Bill Drennan
In Psychological Time
Bill Drennan is author of a space fiction project, Hypoetics http://hypoetics.blogspot.com, a book of poetry, Flightpath Resistor (print version, Prosthetic Books, 2007; blog version, http://flightpathresistor.blogspot.com) & a book of short stories and sketches, Stories Short and Strange (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). He is a regular contributor to Otoliths, has other bits and pieces scattered here and there & is currently working on a play, Flotation Settlement, which is heading towards completion.
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In Psychological Time
The <other> worldly complications presented by William Blake are given to the consideration of certain aspects of a reality present in real-time, the cast-offs of an <alter-realistic?> psychological time broken into whirls & wheels; witness, for example, Blake’s Dantean spirals ghost-walking across Lambeth skies; radicals treading on Volney’s ruins; anchored to ordinariness by junctures, subjunctures & religio-political counterpoints of skeletal flight & other mechanisms whereby the Dark Lord Urizen <& His hirelings of the punchdrunk reasoning> are petrified, relatively speaking, in snowy grime & in policies of negating abstractions.
Butressed by two hundred year old props which Blake’s insight projected as timeless imperatives, Los illuminates the Gothic arch with a lamp, maybe to elevate the pain threshold, but cannot properly delineate the bounds of Beulah <even with the assistance Catherine & Enitharmon>. Between the living room & the other room, the spare room for departed souls, hang his words: How can it be that lightness should be wanting in my works, while in my life and constitution I am too light and aerial, is a paradox only to be accounted for by the things of another world. In the garden the naked lineaments of an overgrown Eden visited by Fuseli’s polyglottal curses & Beulah’s sweet delights which some are born to others to want. Copper-plated projections, by the Light of Blake’s Emanative sighs & Spectral contractions, are arranged heavy with said Light & the anthropomophized space of mental States.
Blake speaks of a reality cast in ever-organising Chaos, considering itself the Only Real. He saw what he saw & that was that. Tweet tweet. The whirling Void collects the Soot & city grime of the Parallel city of Golgonootha & rotates within & without a microcosm of cogs & tears. And the Sciences were fixd & the Vortexes began to operate … Spiritual War: the conglobing aggregation of minute particulars v the redemptive qualities of the Immortal Imagination; the mystical adoption of a curious & naïve position: why should honesty fear a knave? The propensity of Joy frustrated by the Waters of Materialism, flooded by the well-established denial of said Deluge – an illuminated denial: Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves/Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the human Brain./Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps/Thou neer shalt leave this cold expanse where watry Tharmas mourns.
No optical apparatus will magnify the particulars of the Mental Fight that refuse to bend to the paranoid-critical surreality of State Tricks; agents are cloakd in Nobodaddy’s membranous secrecy (No Secresy in Art [sic.]) & Urizen’s left-brained muscle, developed of reification & self-parodic insult, ushered by Empire’s naked Wings’ flight over Chaos, dividing it up, generating more Enclosures. Archontix. The Human Brain is not the ratio of interpretative effort, but a synthesiser of open & dignified Invention, as well as the inversion of those things which block dignity & good development: thou readst black where I read white. The psyche enforced by untrustworthy, unworthy mediators and paedo Prieshoods: They told me that the night & day were all I could see … And they inclos’d my infinite brain in a narrow circle.
Usurper of the throne of mind, Urizen wept, & the Blakean vision never stopped blowing Emanations & Spectres & others in Swelld & bloated General Forms, heavenly debris in puffed-out slow motion; an inner activity of mergers & disappearances; of expansive & comprehensive insights into the reality of Psychological Time. There are drunken floods of abstraction for the Children of Albion in the Ghettos of Stony Law & Debt; where the Imagination is on Drip, cut off & Seal’d in a no-fly zone. Fabulated flesh is dragged out of shape by the overly-magnetised limitations of cold, metallic Urizen’s False North. Frozen imagination. Stalks toughen or wilt & in shallow soil excuses are easy, the dark easily ignored; in the dank Grottos of His phoney caverns, the credit runs on Dream Interception. UnHoly Musculature is sent to collect with Nets of Religion – The Spectre is, in Giant man; insane, and most deform’d. Unwholesomeness licks him & with systematic deceit he can slip out of his shadow thru any door.
