Speaker 2: basically created is in his own system. I must create
Speaker 2: a system, or be enslaved by another man is another
Speaker 2: man's is what he wrote. Uh. And he came up
Speaker 2: with all these weird and wonderful sort of mythological characters,
Speaker 2: all of which are aspects of us, the aspects of
Speaker 2: our mind. And he called them. There was four in
Speaker 2: particular that he called the zoas the Forzo was just
Speaker 2: the title of one of his unfinished works.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And they represented the rational side of our mind, the creative,
Speaker 2: the physical, the emotional, and a lot of what his
Speaker 2: writings were about were putting these figures in different combinations
Speaker 2: and seeing how they clashed, and seeing the dynamics and
Speaker 2: the the energies and and the grief that they caused
Speaker 2: from being placed in different sort of positions. And we
Speaker 2: can from now we sort of see that as all
Speaker 2: this sort of proto psychology. He's he's sort of trying
Speaker 2: to grasp how the mind works. And it was it
Speaker 2: was really quite useful and profound. If you look at
Speaker 2: when he's writing about revolution, you know, he has this
Speaker 2: character called Orc, who's the Who's the spirit? Of revolution.
Speaker 2: But he he understands this character on a far sort
Speaker 2: of richer and deeper level than a lot of specifically
Speaker 2: the Romantic writers and Romantic poets at the time, they
Speaker 2: were all sort of you know, William Wordsworth was at
Speaker 2: the early days of the French Revolution, and it was
Speaker 2: blicited to be alive and to be young is very heaven.
Speaker 2: They just saw it was this wonderful thing. And when
Speaker 2: when the reign of Terror came afterwards, and you know,
Speaker 2: blood was washing through the streets of Paris, they couldn't
Speaker 2: really it didn't fit in their will toy, They couldn't
Speaker 2: really grasp it. Blake's understanding of a revolution, revolution, of
Speaker 2: the desire of revolution, the spirit of revolution was so
Speaker 2: much more richer that that that it just, you know,
Speaker 2: it fitted that what was happening in Paris far far
Speaker 2: better and gave him a far clearer understanding of of
Speaker 2: of human imagination.
Speaker 1: And he, I mean, for somebody who wasn't really well
Speaker 1: known in his life, he was aware of different ideas
Speaker 1: the revolution Newton, so he was kind of had a
Speaker 1: but he didn't totally agree. Can you talk about kind
Speaker 1: of his relationship with Newtonian his a Towny and so
Speaker 1: he's kind of was like a critic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. I Mean the thing with Blake was he
Speaker 2: wasn't sent to school as a child. He was just
Speaker 2: sort of free to sort of play and explore and wonder.
Speaker 2: But as an adult guard he read everything he was
Speaker 2: you know, he from from the evidence of his works,
Speaker 2: he was clearly very very well read and deeply informed on,
Speaker 2: you know, on certain subjects. And this was the Age
Speaker 2: of Enlightenment really, and the general gist of the Age
Speaker 2: of Enlightenment was people saying, you know, previously in the
Speaker 2: medieval world, you know, faith was primary, that was the
Speaker 2: that was the thing faith, and the Age of Enlightenment
Speaker 2: was saying, well, hang on, maybe maybe it's not faith.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's reason. Maybe reasons the thing. Maybe that's the
Speaker 2: the the primary focus. And for Blake, you know, he
Speaker 2: had no problems with this sort of questioning of faith.
