Eric G. Wilson

Eric G. Wilson’s My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing is a fascinating and rewarding little volume, but not one to be taken lightly. Be prepared: it’s dense, rich, academic, philosophical, and – frequently – abstruse. It demands, and warrants, slow reading, and re-reading; close attention and reflection; and, between chapters, time away for mulling over concepts or developing one’s own insight over time and at a distance. Reading My Business Is to Create requires a show more sort of intentional Will and Reward, both in the doing and in its consequence.

Wilson clearly addresses his book to a particular audience, namely creative writers who would explore and draw inspiration from Blake’s unique combinations of imagination, vision and expression. That said, it also has value for any discerning reader, who doesn’t fit the specific demographic of the publisher’s (University of Iowa Press) creative writing programs, but would better understand Blake and find significance in his thinking for their own creative lives and work. The same creativity and passion applied in the specific context of writing, by its very nature, demands further extension to all realms of personal endeavor.

Indeed, Blake, his life, times and work, are what initially drew me to this title, and Wilson afford a remarkable symposium above and beyond any superficial “English 101” survey experience of Blake-in-context at the turn of the 19th Century. In life and his work, Blake was unquestionably challenging and demanding, fully embracing the broadest possible ranges of animal, intellectual and spiritual dichotomies and contradictions: clear insights and understanding, with profound mystification; alternating, elective submissions or rejections, realized through an array of expressions and repressions; agonies and suffering, coupled with inspirations and elation; impulse versus motivation, pursuit and surprise; all in a headlong rush toward recurrent gains of experience, only to shed that experience in appreciation of innocence.

In a way, I’m reminded of Max Eastman’s The Enjoyment of Laughter, another favorite, transformative book in which the author unabashedly states his intention of doing "something which should never be done” (paraphrase?) – i.e., explaining humor; and then, risking disaster (or, at a minimum, spoiling the very object of his purpose for the reader), promptly follows through on that intention, admirably and to great effect. Wilson does much the same for creativity with this little book. Primarily, he undertakes to explain both particular and universal aspects of Blake’s visions and creative energies, thought, expressions and contradictions. Wilson also explores Blake’s influences on a host of 19th and 20th Century artists and authors in all media, who followed Blake’s work. The breadth and depth of Wilson’s context and connections is impressive; references abound, from the perversely eroticized, New-Age spirituality of Allen Ginsberg to C.S. Lewis’ Oxbridge-inflected conception and treatments of Joy. Along the way, Wilson also calls on Carl Jung, Freidrich Nietzsche, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Jackson Pollack, and Aldous Huxley – to name some, although there are also plenty I've not know of before. These references are not mere name-dropping, but add depth and perspective to Wilson's analysis.

An index is evidently meant to be part of the final edition; presumably, it was incomplete, and therefore omitted, at the time of printing the uncorrected proof that I received. It’s addition will be a valuable reference for the reader who would revisit particular thoughts and passages, both because Wilson’s text ranges far and wide, and given the absence of any immediately clear or innately logical organization. The index’s absence, however, does not appear to be a failure or short-coming that compromises use and enjoyment of the text. Wilson amply covers his subject in successive, vignette chapters; but, like much of Blake’s original work, the essential subject matter of this book defies quick comprehension or easy organization. In the absence of an index, Wilson’s notes themselves are helpful tools, both for their intended purpose of referencing sources and for assisting the reader relate back to thematic elements in the text.

If you would explore creativity, regardless of your preferred discipline, find a copy of My Business Is to Create – and treat yourself! show less

Wilson depicts the drive toward constant happiness as a kind of misguided fundamentalist ideal. The melancholic is an individual who looks unflinchingly at the the world, having lived richly enough to know that the response to life is a choice between a beautiful and rich uncertainty and a shallow and simplistic clarity. Happy people do not create great works of art. For that, we are indebted to uncertainty, to despair, and depression, To experience all of these things is to experience life show more versus only pretending at life. Well-written, sublimely thought out. . . but not for the practical minded or those who would reduce experience to abstraction. show less

Eric G. Wilson’s concise book about William Blake’s writing and drawing requires re-reading (and re-looking) the poems and paintings, both intertwined in Blake’s intricately engraved ‘illuminated’ books. No way around this. From Blake’s earliest poems published as Poetical Sketches (1783) to his illumination of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his last year, 1827, nothing mattered but creativity. Imagination is to see, to understand, and Blake’s vision is his ever present gift to show more succeeding generations of artists.

