Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #5: Imagination as Divine: Blake's Revolutionary Spirituality: William Blake (part two)
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
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
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.
He's traveled to inner places that we knew nothing about and returned with exhibits to convince the skeptical. The toughest struggle of all is to try and meld the sacred and the profane, the natural and the supernatural. This world and the next Admit to this preoccupation and you're in deep trouble with your church and your state. Try to make a record of it, as did St Augustine or John of the Cross or William Blake, and you're scorned and perhaps imprisoned by your contemporaries, even if later generations regard you, without actually reading you, as a classic. Alas, I knew not this, and therefore I did weep. That God would love a worm I knew and punish the evil foot that willfully bruised its helpless form, but that he cherished it. I never knew that, and so I wept.
Speaker 2:Did I hear that correctly? Exactly, yeah, like reflecting just to exist in this love, and this presence is absolutely delightful and worth all the pain. Yes, welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide. It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama. Sometimes, when I get bored, I like to fly above the clouds and I ask the Lord what does it take to? Welcome back to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast, episode 5. I'm your host, travis Mullin, and this is part two on William Blake, with Professor Larry and Chastity. I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
Speaker 2:There's a few ways you can interact with us. One is that you can email us questions, comments or subjects to subversiveorthodoxy at gmailcom. You can also reach out and say hi. That way we're really enjoying the conversations and I'm hearing from people that it's really resonating with them, and one group in the Northeast actually wants to do a call with me where we can talk about it and process it. If you haven't already and you are finding value in the podcast, please leave us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple and that'll help other people think it's legit.
Speaker 2:And wherever you are finding the podcast you can do that it's legit and wherever you are finding the podcast you can do that. Please tell others who you think would appreciate it. That'd be amazing. I do foresee a really cool idea coming forward of a reading club of all the books that we are mentioning and creating like a large checklist, and it might lead to some book clubs or Zoom calls where people are getting to process it together. If you're interested in that, let us know. Without any further ado, let's get back to episode five, william Blake, part two, where we pick up where we left off, with the professor going about to go into the poem called the Book of Fel, which is Blake's poem processing his lost daughter through miscarriage. This poem really affected me emotionally, as you might be able to hear in my voice, and thank you for listening.
Speaker 1:So in the Book of Thel, madame Seraphim takes Thel down to Earth and lets her meet entities who lived even shorter lives than human beings do, like the cloud and the water lily and the rainstorm. And this unborn child is allowed to talk to the cloud and the rainstorm and ask them how is it that they can allow themselves to be created for such a short time? And then they ultimately get down to the in the ground. And because it's part of the old saying, you know we're food for worms. Well, what do worms say about that are? Are human beings food for worms? If so, thank you. Human beings, we need the nourishment right like us talking to cows?
Speaker 1:and then, after the worms, he talks to the dirt under the worm. And so this is very psychedelic. But I'll just read you a couple of the lesser known lines. And then the famous lines from this poem that you may have heard before, famous lines from this poem that you may have heard before but didn't know that it came from Blake, or that it came from the Book of Thel, which was a meditation on the loss of his child, child.
Speaker 1:So this is the fell talking to the water lily, and she says oh, life of this, our spring, why fades the lotus of the water, why fade children of the spring Born, but to smile and fall, ah, fell, as like a watery bow and like a parting cloud, like a reflection in a glass. Now notice the imagery here. I mean, this is world-class stuff, like Shakespearean, almost, like shadows in the water, like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face, like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air. Ah, gentle, may I lay me down and gentle, rest my head, and gentle, sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time. And then the lily of the valley answers and says uh, and that's very the lily of the valley breathing in the humble grass, answered the lovely maid and said I am a watery weed and I'm very small and I love to dwell in lowly veils, so weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head. Yet I am visited from heaven. And he that smiles on all walks in the valley and each morn over me spreads his hand saying Rejoice thou, humble grass, thou newborn lily flower, though gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks, for thou shall be clothed in light and fed with morning manna till summer's heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs to flourish in eternal fields. Then why should Thale complain? Why should the mistress of valils of Har utter a sigh? And then Thel says well, are you happy with that, that destiny to become the food of lambs? And then the vegetation says oh, yes, you know, there's no greater honor than to be eaten by the Lamb of God. But then we get that are here and then gone.
Speaker 1:And then the worm is talking to the clod of clay, and then this is the one I thought this kind of famous. The clod of clay heard the worm's voice and raised her pitying head. She bowed over the weeping infant and her life exhaled In milky fondness. Then on fell, she fixed her humble.
