 Welcome to the British Library where we are delighted to be celebrating the great artist, poet and visionary William Blake. Now 200 years ago Blake himself walked these very streets, unrewarded and unrecognised, but today we have a gigantic statue on our forecourt based on the drawing of Newton by Blake himself. And in the main building some of the greatest treasures of the collection are Blake's astonishing handwritten notebook, editions of his early works and letters. So it's particularly pleasurable tonight to be launching a brand new book devoted to the work of Blake by John Higgs, William Blake versus the world, which aims to take a contemporary view of the mind and the importance of Blake today. And John will be joined by some illustrious company, Robin Ince, my colleague the curator Alex Ault, the poets Selina Garden and Kay Tempest and to launch things to this evening all the way from New Zealand, the thoughts of Neil Gaiman. What still fascinates me, delights me and obsesses me about William Blake is there are writers out there, some very good writers and he wasn't one of them. There are poets out there, fabulous poets. He wasn't really one of them. There are artists out there. He never feels to me like one of them. I suppose because there are good artists and there are great artists. There are good poets, there are great poets, there are good writers, great writers and Blake feels like something totally other. He feels like a visionary. And great artists and great writers, we still stand on the earth. Visionaries fly. Visionaries take wing and they fly above us. They do something utterly different, which is why even now Blake is still an inspiration. He's still somebody whose work I turn to. He's still something that makes me feel very proud to be part of the human race, the thing that gave us William Blake because he's not like anything else except himself. He is utterly unique and I think that is the vision that he gives us from having been a visionary in something so very special. Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire and what shoulder and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand and what dread feet? What the hammer what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil, what dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night. What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Hello, welcome to an evening celebrating William Blake. You've already seen Neil Gaiman talking about William Blake and you also heard the fantastic poet and brilliant author of a book called Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death, Selena Godden reading Tiger, Tiger. And later on, there'll be other things I'm going to tell you that you're going to see. But first of all, one of the reasons we're doing this is because of this man, the author, John Higgs, who has written a new book called William Blake versus the World. I'm Robert Ince, by the way. And I want to start off by you were actually the first question I have is in the thanks at the back, you thank your editor for stopping you having a really boring title for your book. What was the boring title for William Blake versus the World? It was my agent. And it was originally called Understanding Blake. Because that's what I wanted the book to do. I wanted people who feel the need to understand what he was on about to go, oh, this is the book for me. But she pointed out that that was a really boring title. And if it could have something a little bit better, and suddenly William Blake versus the World popped into my head. It was always that after that. Yeah, well, it works perfectly for the book. And it is. And I should say as well, it fits in so much with some of the books that you've written previously. I mean, the first book of yours, I read was about why the KLF burnt a million pounds. And it's in that book. And then also later on your book about the 20th century stranger that we can imagine. And also the future is already here. A lot of your work seems to be trying to understand human imagination and why we create what we create. Yeah, I think so. Definitely. I think it's important to recognize how differently everybody sees the world. The concept of being neurotypical is kind of a new thing. And now we know that no one's really that neurotypical or very, very different in different ways. But when you're trying to understand people like the KLF or like William Blake, it's absolutely necessary to see the world through their eyes. Or else you won't really get anywhere. And a lot of, I mean, it's better now, but a lot of nonfiction books tend to be written by people who went to Oxbridge, about people who went to Oxbridge. And there's a certain, you know, there's a thing, there's a blind spot, there's a way of looking at the world that they sort of take for granted. And as I tend to write about people who are from very different backgrounds to that, who see the world in very, very different ways, the need to get inside their head is the only way the book could possibly work. Well, I mean, because you, as far as I remember, your first nonfiction book is Timothy Leary, America, We Have You Surrounded, which I always get in the wrong order. I have America Surrounded. That's it. Anyway, America Surrounded is somewhere in the top. But there is, that does seem to be the perfect kind of germ to start