The Light Within
To see things as they really are, the eye must catch fire. In fact, there needs to be a full sensuous awakening.
‘Unless the eye catch fire, The God will not be seen
Unless the ear catch fire, The God will not be heard
Unless the tongue catch fire, The God will not be named
Unless the heart catch fire, The God will not be loved
Unless the mind catch fire, The God will not be known.’
William Blake, Pentecost
The practicality, the awakening, of the life of the soul on fire. Blake ‘got it’. The awakening to the aliveness of life.
‘If poems touch our full humanness, can they quicken awareness and bolster respect for this ravaged resilient earth we live on? Can poems help, when the times demand environmental science and history, government leadership, corporate and consumer moderation, non-profit activism, local initiatives?’
Yes!
The pleasures of literature and poetry are integral parts of the all-out response we need.
In The Song of the Earth, writer and Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate made the eye-catching claim that poetry could save the world. Our world, that is, the human world. Of no concern to nature itself. But of interest to us, I think. The planet will go on for as long as the sun continues to shine. We, on the other hand, are in need of some inspiration to keep us going.
And there is inspiration aplenty in the work of William Blake. Blake wrote this about his poetic visions:
‘I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.’
Blake is rejecting the flatlands of a one-dimensional rationality, incorporating the single vision within the fourfold whole, embracing the naturalistic within the sacred, the world as a spiritual whole.
In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
Which reminds me of a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein. The logical positivists, who made the bits and pieces atomism of the mechanistic age the height of philosophical virtue, claimed Wittgenstein as one of their own. His Tractatus became the textbook of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s own reaction to them was cool. Moritz Schlick, their leader, sort contact with Wittgenstein. ‘To persuade Wittgenstein to attend these meetings Schlick had to assure him that the discussion would not have to be philosophical; he could discuss whatever he liked. Sometimes, to the surprise of his audience, Wittgenstein would turn his back on them and read poetry. In particular – as if to emphasize to them, as he had earlier explained to von Ficker, that what he had not said in the Tractatus was more important than what he had – he read them the poems of Rabindranath Tagore … whose poems express a mystical outlook diametrically opposed to that of the members of Schlick’s circle’ (Monk 1990: 243).
The poetry of Earth is never dead ... - John Keats.
Another great figure from literature, E.M. Forster, saw the encroachment of the machine and of mechanical modes of thought, and feared the consequences in terms of an increasing deracination, displacement, ugliness, the ‘red rust’ of the industrial wasteland creeping into the countryside. (Howard’s End p 355). For Forster, this ugliness denoted the loss of love and affection from place, the investing of hopes in a purposeless materialism abstracted from place.
Forster’s Howards End is a powerful statement against materialist reductionism and the megamachine that it builds, supports and rationalises:
‘It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?’
Forster Howard's End p 30
That light within, I take to be affection, intuition, the inner light of spiritual liberty. Human beings are not just reasoning beings but sensing, feeling, and intuiting beings who come alive in response to the sensuous would that enfolds and sustains them. Turn the world into an objective, external datum to be dissected, analysed and theorised, and we get the megamachine – a world enclosed in instrumental reason. A world that extinguishes the inner light. We could possibly survive in that external landscape, but we would assuredly die in the inner landscape.
In The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster took the technocratic utopia and turned it inside out. In this book Forster describes a future world state in which the surface of the earth has been abandoned and humanity lives underground. Individuals live alone in identical rooms, each in connection with all through television contact. ‘The Machine’ supplies every need at the push of a button. It is a world of synthetic food, synthetic clothing, synthetic culture … of synthetic human beings who do no work. On the odd occasion when individuals leave their rooms, they are conveyed on moving platforms and airships. The minds of these individuals have become passive and receptive, their bodies have become torpid and feeble. It is a world which is all quantity and which is wholly lacking in the qualitative dimension supplied by the human factor. The earth unified by 'the Machine', which has long escaped human control and comprehension and has come to be venerated as a supra-human force:
"The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine."
It is time to heed the warning that many writers have delivered since the nineteenth century. The suffocation of human beings by the structures they have built derives from an alienated system of production which turns human creations against human creators and invests them with existential significance. That suffocating alienation is incorporated into the things of the built environment.
