WILLIAM BLAKE & THE SHOCK OF DAYLIGHT

Rather more in relation to my having considered the terrorist attacks in America on 11th September 2001 than anything else, it was with a strange sense of foreboding that, a week or so after we started rehearsing for Soul Mass Transit at the end of 2002, I was leafing through a William Blake collection when I happened upon the following passages from America: A Prophecy, written in 1793:

The strong voice ceas'd; for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea:
The eastern cloud rent: on his cliffs stood Albion's wrathful Prince
A dragon form, clashing his scales: at midnight he arose,
And flam'd red meteors round the land of Albion beneath;
His voice, his locks, his awful shoulders, and his glowing eyes
Appear to the Americans upon the cloudy night.

Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,
Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds and raging fires.
Albion is sick! America faints! Enrag'd the Zenith grew.
As human blood shooting its veins all around the orb'ed heaven,
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood,
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea -
Intense! naked! A Human fire, fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire,
With myriads of cloudy terrors, banners dark, and towers
Surrounded: heat but not light went thro' the murky atmosphere.

He goes on to talk of terror coming "like a comet", and of "plagues creeping on the burning winds". On the jacket cover, Dr. Bruce Woodcock cites Blake as a "visionary mystic", as well as one of the most revolutionary writers of the Romantic era. There can be no argument at all over Blake's credentials as a writer, poet and artist, he is easily one of the most important there has ever been, and is rightly acknowledged as such. Nostradamus was a fuckin' lightweight compared to Blake. Barry McGuigan versus Ali.

In case you're unfamiliar with Blake-lore, "Albion" means "England", and has nothing to do with football.

William Blake died in 1827, the same year as Beethoven, three years after Byron and five years after Shelley. It is said that he died laughing and singing. I often wonder if he was on something. Partly because I know many people who regard Syd Barrett as a visionary mystic also. I think, in both cases, they are right. Which neatly brings me to an important point about madness...

I have always suspected that Blake's religious obsession was a side effect of his creativity, rather than the force behind it. He was, after all, a human being with all the flaws and shortcomings therein. "Visionary Mystic" and "raving lunatic" are not mutually exclusive. Not that I think he was a lunatic, though that would explain a lot, besides we should always listen carefully to our maniacs, for they see outside of all the norms. Also, I can more understand Blake for myself when I see him in at least some frame of reference. There is no actual yardstick for William Blake, which is I think why we struggle with him as much as we salute him, and I assert that we owe Peter Ackroyd a great deal of thanks for finally humanising the man. Blake has been dead for almost two hundred years. We will never really know. But his work breaks every boundary and convention, even now. It is terrifying stuff, written with ferocious passion, possessed as if by demons, the ultimate contradiction - or is it? Imagine that Blake himself thought so. What would be his own frame of reference? These were righteous times, when Christianity was a sociological force. Blake's obsession is like the exaggeration of a man trying to make himself believe something. The conflict that makes him so evangelical is just that, an internal war between Right, in this case religion, and Wrong, in this case the overwhelming need to answer the call of creativity. It is a war that Right cannot win, because Right is wrong and Blake knows it. But he denies it at his peril, and the danger emerges in the work. The man is desperate, but he will not give in, his fear of the eternal consequences call upon him to fight, to insist, and to hide behind the zealous nature of his own statements. Blake remains invulnerable to the outside world, locked away in his own head, lest the world should understand the true demonic nature of the man and condemn him. It is this explosive cocktail of self-honesty and self-deceit that makes the artist of the man. Blake's righteousness is overt, a bright light, but it is in the shadows cast by such a light that we find the real nature of the art itself. There is nothing gentle about Blake, he is a dangerous man, fit to explode, knowing that his own genius is a time bomb. He is driven by it's ticking, and compelled by the urgency of it's inevitability. He is obsessed, apparently by the immortal, but in fact by his own mortality, because he is a man, a human being, and that is the obsession of all human beings. Death is the great motivator, the void wherein nothing ever gets done. To deny it is to be a liar. The story of Blake dying with a song puts me in mind of Salvador Dali. In 1989, just a few weeks before his death, Dali spoke to the world's TV and press, in what he obviously knew would be his last appearance. He gave his now famous "Geniuses must never die" speech - interpreted as a call to celebrate the work of great artists. Watching on television, I actually thought he meant that they should be pulling out all the stops to keep him alive. I still think that's what he meant to say, but stopped short of it because he was such a showman, and wasn't prepared to tell the truth in plain black and white. In his Aquarius interview in the early Seventies, the "Butterfly E" interview, he told Russell Harty that death was the only remaining problem. He admitted his fear of it. Yet he had prepared his own grave years before he died, designed and built to his own exact specifications. Fear is the key. If we had unlimited tomorrows, we could put everything off until one of them.

Whatever your leanings on Blake's prophetic works, his words absolutely sum up what it means to be English. Remember, when we say English around here we DO NOT mean British, which is sheer nonsense. Britain is a nation, all flags and anthems and all that crap, and you and I are not interested in such bullshit are we? I am English, like Blake and the Beatles, part of a creative tapestry sewn from the threads of a land and its skies and air, a tradition, a language - NOT a nation, NOT a border, NOT a flag, NOT an army. How dare these things intrude upon my creative bond with my land and it's art... My heart soars when I hear The Tallis Fantasia by Vaughn Williams, for me the greatest piece of classical music ever written. It makes me feel real, alive and in love - and it is completely English, so much that if it was a physical object it would be England. The crescendo that comes in at around ten minutes into the piece remains the closest thing that I have ever felt to a truly spiritual experience, in fact I can close my eyes and damn near see God in the music. The greatest recordings of the piece are also English, which cannot be a coincidence - in fact I never like to hear any classical music performed by orchestras that do not hail from the composer's native land, there is just always something missing. (Perhaps we're just lucky, as we have the five best orchestras in the world anyway - well, okay, that's debatable, but the London Philharmonic are the best and no one's going to argue with that, are they?). If you've never heard it, go and find one of Vernon Handley's recordings of it - and should anyone find the Carl Davis/BBC Symphony version may I beg you to send me a copy.

English art is a proverbial monolith that defies categorisation, but I have always read Blake as if this is what he is referring to when he says Jerusalem - that "Jerusalem" is in fact his metaphorical name for the great artistic and spiritual awakening that must surely come one day. Indeed, in his introduction to Milton he calls on England's artists to rise up and kick against commerce, to wrestle their artistic freedom away from the hands of society and back to the land and tradition from whence it came. Hymn singers beware - you are not on safe ground here. You are, in fact, standing within the dark Satanic Mills; the churches, the schools, the universities, the establishment. This poem is not for you, it is against you, as it is against all banner waving, freedom bashing doctrines. This is a ferocious assault on false promises, false prophets and false nations. It is a glorious and daring statement of physical, mental, emotional, artistic and spiritual rebellion (except I don't like to use the word "spiritual" because I don't know what it means), wherein Blake fires on all cylinders, generating the most important lines to be composed in the English language since Shakespeare:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.


Either you see or you don't. Do you see?