William Blake & The City of The Imagination by Beatriz Fiore

William Blake � The City of The Imagination

BY BEATRIZ FIORE ILLUSTRATED BY KATIE HARDCASTLE

William Blake’s City in ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion.’

To map out William Blake’s city of Golgonooza, present a systematic structure of his cosmology and make a coherent and linear summary of the plot of the poet’s prophetic book ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion,’ would be a near impossible task and one which Blake himself would have likely disputed. This essay, while having to make an attempt at grasping and visualizing the world of ‘Jerusalem,’ will instead explore Golgonooza by diving into the mystic city, contemplating it through an imaginative lens, like as readers we assimilate its chaos and beauty through the senses for it does not pretend to appeal to rational comprehension or any orderly manner of cognitive thought.

Trying to visualise Blake’s city through concrete images in our mind becomes problematic, rather it must be conceived through abstract values and ideas while simultaneously embracing the plausibility of the setting, the familiar names of well-known streets in the heart of London. Golgonooza is alive with contradictions and contrasting elements, while ever-moving towards the common goal: the unification, or salvation of Albion. It is a living, breathing, pulsating human city and at the same time a place of mystical, spiritual and imaginative experience; an amalgamation of blood and stone, of sacrifice and rebirth, of men and women separated and of the fusion of the sexes, a city of intuition and feeling and a city of brick and cement. As it is city of

creation and continuous transformation, it is also a city of violence and destruction, which are both inseparable from the process of revolution and renewal. There are instances of horrific and savage destructiveness; in fact Robert N. Essick points out that “dismemberment is particularly important, it bodies forth the psychic and cosmic fragmentation defining Blake’s sense of the Fall.” A fragmented, harrowing city which comes together in the end to become a great Divine Body. It is many separate entities all striving to be one, a place which cannot be accessed without the human body but at the same time could not exist without the Divine; Golgonooza is a sacred city, its essence is Art, its origin the creative Imagination.

For the poet, Art is the transfiguration of man, the physical manifestation of the divine through the body, the radiation of a pure, spiritual being and Golgonooza, being the city of truth and salvation, is essentially a city founded on Art. Just like its author’s graphic representations of his poetic works, this is a magical place of fusion between other worldly and natural life, but also an attempt, or rather, a struggle to model the material in the service of transcendental ideas, despite the unwillingness and resistance of the material, or the flesh. This is a city that exists in time and is the permanent labour of men and women to realise on earth the eternal vision of heaven, to, as Kathleen Rains writes, “make the politics of time conform to the politics of eternity.”

The struggle seen by Blake between the material and the immaterial, between the spirit and the flesh which separates the inner world of ideas from the outer physical reality, comes about after the Fall; in fact, before this happens, Blake writes of a paradisiacal state where humankind, the earth and all its creatures are living beings, taking part in the world of Eternal Imagination, all things unified in God. It is his vision of paradise, not just a hypothetical possibility of what awaits after death, but something achievable on earth, a state where all living beings come from and to which they will return. Similar to the Platonic conception of the distinction between the world of ideas and the physical reality, in his ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement,’ Blake writes, “There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of Nature. All things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine Body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination, who appear’d to Me as Coming to Judgement among his Saints and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establish’d.”

There are many similarities between this idea and what philosopher Henry Corbin describes as his ‘Mundus Imaginalis,’ the place of all spiritual happenings; it is impossible to ignore how Blake’s vision of the world contains elements of that reported by Corbin in his studies on Islamic mysticism. Furthermore, William Blake’s syncretic cosmology is a phenomenal and hallucinatory amalgamation of ideas and iconographies from many different cultures and religious beliefs: there are elements from Ancient Greek myths, from the Old Testament’s ‘Book of Revelations,’ there are Christian symbols (including a revisited perception of the central figure of Jesus Christ and the concept of the Holy Trinity), aspects of Sumerian and Chaldean Middle Eastern civilisations, images from Ancient Persian Zoroastrian angelology, rudiments of Babylonian prophecy, of the Medieval Book of Nature (a book which, read alongside the Holy Scriptures, was believed to lead man towards the knowledge of God Himself), and inspiration from the visions of the philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote first-hand accounts of his visits to heaven and hell.