Speaker 2: But for him, reason was just such a small part
Speaker 2: art of what the mind was capable of that to
Speaker 2: focus on that was to miss the point. And there
Speaker 2: this character called Eurzone, which is one of the Zoo's
Speaker 2: I was talking about it was our rational side. He's
Speaker 2: kind of blind to the fact that he's sort of
Speaker 2: creating his own reality tunnel, to use a Timothy Leary phrase,
Speaker 2: and he sort of believes it to be reality. He
Speaker 2: believes the model of reality that he's constructing in his
Speaker 2: mind is the universe, and can't see outside of of
Speaker 2: this particular, this particular model. And and you see, you
Speaker 2: see a lot of Blake's art work, there will be
Speaker 2: a figure with compasses that make, you know, focusing on
Speaker 2: on a piece of paper rationally making a measured sort
Speaker 2: of circle, but around them will just be this this,
Speaker 2: this glorious formless void, or this giant red sun, or
Speaker 2: or this sort of ange world. And who's so focused
Speaker 2: on his rationality is just blind to it. He just
Speaker 2: cannot see it. And it's this this, it's the important
Speaker 2: this blind spot that our rationale mind has. We you know,
Speaker 2: we often insist to ourselves that we're rational, even when
Speaker 2: we're just rationalizing. It's it's something you really, it really.
Speaker 2: It comes into a lot of my books, again mentioned
Speaker 2: in Timothy Leary, whose whose concept of reality channels was
Speaker 2: something picked up by Robert Anton Wilson, and he talks
Speaker 2: brilliantly about them in all all his books. And Robert
Speaker 2: Anton Wilson is a figure who's in my k Left
Speaker 2: book and various other things. It's all about trying to
Speaker 2: see your blind spot, trying to not believe your own bs,
Speaker 2: not believe your own belief systems. As as Wilson would
Speaker 2: would put it, this is all central to this eighteenth century,
Speaker 2: you know, romantic poet. It's all all there in the
Speaker 2: work of Blake.
Speaker 1: No it's really remarkable, and I think that it was
Speaker 1: interesting you in your book you talk about the statue
Speaker 1: of Newton in front of the British Library holding the compass.
Speaker 1: But maybe some people may not perceive that that was
Speaker 1: actually a critique by Blake, not a inconium or some
Speaker 1: kind of something where he's really admiring Newton as much.
Speaker 2: Definitely, but I mean in the same painting he's painted
Speaker 2: Newton like it was this idealized physique of a Greek
Speaker 2: god with blonde hair and this naked body. So he's
Speaker 2: not just mocking Newton. He's not just you know, he's
Speaker 2: he's accepting that Newton was this great important figure in
Speaker 2: world history. It's you mentioned the countries earlier, the the
Speaker 2: importance of opposites. This is central. This is absolutely central
Speaker 2: to Blake the that without countries there is there is
Speaker 2: no progression, the idea that you know, he he would
Speaker 2: write about innocence, but he would also write about experience,
Speaker 2: and he wouldn't claim that one was better one was important.
Speaker 2: You know his book that I mentioned earlier, the Marriage
Speaker 2: of Heaven and Hell. Uh, he's having he wants heaven
Speaker 2: and he wants hell. And this is very much how
Speaker 2: our mind constructs it's sense of the world as a baby.
Speaker 2: We've got this completely blank slate of a mind and everything.
Speaker 2: Then there's just this cozy, chaotic sort of blur outside
Speaker 2: and we slowly sort of divide up. Oh, actually there's
Speaker 2: darkness and there's light, okay, and there's there's warm and
Speaker 2: there's cold, and there's you know, there's mummy and not mummy.
Speaker 2: And he so used these these opposites to define uh
Speaker 2: and uh and and understand and understand the world. And
Speaker 2: this is what if you look at the book of Genesis, Uh, this,
Speaker 2: this is what God's doing at the at the very start,
Speaker 2: He's there's this terrible void and he divides the you know,
Speaker 2: the water from the land and the light from the dark.
Speaker 2: And over the over seven days, uh and it's always
Speaker 2: as he entered, as he's creating the world. The idea
Speaker 2: is here is God absolutely creating the world. If you
Speaker 2: look at carefully what he's doing, everything is out there.
Speaker 2: He's just labeling it. He's just forming a mental schema
Speaker 2: to understand it all. He's just dividing things up in
Speaker 2: a a in a way that he can grasp. So. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so the the the use of opposites is utterly integral
Speaker 2: to Blake's thinking because you simply can't have hot without cold,
Speaker 2: or you know, one side of the coin at the other.