with. So much of his work, and then the way that he influenced people like Robert Anton Wilson as well. And again, he comes, it turns up as well, in William Blake versus the world, this beginning to unpeel the layers of all of these different things that create the colors and sounds in our mind. It was quite shocking to see how well these sort of 20th century figures there, what radical worldviews were already being talked about, you know, in the late 18th century, in the work of William Blake. And this concept, which comes from an area of reality tunnels that we don't live in reality, we live in what we think reality is. Our mind creates this model of the universe. I'm being a model. It's not quite a one-to-one match. You know, it's smaller, it's a bit rougher. We don't really see where it's correct and where it's wrong. But that's all we see. We just take it for granted. And so the need to not believe your own reality tunnel is a theme that runs through my books. And when you get to Blake, it's exactly how Blake sort of works. The match is just brilliant. And it's a way to say it's a key to unlock so much of his writing. When did you, I mean, at what point did you think, hang on a minute, a lot of these books are, they're different ways of exploring these. At what point do you begin to go, Oh, these aren't just lots of disparate things. Oh, I'm interested in the way the KLA burnt a million pounds. I'm interested in how quantum theory changed the way that we perceived art and world events and all those things. I'm interested in Wattling Street. All of those different. When did you start to go, Oh, hang on a minute. There's a real through line. We're hindsight. It's all it's always about the amount of my books that mention Blake, that talk about Blake, into whether it's talking about Wattling Street or, or whatever I've written before he keeps popping up. I didn't realize at the time it was because all those were preparing the ground to create a sort of a view of him. So do you fit? Is this the end now? Is it you think, right? I've done that now. This is. No, it's all building to a specific book, which is not the book I'm writing now. It's the one after that. I hope it's always the one after that. Yeah, because that'll be the because then I'll write a book about how did John Higgs's mind work because we always do. There was a book after it. We don't know what it was. We should say that later on as well. Tonight there's also we have the British Library curator Alexandra Olt who is going to be showing us William Blake's notebook amongst other things, which we both looked at today. It's extraordinary. It's just it's just incredible. It's it's it's the presence of the man behind the pen. It's so tangible when you look at that. It's such a small, small, you know, book. And it's the fact that survived for 200 years. When so much of his notebooks and so much as writing and so much of his stuff was burnt by Frederick Tatum after his after his death. The fact that this book, because it was his brothers originally, so it was special. So he kept it for 30 years and it became more special. So his wife after he died knew to give it to Simon Pong's brother. So it survived. It's just unbelievable. It's just unbelievable. Well, we saw I mean, the effect that it had, I think on all of us and you're seeing Kate Empis and also Selena Godden and then turned into the page where London was on that page. And then no one noticed that just at the bottom of the page with London on the sick rose was there as well. And it's a really, it's an interesting thing that where you get such and it seems to me that a lot of what your work certainly done for me is increasingly create a kind of situation where the way that imagination creates the tangible to get into some kind of way of with that's what I love is it's not just about all of your books. I don't think are about understanding an individual or a singular endeavor. They're connected to everyone who reads them. They're connected to, you know, this is not a book about William Blake. This is a book about human minds. The thing about Blake for the most amount of people I speak to who go, oh, yeah, Blake, don't really understand and don't really read him. But I know he's my boy, right? There's a connection. People just feel drawn to them. They just they just be a few lines, just a few images. But they know they're on his side. It sort of made the book necessary really to sort of it's for those sort of people so that they can sort of try and understand what it is about this mind that sort of connects to them so strongly. And that's why I think seeing those original sort of handwritten versions in that notebook had such powerful effect on all of us really over 200 years later, because those ideas, those words really have hit people very, very deeply. They're very much part of ourselves. We very much identify with where people who get William Blake or like William Blake who may not understand William Blake, but we're sort of very much on his side. It's such a strong level of connection. And to be able to sit with that notebook was I'll never forget it. The crossing's out. They're the important bit. It's not really going, Oh, these words which have lived on. It's those words that now that's not the right. And that is such a beautiful because you're so close to the original spark of the idea, you