A speck drifts in the Mundane Shell, ideas bundled, bungled in a factional representation of a potential Wholeness; the Egg contains Adam & Satan & is surrounded by a myth-saturated Venn. Covered in Spunk & bioplasma, Satan & his Devourers chat up the Freudian sex drive with predictive gags & flighty discussions on the diagrammatical leanings of sexual Arousal; & then, prick-teasingly, betray Joy. War: a perverse Specterization of Ungratified Lineaments: brooder of tempests & destructive War/You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue!; & call it Balance & Vision; it is but the strap-on of dessicated power-Lust, the heavy artillery of Empire <or whatever> against Art. War is Money & Money is dying & needless Death is bloat’d with riches. An Empire-Denier asks, “How can it die that never existed?”, & steals away without an answer. Some say, “It is necessary”. Others: “It is Politic Foolery, Prostituted Polity.” The Empire did not end & the lion & wolf have not ceased.
Listening to all this reverse-scribed mirror-mythology about Gnomes & Faeries & Emanations & twisted Dark Lords & Organis’d Religions & Clos’d Senses – an Angel trumps, “Put them away for later for they are Heavy with the weight of Dead Faeries”. Copper Plates, codices standing upright in Bunhill Fields. Peckham Rye taken by a treeful of Angels, Felpham taken by the foot Angel Scholfield. From the beach, the mean sound of a horizon, vibrating with oceanic Scuds. The contours of land & the human psyche inseparable, Albion rises, a warped Vitruvian, dancing on the algorhythms of Urizen’s flattened domain. Urizen: self-invented, self-tyrannizing, self-clos’d, Tiriel-like, fashioned of, & doling out, dysfunctional unilateralism. Without Contraries is no Progression. The Illusion of Acquisition is no Illusion to Urizen’s blinded brain, & the Imagination is itself at war with His sleep-thieved encroachments, a self-argument for Blake to be sure. Beulah is waiting, soft, moony, narcotic, given in Mercy: The daughters of Beulah follow sleepers in all their Dreams/Creating Spaces lest they fall into Eternal Death.
But the fixed etiolated shadows create a death knot whereby interpretation drops & closes the book; the same metal book that Parabolic thought opens. Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made? Is it Noise fashioned of straight lines? Loud Rintrah-roars clap Anger, power-hungry clouds cry smoke for distilled Perceptions: Perceptive Organs closed their Objects close. There is no exclusive right to ‘god’. The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in its chains … the cunning of weak and tame minds.
Imagination denied is reality denied; Imagination, the Saviour Figure; Imagination against conjurations hell-bent on yet another brazen power-grab, whose Reasoning is but a crude Alibi for Perverse Imbalance; The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion; which disproportion <though held secretly by the unwired static of the air> can still be fought; the Imagination can see that it has been abused by the Great Archon; that uniqueness is Universal & has its own equilibrium: no-one thinks alike: the forms of all things are derived from their Genius. Each Anger takes its own form: reaction is annotated, dissolved in conflict that wanders the centuries, weary with Travail. Better to fuck than be screwed by the systems of the power-hungry, the unearned privileges of the ruddy-cheeked, purple-pissing periwigs.
It began with The Fall: a set-up, a con, a psychological hinderance & an ongoing Matrix of Sore Guilt: how my members pour down milky fear. The Artisan watches his craft flourish with Progress & Improvement, slips under Urizen’s <heavy> Rock, coils into the same dull round & leaks essence of a fluid life, another ‘little death’. Consider Sexual Organization & hide thee in the dust. I.e., go fuck yourself & lie with Serpentine Dissimulation. After Biblical name-dropping an Angel, suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep, dribbled “poo poo & pish” all over Exuberance – Exuberance is Beauty abandoned in the Abyss. ‘pressions are multiplied by Organised Innocence in Thought Factories (Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth), under the supervision of Enion-Sophia’s woven Spectre. “Holy God, don’t the Poor know any better?” asks an Angelic mediator of the Soul (tangled in one of the cogs of Blake’s ‘overcomplicated’ myth-making machine & then calls Oothoon a Whore & a C**t & swiftly, chastely, clips the wings of Flight & Desire (Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth). Leutha’s flower is pluck’d & crushd at birth.
