William Blake and Politics
As you know, I am a great admirer of the English visionary poet and artist William Blake. “Disciple” might be too strong a word for that in the same sense that Nietzsche considered himself a “disciple of the god Dionysus”. I am too much the critical spirit to be comfortable with discipleship.
Nonetheless, I recognise the value of discipleship as an important stage in the course of a life, as an apprenticeship is an important phase in life. But one does oneself and one’s teachers great wrong to remain a perpetual disciple. Not even Jesus or Buddha expected their disciples to remain disciples and nestlings forever, but to learn to soar on their own wings.
Or, as Nietzsche put it — the three metamorphoses from a camel to a lion to a child.
“You Create the Reality You Know”: Life as Art
There is an obvious implication to Seth’s constantly re-iterated insistence that “you create the reality you know”, and it is one which is also implicated in the so-called “measurement problem” in Quantum Mechanics. If it is true that “you create the reality you know”, then we are all artists, individually and collectively.
But that is no more than to say, with William Blake, that the “Poetic Genius” is the “true man”, and that imagination is the life of this “true man”.
The Spectral Order: “Economy of Ghosts”
Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness — Naomi Klein
I read a great article by Naomi Klein in this morning’s Guardian, “Climate change is the fight of our lives...” As I’ve found with Klein’s other writings, she often touches upon some very profound issues of the human condition and has a talent for summarising them in memorable turns of phrase. An “economy of ghosts” is a great turn of phrase that is packed full of significance.
The Chrysalis 