William Blake | Contemplative Inquiry

November 22, 2024

DOORS OF PERCEPTION: SUN, SKY, SHADOW, SNOW

This post is about Hillfield Gardens (1,2) and the taste of psychic rejuvenation. Just being there, actively opening to the elemental energies of place and time, I felt confident, happy and strong.

The early morning of 20 November was misty and dark in a slushy, miserable kind of way; closed in and confining rather than magical and mysterious. Elaine and I catastrophised together in gloomy harmony about skies made unfriendly by perpetual drizzle and pavements made treacherous by hidden ice. The term stir crazy came up for me. We have begun to expect fresh air and activity outside the home. This time we planned to be in separate spaces. They are good in themselves and healthy for us as a partnership. So the tension of anticipated disappointment was in the air, for a long moment in a dull morning.

Then everything changed, with clear blue sky and sun. After an early lunch, I could wheel Elaine to her creative arts event and then fully stretch my legs in a walk to Hillfield Gardens. When I got there I slowed down again and shifted from a doing mode to a being mode. I became porous to the world – at once disappearing into it and expanding to embrace it. The snow on the ground looked beautiful to me and a crinkly fallen leaf both modified the picture and enhanced the look. William Blake once famously wrote: “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite” This brief eternal time (being in two worlds at once) – with the snow on the ground, and the fallen leaf – was like that, or at least something which pointed towards it. I feel tremendous gratitude for the experience. In its afterglow, I found myself feeling confident, happy and strong.

At a reduced level of intensity, I continued my walk. Below, My attention was drawn by a seat, and the snow around it, in a secluded corner of the gardens. Sun shone freely on the buildings, and the bushes, but reached only a small area on the seat.

In the most wooded and unmanicured section of the gardens, I found snow still present on a section of cleared space and pathway. Elsewhere there was no trace of it, even in this relatively shadowed space.

On the buildings below – blue sky, sun and shadow. In the picture below snow is just discernible on a rooftop and in a garden. During the period of my walk (1-1.30 pm) the gardens visibly changed. The snow was retreating and shadows continued to shift.

It wasn’t a long walk – twenty minutes each way for the sake of my legs and thirty in the garden. It was enough. I took away the psychic rejuvenation I named at the beginning of this post. The experience was both mystical and ordinary, a place where the ‘spiritual’ and ‘mundane’ are one – and big part of how I live my Druidry.

(1) SEE: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/04/11/images-from-a-town-garden/

(2) NOTE: At the beginning of April 2024 I discovered Hillfield Gardens – a little outside the centre of Gloucester, yet still in easy walking distance (or an easy bus ride) from where I live. Originally the gardens of a large house, Hillfield Gardens are about 1.6 hectares in extent. They are managed by a Friends Group on behalf of Gloucestershire County Council. For me the gardens are a tranquil space, different in feeling-tone from other local parks.

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November 17, 2022

THE ALBION SAILS ON COURSE (NOVEMBER 2016)

“The Albion sails on course. Black script on white wall. The spill-zone around Corbridge Crescent, the painted devil heads and hybrid monsters, the bare-breasted pin-ups from naughtier times mouthing Situationist slogans, are captured and made fit for purpose by film crews and television set-dressers, lighting technicians and catering caravans, responding to dissent as exploitable edge.

“LOADED WITH/ MEMORIES/ I WAS NOT AFRAID/TO SET OFF/ AN ADVENTURE/ ANY MORE.

“14 November 2016: the words I copied into my notebook yesterday are painted over with white undercoat, so that professionals can create rebellion suitable for television. For example, a Worholist head of Che Guevara – CHE GAY – inflated to cover an entire wall, with fake yelps about eating the rich to replace the groundwork of RIP and the Secret Society of Super Villains and Artists. NO PIGS ….

“The outlaw in his shack on the ledge by the canal sleeps through the entire fuss. He learnt his lesson after the first Immigration Enforcement raid. Now his shelter looks like the detritus of a lumberyard. ….

“A young boy cycles uncertainly to school, in the wake of his mother, wearing a silver skull mask. Welcome to the comic world, Hackney. At the base of the image swamp we find the sinister clown: child-catcher, grinning molester. The public joke, the big-haired politician who dissolves into the Joker of DC Comics.

“Extinguish fire with petrol. One of the latest Andrews Road defacements is a poster: SILENT BILL MUSE WANTED. Silence against the noise of imagery? The meditation of a hooded man sitting all day on a bench? Or another who dreams the fading city through all the hours in an Arsenal-branded sleeping bag? ‘Be silent in that solitude,’ said Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Let them come. The restless spirits of the dead are in death around thee’.” (1)

Iain Sinclair has a reputation as a leading figure in the practice of psychogeography, though he has now somewhat distanced himself from the word itself. He is quoted as saying (2) that “I buy into a union of writing and walking” and identifying with “the kind of writers who very definitely have, within their writing, this rhythm of journeys and walks and pilgrimages and quests”.

Sinclair’s work often celebrates London’s neglected and overlooked spaces, and draws on a visionary tradition of London writers from William Blake to Arthur Machen as well as the French situationists who developed psychogeography as a concept. His early reputation rests on the prose poem Lud Heat (1975) which was also influenced by Alfred Watkins and the earth mysteries school that followed in his wake. This work describes lines of force between Hawksmoor’s London churches to reveal the hidden relationship between the city’s financial, political and religious institutions. Peter Ackroyd drew on these themes for his later Hawksmoor (1985).

Last London (2017) is grittier and more concerned with a November 2016 witnessing of social breakdown in Hackney, a London borough that is being simultaneously gentrified. In the UK, it is also the year of the Brexit referendum (the Albion sails on course?) and in the US the month, November, of Donald Trump’s election as president (“at the base of the image swamp we find the sinister clown”).

Why am I drawn to this work? I lived in London for 17 years, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s: there’s an element of nostalgia, and also of grief. Beyond that, my contemplative inquiry has led me in recent years to a practice of walking and writing. Are there lessons for me in Sinclair’s tradition?

My contemplative inquiry is not just about resting in the eternal moment – it also concerns life in place, time and culture. I’ve always liked walking meditation, mobile and open-eyed. Ideally, the still point and the moving line are both present, together as one. Often I stumble around between them, but that’s part of the journey: learning to be present in a field of living presence. I have a lot to learn.

(1) Iain Sinclair The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City London: OneWorld Publications, 2017

(2) Merlin Coverley Psychogeography Harpenden: Oldcastle Books Ltd, 2018 (first edition 2006) In his last chapter, Psychogeography Today, the author devotes a section to Iain Sinclair and the Re-branding of Psychogeography.

July 31, 2019

WILLIAM BLAKE: ETERNITY

He who binds himself to a joy

Doth the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

William Blake Complete Writings Oxford University Press, 1972 (edited by Geoffrey Keynes)