Speaker 1: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 and of itself is dark, but he that loves the lowly pours his oil upon my head and kisses me and binds his nuptial bonds around my breast and says thou, mother of my children, I have loved thee and I have given thee a crown that none can take away. But how this is sweet made, I know not and cannot know. I ponder and I cannot know, and yet I live and love the daughter of beauty, wiping her pitying tears. Alas, I knew not this, and therefore I did weep that god would love a worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot that willfully bruised its helpless form, but that he cherished it. I never knew that, and so I wept.
Speaker 1:And so then the end of the story is the angel is showing her the world, because she says she's willing to be born now, even though life is transient, and he takes her and shows her her grave grave, where she's going to be buried, and it's so terrifies her that she runs back. That's how Blake came to use the death of his daughter as poetry, but also use poetry as a way of meditating and coming to grips with the meaning of the death of his child. And coming to grips with the meaning of the death of his child, wow, and that's great literature of a level that it took 100 years after he died for people to take him seriously, because it seemed too crazy. We didn't have symbolism yet we didn't have wasteland. So that's then. Then you take once he did that poem wait, I'm sorry, pause okay yeah I'm processing what I just heard.
Speaker 2:So the lily and the worm. It sounds like they're glorifying god, like they're saying that this existence, in this presence and in this love is worth it. Did I hear that correctly, exactly?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like reflecting, just to exist in this love, and this presence is absolutely delightful and worth all the pain.
Speaker 1:Yes, and let me. Oh, this is the one that I wanted to.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry Still slow down the okay. The worm talking made me think like it almost takes imagination to imagine God's love like that. Oh yes, and that's what Blake is saying, like because you can't, even you couldn't experience all that he just said with these lowly creatures with such a high view of god. Without an imagination you couldn't write that, and what you capture with that imagination is absolutely, profoundly, making god's love more real than me reading you out of uh, john 316.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, you feel it, it's. It's emotional, it doesn't speak to one dimension of the mind, it doesn't just speak to reason.
Speaker 2: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 art of 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, and beauty speaks to the soul, it speaks to um both innocence and experience.
Speaker 1:Because here again that there's the theme of innocence and experience, because here again there's the theme of innocence and experience, the cloud and the lily are saying you know, we experience the world, we experience loss and we can tell you it's worth it.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's so cool and the innocent don't know that. They don't know that. Where is it that he says oh, I saw the line. We are well, I think it's. Maybe it's in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he says we are put on earth a little while to bear the beams of love, and that's kind of what.
Speaker 2:What a vision for life. That's prophetic right there, because we live in a time where people have completely lost that like, oh yeah, even even even religious people have lost that simple beauty, like just to exist, just to get to experience the love of God itself is the gift of life.
Speaker 1:Yes, true that.
Speaker 2:And I mean a secular person. You know what is their view. It's like life is. They think I mean most of my friends who would be, you know, not of faith, would think life is beautiful. I mean there's a lot of beauty in life. There's a lot of, you know, know, negative and darkness and horrible stuff also. But, like um, to have a, to have an undergirding ability to say like this is ultimately worth it because of x.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that's there for a lot of people lasting physical life chirogenics, you know and the technological hope that, you know, someday we'll be able to tweak our DNA and live forever physically is a dream born of the enlightenment right. That reason and science will ultimately solve, will solve all our problems through technology, but it doesn't?
Speaker 2:I don't. I don't mean to be crass, but it's kind of like the orgasm of the enlightenment.
Speaker 1:Yes, right.
Speaker 2:The climax is leading up to eternal life by through science.
Speaker 1:Yes, and but it doesn't it. It's unimaginative because it can't imagine the problems that that would give birth to. Right, I saw an interview with mother Teresa when she won the Nobel Peace Prize and they had her on with a chemist who had won the, from Canada, who had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and the announcer was trying to create, you know, conflict, because that's what you do on TV. The announcer said well, to the chemist, well, you're in your laboratory and your researches may someday make possible everlasting life, physical, everlasting life. And yet, Mother Teresa, you believe in everlasting life, but it's not physical, it's spiritual. What do you think about this chemist providing us with real, everlasting life? And sister, our mother Teresa says I believe in love and compassion. I believe in love and compassion.
Speaker 2:That was her answer.
