Heaven

Up before dawn

I never get up this early, but I did today. The first thing I read bothered me, and the second even more. Thomas Wright’s What’s for afters? is typical of the sort of ill-informed comments often tossed about regarding Blake:

My personal favourite is the Swedenborg-inspired heaven of William Blake. Only those capable of appreciating beauty are allowed into this dome of pleasure, Puritans and ascetics being unworthy of its splendours and the marvellous conversation of the angels.

Utter rubbish. Blake saw the afterlife as “going from one room into another,” and the gates of paradise as open to anyone who could forgive. Heaven was filled with argument, “mental fight” where people continued with the same force of will to impress themselves upon others. Blake didn’t suffer fools lightly, and some of his conjectures are quite humorous. It’s possible to be a learned fool, as he so amply expressed in his Descriptive Catalogue:

The Learned, who strive to ascend into Heaven by means of learning, appear to Children like dead horses, when repelled by the celestial spheres. The works of this visionary are well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things; the reason they have not been more attended to, is, because corporeal demons have gained a predominance; who the leaders of these are, will be shewn below. Unworthy Men who gain fame among Men, continue to govern mankind after death, and in their spiritual bodies, oppose the spirits of those, who worthily are famous; and as Swedenborg observes, by entering into disease and excrement, drunkenness and concupiscence, they possess themselves of the bodies of mortal men, and shut the doors of mind and of thought, by placing Learning above Inspiration, O Artist! you may disbelieve all this, but it shall be at your own peril.

One of Blake’s greatest heroes, Milton, was a Puritan. The young Blake railed against asceticism, but the old Blake railed against learning without inspiration. Dome of pleasure? That was Shelley's vision of heaven for Adonais, his elegy for Keats. It has nothing to do with Blake. Blake saw life in Heaven as struggle, just as life on earth is, though we do gain freedom from corporeal war there.

In Blake’s day, as in our own, “unworthy men” rule by shutting off the minds of humanity through hollow rhetoric; it isn’t learning that is the answer, but belief. Belief that there are great things, visionary spirits who have left a legacy worthy of study, belief in grand things. Heaven exists primarily through the active process of creating it each day. It isn’t a club that only a few can join, and I resent the implication that “only those who appreciate beauty” are allowed. Blake never said anything even remotely resembling that. Even of one of his worst detractors, Dr. Trusler, Blake offered a sarcastic apology: “I am terribly sorry you have fallen out with the spiritual world...”

It’s all about the inspiration, breathing in the world and expelling it tainted with our own feelings and thoughts. It becomes a thick space, when all the complexities of life draw in, as he said in his Public Address

Resentment for Personal Injuries has had some share in this Public Address But Love to My Art & Zeal for my Country a much Greater.

I would adopt his disclaimer for my own version of this Public Address.