Speaker 2: We sort of need all those and a tendency to go, well,
Speaker 2: that's a good thing. I'll just look at the good
Speaker 2: thing and ignore the bad thing. Uh, is not a
Speaker 2: trap he fell into, I guess right.
Speaker 1: And I mean his his his poetry was with people.
Speaker 1: I mean, think you made an interesting point in your
Speaker 1: book you're talking about bloom Is his biography. Who's like
Speaker 1: this is at the time, like we're still trying to
Speaker 1: unpack full meanings from what he was writing.
Speaker 2: Certainly the later stuff, yeah, absolutely, the latest stuff. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's his longest work, which he himself considered his masterpiece,
Speaker 2: is a thing called Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion,
Speaker 2: and it's it's it feels like it's written from the
Speaker 2: perspective of outside of being outside time and space and
Speaker 2: looking in you know, things happen in the in the plot.
Speaker 2: It's very simple plot, but you know, things what happens
Speaker 2: sort of has already happened, and he's going to happen
Speaker 2: and is happening now. It's it's very psychedelic, definitely, you know,
Speaker 2: and and reading it is quite a shock. He's very
Speaker 2: it's like he's trying to express what his higher states
Speaker 2: of consciousness, as higher visions were, and you know, it's
Speaker 2: baffled many many poetry student or English language major in
Speaker 2: the past couple of centuries. But his earlier stuff, the
Speaker 2: songs of Innocence and I've Experience, you know, are particularly
Speaker 2: well known, and poems like Tiger Tiger they're you know,
Speaker 2: very famous. And here in England there isn't actually an
Speaker 2: official English national anthem, but everyone in England knows that
Speaker 2: the Him Jerusalem is on national anthem. You know, it's
Speaker 2: just it's just been decided by the people. It's amazing, yeah,
Speaker 2: which is his words from the preface to a poem
Speaker 2: called Milton.
Speaker 1: But that also goes back to Albion, and you're, like
Speaker 1: his concept of the early isles of Britain and things
Speaker 1: like that. So it's very profound in his understanding even
Speaker 1: at that time supposedly like who walked these shores? Who
Speaker 1: is this person? So even Albion is a symbol of that,
Speaker 1: right sure.
Speaker 2: And in many ways he's like he's like Adam, He's
Speaker 2: like he's the first man, but he's also Jesus in
Speaker 2: that he has the light inside him, the spiritual light,
Speaker 2: the divine imagination, which, in Blake's view, we lost when
Speaker 2: we started, like you know, the Druids started measuring the
Speaker 2: stars and erecting the stone circles and building their altars
Speaker 2: and basically projecting a mental system out onto the universe
Speaker 2: to categorize it and rationalize it and to understand it.
Speaker 2: This he saw as the rise of this rational part
Speaker 2: of our mind. People often refer to it as left brain.
Speaker 2: That can be a useful way to talk to it,
Speaker 2: even though we know that both parts of the brain
Speaker 2: are responsible for all sorts of things. But what they
Speaker 2: mean when they talked about le brain is the sort
Speaker 2: of the rational modeling part of our mind that sort
Speaker 2: of predicts how people will act and worries about the
Speaker 2: future and frets about the past, and takes us away
Speaker 2: from the moment, the experience of existing in the present
Speaker 2: moments in the physical sort of sense, that of this
Speaker 2: is all more right, brain sort of sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: The joy of you know, I don't know, surfing, or
Speaker 2: the joy of dancing, or the joy of just being
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: And he I mean, he spent all of his time
Speaker 1: in London. There was one brief Properia where he went south.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what city that was, but he was
Speaker 1: also I didn't know that he was accused of sedition.
Speaker 1: Can you talk kind of about his how he took
Speaker 1: interest from the land and kind of his movements in
Speaker 1: his life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. I mean he moved down in the year
Speaker 2: eighteen hundred to the village of Felpham, which is next
Speaker 2: to a place called Bogner on the Sussex coast, and
Speaker 2: it started. I mean, his letters from the early years
Speaker 2: were just just blissful and away from the you know,
Speaker 2: the dirt and fog of central London, he felt as
Speaker 2: he was more spiritually aware and it was it was,
Speaker 2: it was a beautiful thing, but it turned he partly
Speaker 2: because he had a beef with his patron, partly because
Speaker 2: his wife's health wasn't liking the damp and things like that.