know, it appears in his image because the importance of the imagination in Blake's work is the sort of really central theme. The idea that the imagination is divine, essentially as close as we can have to something that's divine. The imagination is where something new enters this world. And to be sat so close to the moment that it appeared centuries later is kind of something. We are in the British Library in the rare books and music reading room here at St Pancras. And I've got one of the most exciting and important objects that the British Library has, which is William Blake's notebook. One of the things I love about this notebook is that it contains seeds of ideas from Blake that become arguably some of his most important works. He continues adapting, changing, scribbling out, writing over. And you really see him developing his thoughts and ideas until they become sort of his published or his produced works that we know today. One of the things I love about this notebook is it encapsulates Blake. It's word and image married together. And I don't think with Blake you can have word without image. And as you turn the pages, there are pencil sketches as ink on top. The ink's been scratched out and rewritten over. There are faint drawings now. There are some images in here that Blake had originally done for Paradise Lost. There's a sort of tiger like looking creature here. And you can actually see it was really done in pencil. And then he's gone over an angle, ink. I mean, I never, ever, ever tire of looking through this because I discover something different every time. You know, this, this is just beautiful with the flowers. It's not completely finished, actually either. And it's interesting that he's happy to leave things unfinished as well. It's really lovely to see sort of the rougher kind of Blake when he's sort of raw and working and thinking, thinking his ideas through. Well, let's have a, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Tiger, Tiger, which is your first choice. But let's have, let's have a look at the second reading. Yeah. And why did you choose this particular panel? Well, The Garden of Love. Obviously, there's a lot of poems that people know from songs of experience and of innocence. But to see it written in his own handwriting, and just just a third of on the right hand side of the page in his own notebook, in such, such tiny letters, but, but it's a perfect copy. Every word is right. It's just, just so unreal. It's just, you feel so, so close to it. It's just so special. So I wanted to hear Selena read it, you know, from the original words. Let's listen to that now. The Garden of Love. I went to The Garden of Love and saw what I never had seen. A chapel was built in the midst where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this chapel were shut and thou shalt not writ over the door. So I turned to The Garden of Love that so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be. And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars, my joys and desires. Now, one of the things that as you start off in the book by talking about the fact that when Blake died, he was buried in a pauper's grave. And now that would seem remarkable to people that somehow he was not elevated in his lifetime. And I think, you know, the the Tate has had, I think, five exhibitions in the last hundred years and the last one, two thousand nineteen huge exhibition. And as you mentioned also in your previous book about Blake, William Blake, now he is used by so many different groups to justify themselves, to inspire themselves. I mean, politically across. It's such a and I just want to get a sense of, you know, the William Blake that you start off talking about in the book is someone who, you know, living in very sparse existence, uncelebrated. Often mocked, just surrounded in the middle part of his life anyway by people who just didn't get him, just didn't understand him, couldn't understand what he was trying to express. It got better towards the end of his life. He started to be recognized. He had a group of young poets around him, which made all the difference. But as you say, he was still penniless and ignored and overlooked at the point he died and he was buried in the paupers grave in Bunhill Fields. And now, two hundred years later, he's in this unique position in Britain, especially in England, where he's this one figure that seems to unify and unite and attract everyone from all areas of society. You know, it's like the Labour Party, they'll sing Jerusalem at their conferences, but it's a conservative party. They'll also sing Jerusalem. You'll hear it in last night of the proms as big sort of, you know, establishment sort of celebration. But at the same time, you'll get like Billy Bragg or a brass band from a coal mining area or a rave band like the KLF. They'll all sort of, you know, he attracts the counterculture and the establishment of the left wing and the right wing and also, which is extremely shocking, you know, atheists and the spiritually and religiously inclined. Now, how many people can you say that about, that attract all these people and sort of unite the country in that sort of way? I mean, we know full well that the English national anthem is Jerusalem, even though technically there isn't an English national anthem and we just use the British one and things like