Professor Wilson explores several critical principles of Blake’s understanding of creativity. The section ‘Contraries’ examines the tensions between general and specific, or, as Wilson brackets certain polarizations or antinomies: memory and inspiration, innocence and experience, energy and form, imagination and reason. In the section, ‘Ratio’, the reader is introduced to the concept of how past experience determines imagination by way of the empirical realm of the five senses. The tension here is always in the balance between inevitable scientific generalization and abstraction, and the individual, unique, concrete “particulars of the visible world as points of luminous infinity.” (p. 12)

‘Minute Particulars’ (p. 13-18) provides a luminous example in the nine-minute film The Powers of Ten during which the camera first zooms outward from an overhead shot of a couple picnicking on a blanket (a 1-meter square frame) to a 10-meter square field of vision (10 to the 2nd power), then out to a 100-meter square (10 to the 3rd power), and so on to 10 to the 24th power, the boundary of our known universe, filled with white specs on a black background; then reversing ‘direction’ rapidly back through each power to the initial starting point of the couple on the blanket, then looking inward, frame by frame, minus power of 10 by minus power to the negative 16th power, or what would be the interior edge of a proton, which one imagines to be analogous to the expanses of the outer edge of the universe. Wilson (via Blake) understands these boundaries as lessons in the specific as the more boundless; the minute as massive, the “sublime shin[ing] in the sliver.”

Irreducible particularly as opposed to abstraction and theory and system is the Blakean mode, exhibited in the our time by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, by Alan Watts in The Joyous Cosmos, to cite two writers discussed by Professor Wilson. Isaac Newton’s empirical and mathematical view of the world is the opposite of Blake’s particulars. Yet, as Wilson reminds us, we must be careful about mistaking abstract for concrete, and offers the example of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, of mistaking a ‘theory’ of how things are for how things ‘really’ are.

‘Looking’ examines perception and vision. We see each of us differently the world in front of us. “As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.” Or, in the phrase of esteemed Blake scholar Northrop Frye: Esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived. “It is not which vision is true,” according to Wilson, “it is – which is more alive.” (p. 20) A writer to see the world in the Blakean mode must first escape the ‘ratios’ and consciously look at things differently. The example given is Emerson’s: “Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs [. . .]” and see it new.

The section ‘Copy a Great Deal’ wrestles with the tensions between tradition and innovation. One cannot escape the ‘ratio’ because words maintain their lexical and semantic history and the visual arts have their iconic lexicon as well. The writer must find a middle ground between the retrospective abstraction required of thought and immediate perception of the never before seen or experienced – the ‘be here now’ of religious poet Richard Alpert / Ram Dass. To revise is to re-vision, to see a text differently each time we engage it.

Some other sections of Professor Wilson’s book include: examination of Blake’s aqua fortis engraving technique, the ‘infernal method’ for Blake in which word and image ‘illuminate’ each other; his interest in ‘free’ verse or prose poetry; innocence as a way of seeing as much as a state of being. For Wilson, “Innocence requires experience to escape ignorance.” (47); and experience as actualization of innocence, a felix culpa (happy fall) that leads to redemption following the pain and pleasure of experience, in particular, of the erotic intermeshed with the spiritual; generation, or the fallen world where “all things subsist on one another” and yet re-generate and re-energize the world’s forms of beauty and being.

Professor Wilson closes his book with the section ‘Infinite Writing’ which summarizes the Blakean aesthetic. Love opens infinite possibilities for connection, change, involvement with others. “And so writing with excellence [for Blake, as well as for Professor Wilson] is loving not just the line but also what escapes design, always just beyond semantics and syntax, trope and tractate. Lively writing requires nothing less than a passion, perverse maybe, for the fragment bereft of finish, hunger beyond filling, constant privation.” (83)

Blake: “If a thing loves, it is infinite.” Love’s labor written is never lost.

Professor Wilson’s little book is challenging, informative, profound. It will be on library shelves alongside Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition; Geoffrey Keynes’ The Complete Writings of William Blake; Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry; Harold Bloom’s Blake’s Apocalypse; and David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire. show less

A book with a title like this is irresistible to a pessimistic, curmudegeonly misanthrope like me and I was not at all disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed the witty, eloquent case Wilson makes to recognize the beauty and necessity of melancholy, a state in which I frequently find myself. Wilson's approach to the subject is more literary and artistic than psychological which I found all the more appealing. This book is an excellent complement to Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided which skewers show more the positive-thinking movement and industry. show less