BLAKE AND THE OCCULT WAR
Originally written in Fall 2019
On the final day of Summer, the path from Blake’s grave, where someone scattered roses, through the City, and across the Thames, and back across the river to his etchings in Tate Britain sensationally unfolds his vision.
Near Bishopsgate the “fearful symmetry” of the City and the global system it condenses extends a labyrinth of scalene angles: “dark Satanic mills” for “mind-forged manacles” marked on every face we meet. A subtle vortex of repulsion redistributes energy from the margins to the centre, from one body to another, in an economy of capture. Activity, desire, need is canalized into vectors of enslavement, from social media to sex and drugs and alcohol, and back to work. The algorithm makes the match, you meet somebody in a restaurant, and return to someone’s rented flat.
Behind Brick Lane, graffiti grins satanic subtext. A superficially antagonistic counter-culture is part of the same program. It’s not political. It’s deeper. How deep does it go?
We try to leave the chartered streets but are dislocated back into the maze. How do you locate yourself inside a pentagram of forces? Which way do you turn? Who walks beside you? Blake described and now his epitaph extends a “golden thread” of poetry stitching experience and innocence into something tougher and more luminous than any theory. “Newton, in an age of clocks,” McLuhan writes, “managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock.” But “poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered ‘from single vision and Newton's sleep,’ knowing that Newton's response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge.”
We keep going down, and never left or right, and finally reach the Thames and cross at London Bridge, past the East India Company HQ. The river glitters likes the Nile. The Southbank is overcrowded with protestors, coming back from marching against Brexit, and Chinese tourists, taking pictures of the ruins of the West, but we know the way now.
Near the London Dungeon, the crowd coagulates, hysterically, but we move through it silently unseen. We cross the Thames again. Outside Tate Britain, the protestors are getting back onto their coaches, they look old and tired. Inside a contemporary artist playing with black magic occupies two galleries. Her work is cold and hollow, like all counter-initiation art.
We spend a long time in the Blake Room, looking at Blake’s Master, this strange being, who appeared before him in a dream and taught him how to paint. A label underneath the work repeats curated lies, but we ignore them. What we do care? You go outside to catch the last rays of the sun, we rejoin you, and begin to walk back home. “What they need is an exodus, not just an exit,” someone says. “Spiritual War,” wrote Blake, “Israel deliver’d from Egypt is Art deliver’d from Nature & Imitation.”