that. It is because it's not being decreed, it's not being handed down, you know, from above. It's just being decided by the people that it is. And so this, he seems such an important figure to get our head around now after we've come through so many years of, you know, division and argument in the country to sort of go back to this sort of unifying figure whose reputation and the amount of understanding of him has just, it's taken 200 years, but it's been 200 years of positive steps of people slowly trying to get their head around what he was saying, how he understood the world, what his beliefs and values were and how useful and how helpful this stuff which initially seems quite incomprehensible to many people is to modern lives, you know, here in the 21st century. Well, you mentioned the religion and that seems to be such in terms of how sometimes he's misunderstood. I mean, you talked early on about a conversation he has with someone I'm going to probably misquote this where he says, you know, basically that Jesus was the one, but I am the one and you are the one. And this is the thing that this respect, as you say, you know, William Blake versus the world, the world might have been against William Blake, but William Blake wasn't even involved in the fight. He was into and that seems to be so much part of this kind of, you know, in the same way religion, he's dislike of anything that became an organized, a collective thought when it became this was the, you know, the group thinking, the mind forge. Yeah, and that certainly his religion seems to be that. Definitely. I mean, one of the choices for Selena's readings that I chose was a page from the marriage of heaven and hell, which for me is the key text in understanding his philosophy or worldview or whatever you said. And it's great because he only sort of wrote it because he just wanted to say why he thought the Swedish mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, why Swedenborg was wrong. And because he did that, he just wrote out how he saw things in a very sort of quite clear, but quite funny way. He talks a lot about sort of walking around hell and listening to the the proverbs that he hears and the conversations. And he recites a lot of encounters with angels where the angels are a bit stupid. And, you know, he shows them up and things like this wonderful, wonderful work. But it very clearly states that all gods, all angels, all demons are internal. They're insiders. They're part of us, which is it's kind of heresy. It shouldn't be because, you know, Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was is within. It's there in the Bible. But that's not how the churches portrayed it. Heaven is always elsewhere. And, you know, you can't quite reach it and you can't quite get there at this point, maybe after death you'll get there. But you can't get. The idea that you have it within you is is the opposite of what the priests were saying. So the the the plate of marriage of heaven and hell that I particularly wanted Selena to read was the one where he clearly states at the end all deities reside in the human breast because it's such an important key to understanding how he saw the world. Well, let's listen to Selena reading that now. The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive and particularly they studied the genius of each city and country placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslave the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales and a length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. Because what Selena's telling us there, this idea that it's all internal, it's all insiders has profound consequences here. It's all in the fairly secular 21st century where most people don't really believe in, say, hell. They don't believe that hell is a real place that you might be sent to to suffer at some point. It's a place that exists and it's a place that's far away. People don't really sort of accept that as being true. But we all know someone who's been living in hell. Once you see it as an internal state, it makes a lot of sense. It suddenly becomes real. And if you can accept that, you know, people who may be living in hell, then suddenly the idea that there are people who are living in paradise starts to become plausible. And this is another thing that unlocks a large part of Blake's writing, because he's basically saying, look, paradise is your birthright. This is where you should be. And it's down to you and it's down to how you see the world. And it's sort of reclaiming just the centuries and centuries of theology from from power structures and whatever to something that's very, very personal, but very, very empowering and very, very wonderful. See, that's when you talk in the book about is it when he sees Angel Gabriel and he just goes, oh, I'm not close. It's oh, oh, isn't it? Basically, but so it's not this kind of, you know, what we imagine is the falling prostrate or being terrified. It is and it seems that even that that first experience of seeing the angels on Peckham Rye, for instance, the way that's what I find really intriguing. And you look a lot in the book about talking to different neuroscientists as well about this, this sense of not, I mean, it's harder because it seems to me one of the greatest battles that we have at the moment is that bit of someone wishing to