Blake and Creative Emergence;

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Speech for the Blakefest Cinematic Glad Day Celebrations 

Bognor Regis Picture Dome 28th November 2021

Video here


When I was asked four years ago to curate Blakefest I was over awed by the great innovating poet’s creative legacy. Soon, however, I began to realise that his song of creative emergence resonated with my ideas about the possibilities for an experience of meaning inside the event. Is, for instance, the event the same as Plato’s Khora; movement as the womb of everything? Thankyou for organising the event Rachel (Searle). What is a song if not an event? And so for Blake the imagination was not a bolt on to or escape from the mechanistic material reality but the core of the cosmos itself. Blake shows us an opening onto a realm where feeling and creative emergence a literally within all matter and we become aware of our indigenousness to nature. This, explains why we need to embody the extra sensory experience via ritual to feel meaning as a part of the expressivity of the universe as imagined moment becoming and becoming always in the middle.

 

In a world more used to analogous thinking, using felt understanding takes bravery and trust. The institution, alas can only accommodate the on off logic of the human abstract. It’s decision making form of forked communication places the hyper-aesthetic experience of Blake’s meaning outside of its specific sense-making domain because its intensities cannot be processed in order to be computed. This blindness to felt understanding is the source of the mind forged manacles of the human abstract. By placing the mind outside nature we have made great scientific and intellectual progress, whilst expanding the region of the hidden by demanding that the apparatus, Newton’s compass, can only know the quantifiable facts. In his hyper-aesthetic realm Blake allows us to experience a truly empathetic form of understanding inside the ritual of the emerging story of reality unrolling as a glittering tapestry of felt intensities.


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