Speaker 2: But there was an incident where there was a soldier
Speaker 2: in his garden. This was around the time then Napoleonic Wars,
Speaker 2: and England was paranoid that it was going to be
Speaker 2: invaded by revolutionary France, and so soldiers were sort of
Speaker 2: in camps all along the south coast of England and elsewhere,
Speaker 2: and you know, he sort of asked this soldier to leave,
Speaker 2: and the soldier gave him some grief, and Blake, who
Speaker 2: was a short man, just all got the arm of
Speaker 2: the soldier behind his back and forced him out of
Speaker 2: his garden and up the road and to the pub,
Speaker 2: the Fox in where he was billeted and in full
Speaker 2: view of everyone. Ah, and this soldier, a guy called Schofield,
Speaker 2: he claimed that Blake has hed been doing this, had
Speaker 2: been damning the king and all the king's soldiers and
Speaker 2: saying if Napoleon invades, then you know he will win
Speaker 2: the newer all run a newer. This was this was
Speaker 2: classed as seditious speak at the time. It was very
Speaker 2: sort of paranoid age because there being the American Revolution,
Speaker 2: the French Revolution, and the powers that be in England
Speaker 2: was scared. They were really scared at that sort of
Speaker 2: that sort of point that it was a revolution, you know,
Speaker 2: a republican revolution would happen there. So he was he
Speaker 2: was tried for sedition, which could have led to the
Speaker 2: death penalty. So he had this huge weight over him
Speaker 2: for a year or so as these things went through
Speaker 2: the court. Fortunately all the all the villagers in felp them,
Speaker 2: they all gave evidence going, no, he didn't hear anything. No,
Speaker 2: I don't think he said that at all. No, that's
Speaker 2: I'm sure that the soldiers just making all that up
Speaker 2: and and he was acquitted. But what the soldier quoted
Speaker 2: him of saying is pretty much the sort of thing
Speaker 2: he would have said. It did fit very neatly with
Speaker 2: his thoughts. So it sort of seems likely that the
Speaker 2: local villagers liked Blake. They didn't like the soldiers, so
Speaker 2: you know, they they were there for him when they
Speaker 2: when they need when he he was needed. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: it was it was a period. It was around this
Speaker 2: sort of period that he went through a time of
Speaker 2: of of bad mental health. We'd say now, and there
Speaker 2: was there was there was paranoia, and there.
Speaker 1: Was he or something melancholy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was, there had been before, there had been
Speaker 2: depression before he moved to phelp them. That does seem
Speaker 2: to be a slightly sort of manic than melancholy, sort
Speaker 2: of bipolar sort of switching. And he would fall out
Speaker 2: with a lot of contemporaries over matters that which the
Speaker 2: which the surviving evidence suggests that he was in the
Speaker 2: wrong and it was all in his head, you know,
Speaker 2: he was. He had he had a bad, bad sort
Speaker 2: of period. But fortunately he sort of came through that
Speaker 2: after writing things like Jerusalem, and the last years of
Speaker 2: his life he was a much you know, happiest sort
Speaker 2: of person. But yeah, you know, trial for s edition.
Speaker 2: Can you know.
Speaker 1: Anybody? It is fascinating to think that only four copies
Speaker 1: of Milton and five copies of Jerusalem were printed in
Speaker 1: his lifetime. And then Jerusalem was put to music right
Speaker 1: sometime in the twentieth century, and that's was that what
Speaker 1: made it more popular?
Speaker 2: Yeah, just to confuse as the Jerusalem that the music
Speaker 2: is too is not from the his work Jerusalem of
Speaker 2: the that's that's that's just a confused matters, but it was.
