Eric G. Wilson

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 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

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

Eric Wilson suggests a close reading of William Blake offers an opportunity for writers to hone their craft. I come to this text as a fan of Blake, and not a writer, but My Business Is To Create conveyed the tone of a motivational speaker more than a workshop facilitator or writing coach. I'm curious how Wilson uses this text in workshops (assuming he does), I'd guess it's not the basis of each session's work so much as inspirational context.

Wilson's focused study of Blake's work serves in show more effect as primer, and though I'm left short of epiphany, these twenty chapters are a useful means of organising (or challenging) my reading of Blake.

BE AN ARTIST
Blake: “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to create.” Wilson: “All of us are artists in potentia, and when we bring to fruition our imaginations, we convert the fallen earth to a paradise where the human virtues flourish: love and charity and forgiveness. Living is creating, and conforming is death.” [4]

CONTRARIES
“Blake was convinced that, 'Without Contraries is no progression.' Given this antagonistic bent, Blake couldn't let himself view creativity as a simple matter of nonconformity, spontaneity, or naturalness. For him the creative is much more vexed and spirited, a dialectical site where powerful polarities collide, coincide, and merge ...” [8]

THE RATIO
Wilson: “This is the great problem for all who wish to create: how to transcend a past, both personal and cultural, that has shaped one's habits of perception.” / “Blake's term for how the past determines the imagination is 'ratio'”. [10] Blake: “He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.” [11]

MINUTE PARTICULARS
Blake: “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.” [13] Wilson: “For Blake, extreme closeness exposes the unbounded.” [13] “To perceive and render the world's subtly divided yet secretly concordant configurations were the primary imperatives of his art.” [16]

LOOKING
Wilson: “'Esse est percipi,' to be is to be perceived – so Northrop Frye condensed Blake's most cherished idea.” [19] “As with Blake, so with Buber. Every experience is a decision, a context we create that shapes the world one way or another: an atom or a bloom, it or thou.” [21]

COPY A GREAT DEAL
Blake: “The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great Deal: The Good one Really Does Copy a Great Deal.” [26] Wilson: “Blake most mimicked that great repository of tradition, the Bible, and the life of Jesus in particular. […] Jesus epitomized climax and transcendence through a kind of allusion, ironic in nature. He both affirmed the Hebrew law and criticized it, suggesting the law is valuable but not yet complete and that he is the one to perfect it. This mode is revisionary ….” [26]

THE INFERNAL METHOD
Wilson: “Finding that the traditional mode of printing, the letterpress, was too expensive for him to use, he tried to come up with a way that would allow him to print his art cheaply, with the tools of his own workshop. This technique came to him in a vision. Blake's brother Robert, recently deceased, appeared as a spirit and taught a special kind of relief etching.” [32] Blake: “notion that man has a body that is distinct from his soul is … expunged … by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutory and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” [33] (It's intriguing to realise Blake died in large part from the damaging effects of his printing.)

POETRY UNFETTER'D
Wilson: Blake “is probably the first poet in English to see form not as prior to content but as an extension of content.” [38]

REVISING
This essay is more about writing than Blake. Write, then revise, urges Wilson. Blake did this continuously: no two copies of a given work were the same, he revised eternally.

INNOCENCE
Wilson: “a way of seeing as much as a state of being”, “When we are innocent, we approach the imaginative state.” [46] Blake: “Unorganized Innocence, an Impossibility / Innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with Ignorance.” [46]

PLAY
Also more about writing, Wilson associates play with creativity and cites Wordsworth, Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Nietzsche. In another section, Wilson writes: “Blake often likens innocence to 'Beulah' – less a place than a psychological disposition marked by playful fancy, moony reverie, and romantic dreaming ...” [57]

EXPERIENCE
Blake: “Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect.” and “What are called vices in the natural world, are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world.” [55] Wilson: “To oppose the body or repress its urges is to dam the spring of art. The ascetic is the hack; the genius loves abandon. The word sought the flesh. Let your carnality pursue the poem.” [56]

GENERATION
“Blake calls the fallen world 'Generation', a realm, as he writes in Four Zoas, where “Life lives upon Death & by devouring appetite / All things subsist on one another.” [57] But from generation the artist can be spurred to regeneration.

THE FLY
Wilson: “Most only notice it as a pest to be swatted or a reminder of carrion or feces. The fly is thus usually only a ratio, an allegory … we must demolish this abstraction and release the fly into infinity.” [61] Then quotes Blake's verse on the fly.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE
“Blake's true Eden, recall, is not the earthly paradise where contraries take respite from their mutually rewarding struggles. Eden is instead the imagination creatively sparring, laboring to generate specifically human forms that raise us above our merely natural cravings – forms like charity, which requires that we empathize with the suffering of another, or art, where we envision cities or poems or paintings that cultivate elegant generosity.” [65]

WORK
“For [Blake], exertion and imagination were little different: both had as their lofty end the creation of humanizing art.” [68]

ETERNITY
Wilson draws parallels between creativity and the eternal: when in flow, in the zone, creativity is eternal. Blake is quoted earlier as saying “There is a moment in each Day which Satan cannot find.” [35]

DICTATION
Wilson: “This was Blake's faith: wait, patiently, and the muse will always come, bringing lines ready-made, stanzas done in full.” [74] Blake: “If the Sun and Moon should doubt, / They'd immediately go out.” [76]

THE FOURFOLD
Blake: “Now I fourfold vision see / And a fourfold vision is given me / Tis fourfold in my supreme delight / And threefold in soft Beulah's night / And twofold Always. May God us keep / From Single Vision & Newton's Sleep.” [79] Wilson: “In Four Zoas, an epic he never finished, he depicts the imaginative human as a harmonious merger of Urthona, Luvah, Tharmas, and Urizen, intimating, respectively, the imagination, feeling, sensation, and reason.” [81]

INFINITE WRITING
Blake: “If a thing loves, it is infinite.” [83] Wilson: “Blake's own texts … proliferate infinite interpretations, unfathomable labors.” [84] show less