persuade you that their subjective experience is the objective truth. Yeah. And that doesn't seem to be an issue with Blake. No, no, his he basically valued the subjective experience as a thing that was worthy and divine as itself. So the idea that, you know, gods and angels are internal doesn't devalue them. If anything, it elevates the rest of your internal landscape, the rest of your, your imagination. Because you talk about these different levels of vision as well, you talk about, can you can you run us through that because we go from two fold vision might be where people would think that that must be the maximum, but you actually then you should take take us through Blake and that kind of different sense of, of realities. I mean, it reminded me in some ways of things like, you know, that it's a very different non mystical thing. But when someone like Carl Popper would talk about the fact that there are, you know, three realities in any single situation, you know, underlying reality, the reality of our experience, that's subjective thing. And then we could go as far as saying, you know, then the actual deep down into the physics of what is going on and is invisible to us. But we won't go back to that because you dealt with that in the previous book. But that idea of all of these different levels. So the fish, they exist at the same time that they are not fighting with each other. No, I mean, one of the his clearest explanations of it, for me, is in a letter he wrote when he was back in Felpham on the Sussex Coast to his friend Thomas Butts. And basically he's explaining how he'd been out for a walk across the Sussex Downs and got into an argument with a thistle. And this is very Blake, you know, the other romantic poets, they'll see a Daffodil, they'll write. Blake gets into an argument with thistle. His thistle's given him grief about various sort of life choices. Unfortunately, he sort of describes quite specifically what he sort of means when he's talking about his visions and his vision states in this particular poem. He talks with a thing called single vision first, which he hates. He says, may God us keep from single vision and Newton's sleep. Single vision is the word, the world objectively observed in a scientific way, with no subjective sort of component to it at all. It's just a pure measurement. And we sort of know now that how our perceptions work, that that's very, very rare to get a sort of pure sort of single vision. But it's what the sort of scientific method is based on, this pure, low measurement of something out there, something material. What he much prefers is what he calls double vision. Can I ask though, on that science thing, because obviously we're in the British Library outside here, in the forecore, his palatsis, you know, the incredible sculpture of Newton based on Blake. And that, do you think he would have, if he'd known, or did he know that Newton considered his greatest work to be his Bible studies, you know, Book of Daniel, and also his fascination with alchemy? Yeah. No, I don't think he knew that. He had Newton and Locke and a few of his favorite down as the reason for the age of enlightenment, which was this at all the time he was living this the idea that, hey, faith, faith maybe is not the way reasons the way that was the sort of the gist of this, the revolution of the age of enlightenment. And for Blake, he wanted to say, look, yeah, you know, I get you with the faith, I'm okay with the faith not being the way, but the reason, the sort of rationality, it's only really a small part of what the mind does. And it's nothing compared to sort of, you know, imagination in its greatest form. It's there is no rationality without imagination in the first point. And that wonderful painting he did of Newton who appears to be at the bottom of the sea, except he's dry. His hair is dry. There's a piece of paper that he's working on. He's making a circle with his little compass on the floor. That's all dry. He's in this weird sort of organic, mysterious void. But he can't see it because he's just looking, he's just so focused on the piece of paper and the circle. That's all he sees. And that's the rational world being sort of created. That's the character in his, in Blake's mythology called Eurism. This is what this represents, this sort of creating this rational model of the world, which ties in with what we were talking about earlier about reality tunnels. That's what we all, we all do. We all create this sort of world and we believe it. But because we're so focused on it, we're missing out on everything sort of behind us. Well, this strange larger sort of experience. Yeah, there's that particular picture of Newton. It's so deep and so interesting that it's too much. And at the Tate's exhibition, they were selling cushions with it on, like a cushion with Newton on it. And there's no way you could sit relaxed on a sofa and look at Blake's Newton without just, just realizing the importance. I've got the full scuba gear so I could reenact the whole thing. That's great. So that's that. And then there's, to be honest with you, so then two-fold vision. Yeah, double vision. Now, this is, this, he has this always, he says. This is, this is when his imagination was projected out onto the world. And he talks about that when he's arguing with a thistle, he knows it's a thistle, but his