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
We risk becoming orphans of our technology, being made homeless in a world of our own making. In fact, we already have been disinherited and displaced, the disembodied mind cut off from the sensuous world creating a machine would cut off from the sources of life.
The green belt in my own industrial town of St Helens is now being opened up for ‘development’ – ‘jobs, growth and investment’ (the very priorities that created the industrial wasteland in the first place).
‘Now is the time’ to use green belt for development, says senior councillor
Cllr Fulham added: “This is the first time that Green Belt land has been released in St Helens, and now is the time. If we do not capture and shape the growth open to us then the investment, jobs and homes will go elsewhere and in these volatile times that’s not a price worth paying.”
http://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/news/14918374.___Now_is_the_time____to_use_green_belt_for_development__says_senior_councillor/
A couple of years ago now, St Helens returned to its old motto of ‘Out of the Earth came Light’. This return had nothing to do with rekindling ‘the light within’; it was a celebration of the town’s coal mining heritage born of desperation for the return of industrial jobs long since gone. ‘It gives us hope for the future’, one person said. Out of the earth came a whole lot of global warming, was my response.
The sorry tale is here: Flourish Well or Abandon Hope
And I’ll stand by every word of scorn and contempt I uttered there, and pity the desperate people clinging to false hopes, so impoverished in their imagination that they have no better vision of the future than working at the coal-face, regardless of social and ecological consequences.
D.H. Lawrence, son of a miner, saw not ‘progress’ in industrialisation, only ugliness.
‘The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile— It was ugliness which betrayed the spirit of man, in the nineteenth century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.’
D.H. Lawrence, Nottinghamshire and the Mining Countryside, Late Essays and Articles, vol 2
‘The blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?'
'Merrie England! Shakespeare’s England! No, but the England of today … It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead – but dead! Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half … Ah, God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship anymore! It is just a nightmare.’
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
An authentic freedom requires a recognition of limits and boundaries, the bonds we have with others and with nature. To the extent that human beings are natural beings, we function and flourish in accordance with the laws of nature, one such law being that the health of anything depends upon an appreciation of limits, others involving recognising recognition of purpose, interdependence ... Modern men and women have bought into the seductive lie that freedom involves a life without restraint, that a life of freely determined choices and satisfaction of desires is good, and that there can be no negative consequences from such a freedom. Addicted to the pursuit of a freedom defined in such libertarian terms, 'free' individuals have come to be enslaved by the negative consequences of the actions, becoming mere cogworkers in a purposeless mechanical order.
'Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.'
That word 'purpose' again, the word that keeps cropping up in all my favourite writers. We have been living in an age of purposeless materialism, and it shows.
Forster wrote well on Lawrence:
‘His dislike of civilisation was not a pose … He hated it fundamentally, because it has made human beings conscious, and society mechanical. Like Blake and the other mystics, he condemns the intellect with its barren chains of reasoning and its dead weights of information; he even hates self-sacrifice and love. What does he approve of? What does he approve of? Well, the very word ‘approve’ would make him hiss with rage, it is so smooth and smug, but he is certainly seeking the forgotten wisdom, as he has called it; he would like instinct to re-arise and connect men by ways now disused …’
From Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster
Isn’t it obvious that we will never get change, real change for the better, unless we rekindle ‘the light within?’ That social movements seeking to transform the human world need a vision that inspires effort, motivates actions, unites and obligates people in a common cause? Scientific knowledge of the factual world allied to the technical know-how for manipulating matter on or about the world’s surface gives people the ability to do things; it doesn’t make them want to do things. That is a matter of addressing motivations and creating the will, inspiring, turning on the inner light. That's the great insight of peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri, when he describes how his 'desire and will' were 'turned' and 'moved' 'by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.' (Dante, The Comedy, Paradiso 33.143-45). We had better understand just what it is that has the power to do that. I'll tell you what doesn't - the new idols of capital, money, commodities, nation states, bureaucratic power, external regulation, legislation - all born of despair, the despair of half-corpses who see no option but to take the bribe and go further down the road of 'progress' and its false prospectus.
There is hope, in true Love, in coming to touch the earth as new again. Dante again:
'By such a curse as theirs none is so lost that the eternal Love cannot return as long as hope maintains a thread of green.