Speaker 1:So it's like everlasting life doesn't mean much if you don't have love and compassion. Yeah, the songs of innocence are great, but I'm grown up enough to know the songs of experience too, and I'm also enough of a poet to imagine their synthesis in the marriage of heaven and hell as envisioned in the gospels. How did he put it in the beginning of Milton Justify the ways of God to man. And what Mother Teresa is saying? You know, it's the classic enlightenment, mysticism or faith or the human imagination. I don't think she's saying I believe in God and so therefore you shouldn't be looking for everlasting life. Looking for everlasting life, I think she's saying everlasting life can be good or it can be bad, depending upon if we love and have compassion.
Speaker 2:I got to interject right now the fact that I mentioned to you before that CS Lewis wrote the Great Divorce in response to Blake's Marriage. Marriage of heaven and hell oh yeah, and and cs lewis's perception in heaven and hell. It might have been more in agreement with what blake was saying, because, I mean, maybe he, maybe he was theologically differentiating himself somewhat, but in the, in the story, people are getting on a bus from a place that's drab.
Speaker 2:It's like suburban, suburban that has spread out to where everyone everyone can't stand each other, yeah, and so they've moved farther and farther apart, and all they do is continue whatever their thing was on earth. So they're still saying, they're still complaining about their ex-husband, or they're still complaining about, complaining about everything the government. Um, they put us out here on these lots and they're still complaining about their ex-husband. Or they're still complaining about, complaining about everything the government. Um, they put us out here on these lots and they're getting farther and farther apart. But I don't want to be around anyone anyway so everyone, everyone's turning into like a murmuring uh loop.
Speaker 2:You know, like a loop. They can't, they can't get out of it and every day, this bus picks them up and takes them over to this place, where the solid people are and the grass the grass feels like crystals stabbing their feet and they're like they can't enjoy it. Yes, because they're so stuck in hell of their own volition. Yeah, it related to see it. One of cs lewis's quotes was that hell is hell's doors locked from the inside so that was one of his philosophies.
Speaker 2:So people in the great divorce are choosing continually to stay in their own hell. Yeah, and it's actually probably not that far from the truth in reality. Like and that's what blake was probably saying when he said he didn't believe in hell he's probably saying hell is what we're doing to ourselves literally all the time and what mankind does.
Speaker 1:Material, physical, everlasting life. The question is, where are you going to spend it? In heaven or hell? Right In your locked in room from the inside, or yeah?
Speaker 2:where you kind of hate everyone and everyone annoys you yeah, but one more thing I noticed. He has a poem called dark satanic mills, uh-huh, and it says that um blake wrote this and and it brought the. It brought the phrase into the english language from his poem. It's often interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction. This would be like wendell berry's favorite poet then. Yeah, and industrial revolution's, its destruction. This would be like wendell berry's favorite poet then yeah, and industrial revolution's destruction of nature and human relationships.
Speaker 1:Exactly blake wrote that back in 1700s well, you know, right around the turn of 1800, maybe, yeah, 1791, that that mill burned by fire.
Speaker 2:It was right, by house.
Speaker 1:And it probably wasn't widely quoted until close to the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, it turns out he has the words for our reality. Now. I wanted to read this at the beginning. I didn't get a chance to. This is from Subversive Orthodoxy. It's a quote from a fellow named Jim Christie, who wrote a book called the Long, slow Death of Jack Kerouac. We'll probably talk about Kerouac's Catholicism someday, but this is what Jim Christie that I quoted from the beginning. He says in this chapter about Blake and Garrett the toughest struggle of all is to try and meld the sacred and the profane, the natural and the supernatural. This world and the next Admit to this preoccupation and you're in deep trouble with your church and your state. Try to make a record of it, as did St Augustine or John of the Cross or William Blake, and you're scorned and perhaps imprisoned by your contemporaries, even if later generations regard you, without actually reading you, as a classic. And that pretty much says it all for Blake.
Speaker 2:Later generations regard you, usually without reading you, as a classic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we were going to talk about the 60s beat, rediscovery of Blake and a little bit of that. Do you want to go into that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just kind of relates to his relevance. I mean, they started to find it again in the 60s, obviously, and it probably points to his madness too, because those were considered by you know your. What do you call what in your generation? What did you call the uppity people who were like you know? We would call them preppy or uh, what's that word? Um, yuppies in the 80s, um, yeah, the non-hippies, the non-beatniks, what do you call them in this?
Speaker 2:squares, squares squares would have thought oh, they like blake, because blake's mad too. Like them, like the beatniks and such.