imagination is, is portraying it as this sort of prickly old man. And he's seeing both at the same time, which is a relief because otherwise that's how he knew he wasn't quite mad. You know, he knew it was all in his mind. And he'd be very specific about his visions. A woman at a party asked him, where did you see this? And he said, here, madam. His visions were all in the mind. But he knew that our perception wasn't the scientific method, the single vision of the purely objective thing. He knew that perception is, in many ways, has a moral component that we see. What we see tells us as much about ourselves as the world out there, the sense that the world is a little bit of a Rorschach-ing-Bock test. And that's if you see the world as cruel and, you know, scary, and it's a very dark and paranoid place, part of that is yourself. And there's this wonderful he writes about this in a letter to a guy called the Reverend Dr. Trussler, sorry. And the letters are just brilliant. It's just these two letters, this one guy, who was a friend of one of his patrons, Cumberland. And he'd approached Blake. And he'd been recommended to Blake. And he wanted a painting, just one picture of malevolence. And he explained in great detail, you know, exactly what he wanted, and gave Blake the commission. And then Blake came up with something completely different. And there's this letter saying, well, you know, I had to listen to my poetic genius. This is really what you want. This is what you should have. And then we don't have the response letter, but we're going to have Blake's next letter, which was, well, I'm sorry that made you angry. But I will now explain to you why you're wrong and why my worldview is correct. And he just writes this brilliant sequence of an explanation of how people see the world differently and how we miss it so often, the extent to which the world is something that we make ourselves. And we've got that section for Selena to read. And it's a real insight into understanding the mind of Blake, I think. Brilliant, let's have a look at that now. So in front of me, I've got volumes of letters and two of which are written by William Blake to his one-time patron, Dr. Trusler. Now, there's only two letters here, but it really shows essentially a three-act play of Blake being offered work, telling his patron what he thought he was going to do and saying, I'm not going to do what you want. I'm going to do what I want. And then in the second letter, saying, I'm sorry I've disappointed you, but here's why you're wrong. And obviously, the correspondence stops there. Blake obviously continues to try and charge his patron in the letter. But as we know, no more work came from Trusler for Blake and the relationships stopped there. What's lovely about these two letters as well is that they really set Blake within the world of correspondence. And you can actually see here the post stamp and the seal and how the letter was originally closed and sealed and then transported to Trusler. Excerpt from 23rd August 1799, letter to Dr. Trusler. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world. But everybody does not see a like. To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is more beautiful than the sun. And a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature, all at ridical and deformity. And by these I shall not regulate my proportions and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself as a man is, so he sees. Right, so we've only got something might have thought, oh, two full vision, that's that done. But it's not, is it? This is, it keeps. And this is where it gets, I think two full vision is something that many people will be able to grasp and have a sense of the balancing of that. But then where do you find it gets precarious? Well, it gets more and more interesting, the higher up you go in the scale. Two full double vision or two full vision for Blake, he'd say, this is how I see the world always. That was his normal sense. He had this very, very strong imagination and he projected it out on the world. And that was his normality. But occasionally it would lead him into sort of higher visionary states. And the key that it was coming was a thing he called three fold vision, of course, which he also refers to as a state called Bueller, which Bueller is essentially it's when all your sort of cares fall away and everything's right and everything's perfect and all your worries and responsibilities that just don't matter. And it's just beautiful. I describe it as like a sort of a post-coital embrace of the cosmos. In religious terms, it's usually called grace. Grace is this notion. I talk a lot about Timothy Leary because he described it as this neurosomatic level, as this more modern way of talking about it. But it's the key to it is that it's not heaven because it's temporary. It's just a temporary respite from the pressures of the universe, which heaven wouldn't be passive. This is a passive thing. Heaven just sitting around on clouds, twang in the harp. That wasn't Blake's heaven at all. Blake, he had to be active. He had to be creative. That was when you created eternity, created heaven. So this state, this Bueller was just this, if he'd exercised his imagination well enough and got to that second fold vision, sometimes on rare occasions, then this cares would just fall away and everything