Jerusalem: An Essay on the Imagination

Part 1

My first exposure to the poetry of William Blake, like many American kids of my generation, was not in a schoolroom but on the radio airwaves when I heard prog band Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of Blake’s lyric “And did those feet in ancient time” (more commonly known as “Jerusalem”), the opening track to their album Brain Salad Surgery. I had no idea of the song’s pedigree as the lyric of a visionary poet (I assumed Greg Lake wrote the song) or its position as the unofficial national anthem of Great Britain. But that’s how things were in the 1970s. The only place to learn about such things was in these things called books and they were stored in these things called libraries.

The ELP version is very British, very 1970s British prog: pompous, overproduced, bombastic, yet nevertheless very charming, and even patriotic, in an almost naïve way. This is no doubt due to the inspiration of Blake’s lyrics which uphold the Imagination and its role in revealing reality in the face of a mechanized and contrived world of gnostic artifice. Blake’s first two stanzas beautifully and succinctly phrase the problem:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

What can I say about the cover art? It was 1973.

The ability to perceive reality—despite the overwhelming evidence of satanic hegemony—is the poet’s unique and salutary gift. Most of Brain Salad Surgery is given over the suite of compositions entitled “Karn Evil 9,” which tells the story of a man who designs a computer that attains consciousness and then overtakes him; so the invocation of Blake’s contention with the dark Satanic Mills more than coheres with their greater project. This was in 1973, mind you, when the idea of having a “personal computer” was a distant dream; but we all know where things were headed: exactly where they are.

Nevertheless, “Jerusalem,” both the song and Blake’s poem (which is the prologue to his illuminated book, Milton) has accompanied me now for probably fifty years, my entire life so far. That’s a long spiritual relationship. Eventually, I started toying about with arrangements for the song—I even taught it to my students when I was a Waldorf teacher—but it was not until the Years of This Our Covid and lockdowns compelled me to start a house church that I took the time to write an all-new arrangement of the hymn. Think of it as a collaboration over time between me, ELP, Sir Hubert, and my spiritual father, Blake.

My introduction to Blake in the hymn, even though I was unaware of its origin in the poet at the time, eventually flowered into an immersion in Blake that began in my early twenties when I read the illuminated book, also named Jerusalem: an immersion that has yet to subside. Starting with Jerusalem, the entire title of which is Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion was rather jumping in at the deep end of the pool, as it is Blake’s most complicated work (and that’s saying something!), but also the one in which his mythos is most fully realized. The scaffolding for Jerusalem is the Apocalypse of John, but through the Imagination Blake uncovers layers of the Apocalypse both only hinted at in the text and others more profoundly integral to his own psyche.

When Jerusalem first appeared in illuminated form, it was almost completely indecipherable to the few people who read it, and when it was eventually published in print (without Blake’s extraordinary artwork that inhabits his text) over the centuries it likewise proved indecipherable to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) more. At my own first reading, I took away very little; but what I took away was enough to last a lifetime: 1) the importance of forgiveness as the ultimate act of creativity and Imagination; and 2) the radical proposal of “Jesus the Imagination.” As Blake describes it in chapter one of the poem, one problem that plagues all of us enmeshed in modernity is due to “Abstract Philosophy warring against Imagination / (Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever).” Think about that: Imagination is the body of Jesus. That is, Imagination is incarnational. Another problem which Blake tackles unflinchingly is the problem of sex and sexual difference. And in this he may be the greatest, the most perceptive, and most honest explorer of Christian psychology in all of history.

In the poem, Jerusalem, the emanation of the title, is the feminine aspect of Albion, the imaginative image of England. It’s easy to read this in terms of Jungian anima/animus (and it has been read in precisely this way), and there is also a lot of Gnosticism lurking in Blake’s mythos—and that’s a weird thing, because he was writing almost 150 years before the discoveries of the Nag Hamadi and Dead Sea Scrolls. (I assume he found anything he might have known about Gnosticism from Ireneus’s Adversus Haereses, if he even found it here. He could have discovered it via the Imagination.) What’s fascinating is that the emanation (as well as the spectre, the intellectual daemon of his mythos) splits from the self due to anxieties and fears, to self-reproach and the inability to believe that Jesus can forgive sins. The emanation is therefore also prey to anxieties and insecurities while the spectre nurtures self-doubt and the temptation to nihilism and the false security of the intellect. For Blake, biblical gendered difference arose when Eve was taken from the side of Adam (the archetype of the emanation) when thus was also born a desire for return and reunion (also a theme of the Symposium, Gnosticism, and the Kabbalah). Only, this restoration is not simply a matter of reintegration, but of a process that must be experienced—in all of its despair and pain—until the coming of Jesus. Blake’s is a Christian eschatology that is always already happening: it constantly occurs in the human soul, in human relationships, and is simultaneously the telos of a Creation that continues to groan as “we await the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).

It could be argued that Christian sexual psychology has been compromised ever since Paul told the unmarried that it is better to remain so, with the get-out-of-purgatory-free-card that “it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Cor 7:8-9). For a religion that relies on nuptial imagery for much of its soteriological vocabulary, Christianity has yet to come to terms with sex as it is and most of the problems that plague the world even now, from pornography to confusion over gender (“I was born in the wrong body”), are due to the reluctance of Christianity to look into the psychic environment of Christian sexuality. Blake is one of the only Christian psychologists (and he was, without question, a Christian psychologist) to honestly confront the problem with integrity and honesty.

To be continued. . .