Dante Purgatorio III 133-135
We need to put the worlds of fact and value, quantity and quality back together, generate a world view that integrates reason with our other faculties so that thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuiting work in tandem in the one responsive body. Come out of the despair of the economics of endless accumulation of material quantity, and start working within the motivational economy, the moral economy. With these ways of being and knowing working in harness, we become sensitive to the qualitative aspects of the world around us.
“There is a new vision emerging demonstrating how we can solve problems and at the same time create a better world, and it all depends on collaboration, love, respect, beauty, and fairness.”
Constance Falk, In Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, 2011, pages 329–330.
That’s the view of ecological virtue I hold, integrating reasoning, sensing, feeling and intuiting within an ecologically sensible character. To act well requires the creation of the right kind of character within the right kind of social relations. Without that, we will continue to resort to external compulsion, institutional restraint and a sense of moral duty and obligation. But we know that these things have not been sufficient in bringing about the required transformation, merely regulating the problem from the outside. To be effective, reason, ethics, law and institutional action require that human agents develop the character that enables them to respond to evidence, facts, and moral appeals, doing the right thing as a matter of essential being rather than outer persuasion and external force. I see an ecological society of volunteers rather than conscripts compelled to ‘save the world.’ A genuinely ecological approach proceeds from a materially envisioned future, projecting an ideal that is immanent in the real sensorial present. It is an approach that awakens to the sentience and sensibility of other beings and bodies in the sensuous world that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us.
In arguing against a world totally enclosed and encompassed by institutions, systems and technologies, in appreciation of the sounds, tastes and visions other than those we have created, the intention is to enrich reason rather than repudiate it. The challenge is to recover the purported connection between reason and freedom by connecting the rational faculty with the faculties of sensing, feeling and intuiting and restoring the mind to the land. My intention is to revalue reason as an earthly intelligence, allowing reason to be responsive to the manifold voices of the sensuous world.
Our sensing bodies integrate thinking, sensing, feeling and intuiting. These faculties have coevolved in communion, communication and cooperation with other organisms within the biosphere as a living entity. Since this is so, it is the Earth that remains the end point of our most abstract reasonings, the living Earth looking back at us in the mediated form of our concepts and calculations.
Our reason, encased in the form of technique, control and manipulation through institutions and systems, has alienated us from the sensory world whilst removing us from our own senses, even whilst giving us power, technique and knowledge of seemingly greater range and potency. The idea of Gaia as a living, self-regulating biosphere indicates the inadequacy of such conceptual, technical and institutional abstractions. We are both ‘of’ and ‘in’ the Earth as a living entity. Gaia is no scientific abstraction or cybernetic model, it is our own sensing body. Knowing Gaia from within, we see the world as greater than anything we can hope to comprehend and control through our reason.
But here we still are, knowing we need the 'degrowth' economy if we are to have any kind of a future worth having, yet still being seduced in our dependency upon external processes by promises of 'jobs' growth and investment' - things worshipped all the more in their absence. It's a world of dependency, a world of despair, a world of needy people in need of saviours - jobs, money, technology...
I compare progress to a car ride, the kids in the back asking endlessly, ‘are we there yet?’ Yes, we are there. We’ve been there a long time. This is what ‘progress’ looks like. And if you don’t like it, it’s time to go some place else. Because this is it.
Lewis Mumford titled his book The Myth of the Machine for this reason, the power of the Megamachine is not merely physical, an external imposition, it is mental – it is based on a bribe and a seduction, the promise of all manner of good things should you serve the machine. And in that service, human beings have been reduced to cogworkers, their productive and creative qualities stultified. But, as the machine starts to fail, the bribe is losing its power. With the promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’ come warnings of an austerian straightjacket for years to come. The future becomes no more than a dismal present enlarged for all times.
Capitalism is based not merely on material scarcity, but on a psychic scarcity. The Megamachine as the disembodied mind at the end of its tether. A psychic prison that embraces the very subjectivies of the captives that they no longer see the bars on the cage. This is how it ends.
But the myth that Mumford referred to was the belief that the Megamachine which dominates our lives is all powerful and cannot be resisted. We can refuse the bribe, and stand up as citizens instead of submitting to the status of cogworkers.