Speaker 2: It was in the First World War. It was. It
Speaker 2: was put to music by Hubert Parry. H And I
Speaker 2: don't know how familiar American, if most of your listens
Speaker 2: are American, how they would be to the him Jerusalem.
Speaker 2: But it's great, it's it's it's it's a really beautiful,
Speaker 2: stirring piece of work. Uh. And he gave the Hubert Parry,
Speaker 2: he gave the copyright to the women's suffrage movement. So
Speaker 2: it's always had this slightly sort of radical progressive feel
Speaker 2: to it. But at the same time that's become the
Speaker 2: unofficial English national anthem. It talk. It talks of the
Speaker 2: the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and it
Speaker 2: talks of the green and pleasant land of England. And it's. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's an amazing piece of work.
Speaker 1: I think that I've seen it when in Canterbury, people
Speaker 1: seeing it in church, you know, so I think some
Speaker 1: of this, so I'm somewhat annoying with that. But he
Speaker 1: died in a pauper's grave, and yeah, I think you
Speaker 1: show that. Like even to this moment, they had some
Speaker 1: showing where two hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold
Speaker 1: to some showing up. So the modern is almost just
Speaker 1: like huge, hugely famous and influential.
Speaker 2: This was an exhibition at the Tate in London just
Speaker 2: just before it was just before the lockdown, and it
Speaker 2: was astonishing. It was astounding. They had room after room
Speaker 2: after room of so many pieces of his work had
Speaker 2: been collected and collated. This was looking at him as
Speaker 2: as a painter rather than as a poet or a writer.
Speaker 2: It was focused on his visual stuff. But still it
Speaker 2: was just overwhelming the amount of work that he did
Speaker 2: in his lifetime. It was just extraordinary. And to go
Speaker 2: from you know this, this pauper's burial in in bun
Speaker 2: Hill Fields, which is a dissenter's burial ground, which was
Speaker 2: then on the outskirts of London sort of. Bun Hill
Speaker 2: comes from bone Hill. It was where they unwanted dead were.
Speaker 2: But two. Being celebrated to the extent he is in
Speaker 2: modern British culture is just extraordinary. But it's still the
Speaker 2: case that there's a feeling that people are drawn to Blake,
Speaker 2: but they find him, they don't understand him. A friend
Speaker 2: of mine said to me recently, She goes, I don't
Speaker 2: understand Blake, but I know he's my boy. I know
Speaker 2: he's he's on my team. We're drawn to him, but
Speaker 2: getting getting grips with what he's trying to say can
Speaker 2: seem off putting to a lot of people. They may
Speaker 2: start to sort of google a few things and then
Speaker 2: fall into sort of an academic rabbit hole and not
Speaker 2: really have a framework to understand where these arguments sort
Speaker 2: of fit in. Or it's like it's like the it's
Speaker 2: like Blake is this big, glorious castle and they can't
Speaker 2: kind of find a way in there. And I've heard
Speaker 2: this again and again for various different reasons, which is
Speaker 2: what this book was really written for. You know, It's
Speaker 2: it's not it's not intended for people for academics who
Speaker 2: are roundly knowledgeable about Blake. It's for people who who
Speaker 2: maybe heard a poem or seeing an image and recognize
Speaker 2: that it's something, uh, something connects with them and they
Speaker 2: want to know more, but they don't know how to
Speaker 2: sort of get into his into his world and understand
Speaker 2: his mind view. This is it's like a ramp. It's
Speaker 2: a ramp into the giant castle of Blake.
Speaker 1: I mean, I felt like, oh, well, I commend you
Speaker 1: from writing it because I felt like, I got a
Speaker 1: much better understanding of this very imaginative, complex person after
Speaker 1: finishing the book.
Speaker 2: So, h well, I hope you also got. Sorry, sorry, well,
Speaker 2: I hope you also got was a different understanding of
Speaker 2: imagination itself, of your own mind and how your own
Speaker 2: mind works, and how imagination differs from from person to
Speaker 2: person and can be this overwhelming thing that sort of
Speaker 2: takes takes people over, because that's I think that's important
Speaker 2: for understanding Blake. But it's it's not just Blake, It's
Speaker 2: about all of us. It's about all.
