Approaching William Blake

The Poets light but Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks they stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference –

Emily Dickinson

*

My third visit to see the rich, comprehensive and often overwhelming William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain chimed beautifully with the completion of Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead. And, indeed, thinking about Tokarczuk and her Nobel Prize winning writing has finally allowed me to approach Blake, if not quite with confidence, certainly with less intellectual trepidation than before.

To start with, and by way of explanation, I should say a little about Tokarczuk's novel. If I’m being loose, I'd describe it as Polish-noir. Janina Duszejko, the novel's narrator is a sixty-something semi-recluse, living in a semi-secluded house in the wilds of Silesia. She is a fierce proponent of animal-rights, a believer and interpreter of horoscopes, and, through a former pupil at the school that she teaches at, a keen reader of William Blake. A series of murders disturbs her lonely idyll and she sets out to solve them. Less about the overall story though; it is a sublime piece of literature and I urge you to read it.    

Perfect bedfellows

Reading first person narration, free from the sometimes stultifying shackles of academia, allows for a more generous development of sympathy. A novel isn't reduced to an exercise in the forensic cross-examination of an unreliable narrator. The luxury of companionship which fosters empathy - often the reason that we begin to read in childhood, and the primary benefit - returns. I might be a real sceptic when it comes to astrology, but this shutting down of cynicism - and yes, common sense and rigour - gives me the license to revel in Janina's eloquent eccentricities, and for just that moment, believe her. Watching the weather channel on television, Janina imagines a different station, one that aligns with her own astrological set of beliefs:   

"I wish there was a channel about the stars and planets as well. The Cosmic Impact Channel. This sort of viewing would also consist of maps; it would show lines of influence and fields of planetary strikes. 'Mars is starting to rise above the ecliptic, and this evening it will cross the belt of Pluto's influence. Please leave your car in the garage or a covered parking lot, please put away the knives, be careful going down into the cellar, and until the planet passes through the sign of Cancer, we appeal to you to avoid bathing and chickening out of family quarrels,' the slender, ethereal presenter would say. We would know why the trains were late today, why the postman's Fiat Cinquecento got stuck in the snow, why the mayonnaise didn't come out right, or why the headache suddenly went of its own accord, without any pills, as unexpectedly as it came. We would know the right time to start dyeing our hair, and when to hold a wedding."

Likewise, Tokarczuk's own comments on her art, and specifically divisions in European writing, urge you to free yourself from other areas of prescriptive thought. "You [Western Europe] are rooted in psychoanalysis while we are still thinking in a mythical, religious way."

So it was then, that this inclination towards the mystical surrounded me on my latest visit to Tate Britain. You encounter Blake himself in the very first room. Emily Dickinson’s poem at the head of this piece, and its assertion that the poets themselves will be extinguished is almost refuted by the arresting Self Portrait which brings you to a sobering standstill: big owlish eyes skewer and draw you into his sphere, making it all too clear that disagreement will not serve you well. Blake may be nearly two hundred years dead and belong to a very different age, but don’t you dare come laden with scepticism, indeed with any 'ism', with psychoanalysis, with an agenda, with clumsy, fumbling and overstretched analysis. William Blake is to be your only guide here.

Self Portrait

My favourite piece in the exhibition, The Ghost of a Flea, puts that trust to the test. Blake claimed - a word always ripe in triggering the more sceptical synapses - that spirits would visit him in his waking state. One such 'visionary head' paid a call on him whilst he was in the presence of the artist and astrologer John Varley. The vision was of a man reincarnated as a flea. Blake took up his pencil and sketched. Later he would transform these rudimentary outlines into one of his most famous works, a spellbinding miniature far greater than its tiny size.

Standing before this painting, I have a combined sense of repulsion and fascination: the creature's bulbous bull-like head; the blood-letting tongue, greedy and anxious, protruding from the mouth; the muscular frame equipped and ready for violence. And yet all of this is balanced by that warm golden haze permeating the whole. You don't quite feel that you are in the presence of evil. I dearly want to believe that this vision was real. And for that moment I manage it.

The Ghost of a Flea (1819)

  

Some of the works in this exhibition conjure up a different kind of difficulty, in that there is nothing of Blake's own direct thinking attached explicitly to that work of art. Hecate (Blake did not give it a title) is a 1795 colour print that is both glorious and peculiar. As the artist is silent, the interpretations are given free reign and proliferate. There is so much of it: figures inspired and lifted from the works of Michelangelo; the Three Fates of Classical mythology; false religion; allusions to the works of Shakespeare, mainly Macbeth – think of the witches' brew and the bat, owl and frog that are tossed into the pot - but also A Midsummer Night's Dream and Bottom transformed into an ass. Suggestions as to the identity of the sitting woman range from Hecate, Jealousy, Media and Enitharmon. The most convincing of these has been that the figure represents Enitharmon, a female character who appears in a number of Blake's mythological books.  

Where on earth do you start? Interpretation is like trying to tune into a station on an old long wave radio. Snatches of sound fade in and out, and sonic clarity is elusive. Instead - as my six year old son did on our first visit - I switch off the radio and gaze rapt at the strange, magical, unsettling, and finally irreducible scene in front of me.  Hecate, as with many other works in this incredible exhibition, leaves me reaching for the Wittgenstein maxim: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Hecate (1795)

Which is not to say that we cannot enjoy and revel in what is before us. Just before you leave the exhibition you are confronted with the magnificent Ancient of Days.  A godlike figure crouches over a void, his left hand plotting above it with a compass.  It matters not how you rationalise the figure – God is the immediate inclination; Urizen, the architect of reason and law in Blake's Universe is the actuality – but rather how you react. My immediate feelings were of the sublime, a sense of awe at something incredibly powerful, something that can't quite be rationalised – despite the presence of those scientific tools.

The Ancient of Days (1794)

Nevertheless, The Ancient of Days took me immediately back to the Tokarczuk novel and Janina's remarks on astrology, and the reminder that amidst the sublime unfathomability of the universe is the human inclination to understand and predict.   

"Studying Horoscopes gave me pleasure, even while I was discovering these orders of death. The motion of the planets is always hypnotic, beautiful, impossible to halt or hasten. I like considering the fact that this order goes far beyond the time and place of Janina Duszejko. It's good to be able to rely on something totally."

Reading that back after completing the novel, I sense the return of the sceptic. Janina's certainty is surely misplaced. The spell is broken, and as I leave the exhibition, still in thrall to Blake's lifework, I am less sure of the actuality of his visions. But – as hinted at in those lines of Emily Dickinson's - even if the poets and writers fade away, those works which are still able to speak to the present age, will inhere. With words, it is easy to bring yourself under the spell again. With paintings and prints, less so. The Blake exhibition closes in less than ten days time. Perhaps I should slough off the sceptic and encounter that vital light one more time.