would be right and he could just sit back and enjoy it. And that was a sign that he reached the three-fold vision and it meant that he could then be going to the real vision state, which is four-fold vision, which is when things get very, very complicated. And that is when you need to reach some strange psychedelic models to try and explain what he was talking about. But that was the sort of state that his great illuminated work, Jerusalem, seems to be written from. And that's why it's so confusing, why it doesn't seem to make any comprehensible sense to people on first sort of glance. He's trying to describe what the world looked like from this state of four-fold vision, which was the highest of this, which was a glimpse of eternity. It was just glorious and it just made the simple existence of being helped to perceive in this way. It just made life such a joy for him. And so in terms of the state that you... How much of a sense... When he was writing, when he was creating his art, that sense of... Do you get a feeling of different states that he may well have been in, which lead to that different sense of self or loss of self? I think so. He's always very clear that his paintings are things that he sees. He has this very, very strong mind's eye, this internal... And we're only now sort of realising how different people's mind's eye are. This only in recent years has been working to what they call aphantasia and hyperphantasia. Aphantasia is when you have no mind's eye at all. If I was to say imagine a cow and someone's aphantasic, they wouldn't see anything in their heads. But if you say that to a hyperphantasic person who's at the opposite end of the spectrum, what would appear in their head would essentially be a cow. It would be that vivid. You would sort of feel the heat from its hide. You'd see the smoke from its breath. It would be such an overwhelming sort of visual experience in his mind's eye. And it's a fascinating condition. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are absolutely fascinating. You get the sense that people who are hyperphantasic have a real sort of anger about social injustice and things like that. Because for instance, when if you talk to Blake about child chimney sweeps, which was an issue in his lifetime, he would see it. He would see it so visually in his mind and these small children in this choking, cramped, dark sort of atmosphere. And it becomes impossible not to be angry, not to be furious about these great injustices. So there's a sense that is the vividness of his imagination ties into his politics and explains his politics and a lot of his sort of social noise like that. Yeah, the aphantasia is such an interesting thing. I find that this is, you know, the book opens up so many. I'd read a book previously where in fact it's not, I was talking to a neuroscientist who said, one of the things we have to be very careful about talking about is different levels of consciousness. And it seems to feed into that as well. That the idea that every human being is conscious there. And it doesn't mean that if you're really conscious, it's a good thing. It could be, you know, but that I think is what you look at so well in the book is it does seem this is a time now where we're beginning, even people who could be counted as neurotypical because everything, it still doesn't, you're not able to work out what's really going on in the mind and you as a person are not able to know, does everyone think like this? It's only by these expressions, outward expressions, where people begin to go, oh, okay, some people have these thoughts and some people think like this and some people, this is what they see in their head. And that seems to open up so many opportunities in us being able to get a greater understanding of each other, our disparities and our similarities. Because we have centuries and centuries of accounts of people having visionary experiences. And the thing with visionary experiences is they're almost impossible to explain, to express to other people. They're so far beyond our normal sort of understanding of the world, that to translate them into a normal everyday conversation, to explain to someone what you've just experienced is pretty much impossible. You have things like William James, who wrote the varieties of religious experience in the early 20th century, which understands that these are a cross-cultural thing that people from all sorts of cultures, all different times have these similar experiences, these visionary experiences. But so few people can get across what they are, which almost makes Blake as such a great painter and writer, so valuable. Because more than anyone else, he produces his work and shows it to them and you think they're real, aren't they? Those visionary experiences, they're real. I wasn't sure before, but now I see this work. They must be real. He just connects you to them in a way that, you know, no one else really can, I think. Now, in the book, you actually talk about the fact that songs of innocence, you don't consider to be kind of a great piece of Blake work necessarily. Well, it's still great, but it is, it's his children's poems. At least the songs of innocence are. He goes much, much deeper. I sort of compare it to, it's his Yellow Submarine. You know, like the Beatles, only they could have made Yellow Submarine, but the