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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from The Body is the API of the Soul
  • Riffing on Blake
    • Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
from Weird Studies/Courses/Kubrick
  • Quote Blake's Tyger on symmetry
from Full STEAM Ahead
  • Opposed in Blake and in Weird Studies world.
from Fearful Symmetry
from William Blake vs. The World
  • Book by John Higgs on Blake
from William Blake/2002 email
    • Found in an old mail dump (to who??)
    • At 03:20 PM 11/27/2002 -0500, P wrote:
    • So as long as we're talking about Blake, let me throw out a > Blake question that I'd like to get opinions on. One of > the most famous disseminations of Blake is the song "Jerusalem", > which includes the phrase "dark Satanic mills". That phrase > is often alluded to be writers, generally to connote the > "mills" that emerged in England during the Industrial Age. ... > This interpretation of the phrase drives my wife nuts. My > Inestimable Treasure, who majored in 19-th century English > literature, insists that this is not what the phrase means > at all. She says that Blake frequently uses the word "mill" > in his writing, and he is not talking about smoke-belching > factories at all. She says that Blake has his own vocabulary > for many things, based on a general constructed-fictional-world > that pervades the works of Blake, and Blake very frequently > co-ops ordinary words and uses them in his own highly > ideosyncratic fashion. "Mills" is one of those words, and > what he's talking about are "mills" in the mind, evidently > an image of little wheels (like windmills) rotating around > and around in your head, or something like that.
    • I would hate to second-guess an English major, but in my limited understanding, the point of poetry is to compress many meanings into the same few words. Otherwise, you might as well use prose, or first-order predicate calculus. I'd assume that in Blake's mind the images of the psychological notion of mills and the actual dark mills in England were closely joined; and he used that in his poem. If we have to choose one or the other -- well, Blake was certainly more interested in the battle between different modalities of mind than in industrial reform (he probably never saw a mill town, although he saw plenty of other forms of misery in London -- referenced in other poems). On the other hand, the context of "Jerusalem" is about various qualities of England itself (and the poem has become something a national anthem, which seems odd to me):
    • And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?
    • And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills?
    • So he could be talking about actual dark satanic mills. On the other other hand, this England doesn't seem to have much to do with the actual England but is yet another projection of Blake's elaborate system of meaning.
    • While googling around I found this verse from Blake's Jerusalem (not the same as the song which is actually the preface to Milton) which interested me:
    • I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.
    • Interesting because it once again takes a swipe at Newton, and mentions "cogs tyrannic" which are presumably what run the dark satanic mills. Apparently Blake has a theory of machinery, in which some cogs are tyrannical and others revolve in harmony and peace. Since many of us here are builders of mental machinery (software) I wonder what Blake would think of how our cogs revolve?
from Luvah
  • One of Blake's Four Zoas, generally thought to represent emotion and compassion.
from John Zorn
from Urizen
from Weird Studies/The Beauty and the Horror
  • Yay Blake (they read The Tyger)
from Truth Takes a Vacation
from Weird Studies/JFM philosophy
  • To JFM (and many others, including William Blake ), the causal world is cold, lifeless, dull, incapable of generativity, and the imaginal realm is another plane on which all the stuff we care about exists, including ourselves (as minds).
from Hakim Bey/Satanic Mills
  • He's making an argument against technology, in part by resurrecting older ones (Luddites, Blake, the Lunar Society romantics like Coleridge and Wordsworth).
from obedience
from Weird Studies/Request List
from Free Play
  • Another William Blake quote: "Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules."
from LWMap/Being a Robust Agent
  • Let me try and unpack that feeling. First, it reminds me of William Blake's dictum:
from Stances, a Catalog
from Weird Studies/From Hell
  • Hm well didn't get tons of new insights here, but this is a work I know well. Once again they fail to mention William Blake (who sees Gull in a vision towards the end of the book and inspires his Ghost of a Flea).
from Deleuze
  • Sounds William Blake ish to me. Also resonates with the situated action critique of planning and AI goals somehow.
    • The AI/rationalist model is: you have a representation of some goals, and a representation of reality (via the senses), your executive machine diffs these and use the differences to drive actions that are intended to reduce the differences to zero.
    • The real problem with this is that it's entirely representational and ignores embodiment.
from mysterianism
  • by William Blake
    I've wondered why the WS guys don't talk about Blake much, given that he's one of the loudest champions of Imagination in English literature. Maybe this is why? Blake is anticlerical and JFM is a weird kind of Catholic.
from Joel Kovel
  • A radical therapist and author, had a Marxist critique of psychotherapy. Also had a good essay on William Blake (in his collection The Radical Spirit)
from Obstinancy
  • Aside from Blake, the other obstinate man that comes to mind is Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, recently cancelled, a Macarthur Fellow and completely socially unacceptable person. I had some personal dealings with him back in the day, including having to rescue a few female friends from his attentions.
from Anitya
  • I came to this term because I was listening to a Shpongle track that sampled Terence McKenna attributing to Blake something like "nothing lssts, but nothing is lost". I was suspicious, and for sure, McKenna seems to have made that up. Blake did say, however:
    • He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sunrise
from quarantine reading 2020
from Free Play
from conflict theory

  • William Blake

    • Without Contraries is no progression Opposition is True Friendship
      • – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
from Georges Bataille
  • Has the human being ever, for a single second, been able to discover an expression of liberty which rises above misery? In an eloquent world where logic reduces each thing to a certain order, William Blake spoke, on his own, the language of the Bible or the Vedas. By so doing he managed to restore life to original energy. So the truth of Evil which is essentially a rejection of subservience, is his truth. He is one of us, singing in the tavern and laughing with the children. He is never a ‘sad sire’, moralising and rational, who looks after himself and his money and slowly yields to the sadness of logic, without energy.

William Blake

30 Oct 2021 - 17 Jun 2023
Open in Logseq
    • One of the most striking things about Blake is his genius at crystallization. – Fearful Symmetry
    • Urizen is the principle of excessively cutting intellect, a destructive or negative intellect so solidified or impacted that it doesn't allow for any feeling or bodily rest or richness or generosity of imaginative space.
      • – Allen Ginsberg, Your Reason and Blake's System, p20
    • All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight. (Plate 4, E34)
      • – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

    • Readings

      • William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever, Higgs
        • Short and sturdy introduction, read it a 2nd time to refresh myself.
        • I liked this framing:
          • Blake was born in the Age of Enlightenment, with rejected the medieval idea that our most important value was faith. Instead, reason was declared to be primary...For Blake, this wasn't going far enough. Reason was important, but it was only a small, bounded part of what the mind was capable of. Blake recognized that it was imagination, not reason, that was fundamental, because reason was only a product of the imagination.
        • "Imagination" in Blake's use being something more than mere fantasy, more like the divine power of the mind to create.
        • Ends with Blake's relevance to British culture and self-image in age of Brexit, which is fine but a bit outside of my concerns.
      • Blame it on Blake, Rabinowitz
      • Nice intro to Urizen

    • "Cogs Tyrannic"

      • I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.
        • – Jerusalem
      • It՚s not that “machines are bad because they have parts that move each other”, although that is certainly a possible reading. He՚s not an engineer, so these wheels aren՚t real wheels, they are metaphors for the human spirit. It isn՚t so terrible if a gear turns another gear, but it is terrible if a human is solely driven by external forces and has no freedom or autonomy.
      • OTOH – Blake is sensitive to the metaphorical resonances, that if we build machines with parts that “compel” others, then that relationship is probably to be found in human relationships as well.