This merging of beliefs and traditions to form a unique and extravagant imaginative cosmology is shown above all in Blake’s concept of the four Zoas. These are four “beasts” which stand around the throne of the Lamb, worshipping and guarding Him, and each projects one of the four riders of the Apocalypse. In traditional iconography, these four beings can be correlated to the four evangelists, instead Blake identifies them with the four principle aspects of Man: Tharmas (the body, or instinct), Urizen (abstract reason), Luvah (passion, emotion) and Urthona (the principle of Imagination.) Every Zoa has an embodiment and Los, the welder, creator of Golgonooza, is the embodiment of Urthona in the temporal world. These aspects of humanity were all united before the Fall, but are now split into antagonistic capacities that are at war within us; as they also take physical shape, they are at war with one another in the tangible world.

His spiritual beliefs, free from any established doctrine, were of course extremely blasphemous at the time (especially as the poet used the irregular strophic verse form and tone of the Bible, making it inevitable to draw comparisons), but perhaps Blake saw that every religious practice and cultural tradition had, at its core, the ultimate desire of humankind’s unification with a Supreme Being and, no matter which formal creed is professed, we are all capable of reaching this state by looking within ourselves.

The poet condemned the age of science and reason and of positivist philosophy which dominates the Western world, a “mutilation of consciousness”, a view which values empirical knowledge above all else and thus considers valid and relevant only that which is experienced in the physical world; this way of thinking has forced man to neglect the exploration of the most profound regions of the soul. Many established religions, according to Blake, have embraced this positivist way of perceiving life, teaching its followers to worship an outer, abstract idea of God, impenetrable and unreachable from within the self, separate from all which is tangible and visible, withdrawn and wiped out from our memory and impossible to detect in our manmade cities. In plate III of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ Blake writes: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realise and abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. (…) and at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”

That all deities reside in the human breast is, in short, what Blake’s prophetic works seek to communicate. Golgonooza is itself like a human striving to reach the Divine within. In this city, as within ourselves, we are able to open up doors of perception, portals that communicate directly with the Eternal and it is from this transcendental realm that our ideas are conceived. Ideas are therefore innate and we are not, as Locke presumed, a blank slate: we, as spiritual beings, come from an infinite world of Imagination which we can sometimes access through both outer and inner portals, and to this world we shall hopefully return. Therefore, as we are encouraged to look through the material and into the city of Imagination, we can potentially find gateways in London which lead us into the city of Golgonooza.

London manifests itself in the prophetic poem of ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Great Albion’ also in its visible, palpable nature. Furthermore, Blake builds Jerusalem with descriptions from the real London, and in plate 27 the spiritual Jerusalem is composed of specific regions and areas of the city and its surroundings: he does this not to corrupt the idea of the Holy City, but to redeem it from abstraction.

“The fields from Islington to Marylebone,/ to Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,/ Were builded over with pillars of gold,/ And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.”

The history of the ancestors of Golgonooza seems to be deeply rooted in the city and the author takes us through its streets, which become a ‘memento mori’, to ruins beside Paddington where Satan had his first victory and to the place where “Albion slept beneath the fatal tree” while human sacrifices were rife. He goes on describing how victims “groan’d aloud” on London Stone and Tyburn’s brook (London Stone’s vicinity to Newgate prison would have made this a reality in Blake’s contemporary London too, and public executions were carried out on the banks of the Tyburn brook). Lambeth, on the other hand, where the poet resided for seven years with his wife Catherine, is depicted as a Bride, as the “Lamb’s wife”, where Jerusalem’s foundations began. Blake’s evocations of Lambeth are often accompanied by a sigh and by memories of a time when the city was held in glory, the awakened Albion a reality. Alas, London is now a blind old man, led by a child through the streets of Babylon and the tears and the voice of this wandering beggar echo through the city streets, reaching all the cities of all the nations across the Western world, “and all is distress and woe.”(p.84, ll16)

