Hold Infinity: William Blake and Visioning the Future

I recently recorded a conversation with writer and philosopher Mark Vernon about his new book Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination. I enjoyed the book and our conversation a lot, coming away from both with new ideas on how we can imbue culture with visionary imagination, and why Blake’s genius is more important than ever.

Mark holds a PhD in ancient philosophy, and our conversation covered a lot of ground, including Gnosticism, non-duality and the confused state of spirituality today. You can watch it here on Substack, on the Kainos YouTube, or listen to the audio on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Mark has also provided a short excerpt from Awake! below, which ties Blake’s ideas together with some of the themes we’ve surfaced on Kainos, pointing to a surprising synthesis between animism and individualism.

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This is an edited excerpt from Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination by Mark Vernon (Hurst). Find out more here.

Indigenous ways of knowing are today growing in appeal as a way of supplementing or transforming an alienated western worldview with a wisdom of mutuality. However, Indigenous epistemologies also present challenges because they developed before the modern sense of freedom that brings goods, such as the liberty of the individual. The question, then, is whether older ways of knowing can marry newer understandings of the self in order to bring transformed possibilities for the future. William Blake, who knew of Indigenous epistemologies that were discussed in Georgian England, can aid us in this imaginative task.

“Indigenous peoples live in relational worldviews,” Melissa Nelson told me. A professor at Arizona State University, whose heritage includes Anishinaabe, Cree, Métis and Norwegian, she researches and preserves the rituals and myths around which Indigenous ways of life are structured. These patterns of organisation are partly practical but hold intelligence, too, joining skills with a lived awareness of the more-than-human.

“There is a nurturing quality to the universe that is for us like a natural law, a universal principle that we can tap into: this field of love that is the matrix of the universe,” Nelson continues. Indigenous knowledge therefore invites us to consider the possibility of participating in the world not from assumptions of difference and isolation, but difference and communion.

The poetry and insights of William Blake can help us in that imaginative task, which is necessarily not one of adoption but adaption and transformation. For he takes the insights a step further. His aim is to incorporate the freedoms inherent in the western worldview, too.

When learning again to discourse with Nature’s powers, a new revelation might become clear. The restored sacred aspect not only re-enchants the world but, when conversing with the subjectivities of “Each rock & each hill, Each fountain & rill, Each herb & each tree, Mountain, hill, Earth & Sea,” as Blake put it, there can be detected something else. Speaking, too, is the eternal source of all transient things: a third, eternal divine dimension.

We can be alerted not just to other presences but a shared ground of being and source of all vitality. To recall Blake’s famous phrase: when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears not myriad but infinite—the infinite being the one fount of “Each grain of Sand, Every Stone on the Land, Cloud, Meteor & Star.” Heaven is indeed in a wildflower, eternity is indeed in love with the productions of time, because heaven is in the flower, eternity is in the events of time.

Blake advises us to enter the transcendent dimension within the immanent world via our imaginations, with words, through the arts, in the sciences. He shows how to make these disciplines a “Fiery Chariot of Contemplative Thought” that can enable us to make “a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder.”

In short, Mother Nature does not treat the natural world as her personal fiefdom because what she tends exists at a threshold to the All. “The Vegetable Universe,” Blake explains, meaning the world as seen biologically, “opens like a flower from the Earth’s center: In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell [the sky’s dome]; And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without.”

Any finite thing reflects, in some manner or mode, an aspect of the infinite and Blake invites us to consider how Nature always displays more than a kaleidoscope of colour and tumble of activity. When imaginatively speaking with “Rock, Cloud, Mountain”, there can also be felt moving “the Spirit which Lives Eternally.”

The divine aspect, implicit in every exchange or encounter, helps foster the shift from possessing to participating, from grasping to communion, because with that larger awareness we are freed from feeling self-concerned, knowing that our life too is held. Thereby, the modern sense of individual liberty is valued and also transformed: the right to personal choice becomes a virtue of mutual self-giving generosity.

That awakening might be said to happen in two stages. First, our reception of the world around us is transformed from self-centredness to other-centredness. An example might be what happens when, say, at dusk, a shadowy shape on the roadside turns out to be not a threat but a shrub. In that moment, there is release from self-concerned fear, enabled by self-forgetting attention. Then, that relief might prompt a second stage: a realisation. The shrub shares my path literally and metaphorically, having embarked on a life course, too, and also shares a common wellspring: in a word, God. The awakening is one reason Blake remarked, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

The unfolding liberty maintains one of the great gains of the western worldview, the chance to develop one’s individuality, now known around a divine core, whilst also inspiring a totally changed attitude to transient life. Blake expressed this in the beautiful quatrain entitled “Eternity”.

“He who binds to himself a joyDoes the winged life destroy;He who kisses the joy as it fliesLives in eternity’s sun rise.”

“Kissing the joy as it flies” is a selfless but individual stance of attention. It takes delight in what passes because that participates with us in the timelessness of all things. The result is that, when enjoyed without possessiveness, the All becomes present. Each becomes part of the one, reflecting the whole in as many refractions. This vision is Blake’s promise.

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