The Traveller in the Evening – Details, episodes & analysis

It is acceptable these days to describe Blake as a Taoist, a Pagan, a Buddhist or an atheist... anything but a Christian. The Traveller and his guest, Mark Vernon argue that this is a big mistake: "Blake... did not claim to be a mystic, and did not use the word. He claimed to be a visionary, an enthusiast, and a Christian, and defined the terms carefully. I have read, and now am reading in newspapers, statements of literary critics and those who call themselves "atheistic theologians" to the effect that Blake had no god but man. People who are not atheists are usually willing to leave to God such important judgments about others. On this subject, as on other statements about himself, Blake seems clear enough. He said always and passionately that he was a Christian, and I know only One who has a better right to an opinion on that subject." Bo Lindberg

Planned as a long Q&A session between Andy and long-time Traveller podcast co-host, Conor Kostick, that discussion raised so many questions and went on for so long that it seemed best to postpone airing the issues on the podcast. For this episode we excerpted Andy’s intro to the discussion, touching on his own experience listening to and making electronic music.

Starting with Wendy Carlos and Popcorn, (yes, it’s Hot Butter by Popcorn, not Popcorn by Hot Butter… Andy got that wrong throughout) passing through Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound, Andy argues that the technology is generally used lazily and to little effect, compared to the enormity of, eg., the work of Iancu Dumitrescu.

The gist of Andy’s argument is that all the things he found interesting in the distorted timbres and extremities of electronic rock and industrial music are used with overwhelming effect in the music of the Romanian Spectral composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, whose music runs throughout the show, along with samples from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, the Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder collaboration, KSpace, and Andy Wilson’s own recorded archives.

Along the way, Andy discusses the combined and uneven development of electronic music, with huge increases in the expressive power of the tools available to musicians still lagrely unexplored by most musicians. Yes, Andy is complaining about the music young people make today. Conor thought so, and he might be right.

Andy also tells stories about visiting abandoned quarries on a military base to record foxes with Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire, Cod that burp (off the Galapagos Islands, not Japan) at hissing cockroaches, Chris Carter’s Gristleizer, Bourbonese Qualk’s Simon Crab buying Throbbing Gristle’s Korg MS20, comparisons between buying tickets for Oasis and dumping grain in the Pacific, seagull reverb, the Nagra tape recorder, BBC Radiophonics, ‘Dada, Futurism, Industrial Music’, Wendy Carlos, hand-cranked ring modulators, The Aphex Twin and the Supercollider user group, Steve Stapleton bunking off at Faust’s Wumme and Kurt Graupner’s Faust Machines, computerised shamanic improv, John Lennon’s tape experiments, SoundRaider, time division multiplexing, nature recording with David Attenborough, the pleasures of dentistry under general anaesthetics, and more besides.

Criminally, I didn’t get around to talking about how the sound of King Iwah and the Upsetters’ Give Me Power, produced by Lee Perry in 1972, set the scene for everything that followed. I can only apologise and drop this video here.

Traveller Music Tech

An interview with Jason Wright, author of a new book, Blake's Job: Adventures in Becoming – taking in Blake's Leviathan, gender, Jung, addiction, the singer Jackie Leven, and more on the way.

Podcast | Andy Wilson interviewed by Conor Kostick on William Blake, Surrealism, ecology, radical politics and theology, and how Blake's meaning has been distorted by contemporary Blakeans such as John Higgs.

Conor Kostick interviews Andy Wilson about his recent essay, From Hyperobjects to Re-Animism: Titans at the End of the World.

Blake saw imagination as the ‘body of Christ’, as divine: imagination is what will build Golgonooza, his New Jerusalem. Some readers of Blake interpret this imagination as merely the power that drives the artist to make inspired art. It is far more than this in Blake. The imagination is tasked with building God’s Kingdom itself. But what can this mean?

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a child of the post-war revolutionary movement. He led the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), which split to the left of French Trotskyism and was active from 1948-1966. Castoriadis eventually rejected Marxism, based on his belief in the power of the collective social imaginary to create social forms (languages, institutions, social relations), symbolic artefacts and entire societies. Could this social imaginary, able to create ex nihilo and overturn all categories, be the divine body of the imagination Blake envisioned?

In this podcast, Andy Wilson talks to Joe Ruffell about Castoriadis and the imagination, taking in topics including;

* Castoriadis’s political history and his development beyond Marxismthe role of imagination in Blake

* Castoriadis’s account of the history of the concept of the radical (esemplastic) imagination from Aristotle to Heidegger and beyond

* Castoriadis and Primary Narcissism

* State Capitalist groups to the left of Trotskyism in the New Left

* worker’s power against Lenin and Taylorism

* the later Castoriadis’s idea of the interregnum, and of the power of the imagination to entrap and beguile

* Castoriadis’s ecological and anti-oppression politics

* Castoriadis and imagination against Marxism

* the debate between Castoriadis and Alasdair MacIntyre (the latter speaking for the International Socialists before becoming a Catholic Aristotelian)

* democracy in the Greek polis and elsewhere

* the curse of the imagination

Does the radical duality of Castoriadis’s imagination – its power both to liberate and enslave, and the slippery dialectics between those states – resemble in any way the arrangements in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell?

