blake is kind of growing on me a bit. the love of nature, the whole "perception is reality" thing, the violent, sudden changes in his system of belief based on no logical or explicable evidence...he's my kinda guy. a little too emo, perhaps, but we all have flaws.
my new officemate jim gave a presentation today in 521 about blake and part of it was centered around blake's dichotomizing of law/desire and innocence/experience...or maybe more correctly innocence and desire/experience and law. basically the idea is that (as i understand it) law suppresses desire, which creates conflict, because desire needs to be expressed and in a law-centric life conflict is then the only real way to get that desire out into the open (unless, i suppose, if you just want to be super-repressed and go slowly insane or just be apathetic about everything). so blake posits that the way to express desire in a world of law is through work. he means most especially artistic work, of course, but i like taking the bigger meaning of the word work to just mean anything you do to give your life meaning in a larger context beyond yourself (i have a feeling blake wouldn't mind me appropriating his definition).
jim also included a good summing-up quote from everybody's favorite, frye: "all such work operates in the world of experience: it takes account of law and of our waking ideas of reality. work takes the energy which is wasted in war or thwarted in dreams and sets it free to act in experience".
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