Speaker 1:yeah, the squares, yeah, the hipsters would be. Would the hipsters evolved into the hippies? But, um, ginsburg, uh kind of made. Uh, well, he, ginsburg made, made Blake famous again. And also, I think Dillon found Blake through Ginsburg and the Beats and the Doors named their group from Blake's line about the doors of perception. If the doors of perception were cleansed, you would see, things would appear as they really are infinite, and so that became why the doors picked their name and so, but Blake actually.
Speaker 2:Also one more contemporary reference was U2 named a more recent album, songs of Innocence. There you go, I just discovered again. I mean, I saw the album title and I didn't know much about Blake, so that's obviously a reference or an illusion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it'd be interesting to look at that album whether those are actual songs of innocence or songs of the second innocence. It could be either one. And then Ginsberg became famous with his breakout poem Howl right, and Howl has a section in it where he talks about the reign of Moloch, the monster that devoured, the Philistine monster that devoured children. That is described in the Old Testament. They would sacrifice babies too yeah, which is a direct like riff on blake right a, a biblical reference, uh, used as an image of contemporary poetry yeah and and after he became, you know, everybody was interested in.
Speaker 1:You know this new oral poetry that sounded more like music and rapping well, they didn't call it rapping then but sounding more like oral poetry and song than the kind of poetry that shows up in literary journals that you read silently in coffee shops. This is a poetry. You go to coffee shops and they and they recite it over the loudspeaker. You know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, on the microphone.
Speaker 1:So they asked him where he got it and you know he he said that he had. He had been visited by William Blake and his dorm room or I think it was his dorm room at Columbia where he was writing poetry, or while he was trying to write poetry, and Blake's voice appeared in the room and recited the Poison Rose, which was one of the poems in the Songs of Experience. One of the poems in the Songs of Experience, the Lost Little Girl, which was also in Songs of Experience, and one other one. I don't know what the other one was now, but he said he actually heard his voice and that he had this vision and that that was what inspired him to write Howl as a visionary, prophetic poem of contemporary America, written with the same sort of spiritual reach as William Blake did in his prophetic poems.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:So that's where that came from.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that I didn't know that. He claimed to have heard Blake talking in his room.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he later, ginsberg, wrote music to Songs of Innocence and Experience and recorded an album of him singing it Really and you can go online and you can see Ginsberg singing and reciting Songs of Innocence and Experience and he even gives. After some of the poems he even gives commentary. Like the two most famous poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience are the signature poems the Lamb in Innocence and the tiger in experience. And the lamb is a poem in the voice of a little child who is playing with a little lamb and is asking the lamb if the lamb knows who he is. He is and then, after the lamb only responds with buying, he explains that he is a divine creature whom God was made in.
Speaker 1:The image of the lamb becomes famous for being poem. It's just all questions and that's the experience poem. And so the image of the tiger is this image of violence, carnivorousness, survival, energy, the Survival energy, the ability to survive, and these lines at the end, when the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see that he who made the lamb make thee Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry. So it ends with that, those powerful questions about where evil comes from. Now, ginsburg I watched him read that the other day because I knew we were going to talk about Blake and he says that that poem you know who Made you is the tiger poem. The rhythm is different than the rhythms in some of the poems of innocence in that it has a trochaic rhythm soft, soft, hard, soft, soft, hard. That da-da-da, da-da da, which imitates the human heart, and that the line at the end did he his smile, his work to see?
Speaker 1:Did he who make the lamb, make thee tiger tire burning bright in the forest of the night? What immortal hand or eye dare to frame thy fearful symmetry? Where did this come from? This kind of energy? And Blake thinks the human imagination helps shape that kind of energy, as well as the human imagination help shape the lamb as a symbol of God. And so, getting that, both those poems are showing us two facets of the human soul. Showing us two facets of the human soul, two capacities we have, and not necessarily attributes of God that we know intellectually, but actually attributes we live of. The divine, was the way Blake took it, which I thought was very, very interesting, because I had never taken it that way. I've always, like a lot of people, puzzled over why the tiger has questions and the lamb has answers, and when he's talking about immortals, blake is often talking about human beings. For him, the human soul is immortal.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure what you just said, but it triggered a portion of himself parceling it out to where they have to be in unity to create the whole by self-sacrificial parceling himself out into us. It'd be kind of an amazing meditation if nothing else.
Speaker 1: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 helps you understand something about your relationship to god and other people. Right, yeah, and it's only if you don't.
Speaker 2:That's what imagination does, rather than staunch literal rhetoric.
