Tobias Churton - Jerusalem!: The Real Life of William Blake

I dedicate this book to the memory of Kathleen Raine CBE (19082003)

Tobias Churtons work and research in Jerusalem! are truly astonishing in their detail. He has revealed to me so much. This must be one of the most illuminating and enlightening biographies of Blake to date. I would very much like him to speak at Glastonbury 2015 and read some extracts from Jerusalem!

William Blake has always been very close to my heart. Perhaps it is the rebel in him that appeals, or indeed our shared love of Methodism. To me the fundamental attraction to William Blake is, of course, the magical words of the hymn Jerusalem. Is there any piece of English literature that is half as well known as these wonderful words? Then theres poetry and prose that have challenging and searching intentions for us all. Ive used so many quotes from Blake in my efforts to portray what exactly Glastonbury is all about the mysticism and the hope that there is a force of nature that not only created us but sustains us daily in our pursuit of pleasure and meaning in our lives.

Blake might have been slightly barmy by todays definition of sanity but his incredible visions and childlike beliefs in God drove his energy and created the heroic genius that he really was.

Michael Eavis CBE

Founder of the Glastonbury Festival

From a Dorsetshire family, Michael Eavis (b.1935), dairy farmer of Pilton, Somerset, is best known as the founder of the Glastonbury Festival. The son of a Methodist preacher and a schoolteacher, Michael was educated at Wells Cathedral School and the Thames Nautical Training College, whence he entered the Merchant Navy as a Midshipman. Inheriting Worthy Farm, Pilton, in 1958, he returned to the land, combining his commitment to agriculture with an interest in 1960s politics and pop culture, deeply informed by the practical spirituality of Methodism (he attends Pilton Methodist Church every Sunday). Aware of the needs of young people for freedom and space, Michael hosted the Pilton (Free) Pop Festival on Worthy Farm in 1970, launching the Glastonbury Festival the following year, with its longstanding commitment to charitable causes, local, national and international.

Holding honorary degrees from the universities of Bath and Bristol (Master of Arts, honoris causa, 2006), Michael Eavis was awarded the CBE in 2007. Now a major part of the British cultural landscape, and much loved by musicians and festival visitors alike, Time magazine listed him as one of the most influential people in the world in 2009.

In Genesis 1: 2627, God decides to make man after his image: a qualification with far-reaching implications. How good, omniscient, eternal or infinite, is man? At first sight, the image is rather deformed. Can the image be restored?

Answers to this question have been formulated in terms of mirror metaphors. William Blake found inspiration in Jacob Bhmes theosophical system wherein the original Adam reflects Gods gaze in passive contemplation. Adam is Gods imagination until distracted, whereupon he falls into created substance. A second fall occurs in the earthly paradise (Eden): the mirror image is clouded. Adam longs for the light. What makes Adam human is a sense of loss, of melancholy. Eventually, however, Jesus, the mediator and saviour, will return to restore the original image; hence Blake referred to Jesus as Jesus the Imagination. Blake intended, through Art, to restore the original image of Man.

Blake lived at a time when Immanuel Kant was searching for the boundaries of reason: that which was ungraspable had to fit within this scope or else be excluded as nonsense. Kant realized that not everything could be understood through the faculty of reason alone. The sense of the vastness of a mountain landscape, for example, has an unsettling effect on our reasonable perception. Something happens which transcends the boundaries. Kant referred to this phenomenon as the sublime. For Blake such an experience was anything but exceptional: he saw infinity in things.

In a way, this is where modern art begins. Perspectivist construction is gradually abandoned, as a result of which the difference between the foreground and the background is blurred. Things lose their confines, and the mathematical model makes way for vision and gesture.

Blake was absolutely unzeitgemss: he literally did not fit the measure of his times: an untimely stranger, an anachronism. Before Blake it was unthinkable that the graphic arts were judged in terms of their expressive abilities: the brush was more flexible than the burin. Moreover, graphic artists, etchers and engravers were in the first place craftsmen, who simply copied the work of another artist. Blake succeeded in fusing verbal and pictorial expression in a completely new way, producing a modern emblem capable of providing insight to those susceptible to its meaning. He was a visionary extraordinarily aware of a spiritual dimension in our perception. To him, perception was a faculty that served poetic genius, by which he meant not the romantic ego, but Mind, the Maker, himself. The Maker himself beheld him, he felt, as in a mirror.

Few documents on the life of William Blake have survived. His image was already distorted shortly after his death. Tobias Churton has stripped his biography of numerous ides reues that clouded that image, allowing Blake to emerge from his work against the backdrop of an age marked by revolutions and modernization. It is a brilliant and illuminating book with a personal touch that invites further reading, as Churton generously shares with his readers his pansophical grasp of rejected knowledge.

Frank van Lamoen

Frank van Lamoen (b.1959) is Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Amsterdams Stedelijk Museum. Together with Geurt Imanse and curator Frits Keers, he organized the exhibition Kazimir Malevich: drawings from the collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation (1997). Frank is co-author (with Geurt Imanse) of the remarkable Russian Avant-Garde: The Khardzhiev Collection (nai010, 2014). Described by the Stedelijks Director, Ann Goldstein, as an incomparable document, it was published in 2013 by the Stedelijk Museum.

He has published articles on alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, and Jacob Bhmes followers in Holland, and has compiled the first Dutch selection from the work of Giordano Bruno. He has contributed to a quarter of a century of prestigious publications of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, concerning the Hermetic textual tradition and the works of Jacob Bhme, including Jacob Bhmes Weg in die Welt (Amsterdam, In de Pelikaan, 2007).

It was a girl called Val who introduced me to William Blake. That was back in 1979. She was in the Brasenose College Christian Union and I was a fellow Theology student struggling with unorthodox ideas and a desire to be lauded as a poet. Val thought I should have a look at Mona Wilsons 1927 Blake biography, as the things I was saying reminded her of things shed read in the book. I think Val was as concerned for Blakes salvation as she was for mine. I remember picking up the paperback and being quite struck by the cover image: the Thomas Phillips portrait of Blake aged about 50. The modestly attired artist-poet had large wide eyes that focused on something elevated beyond the frame. Whatever compelled his gaze rendered an honest face alive with inspiration. I flicked through the pages, packed with long extracts of verses, and put it down again. It looked like hard work.