Golgonooza is, therefore, an imperfect city. However, the cause of its malady for Blake does not coincide with what his contemporaries thought was at the root of its sickness. The metaphor of the city as a human body is nothing new: this analogy, especially referring to the politics and hierarchical structure of the city existed from medieval times and was used to highlight the different divisions of power and order, rather than cooperation of the members as part of a whole entity. In the centuries to come, with the growth of commercialism and capitalism, the city’s comparison with the body was used to emphasize the flow of the free market, of goods and labour (like the free circulation of blood in the arteries), an organic system always in motion, in need also of green spaces (lungs) and directed by a central power (mind.) Well into the 17th century this analogy becomes damaging, as the city grows in an uncontrollable fashion the body becomes monstrous, an all-consuming, infected beast (with the advent of the plague, the single bodies in the city share the same fate as the diseased carcass, the macrocosm and the microcosm, like in Blake, are one): even after the plague and with better sanitation, the damage to its inhabitants and its surroundings passes from being physical to being moral. Hence, this illness is caused

by the cohabitation of large masses of people in a restricted space and, as some people thought and lived in fear of, the inevitable mingling of the different classes of society, the poor infecting the rich. Instead, for Blake, London’s malady is one of the soul and its cause is quite the opposite of the coming together of people: the city’s spiritual sickness comes about with the alienation of its members.

The cure lies in the unification of humankind towards the common goal of building Jerusalem on earth, constructing the outer city in the image of the inner city, through the process of artistic creation. This change must come from within the self, conceived in the human mind and realised through the human body. The body and the material city is necessary for the fulfilment of the prophecy. London, Golgonooza, goes through a healing process and its intricacies and infrastructures are themselves healing.

This perception of Blake’s city coincides with James Bogan’s comparison of Golgonooza with a mandala, and perhaps on looking at a mandala it is the closest one can get to visualising a map of Golgonooza. Bogan compares the construction of the city with the healing process that occurs when one draws or loses him/herself in a mandala and mirrors it with the words Jung uses to describe the mandala as “an attempt to abolish the separation of between the conscious mind (Albion) and the unconscious (Jerusalem), the real source of life, and to bring about a reunion of the individual with the native soil of his inherited, instinctive, make-up (as) loss of instinct is the source of endless terror and confusion.” Mandalas are used to establish a spiritual and sacred space, as a gateway to the transcendental, a tool of spiritual guidance. This can be a practical example of what Blake means when he writes that prayer is the study of art. Though Blake avoids providing us with a visual representation of the city of Golgonooza, we do however know some of its infrastructural aspects and again, may juxtapose to it an image of a mandala.

Blake’s looms and furnaces (and Los’ palace) are found at the centre of the city, just like the generative symbol at the centre of Tibetan mandalas which brings forth life into a new world. It is also, like the intricate structure of a mandala, a fourfold city, a four-dimensional space which has a fantastical and seemingly complex structure. Golgonooza is guarded by four gates which coincide with parts of the human body, with the four cardinal points and protected by mythological creatures. Each of the

four gates has then four openings to the four regions of Eden, Generation, Beulah and Ulro: the Northern gate (Gnomes,Nadir, Eden, Ear), the Southern gate (Eyes, Ulro, Zenith, fairies), the Western gate (Nymphs, circumference, Generation, Tongue) and the Eastern gate (Genii, Center, Beulah, Nostrils). Again the city is made in the image of both the physical and the spiritual man: “And every part of the City is fourfold; and every inhabitant fourfold” (as the four Zoas reside within us).

The task of imagining Golgonooza is left to the reader, and we must recreate the city in our own minds using our sensory perception and multidimensional minds, thus, it takes a different form for each one of us just like all mandalas differ in pattern and scope. Centuries later, we are allowed to take part in the common construction of Jerusalem, turning inward to our Imaginative faculty, we are all part of the rejuvenation of Albion.