The wonders of a Violated Cosmos: What is now proved was once, only Imagin’d. Things move on: from Alchemy to Chemistry, Behmen & Paracelsus to the mysticism of particle acceleration. Enion took an atom of space & opend its centre/Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. Blake’s Mundane Shell is a god-particled abridgement between the finite & the infinite <which is hid> & is given artistic form by contortions not so far removed from those of modern Physics. In the whirling clarity of the Blakean Imagination, ever multiplying, with Energy & honesty & directness, 3D is not enough. In the Electric Universe, God is Plasma & is Every Where. Infinity infiltrates the beautifully grotesque encrustation of the Mundane Shell from the outside-in & the inside-out. In Eternity All is Vision. Too much to see. Newton & the Administrators of the Solar System possess a snapshot & a ratio; as the Inner Space of visionary speculation continues to build Cities not yet embodied in Time & Space, satellites are seeded to intercept openings beyond the doors of perception; perception is one thing, perfection another, an impossible lack of rupture, an unfathomable wholeness; not a circle to contain, not circumfren’d energy compromised by State Hirelings & others of Geometric inclinations.
Now Urizen is impatient for a system; to make the Circle that His auto-divine Selfhood requires; for a schema that will deliver at system-critical speed: then pausing in deathlike silence/Time was Finished! Ah Sunflower! The Contract is not fullfilld ‘til Entropy is considered: What can be Created Can be Destroyed. Burn out. Half life. Sickness & Knavery. That which does not decay does not necessarily make the Honey Bee stronger, mutatis mutandis. The Metal of Urizen’s books are DU contaminated; his Concrete moulds turn’d to Lava <with uncontrolled particld heat>: “Bring me a Hot Code that I might find a <stagnant> Cistern to contain it, & the Waters <of Materialism> to cool & dilute it.” But the Blakean Imagination is more controlled than the death-affirming imbalance of Urizenic mind-fetters, cast-offs of Tharmas, Father of watery delusions, whose Light is absorbed in the escalation of brooding stone, <too-heavy> rocky masses frowning in the abysses revolving erratic/Round Lakes of fire in the dark deep the ruins of Urizens world.
The Singularity is a version of the Last Judgement & Newton calculated the date of the Apocalypse to XXXX <precisely> long before Harold Camping spent the world without a plan B. For Blake’s belly, the nervous anxiety was bad enough. Judgement was ongoing, the Accusers’ dream, Blake’s courtroom psychodrama. Inward rolling, the apple finally dropt: the Vortex was an Inner Stargate, looping & whirling thru Dante’s spiral Drunk on Vision, riding a hot column above a labring Earth & tensing brain muscle under accumulated aerobatic Gs before landing in Lambeth. Blake notes: What is Liberty without Universal Toleration. It is Illiberty. & what is Liberty? It is a Sick Rose, irradiated by cold-driven manipulative wafts thru Aerial Fields. Where is Sweet Vala gloomy prophet where the lovely form/That drew the body of Man from heaven into this dark Abyss/Soft tears & sighs where are you come forth shout on bloody fields?
Butressed by two hundred year old props which Blake’s insight projected as timeless imperatives, Los illuminates the Gothic arch with a lamp, maybe to elevate the pain threshold, but cannot properly delineate the bounds of Beulah <even with the assistance Catherine & Enitharmon>. Between the living room & the other room, the spare room for departed souls, hang his words: How can it be that lightness should be wanting in my works, while in my life and constitution I am too light and aerial, is a paradox only to be accounted for by the things of another world. In the garden the naked lineaments of an overgrown Eden visited by Fuseli’s polyglottal curses & Beulah’s sweet delights which some are born to others to want. Copper-plated projections, by the Light of Blake’s Emanative sighs & Spectral contractions, are arranged heavy with said Light & the anthropomophized space of mental States.
Blake speaks of a reality cast in ever-organising Chaos, considering itself the Only Real. He saw what he saw & that was that. Tweet tweet. The whirling Void collects the Soot & city grime of the Parallel city of Golgonootha & rotates within & without a microcosm of cogs & tears. And the Sciences were fixd & the Vortexes began to operate … Spiritual War: the conglobing aggregation of minute particulars v the redemptive qualities of the Immortal Imagination; the mystical adoption of a curious & naïve position: why should honesty fear a knave? The propensity of Joy frustrated by the Waters of Materialism, flooded by the well-established denial of said Deluge – an illuminated denial: Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves/Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the human Brain./Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps/Thou neer shalt leave this cold expanse where watry Tharmas mourns.
