William Blake's Four-Fold Imagination (2020)

There is a door to sleep, which, when opened, expands the possibilities of perception geometrically and chromatically, all the way to the open horizon of dreaming, unbound by the physical laws that tether us to mundane Waking life.

Blake had his foot in that door. And the rest of him, for his foot was oriented backwards, just so that he could prise the door open from the opposite side for long enough to deposit a missive.

It seems that Britain celebrates this extraordinary man with not even one single statue. There is a statue of Blake in Bridgewater, Somerset but it's Robert Blake, a naval commander, worthy no doubt but hardly a global figure. Anyone crossing the Albert Bridge in London might notice a church up-river (on the left as you go north). William Blake was married in that church in 1782.

Love Blake, a brilliant madman. One of my favorite connections of him to the modern world besides Marilyn Manson reading "The Proverbs of Hell" is the Fusion work of David Axelrod, who makes many Blake references in song names and album names. Those same songs go one to be heavily sampled by the hip hop community. Some examples of the songs that sample Axelrod are listed in this article. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1436-david-axelrods-hip-hop-i...

Many of you will easily recognize this intro https://youtu.be/6pG_3jZxzlo

Its a very cool connection that bridges a gap between some of my beloved contemporary artists and one of my favorite enlightenment thinkers, Blake.

One of my favorite concept albums is Ulver's "Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": https://youtu.be/PlrW9SUCINo

Incomplete without mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger

and what can be made out of that like for instance in

https://youtu.be/_6UsrgRkOas