Speaker 1:Same with poetry? You know it's not, do you believe the poet? Well, I believe the poetry throws light on human experience. I don't believe that it's necessarily literal science, although it turns out that a lot of the things that Blake said are closer to the social, political and scientific reality now than they were when he wrote them. It's sort of like these things catch up with the imagination. He even views history that way that history doesn't unfold logically. It's a series of imaginative forces, that sort of rendezvous with their times and make things over in their own image and then disappear and then are replaced by other imaginative images and agendas.
Speaker 1: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 thing Marx said correctly the Ginsburg, if that is not Blake was that religion could be an opiate of the masses if it was not seen as a inspiration to a greater spiritual and liberated life of equality amongst all creation. So that's why the, the poetry is, gets hard to understand if you want it to be literal truth. But once you realize that this is a different game that Dillonin and ginsburg and and blake are playing, uh, and it's called symbolism, and it's addressed to your heart, not to your head, but it's also addressed to your head, um, and that's why I um, it's so powerful it's.
Speaker 2:It's probably because these guys knew it's easier to get to the, to the head, through the heart.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to get to the heart through the head. Exactly Well put. I just thought of that as you said that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's your right. You get credit for that.
Speaker 2:I get to create a quote on brainy quotes, yeah. You get to, you get to write your own proverbs from it's easier to get to the head through the heart than it is to get to the heart through the head.
Speaker 2:It's probably very true, a truism, so that quote you read when the stars threw down their spears, watered heaven with their tears before words were spoken before eternity. I don't know if those last last two lines were part of it. That was from a five iron frenzy song, a band um two. Two last stories before we wrap this up. Okay, you said blake, a couple of your notes, blake's relationship to british radicals and ravers, antinominalism, oh, muggle tonian seekers. And then the thomasne story. Okay, I mean whatever you think is worth it there. And you also did say some connection to Marvel Universe of four Zoas.
Speaker 2:I don't know what that connection's about.
Speaker 1: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 for psychological states, right, okay, so, like your reason is your reason and represents, you know, that calculative measurement engineering side. Right, we talked about that loss. Los represents the imagination and and you could sort of see Marvel characters as representing different kind of forces in the universe, you know, like Iron man is the technologist and Spider-Man is the teenage Avenger and Batman is the intellectual detective, and then they have these counter forces which are super villains, like dr octopus and uh, who represents this eight-armed technological uh, uh, leviathan out to destroy, and you know, and so you can work out, uh, when, when the marvel comic books play their stories out, they work out these sort of mythological clashes between, you know, the teenager Spider-Man and the corrupt Octopus man or whatever he was, and it takes on a kind of symbolic meaning that in the best comic books or in the best graphic novels become like they create their own mythological view of our time, right, or our history or what's happening now, like Black Panther was a utopian society that was revealing the things that are lacking in our society, and Blake's longer poems do that. And not all the lines for us make sense, but occasionally, you know, you'll hit those lines like 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 up what's going on, then they're very powerful, like Dylan's songs, like once you get what that song is about, you get some of the images to it's All Right, ma, for example. To it's all right, ma, for example, um.
Speaker 1:Then you the whole thing unfolds for you and you just it, you just feel it on multiple levels.
Speaker 1:And if you need help with blake and I, everybody needs help with blake there is a blake dictionary, uh, by the guy who wrote the first great work on Blake, foster Damon, called A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, and that's you can get that.
Speaker 1:And there's another book that just came out on William Blake's biography called William Blake versus the world, by a guy named um Higgins I think I'm going to say that's John Higgs and uh, that's, that's new. And and he's got a, a um, some interesting um descriptions of the um antinomian riots that took place by these renegade Catholic well, not Catholic renegade Protestant sects that were rioting against the Catholic king and some of them, the antinomians. They believe that once you were saved, you were free from any responsibilities to the law at all, which meant that you could commit any crime, you could do any deed as long as you were with Jesus. People would attribute Blake to those groups, saying that he was like the bastard child of the antinomian groups that believed that they did not have to follow any laws because they had been saved by Jesus in the New Testament.
Speaker 2:They were like Christian anarchists.
