Alan Jacobs

Ed Ruscha, Sin 

'Satan viewing the Ascent to Heaven' from The Paradise Lost of John Milton with illustrations by John Martin, London, 1846, pl. facing p.83. Mezzotint on steel, 19.6 cm x 15.3 cm. Photo: ©Royal Academy of Arts, London

Paul Ford: "The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel.” This would be a lot more convincing if Ford didn’t then go on to praise Mastodon, which is an earnest attempt to rebuild Babel, just by using stones from several different quarries. 

Who among us hasn’t met ChadGPT?

Culling my RSS feeds this afternoon, I was both saddened and annoyed to see how many museums that once had wonderful Tumblrs have abandoned them — almost certainly in favor of Instagram, which is a truly terrible environment for viewing art.

John Higgs’s William Blake vs the World is a real disappointment. Higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about Blake, he’s simply not willing to take Blake seriously. He wants to like Blake, and so he has to make him safe. The curators of the 2019 Blake Exhibition at the Tate Britain sought to diminish Blake to a merely political figure; Higgs wants to make him merely a proponent of “imagination.”

You can see the problems emerging in the first pages. Look, for instance, at these two sentences:

Blake himself recognised that the entities he saw weren’t ‘really there’ in the everyday sense. He knew that the people he was with did not see the things he saw.

Everything about this is confused. Of course Blake knew that others didn’t see what he saw — he talked about this all the time. Once he wrote to a friend, “What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” But Blake didn’t think that the "round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea” is really there and the "Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” aren’t really there. Indeed he thought something close to the opposite.

Higgs over and over again contrasts Blake’s visions to the “objectively true.” Blake wouldn’t have used the word “objectively” — and in general no one should, because it’s an incoherent concept — but if he had, he would have said that his vision of the Heavenly Host is more objectively true, more real, than his friend’s perception of a round disk of fire. As he wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue for an exhibition of his works,

A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.[mfn]I think this idea may underlie CSL's conceit, in The Great Divorce, that the denizens of Hell are vaporous and translucent, while the Blessed are infinitely more substantial. [/mfn]

Higgs doesn’t recognize this at all; by the end of the book (p. 342) he has reduced Blake’s magnificent visions to an example of thinking with the right hemisphere of the brain. But Blake wasn’t a proponent of a properly balanced holistic psychology; he was a visionary and a prophet. All his life he saw a rich, complex, glorious but also terrifying spirit world that he believed to be infinitely more real than what the rest of us perceive with our five senses. And he believed this with an absolute and unshakable conviction. Any genuine encounter with Blake has to begin by grasping that point; but that’s precisely what almost no one who writes about him is willing to do.

Paul Kingsnorth: 

Everybody is talking these days about the decline of the West, and with good reason. Some people think that Christianity should have something to say about this: that as the faith was the rock on which the West was built, so the faith should rebuild it again, or defend it against its enemies. We need a Muscular Christianity! they insist in the comment sections. Bring on the Christian knights! they shout on YouTube. But I don’t think this is how it works. When the last empire collapsed, the Christians of Europe weren’t trying to build, let alone defend, some construction called “Christendom.” They didn’t plan for the dome of St. Peter’s or the Battle of Lepanto. They were just trying to do the humblest and the only thing: to worship the true God, and to strip away everything that interfered with that worship. They took to the deserts to follow Christ and to battle the Enemy. Their work was theosis. They had crucified themselves as instructed. What emerged as a result, and what it turned into — well, that wasn’t up to them.

In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn is not that the external battle is never necessary; sometimes it very much is. But a battle that is uninformed by inner transformation will soon eat itself, and those around it. Why, after all, were the cave Christians so sought after? Because they were not like other people. Something had been granted to them, something had been earned, in their long retreats from the world. They had touched the hem. After years in the tombs or the caverns or the woods, their very unworldliness became, paradoxically, just what the world needed.