song itself doesn't quite give you the full depth of everything that they would do. It's the same with Blake. Only he could have written songs of innocence and experience, but it doesn't really go to show you exactly the depth he's going to. But you've chosen the Poison Tree. Yes. From late work, so why did you choose that? Well, what we were saying earlier about how Blake is really talking about what's going on in our minds. He's essentially, in a lot of his work, it's like, it's essentially before Freud and Young, but he sort of come up with the field of, you know, psychiatry or psychoanalysis or whatever before these things existed. And if you look at a poem like The Poison Tree, the understanding of psychology that it displays is just terrific. You know, he really focuses in, you know, on what's driving people and how people are acting and the psychological forces behind it all. I'd say it just seemed a great example of his insight into our minds. Well, let's listen to Selena Godden reading it. A Poison Tree. I was angry with my friend. I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe. I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears, night and morning with my tears. And I sunned it with smiles and with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine. And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole when the night had veiled the pole. In the morning glad I see, my foe outstretched beneath the tree. That's such a, I want to talk a lot more about this book and said it's Get William Blake first of the world. It's fantastic. Thank you very much, John. We're going to end obviously with Drewson. And thank you also to Selena and Alex and the British Library. And I hope you've enjoyed it. And it's a great way of just starting to explore so many more things at all of that work at Blake. It was really fascinating. You find when you went to that take exhibition seeing that part of the joy of it was if you hung around offers just all the different faces and expressions on people as they walked out. Yes, and people would be like, wow, I didn't understand it, but it made such a powerful impact. That's the bit, isn't it? We're a bit too hooked on trying to understand things. I think that's part of it. Well, it helps. I mean, we're in a position now where we can get the basics right, if nothing else. And understanding Blake is something that's always worth starting to do because it's such an rewarding thing to do. And there's no time like the present. And if you do make the effort just to go back and read him, which people are very wary of, you go back and read Blake, you know, it does enrich your life. You'll have a better quality of life if you have Blake in it than if you don't. Now, obviously we've been talking about Jerusalem and we've now got K Tempest is going to read it, who is a poet, winner of the TS Eliot Prize, author, a musician, and also now president, I don't know why I did that gesture, it was overly jaunty, but also president of the William Blake Society. Yeah, they're amazing. Now, they are amazing, aren't they? Yeah. We've talked about it, yeah. So, but K's done something with Jerusalem. Yeah, well, I mean, we're all so familiar with him, Jerusalem, and those words. I just wanted to put it in a little bit more context. The words come from the preface to the poem Milton and not the poem Jerusalem, because that would be far too simple, just to confuse matters. K's going to read it with the paragraph before and just a line or so after, to put those words, which we're so familiar with, into the context that Blake meant them. And you certainly see them as a much more of a rallying cry, a much more angrier thing. He's complaining about the idiots, really, the idiots coming from the universities, who were sort of running things and running the art world and the establishment and who had been sort of taught to recite things from memory and to learn sort of Greek philosophy and that was how they saw the world. Blake saw the world very, very definitely. And he thought we really need to sort of get rid of, overthrow these people, to get back to this pure raw of imagination that the barge used to have in days of old and become the people we could be. So it's a real sort of passionate rallying cry that sort of sets those famous words in a context that people probably aren't that familiar with, but which I think will make a lot more sense when done this way. Brilliant, thank you very much, John. Thank you, Robin. Here's Kate Tempest. Rows up, oh young men of the new age, set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings. For we have hirelings in the camp, the court and the university who would, if they could, forever the press, mental and prolonged corporeal war. Painters, on you I call. Sculptors, architects, suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works. Believe Christ and his apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live forever in Jesus, our Lord. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green and was the holy lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen. And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills and was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic mills. Bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear, oh clouds unfold. Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.