We're in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, which is near Finsbury, just outside the walls of
the City, where Blake was buried in 1827 and the point of this is that it's a nonconformist
burial ground - it's for the unofficial religionists - it's for the people who are dissident and
difficult and so they're put just outside the City in this little oasis, with fig trees
- a place of real calm.
One special aspect of Blake, is the way he sees his visions and the visions changed throughout
his life - as a child - is this some sickly child, feverish, seeing visions? I don't think
so, something else - he takes long walks out of Soho, where he lives, into the fields and
he's in Peckham Rye - he sees a tree of angels - when he sees a tree shimmering, it looks
like angels. He sees angels - they're angels to him. He sees figures at the window of his
bedroom and as life goes on, these visions become more challenging. The old prophets,
or Raphael, the painter, or some great figure he wants to discuss things with, appears in
his chamber - it's a kind of séance. Other people find it difficult - for him, not. He's
in that heightened sense of perception that other people achieve much later through Peyote
or drugs, or some kind of experience that they've pushed their visionary entity - he
didn't need to - it was natural, it was engrained in him.
I think it's impossible to detach Blake's radical spiritual beliefs from the radical
political beliefs, because they all grew out of the same soil. Blake's spiritual beliefs
sit on his own eccentric learning and studies. This idea that he must create his own system
to avoid being enslaved by someone else's and he dives into The Old Testament, but he's
also reading about Egyptian mythology, he's involved with the alchemists magicians of
Europe, he reads Paracelsus and Boehme and he loves them because they're working men, who've
suddenly been overcome by a sense of vision and he translated that into the substance
of London. So that, always beneath the grey and the overcast skies and the slate-like
streets, there would be a vein of gold shining and he would locate it.
William Blake has the notion that if you're on top of Primrose Hill, you can see London
reborn as a kind of Jerusalem, that the fields of his - meadows of his childhood, growing
up in Soho and walking out into the landscape around him, he finds the attributes of a Holy
City and he believes that the pillars are there - in Marylebone, and Lambeth and so
on, Islington - but it's a metaphor - it's a metaphor for renewing London, which becomes
the poem, ‘Jerusalem’, but also, behind it, are these ‘dark satanic mills’ - the
sense of the forces of industry, the forces of the new machines that are hammering and
firing, the fires, the darkness - all of that makes a tremendous apocalyptic theatre, of
which he's the master craftsman.
What people find a little difficult sometimes, is to understand the schizophrenic split between
an ordinary man working away in his little house in Lambeth and the visionary prophet
whose seeing great golden cities and how that argues with what's going on in the human world
of industries developing machines, churning out flour, the noise, the dirt, the chimney
sweeps, the prostitutes. There's a grain of something in him that stands him apart and
is sometimes defined as madness - you know, more respectable poets sometimes thought he
was brilliant, sometimes thought this is insane, this is derangement, how can someone talk
to prophets - you know, that's what we have to understand - is the potentiality was there
for the two things - the real world and the great world of the imagination. For someone
like Blake living in London, was at risk - he could have been hanged for his parts in the
Newgate mob and his attacks on owners who've maltreated children or any of these arguments
he got into, so he's on the fringe of being arrested or even of being declared a madman.
One possible explanation is that Blake's revolutionary hopes, when he's wearing the red bonnet, when
he's excited by the American colonies throwing off the yoke and the French getting rid of
their King - that great moment disappears. It becomes bloody and apocalyptic and dark
and the forces of repression and the soldiers are closing it down in London, so maybe in
some senses, Blake withdraws from that political world and puts all of those energies into
the spiritual world - so he then has to invent, on an epic scale, even more terrifying wrestlings
and collisions and damage, chains, forges, manacles - all of those fetishistic items
become part of his poems and his great human entities are struggling with them.