Alarming news – from climate disaster to populist politics – can be paralysing. Doom-laden journalism may use the language of science, but it echoes apocalypse-crazed religious prophets. It tyrannises with despair. The Romantic poet William Blake lived through an age of upheaval remarkably like our own. His revolutionary politics of hope and openness offer a more energizing way to respond to chaos and disaster, suggests Timothy Morton.
Timothy Morton's new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, finds comfort and inspiration in William Blake, the radical Romantic writer.
1. Losing Your Mind in Terrible Times? William Blake Has an App for That
You can sound like an ancient prophet of the end of the world – take your pick: from the Norse Ragnarok to the Kaliyuga to the Christian apocalypse, there are too many to choose from. But it’s truly sinister when you sound like that in the language of secular science. You see, you are doing the same thing: you are closing down the future. You are making your reader submit to tyrannical despair.
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It was like reading an ancient religious prophecy of doom and apocalypse, only it was made out of scientific and sociological facts.
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I couldn’t read the article any more. I texted my wife Treena: “Is it okay if I just stop?” I needed permission: I’m an environmental news junkie – I write about ecology all the time, and was forcing myself to push through the article. It was like reading an ancient religious prophecy of doom and apocalypse, only it was made out of scientific and sociological facts. The authors, a scientist and a sci-fi writer, seemed Hell bent on making me feel horrified and paralyzed, stupid and evil. They succeeded.
“Yes,” said Treena. “Just put it down.” I closed the page, teetering on the edge of a panic attack. That was yesterday. I’m sure you’ve been in similar situations. Something else will no doubt try to crawl inside my soul today. If it isn’t climate disaster, how about the rise of fascism worldwide? How about the possibility that the next President of the USA might be… the previous President of the USA?
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So, I decided, today I would start my essay on why the Romantic poet and painter William Blake has been seeing me through this frankly horrible time. It’s just not going to help my kids if I collapse in the fetal position. And it’s not going to help anyone if I write from that place. Every day I have to get up, dust myself off, and continue what Blake called “mental fight” in the poem the British sing as the hymn “Jerusalem.”
They sing it at the annual Promenade Concerts in London’s Albert Hall. Many see “Jerusalem” as a patriotic hymn, but it’s really about creating a better future, patriotic or not:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant land.
2. Two Ages of Upheaval
It sounds like Blake is advocating violent revolution (“Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand”). He was certainly a feisty guy. There’s an anecdote about him passing a soldier near his house in Lambeth and muttering “Damn the King” – and getting into a fist fight.The King was the deranged George III, who reigned over Britain from 1760 until 1820. It’s uncanny how similar to Donald Trump he looked, if James Gillray’s cartoons are to be believed: the disbelieving squint without a shred of kindness; the lips pouting like the display of an aggressive chimpanzee; the pudgy little fingers; the wig (or combover); the overfed jowels.
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The continuity between Blake’s age and ours is not a historical curiosity: it is a matter of the utmost urgency.
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Blake’s was a period of upheaval: French, American, Haitian revolutions; struggles against slavery; the rise of feminism; Napoleonic Wars… the list is endless. The late 1700s were an age in which people fought for democracy. We, at least in “Western” countries, have tended to think that battle was won. But it is very important that we wake up and realize that the struggle is far, far from over. The continuity between Blake’s age and ours is not a historical curiosity: it is a matter of the utmost urgency.
Democracy is fragile, and tyranny is a constant risk. We know that afresh, like people in the late 1700s. Because of slavery, there was an overlap between colonizer and colony, Britain and America. Because that legacy hasn’t been fully addressed yet, we live in the shadow of those times. You could easily argue that modern capitalism – which Marxists call an automated version of slavery – began then. Add high-tech machinery, starting with the steam engine (patented in 1784), and you also commence a massive increase in carbon emissions that atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen took to begin what he christened the Anthropocene, a period of geological-scale human influence on our planet. Not until the computer did a general-purpose machine revolutionize the world so violently.
We’re talking about what Blake in “Jerusalem” portrays as “dark Satanic mills”:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
The simple answer to Blake’s question here is, no. There’s no Jerusalem yet… not in Blake’s time, and not in ours.
England in the 1790s is soiled with soot and packed with toil and misery. To stand around with two or more friends on the street is asking for trouble from the authorities: you might be trying to start a rebellion. The government can have you arrested without reason and without bail (“habeas corpus” was suspended), just like in the Bush-era War on Terror, when anyone who wasn’t a citizen could be rounded up like that. This anti-terrorist, Islamophobic energy is now being turned against American citizens themselves, “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” (Donald Trump). Good times.
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Oh, and “terrorist”? It comes from the French “terroriste,” a supporter of the French Terror of the 1790s, which like the Stalinist purges turned the French Revolution against itself. And the legacy of slavery is still being fought over, with blood spilled. We’re partying like it’s 1799.
3. Hymns from a Future without Tyranny and Despair: Why Reading Blake Is More Important than Ever
William Blake understood what it was like to live during a tyrannical, scary age, where violence could break out at any moment. So did his contemporary Jane Austen. Martial arts movie maker Ang Lee was the perfect director of Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. If you were female and belonged to the precarious lower gentry, you couldn’t spend your own money until you had married. No wonder Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake’s friend, compared the status of women to that of slaves in her groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Women had to restrain themselves just to survive – a kind of inner kung fu, where the violence was about holding back the anger and frustration and fear, while sitting politely in a drawing room waiting for Mister Right to come and make everything better.
