Prophecy, Blake, and the Divine Will

"We have such good lives!" -Gina

In our last conversation, Gina brought how we are a text oriented world, how everything is somehow a receptacle for virtual reality, an imagined space. We know from Blake that there is another, non-spatial world, one that is knowable, and in fact, we all know whether we know it or not. Fuck!  

But what of this located, spatial way of being? This is particularly our way of living.  For example, the location of what we call "consciousness," not thinking, but awareness of being, is typically in the cranium. Creating mind-spaces for what we think about is something we do self-consciously. The ancient Greeks (of Homer's ilk, not sure when) had a word that is close to "consciousness," but they located it in the chest, below the lungs, and called it a "thumos." A "thumos" was a will towards action, a receptacle for impetus and desire. When Achilles gets pissed off, for example, his thumos gets filled with rage by a God.  An ocean also has a "thumos," though, and so the term is broad and is a location of a natural consciousness.

So, for the Greeks, this thing called "awareness" is located in terms of desire and will towards action. This divine will is very similar to Blake's conception of "Poetic Genius," in "All Religions are One," of which the introductory text stipulates is "using 'poetic' in the original Greek sense of 'making' and 'Genius' in the Latin sense of 'guiding spirit.'" The literal mashing of "Making Guiding Spirit" leads logically to the "Spirit of Prophecy" which accounts for divisions in viewpoint. 

 

Blake says that this Genius was called an "Angel, Spirit, and Demon," and so the voice of a God is implicated, if not some variety of divine experience, to manifest the Genius. For the Greeks, a God was needed to fill the thumos. 

This relates to a fascinating theory by a fellow named Julian Jaynes, who wrote about the "Bicameral Mind" of ancient peoples, who, he argues, did not in fact have self-aware consciousness (thus, no 'self' as we think of it) and instead literally heard the voices of Gods in their heads, telling them what to do. As the idea of "self" as we know it emerged with complex civilizations and the rise of the individual, the voices disappeared. I would recommend his book highly, and you can read the first few pages on Amazon if you're interested. Check out the link.

We discussed in class the question of whether or not every person writes without self, or, instead, writes with a divine or prophetic hand. This is to say that Blake clearly writes in a way that is self-aware (that is, bodily, corporeal) and in contact with the divine (spiritual food, prophecy).

 Gina brought up bad, lust-driven devotional poems as evidence of someone working only in terms of the self, and not being in contact with the divine or with eternity. (I must beg pardon if I have misunderstood you, Gina.) My response to that idea is 'Principle 3d':

   "No man can think

   write or speak from his

heart but he must intend

truth. Thus all sects of

Philosophy are from the

Poetic Genius adapted 

to the weaknesses of 

every individual."

So, a bad love poem is still a poem that intends truth, if it speaks from the heart (or even if it doesn't, because the poet knows the truth. It is merely whether or not he decides to reveal it.) and it is thus also a product of Poetic Genius, the divine. No poem, person, place, thing, or *insert anything here* is exempt from divine status under Blake's cosmology, if I have read it right. Just because it does not address the divine conceptually does not exempt it from divine status. We discussed how in Genesis, God is given a voice, a way of acting, a desire, an impetus that is trumpeted by "Let there be light." This voice is like Blake's voice (one crying in the wilderness, too), emerging from chaos or void with a weakness, a philosophy perceived through longing. A world is built upon longing, grasping. A thumos filled with the divine can create nothing less. It also can't create anything, which is why Blake's conversation about the issue is so hard to interrogate.  

I will stop now, because I feel I risk abusing the class. Ginsberg puts it best I think when he describes his experience in the bookstore: Everybody gets it, everyone is divine, perfect (with a capital and lower case P, in all times and world systems), and made of the same substance. We just hide it for some reason, wearing masks. It struck me that Blake wrote: "On every face I see, I meet/ Marks of wearyness, marks of woe."

It's a good thing that wearyness and woe is also Poetic Genius, a full thumos, corporeal and spiritual food.

Thanks for reading, I hope I have been clear. 

-Willi