Revelatory nausea.

He was in an unlikely business. I am not talking about the printmaking, but the wordmaking. The thoughtmaking. He saw things that people don't usually see, and he presented them in a way that made them visible. Example: the connections between times and places, between fiction and the things we tell ourselves aren't fiction, the omnipresence of subjectivities in all things. His poetry prefers question marks to exclamation points--maybe he didn't personally, but there's no evidence of that in what he wrote. Maybe he wrote with the intention of sending a very specific message that just happens to be completely over the heads of everyone who isn't him. Blake wrote convincingly about things that shouldn't exist. His work is an inscrutable puzzle. It is a maze, or rather, a very accurate relief of a maze. That maze--and now the headache sets in--is everything.

Allen Ginsberg is pretty confident that he has the man figured out. Blake reflects the world, the world reflects Blake. In observing the reflection, we come to a series of uncomfortable realizations, like the above bit about the connections between things, or--if we aren't too hardheaded--the knowledge that we created the ideas of the supernatural and the unreal. Of course, Blake doesn't just open our minds up to preexisting curiosities. He also asks us Dangerous Questions. These lie in his presentation of causes and effects ("Visions..."), neither of which seem to be too closely attached to their counterparts. But then--getting a bit woozy here, I'm approaching a summit--when did we decide that we had a right to say what cause/effect relationships did and didn't make sense? I am sure that Blake understood why things happened the way they did in his poems. I also know that he wrote those poems, and that, like Mr. Ginsberg says, they reflect life. No way around it, then: we can't assume that events happen as they do for reasons beyond our analytical abilities in Blake. We have to keep asking questions.

Another dangerous question: what isn't sacred, and to a lesser extent, what isn't moral--in Blake's work or otherwise (Songs, "There Is No Natural Religion," "All Religions Are One")? I feel compelled to dispute the sound condemnations I've been getting for building my analysis of his poetry on questions rather than answers. How can we make judgments about Blake when he sought to address the problems of a world which he presents as clearly lacking in solid footing? Further, how can we regard his work as affirmative, rather than inquisitive? I am interested in determining the resolutions Blake reached in the act of questioning itself. The religious considerations, the symbolism, the heart and passion of his labor: these are all interesting, but not especially challenging. I am interested in what Blake accomplishes as a poet (nothing special), and what his accomplishment means for art as a medium that both reveals and creates in the same moment. At present, I am convinced that the biggest, coolest, most impossibly amazing thing that he has to offer is the discovery--and with this, I will have to take a break or surely suffer some kind of collapse--that art is proof that everything is "supernatural." Like, everything.

Yeah.

Hope I haven't offended everyone,
Scott