But where are the citizens in all of this? They are in despair, reduced to dependency upon impersonal economic mechanisms and processes of trade, employment and investment. ‘Half-corpses, all of them’, wrote D.H. Lawrence. That view at least has the optimistic implication that they may, still, be half-alive. They need to awaken, come alive.
"So we must realize this: the suicidal framing story that dominates our world today has no power except the power we give it by believing it. Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do."
Brian D. McLaren
‘Now is the time’ for development of the green belt, say St Helens’ councillors. ‘Jobs’ growth and investment’ is the promise. ‘Economic growth’ remains the anti-politics of governments around the world. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets’, wrote Marx. That’s our god. That’s where the wasteland begins. ‘Now is the time' for Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972). Now is the time for building William Blake’s Jerusalem in our green and pleasant land.
Who are the builders? Where are the builders? Where is the home you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?
Lines from Roszak (1972 ch 9) Roszak draws on Blake, but the 'wasteland' of his book comes from T.S. Eliott, who took it straight from Dante ... (my favourites are all as one).
Under the despotism of Urizen, the life of the senses decays, "vegetates." We fall to the empirical lie.
We are led to Believe a Lie When we see with, not through the Eye Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
"Our infinite senses" shrink and grow opaque. The extreme limit of this opacity, this materialization and objectification of sense life, Blake calls "Satan." Psychically and morally, the shrinkage is experienced as "Selfhood": the alienated identity "shut in narrow doleful form." Philosophically, the shrinkage is experienced as the "truth" of the scientific worldview: the world as seen by a dead man's eyes.
The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix'd into furrows of death . .
The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, clos'd up & dark, Scarcely beholding the Great Light, conversing with the ground:
The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out True Harmonies & comprehending great as very small. . .
To such diminished consciousness, nature becomes Blake's Vala, the "Shadowy Female" (the veil: the delusion: physically Out There but lacking moral and poetic significance: Maya, who deludes by claiming to be the totality).
No breaking Urizen's tyranny, then, but by cleansing "the doors of perception":
Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect integrity, At will Contracting into Worms or Expanding into Gods, And then, behold! what are these Ulro Visions ..
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."
But, . . Urizen is also the Zoa of physical power. That is his trump card. Urizen is builder of the "dark Satanic mills," architect of vast geometric structures, imperial cities: master of the "Mundane Shell," genius of the machines: "the Loom of Locke ... the Waterwheels of Newton . . . cruel Works of many Wheels, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic . . ."
This is Urizen-Satan's spell over mankind: "To Mortals thy Mills seem everything."
Alienated Reason brings vast technical power—even though" alienated Reason is
An Abstract objecting power that Negatives everything.
This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reason,
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.
And yet Urizen dares to teach, can only teach that the Spectre ("the Reasoning Power") is the whole person:
"Lo, I am God," says Urizen. "The Spectre is the Man. The rest is only delusion & fancy."
But of course, "the Spectre is in every Man insane, brutish, deform'd . . ." That is why (here is Blake's great insight) Urizen's will to power is grounded wholly in despair! He sits among his vast works "folded in dark despair," knowing nothing of purpose, value, meaning . . . except to build more, subdue more; knowing nothing of Eternity, but only of time's bondage and the absurdity of mortality.
... he stood in the Human Brain,
And all its golden porches grew pale with his sickening light, No more Exulting, for he saw Eternal Death beneath. Pale, he beheld futurity: pale, he beheld the Abyss . . ,
Stern Urizen beheld . . .
if perchance with iron power
He might avert his own despair.
No living motivation here: only the frenzy of desperation, the fever pitch of anxiety: the panicky flight from meaninglessness: keeping busy, conquering, achieving ... on the brink of the void. As in Beckett's Godot: the only purpose left is to pass the time . . . any mad project will do ... keep your mind off it ... think up a game . . . make up a task . . . something spectacular . . . rockets to the moon. Camus missed a nice irony: Sisyphus finishes by inventing himself ingenious machines to roll the rock. "Progress": the mechanization of absurdity.
The regime of Urizen-Satan is despair, despair, despair. Where Urizen appears in Blake's work, the word is on every page. Single vision is despair: clever-minded despair. Blake has the matter by the throat: what Marx and all the later ideologues failed to see: once endorse scientific-industrial values, and the struggle for justice is pitched on the edge of Urizen's wasteland.
Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends 1972
Development, they say. I see only despair.