No optical apparatus will magnify the particulars of the Mental Fight that refuse to bend to the paranoid-critical surreality of State Tricks; agents are cloakd in Nobodaddy’s membranous secrecy (No Secresy in Art [sic.]) & Urizen’s left-brained muscle, developed of reification & self-parodic insult, ushered by Empire’s naked Wings’ flight over Chaos, dividing it up, generating more Enclosures. Archontix. The Human Brain is not the ratio of interpretative effort, but a synthesiser of open & dignified Invention, as well as the inversion of those things which block dignity & good development: thou readst black where I read white. The psyche enforced by untrustworthy, unworthy mediators and paedo Prieshoods: They told me that the night & day were all I could see … And they inclos’d my infinite brain in a narrow circle.
Usurper of the throne of mind, Urizen wept, & the Blakean vision never stopped blowing Emanations & Spectres & others in Swelld & bloated General Forms, heavenly debris in puffed-out slow motion; an inner activity of mergers & disappearances; of expansive & comprehensive insights into the reality of Psychological Time. There are drunken floods of abstraction for the Children of Albion in the Ghettos of Stony Law & Debt; where the Imagination is on Drip, cut off & Seal’d in a no-fly zone. Fabulated flesh is dragged out of shape by the overly-magnetised limitations of cold, metallic Urizen’s False North. Frozen imagination. Stalks toughen or wilt & in shallow soil excuses are easy, the dark easily ignored; in the dank Grottos of His phoney caverns, the credit runs on Dream Interception. UnHoly Musculature is sent to collect with Nets of Religion – The Spectre is, in Giant man; insane, and most deform’d. Unwholesomeness licks him & with systematic deceit he can slip out of his shadow thru any door.
A speck drifts in the Mundane Shell, ideas bundled, bungled in a factional representation of a potential Wholeness; the Egg contains Adam & Satan & is surrounded by a myth-saturated Venn. Covered in Spunk & bioplasma, Satan & his Devourers chat up the Freudian sex drive with predictive gags & flighty discussions on the diagrammatical leanings of sexual Arousal; & then, prick-teasingly, betray Joy. War: a perverse Specterization of Ungratified Lineaments: brooder of tempests & destructive War/You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue!; & call it Balance & Vision; it is but the strap-on of dessicated power-Lust, the heavy artillery of Empire <or whatever> against Art. War is Money & Money is dying & needless Death is bloat’d with riches. An Empire-Denier asks, “How can it die that never existed?”, & steals away without an answer. Some say, “It is necessary”. Others: “It is Politic Foolery, Prostituted Polity.” The Empire did not end & the lion & wolf have not ceased.
Listening to all this reverse-scribed mirror-mythology about Gnomes & Faeries & Emanations & twisted Dark Lords & Organis’d Religions & Clos’d Senses – an Angel trumps, “Put them away for later for they are Heavy with the weight of Dead Faeries”. Copper Plates, codices standing upright in Bunhill Fields. Peckham Rye taken by a treeful of Angels, Felpham taken by the foot Angel Scholfield. From the beach, the mean sound of a horizon, vibrating with oceanic Scuds. The contours of land & the human psyche inseparable, Albion rises, a warped Vitruvian, dancing on the algorhythms of Urizen’s flattened domain. Urizen: self-invented, self-tyrannizing, self-clos’d, Tiriel-like, fashioned of, & doling out, dysfunctional unilateralism. Without Contraries is no Progression. The Illusion of Acquisition is no Illusion to Urizen’s blinded brain, & the Imagination is itself at war with His sleep-thieved encroachments, a self-argument for Blake to be sure. Beulah is waiting, soft, moony, narcotic, given in Mercy: The daughters of Beulah follow sleepers in all their Dreams/Creating Spaces lest they fall into Eternal Death.
But the fixed etiolated shadows create a death knot whereby interpretation drops & closes the book; the same metal book that Parabolic thought opens. Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made? Is it Noise fashioned of straight lines? Loud Rintrah-roars clap Anger, power-hungry clouds cry smoke for distilled Perceptions: Perceptive Organs closed their Objects close. There is no exclusive right to ‘god’. The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in its chains … the cunning of weak and tame minds.
Imagination denied is reality denied; Imagination, the Saviour Figure; Imagination against conjurations hell-bent on yet another brazen power-grab, whose Reasoning is but a crude Alibi for Perverse Imbalance; The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion; which disproportion <though held secretly by the unwired static of the air> can still be fought; the Imagination can see that it has been abused by the Great Archon; that uniqueness is Universal & has its own equilibrium: no-one thinks alike: the forms of all things are derived from their Genius. Each Anger takes its own form: reaction is annotated, dissolved in conflict that wanders the centuries, weary with Travail. Better to fuck than be screwed by the systems of the power-hungry, the unearned privileges of the ruddy-cheeked, purple-pissing periwigs.
