Oh, and did I mention the apocalypse / terror connection?

What made this almost comic incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake had said “Damn the King” and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he was forced to post bail and appear in court.

Christian?

Theologian Thomas Altizer writes of Blake that “From the beginning, he rebelled against God, or against the God then present in Christendom” — perhaps thinking of Blake’s own words in The Everlasting Gospel:

THe vision of Christ that thou dost see

Is my vision’s greatest enemy.

Thine has a great hook nose like thine;

Mine has a snub nose like to mine.

Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;

Mine speaks in parables to the blind.

Thine loves the same world that mine hates;

Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.

Socrates taught what Meletus

Loath’d as a nation’s bitterest curse,

And Caiaphas was in his own mind

A benefactor to mankind.

Both read the Bible day and night,

But thou read’st black where I read white.

— and then calls him “the most radical of all modern Christian visionaries”, explaining that “no poet or seer before him had so profoundly sensed the cataclysmic collapse of the cosmos created by Western man” —

So yes, apocalyptic, too.

**

Terrorist? Christian? Muslim? Artist? Mystic? Poet? Blasphemer?

Words strain, TS Eliot wrote, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.

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