The day Blake came to get me
Because poetry is alive
Hi, friends,
I want to tell you about an experience I had a couple of months ago. I haven’t been sure whether to share this experience. At the least, I wanted to keep it to myself for a little while. When you have an experience that makes you sound a bit mad, I’ve found it’s usually best to sit on it for a while.
I was with my classmates on the MA I’m studying for, Poetics of Imagination, close-reading poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. We’d been at it for an hour or more, not really getting anywhere—making clever little graduate-student comments about cadence and allegory.
Then I started to feel very cold. More than cold: chilled to the bone. I was shivering. And I was somewhere else—meaning, no longer in a room on an arts-school campus in Devon. I was somewhere very far away, farther than I had ever been, and alone. What it felt like, more than anything, was that I was alone on the dark side of the moon, in the magnetic field where all ideas and stories are born.
I hung there for a few moments, terrified, before speaking up. When I did, I found that many of my classmates were having a similar experience of their own.
And we’re far from the first people to have encountered something like this while reading Blake. Talking to The Paris Review in 1966, Allen Ginsberg described a journey Blake had taken him on, beginning with an auditory hallucination: Blake’s voice in the room, speaking his own poem, “like God had a human voice”. Soon, he started seeing evidence everywhere of “a living hand”—evidence that “some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me”…
Not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God… What I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body… my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise.
Yes, I thought, reading this. That’s it! My experience was different to Ginsberg’s—darker. More frightening. But like Ginsberg’s it was a breaking through, a homecoming to a staggering cosmic truth that had been there all along, just waiting for me to perceive it.
Ginsberg describes trying to go about his life after this visionary experience. He toddled along to the Columbia bookstore, where he saw the same strange old characters he knew from going to that same bookstore every day. Nothing strange. But nothing could have been more strange. Looking at one familiar sales clerk, he says:
I looked in his face and I suddenly saw like a great tormented soul […] all of a sudden I realized that he knew also, just like I knew. And that everybody in the bookstore knew, and that they were all hiding it! They all had the consciousness…
Meaning, Ginsberg says, that on some level we’re all carrying this enormous cosmic truth, and trying very hard not to look at it, not to show that we know it, because if we did it would shatter us and the whole human world we’ve created, our relations, our businesses, everything. In other words, Ginsberg says,
The position that everybody was in was ridiculous, everybody running around peddling books to each other. Here in the universe! Passing money over the counter, wrapping books in bags and guarding the door, you know, stealing books, and the people sitting up making accountings on the upper floor there, and people worrying about their exams walking through the bookstore, and all the millions of thoughts the people had…
This is how I’ve often felt since my own experience with Blake. Everybody (including me!) running around, eating shitty sandwiches, getting stuck in traffic, watching TV, talking about our attachment disorders, thinking Elon Musk matters. Here in the universe! And the power, the resonance of the experience Blake gave me, it isn’t fading. It’s like I’ve found a whole new wing to the house I was living in, and now that I know it’s there, I can’t unknow it.
I’m not quite sure how to straddle this experience and the demands of daily life. I think the difficulty of this straddling is exactly what makes it so easy to dismiss any kind of ‘visionary’ experience, even when you’re the one who had it. But I’m also convinced that the effort of trying—of keeping one foot in that other world—is vital, is everything. Because whatever’s in that other world, it’s exactly what we’re missing in this one.
And if you’re reading these letters, I suspect you probably agree.
With love from me, halfway into the otherworld, to you, likely halfway in it as well,
xx Ellie
Yup ... it really happened