Blake understood this and wrote many poems that intersect with feminism: The Book of Thel for example features a surly, goth-girl lead character who rightly asks why she shouldn’t just lie down and die, given how unpleasant and oppressive the social machinery is. Young people ask the best questions, but the grown-up world prods them into cynicism, and Blake knew all about that too. Blake wrote his Songs of Experience to give readers a feel for cynicism, its truths and its horrors. I reckon twenty-something me sang those Songs in my own ways, full of vinegar, totally certain I was 100% right about everything. I was acting elderly before my time.
Who can blame younger people for despair?
We older people shouldn’t add to this grizzled-before-its-time vibe. We should be singing what Blake called Songs of Innocence, reminding the kids that the world is open, the future is not fixed, goodness is real and easy to find. “Innocence” doesn’t mean “ignorance”: Blake rightly announces that it means “harmlessness.” Blake’s innocence, however, is special, like the child who sees the emperor has no clothes. Greta Thunberg became powerful on the world stage because of what I like to call this “weaponized harmlessness.”
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There is always a lovely, innocent excess of reality over what we think we see, our eyes dimmed by conflict and rage and fear.
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Blake’s Songs of Innocence cry out that we don’t have to live in a world where master versus slave, human versus nonhuman, male versus female define everything. There is always a lovely, innocent excess of reality over what we think we see, our eyes dimmed by conflict and rage and fear. This is what Blake meant when he wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand” (Auguries of Innocence). That grain is not defined by its place in an hourglass. “Satan’s watch fiends” – the ideas, ideologies, and people that master measurement (Blake’s allegorical writing lets you be wonderfully flexible) – do not have a monopoly on that tiny crystal of silicon. You could find all kinds of sparkling facets in that grain if you looked carefully enough.
The dark Satanic mills cannot grind that grain down to nothing. Not only are there physical “mills”; there are also “mind-forgd manacles” (“London”), mills of the mind in the form of terrible ideas. Ideas are like demons: they last forever, indestructible, just waiting for someone to repost them. Brexit and MAGA are just two examples of how ideas from the past can turn into manacles to shackle the future.
And it’s all about religion, whatever you (think you don't) believe. Hell and Heaven are all about the here and now, how we treat each other and how we treat our planet. Blake was a creative Christian who forged his own Christianity in the face of the versions that justified killing, slavery and fear. It’s why I just published a book “with” him, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. With so many people turning to Christianity in the UK, and turning away from it in the USA, Blake and I have something to tell y’all, as we say in Texas.
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Like I say, even when writers of doomy essays think they’re being scientific, they’re being religious. So we have to change how we are being religious, or spiritual, or what have you. There’s no getting around it: we’re talking about the most basic connections between our individual bodies and selves and the “neighbor” bodies and selves we relate to, both human and nonhuman. Those connections don’t go away. Whatever we think of “religion” we are stuck with its basic realities: it’s why Martin Luther King was able to use his Christianity to energize Civil Rights. So getting this “religious” level right is a deeply ecological issue, and a profoundly political one, at the same time. Forget thinking in terms of “ecology” versus feminism, democracy or anti-racism (and so on). Blake fought against dividing these issues up, because he thought that was part of a “divide and conquer” strategy of tyranny.
Let me explain. All we’ll need is one tiny piece of our planet: that tiny grain of sand will do. If we can imagine our Earth differently, we can treat it differently. If we can imagine Earth in such a “granular” way, where even the smallest things have a power to resist the worst in us, we can use those grains to build a better world. “Minute particulars” are the building blocks of the future, as Blake would put it. How we treat the tiniest and weakest beings shows who we are, as Jesus put it (Matthew 25:45).
One tiny grain of sand versus all that? Versus the plantations of Jamaica, the English army, “church and king” mobs, not unlike MAGA rioters, destroying your lab because you might be an atheist? (That really happened to another of Blake’s friends, Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen.) Volatile, dangerous times indeed. Wordsworth and Coleridge had the secret service put on them for daring to put noble words in the mouths of people with learning disabilities and farm workers, just like how today librarians across the USA are threatened for radicalizing schoolchildren with books about being kind and understanding to people with genders and races different from one’s own. All of that, versus one little grain of sand?
Yes, says Blake.
If you can imagine just one teeny grain of sand as more than just a component in some tech, then you can imagine the future at every scale. Just one pixel on your screen could be enough to open a window onto a better world. Today’s tech is made of silicon, which comes from sand, after all. To see a world in a silicon wafer.
You don’t have to stick your head in that sand: you can be as pessimistic as you like. But a Satanic mill of pessimism can’t destroy even the tiniest grain of hope. We may be heading for Hell on Earth, but maybe, just maybe, we could marry Hell to Heaven, like Blake imagined.
And that’s how William Blake comes to my aid, when I witness the terrible state of the world. And that’s why you need Blake by your side.
4. Find Out More about Blake
Blake practically invented the meme and the comic book: the way he puts images and text together, the way he imagined his pantheon of characters, is ironic and brilliant and fresh as a daisy and action-packed. Need some Blake after reading this? Look no further than the radiant, beautiful and comprehensive Blake Archive, curated by the University of North Carolina. Or find John Riordan’s magical new graphic novel about Blake.
