It is the aesthetic element for Blake which moves in the sphere of existential freedom; it is the ethical element which is the spectator, under the bondage of the law and the knowledge of good and evil. We begin, then, with the view of an orthodox or moral ‘good’, founded on an acceptance of the world out there, contrasted with the submerged ‘evil’ desires of man to live in a world that makes more human sense. This vision of life turns out to be, when examined, a cyclical vision, completed by more elaborate cycles. But in addition to the cyclical vision there is also a dialectic, a separating-out of the two opposing human and natural visions. The categories of these visions are not moral good and evil, but life and death, one producing the real heaven of creation and the other the real hell of torture and tyranny. We have met one pole of this dialectic already in the conception of Satan, or death, as the only possible goal of all human effort from one point of view.
The other pole is the impulse to transform the world into a human and imaginative form, the impulse that creates all art, all genuine religion, all culture and civilization. This impulse is personified by Blake as Los, the spirit of prophecy and creativity The aesthetic image, springing from love and self-knowledge, alone is real and free. The act by which we maintain contact with existence must be one of love. It must be one which relates all images or ideas, joyfully or painfully, to our consciousness . It must be an act of self- knowledge.
There is only one world, but there are two kinds of things to be done with it. There is, first, what Blake calls the natural vision, which assumes that the objective world is essentially independent of man.
This vision becomes increasingly hypnotized by the automatic order and tantalizing remoteness of nature, creates gods in the image of its mindless mechanism (to be unmasked later), and rationalizes all evils and injustices of existence under some such formula as ‘Whatever is, is right’.
In extreme forms, this alienating vision becomes the reflection of the death wish in the soul, or soulless almost human pathologicals. It develops annihilation wars like those of Blake’s own time. Nature becomes the term for the given world in all its limitations, a world ruled by money and the forces of alienation which transform men into things, a world ruled by endless inner and outer divisions. The Natural Man for Blake is the man who accepts without question this world of division in which the rule of money and the forces of the market are an aspect of a science which ignores all qualitative differences and reduces phenomena to a purely quantitative level. We know not that we lie to ourselves.
Then there is the human vision, which takes the objective world to be the ‘starry floor’, the bottom of reality, its permanence being important only as a stable basis for human creation. The goal of the human vision is ‘Religion, or Civilized Life such as it is in the Christian Church’. This is a life of pure creation, such as is ascribed in Christianity to God, and which for Blake would participate in the infinite and eternal perspective of God.
The reality of a tree does not lie in the mere image it casts on the retina of wise man or fool equally, but in the act of looking. It is not as a thing looked at, but as an element of an act of the mind, that its reality is determined. If we look past the screen of the eyes into the skulls of the wise man and the fool, to find how the tree shows when its image is cast on the skies of the mind, we shall see very different things. The wise man sees a swarm of energies have assailed the tree, like sailors in the rigging of a ship. They have snapped branches and leaves off here and there, they have rapidly added others and run wires of rhythm through the slumping structure, they have woven into its textures the silk of the mind, they have pulled the skies down over it and penetrated it with lustrous imaginations.
And following the mood it evokes or to which it joins itself, it becomes the bright house of lovers whose kiss takes the rhythm of its swinging boughs, or else some cloudy violence of bursting sunlight sets it charging an army of spears or makes it the challenging sky of some murderous anger. There is no end. The senses like waves foam, clash, break, and foam, where there is a spiritual tide, a moon of beauty, lugging them along. Infinitely they mix, infinitely they knit cross-suggestions of tangled color and shape.
It depends on the creative will how deeply and how widely this mass of material, restlessly merging, restlessly separating, is to be conquered: how compactly it is to be suddenly compressed into the definition of form without its delicate vitality being destroyed. Nietzsche who also saw that freedom could only be proclaimed in a universe for which the aesthetic fact transcended all others.
The problem is: Here is the tree, here am I – am I to become the tree? Or is the tree to become I? For in the endless conflict of I and all that is not I, which is also the agitated point where Being and Becoming merge, there can be no compromise. Either my mind is moving towards greater cohesion, power and beauty, or it is becoming more abstract and inert. Either I am the creature of the image or I am the lord of it. Either I am a slave, my spirit a crawling mass of disintegrating relations like a maggoty corpse, or I am king ofthe sun, a demiurge, picking up the dull matter of earth and scattering it in clear and starry ecstasy about me.
A way to penetrate deeper into unity is to clarify and tighten our conception of the married opposites: Being and Becoming, Life and Death, Force and Inertia, Joy and Torment, Individuality and God, Spirit and Matter etc.. Until then these are undigested flotsom, not a dynamic factor in its unity.
Always thought is two, and always thought desires to be one; and so always thought will have a division and an agony at its heart, as well as a unity and a joy. All antinomies are resolved in love, in faith, in acts which affirm life.
Blake was uniquely fearless in portraying the terrible sense of the division of the soul, its dazed and agonized realization that it is lost in a universe of crumbling forms, that disintegration is assailing it from all quarters while the primal schism remains unknit at its core.
Therefore go and create.