Speaker 1:Christian anarchists of an extreme degree, yes, and in this book they describe how, in their riots, for example, they would go to sermons in insults and put downs because they wanted to show that they'd been freed from the law by the new testament. And of course, blake is saying something similar. He's saying well, you're freed from the old law and the law, the side of uh, experience that that has no pity, but you're not free to just do whatever you want. This isn't you know. So he was never an antinomian, even though he got charged by that by some people because he seemed so crazy or open to writing these poems about, you know, creatures that don't really exist. But that's fiction in the same allegorical fiction, in the same way that CS Lewis wrote his sci-fi stuff. It told him his fantasy stories. It's not antinomianism, but there are some great descriptions in this book. William Blake versus the world of antinom. Did I say John? Yeah, john Higgs.
Speaker 1:Blake's central argument that imagination is divine can't be ruled out or dismissed as easily as his views on nature and even reason. His position is not argued in the language of his opponent, with logical proofs and measurements of matter. Instead, he presents his body of work and awaits our artistic reaction. That work is an illustration of as a far deeper and more overwhelming level than most of us are familiar with. Like early explorers returning from their ocean voyages with exotic plants and strange beasts, or Apollo astronauts returning to Earth with a case of fall of moon rock, he's traveled to inner places that we knew nothing about and returned with exhibits to convince the skeptical.
Speaker 1:When we see his images or hear his 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 if they wake up something inside. They are not from our world, as we do not see their light elsewhere. It is our reaction to them that convinces us that the world they are said to come from is real, convinces us that the world they are said to come from is real. After all, haven't we all dipped our toes into the sea of the imagination. Should it surprise us that others have dived much deeper?
Speaker 1:The human mind is the one thing that emits imagination into our closed, limited, emits imagination into our closed, limited, finite universe. It's we, and we alone, who are the source of meaning, purpose, love and hate in this otherwise cold, dead cloud of matter, if our eyes have evolved to see the light of the imagination rather than sunlight, then we would see ourselves as part of the constellations of the heavens down here on earth rather than up in the night sky. We are the source of what we perceive. We are that which we crave. We might argue about the semantics of a word like divine to describe this, but it's certainly true that many will reject such a word for deeply ingrained cultural reasons. But as a rough, so that's, that's as John Higgs, you know, it's just a year old, so it's kind of interesting to see a guy who's, you know, one of our contemporaries coming to see Blake with contemporary eyes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I think you sold me on Blake and I really get what he means about imagination now a lot better and how it's actually a spiritual necessity oh yeah, I don't think really the church even believes that currently. Spiritual necessity oh yeah, yeah, I don't think. I don't think really the church even believes that currently or or ever really totally understood that, uh.
Speaker 1:but you know that's hard to say because look at the all, the all, the great art.
Speaker 2:No, I think pre, I think pre Blake's, blake's time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he was trying not to let them lose that and they, they were losing it quick yeah, post the sciences, and and these are the figures we're dealing with we're dealing with the post enlightenment, the enlightenment. And well, that's why, when we get to gerta, you're going to see another genius who's saying wait a minute, this new enlightenment, as rational and as powerful as it is in sorting out our false superstitions and our, maybe, use of the imagination, uh, we still haven't had a critique of a of a mature use of the imagination in art, literature and philosophy, and that's that's going to be left to me as the king of the, the german romantic naturalists, um, you mean gert was thinking that you mean yeah, that.
Speaker 1:that what he comes up with is, you know, looking at his own life, it becomes the, the autobiography of a spiritual psychology of how he, how he, his faith was both challenged and then renewed, and then challenged again and then renewed again, and all the different phases that he went into. That became for him what he called the Bildungsroman, which was the novel of development, which is the novel as spiritual story or another way of putting it, the novel as the inner life, the story of the inner life. Because the story of the inner life is not being told in our culture at large for the most part, or if it is, it's being told in such a reductive, political and moralistic way that its beauty and its power and its reach aren't appreciated so, yeah, these two episodes are going to be focusing on blake and then, um, as professor was just alluding, we'll be moving on to gerta next and finding, finding what's what he's got to offer us, which I think blake delivered.
Speaker 2:So thank you thank you so much, professor. Okay, thank you. Talk to you soon. All right, adios-bye, and that concludes this episode.
Speaker 2:I think there may be something in here for all of you, each of you whether you're a skeptic, a believer or somewhere in between, on your own deconstruction journey. We're going to be exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic, and this revelatory faith doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. The prophetic voice doesn't seem to come from the pulpits or the seminaries. It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the unexpected corners of culture. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Adios, shoot like I'm high on cannabis and skip through fields naked like I wonder if I could drift, or if I could drift through it, dancing through moonlight under nighttime skies, forgetting the world. This has been a subversive orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Entrosky.