The Traveller in the Evening talks to Timothy Morton about Tim's new book Hell, their personal journeys towards Christianity; the role of aesthetics in theory; the war against The Holy Spirit and Žižek's blindness to the latter; charisma; Speculative Realism as an attack on theory; ‘French feminism’; the impact of music on their lives; the trouble with Marxists pirouetting like Jerry Falwell… and Falwell’s demonic level of aggression toward Desmond Tutu; doing peyote with your mum; The Sex Pistols tearing a hole in the curtain of reality on the Bill Grundy Show; transpersonal boundary-violating sensations of extreme benevolence; Bjork as a 'soul-opener'; René Girard channelling Alice Through the Looking Glass; Marx's meanness, the role of wonderment in theory; Terry Eagleton giving Marx a leg up; being a happy scapegoat and cheerful assassin; Luce Irigaray and the Sokal hoax; and the influence of childhood trauma on their views.

“Aggressively expressed contempt is absolutely the wonderment killer.”

"I've been calling them Right Club recently, like Fight Club. The first rule of Right Club is you never mention Right Club... and the second rule of Right Club is that you never mention Right Club. And as soon as you call them out, like we actually were in a church, this is a church with some Hegel, with a sort of stained glass window of Marx, and you are all like crusading inquisition people. They get so mad, you know? And the first time I ever said I'm not quite sure anymore about the concept of critique, I got killed in public for three days by people who had to perform a ritual sacrifice on me. And incidentally, by the way, I love Theodore Adorno."

“The sense of beauty that even beetles and perhaps flowers… share has nothing to do with being a 'biologically female' body: this is a trans theory of beauty, as a matter of fact. I'm going to say that again: the default theory of sexual selection consists of a trans theory of beauty. Far from 'essentializing' or 'biologizing' art, what this means is that beetles and flowers also make art: 'art history' can't possibly stop at human beings or even primates. And that art is profoundly queer and indeed trans. Think about it. Those female ducks and butterflies simply can't be the only lifeforms with a sense of beauty. The non-cloning part of our biosphere, the way it appears, from flowers to wallpaper to disco balls to iridescent beetles, is a reflection of queer desire without a goal.

Thel created Earth.

So Thel is a figure for theory, throwing a wrench of 'what the f**k?' into the machinery. And therefore Thel is a figure for 'life,' but not the procreative, goal-directed life of parents and daughters. Wonderment is the 'feel' of theory, and wonderment is without a goal. The fact that consciousness can wonder is perhaps another flower, another 'meaningless' life, meaningless in the sense of not having a telos or point. And what is esoteric religion aside from asserting what Kant asserts about beauty, a meaningful lack of meaning?”

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of Ecology without Nature (2007), The Ecological Thought (2010), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Being Ecological (2018), ten other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

Watch now | An introduction to Blake given by Andy Wilson at St Luke’s Community Centre, Islington, London, on 24th Nov 2021, for the residents around Bunhill Fields, where Blake is buried.

The fourth wall between the human subject and everything else evaporates. How to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? How to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theatre on fire? When being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? The play was s**t. We need another play.Timothy Morton, Hell

Hell on earth is here. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can yet fathom. As Timothy Morton’s new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, shows, escaping global warming hell requires a radical mystical marriage of Christianity and biology to awaken a future beyond white male savagery.

On 17th April 2024, Timothy Morton was interviewed by Andy Wilson for The Blake Society and The Traveller in the Evening. This podcast captures the interview and resulting discussion.

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of Being Ecological (2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), ten other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology is published on Earth Day (22 April) 2024.

The Traveller in the Evening

Andy Wilson runs the blog The Traveller in the Evening: Reflections on William Blake, Radical Theology, Politics and Surrealism, founded Reservists Against War and co-founded the Association of Musical Marxists (AMM). He is the author of Faust: Stretch Out Time 1970-75 (2006), Cosmic Orgasm: The Music of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram (2013), and The Brilliant New Hercules: A Blake Reader (2015). With Michael Tencer he edited The Assassin (2014), and with Jules Alford, Khiyana: Daesh, the Left and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution (2015).

Join the Blake Society here.

These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the VintageThou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summerUpon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the danceKnows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & returnThese are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountainsThe wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom skyUttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sonsOf men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of EternityBut we see only as it were the hem of their garmentsWhen with our vegetable eyes we view these wond'rous VisionsWilliam Blake, Milton I 26:1-12, [E123]

Conor Kostick leads a discussion with Andy Wilson about panpsychism, a philosophy gaining popularity with its account of how awareness is baked into matter as a fundamental property from the outset. Conor and Andy discuss:

* the current popularity of panpsychism

* what its basic idea is

* the ‘composition problem’ in explaining consciousness

* Galileo’s idea of science

* hierarchies of consciousness

* animal consciousness

* the possibility of higher forms of consciousness

* cultural resistance to panpsychism