It began with The Fall: a set-up, a con, a psychological hinderance & an ongoing Matrix of Sore Guilt: how my members pour down milky fear. The Artisan watches his craft flourish with Progress & Improvement, slips under Urizen’s <heavy> Rock, coils into the same dull round & leaks essence of a fluid life, another ‘little death’. Consider Sexual Organization & hide thee in the dust. I.e., go fuck yourself & lie with Serpentine Dissimulation. After Biblical name-dropping an Angel, suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep, dribbled “poo poo & pish” all over Exuberance – Exuberance is Beauty abandoned in the Abyss. ‘pressions are multiplied by Organised Innocence in Thought Factories (Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth), under the supervision of Enion-Sophia’s woven Spectre. “Holy God, don’t the Poor know any better?” asks an Angelic mediator of the Soul (tangled in one of the cogs of Blake’s ‘overcomplicated’ myth-making machine & then calls Oothoon a Whore & a C**t & swiftly, chastely, clips the wings of Flight & Desire (Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth). Leutha’s flower is pluck’d & crushd at birth.
The wonders of a Violated Cosmos: What is now proved was once, only Imagin’d. Things move on: from Alchemy to Chemistry, Behmen & Paracelsus to the mysticism of particle acceleration. Enion took an atom of space & opend its centre/Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. Blake’s Mundane Shell is a god-particled abridgement between the finite & the infinite <which is hid> & is given artistic form by contortions not so far removed from those of modern Physics. In the whirling clarity of the Blakean Imagination, ever multiplying, with Energy & honesty & directness, 3D is not enough. In the Electric Universe, God is Plasma & is Every Where. Infinity infiltrates the beautifully grotesque encrustation of the Mundane Shell from the outside-in & the inside-out. In Eternity All is Vision. Too much to see. Newton & the Administrators of the Solar System possess a snapshot & a ratio; as the Inner Space of visionary speculation continues to build Cities not yet embodied in Time & Space, satellites are seeded to intercept openings beyond the doors of perception; perception is one thing, perfection another, an impossible lack of rupture, an unfathomable wholeness; not a circle to contain, not circumfren’d energy compromised by State Hirelings & others of Geometric inclinations.
Now Urizen is impatient for a system; to make the Circle that His auto-divine Selfhood
The Singularity is a version of the Last Judgement & Newton calculated the date of the Apocalypse to XXXX <precisely> long before Harold Camping spent the world without a plan B. For Blake’s belly, the nervous anxiety was bad enough. Judgement was ongoing, the Accusers’ dream, Blake’s courtroom psychodrama. Inward rolling, the apple finally dropt: the Vortex was an Inner Stargate, looping & whirling thru Dante’s spiral Drunk on Vision, riding a hot column above a labring Earth & tensing brain muscle under accumulated aerobatic Gs before landing in Lambeth. Blake notes: What is Liberty without Universal Toleration. It is Illiberty. & what is Liberty? It is a Sick Rose, irradiated by cold-driven manipulative wafts thru Aerial Fields. Where is Sweet Vala gloomy prophet where the lovely form/That drew the body of Man from heaven into this dark Abyss/Soft tears & sighs where are you come forth shout on bloody fields?
Bill Drennan writes: "William Blake was the subject of my PhD thesis. That was some time ago, so a little rustiness is inevitable. This is an overdue re-visit to Blake. I haven’t referenced the quotes, because this was never conceived as an academic exercise or essay, but as an attempt to capture (or re-capture) the compressed psychological intensity of the man’s work, the anxiety of the over-sensitive gut knotted with questions into human origins and how this connects with psychology. Many of the quotes are from Vala – not published in the artisan-artist-poet-engraver’s lifetime; others are from his letters, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell and his Annotations and elsewhere too in David Erdman’s Complete Blake. I’ve included some biographical references & weaved them according to my own take on Blake – however incomplete this might be."
Bill Drennan is author of a space fiction project, Hypoetics http://hypoetics.blogspot.com, a book of poetry, Flightpath Resistor (print version, Prosthetic Books, 2007; blog version, http://flightpathresistor.blogspot.com) & a book of short stories and sketches, Stories Short and Strange (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). He is a regular contributor to Otoliths, has other bits and pieces scattered here and there & is currently working on a play, Flotation Settlement, which is heading towards completion.
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