Speaker 1: Of our minds, and it just kind of felt like
Speaker 1: you it was a mind expanding and understanding of the
Speaker 1: capacity of a human mind. Somebody is talented as Blake
Speaker 1: and had it definitely had a genius, but also a mystic.
Speaker 1: So really a fascinating this.
Speaker 2: This is the thing with I mean, people have been
Speaker 2: having visionary experiences throughout all of history and in all
Speaker 2: of culture, and frustrating things about them is they're just
Speaker 2: ineffable nature. These people come back and they just can't
Speaker 2: explain to other people what they've experienced. But you get Blake,
Speaker 2: who's so talented as a writer and so talented as
Speaker 2: an artist, his work. When you see it, you do go, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: that's okay. It's real, isn't it. It is real. The
Speaker 2: experiences that he's talking about, these have definitely happened. His
Speaker 2: work is just utterly convincing. You know, there's there's there's
Speaker 2: no there's no sense that it's wish fulfillment or he's
Speaker 2: just making it up or something like that. He's seen
Speaker 2: those things, you know, he's he's his mind has been
Speaker 2: in that's expansive. And yeah, I think that's why he's
Speaker 2: very important so well.
Speaker 1: And there's so much of that visuals that are interspersed
Speaker 1: through our culture even in the States. The Great Dragon
Speaker 1: and the Woman Clothed with the Sun is in films,
Speaker 1: and we've seen pieces of Blake still to this day's
Speaker 1: and then the poem's Tiger and Jerusalem is pretty incredible
Speaker 1: what what he.
Speaker 2: Achieved, and many little phrases such as the mind for
Speaker 2: Germanicals that sort of creep out of his poems and
Speaker 2: into sort of general acceptance and general sort of knowledge. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's I mean, I would recommend to anyone you know,
Speaker 2: just that if you get into Blake, your life will
Speaker 2: be richer and you will have a better quality of
Speaker 2: life from having from having Blake in there, and there
Speaker 2: really is sort of like no time like the present.
Speaker 2: You know, the longer you sort of put it off,
Speaker 2: you're just you'll just be frustrated that you didn't do
Speaker 2: it earlier, because it's his work is so rewarding on
Speaker 2: just a very human level, on on what it says
Speaker 2: about human the way the way it sort of elevates humanity.
Speaker 2: You know, it's the when I was saying earlier about
Speaker 2: the notion that the gods and everything were internal. A
Speaker 2: lot of people might think, well that the values them,
Speaker 2: but reading Blake, that's really not what you get. What
Speaker 2: it does is just really elevates, you know, the human
Speaker 2: potential and what humanity can be and can experience.
Speaker 1: Agreed, well, excellent book. I highly recommend this book. Where
Speaker 1: can people find it? It's on amazons. Did you have
Speaker 1: a website or is there a way people can reach
Speaker 1: out to?
Speaker 2: Sure, my website is John Higgs dot com. But yes
Speaker 2: they can. They can find it on Amazon. William Blake
Speaker 2: Versus the World. I mean, it's only published in the
Speaker 2: UK certainly at the moment. Hopefully we'll find it American
Speaker 2: publisher one day. Or sooner, sooner rather than later, but
Speaker 2: you can. You can certainly get the UK version from
Speaker 2: Amazon or your your bookshop of choice.
Speaker 1: Did you have an audio version? Are you intending to
Speaker 1: do an audio version?
Speaker 2: Yes, there is an audio version, but because of the
Speaker 2: way these things work, if you're not in the UK,
Speaker 2: I don't think it allows you to buy it.
Speaker 1: Well, well there's if you have a VPN you might
Speaker 1: have some success. And that's not a bad idea anyway,
Speaker 1: great book, great conversation, Thanks so much for joining me again.
Speaker 1: The title of the book is William Blake Blake Verse
Speaker 1: the World, published May twenty one by author John Higgs.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. Thanks William, still there.