Idea

[likeminded01]

The human? The human being? Me being a human?

Why would i? Its one lonely ride.

This life is not about my body/image.

I am hundreds of humans.

Like would you believe theres only 4 people in the world?

And when your not looking they change mask?

[Redbeck]

Greetings likeminded01, welcome to the Oracle forum and thank you for your most poetic post. Well it seems to be my summer of excursion into the metaphysical and I am conscious of a certain synergy of word and perhaps thought with The Human Abstract by William Blake. Therefore, hopefully it is useful in the scheme of things to elevate Blake once again, certainly he has proved highly influential over time, into the limelight as a perhaps an extrapolative catalyst applied to the thought process behind your writing in this instance.

The Human Abstract is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience 1794. The poem was originally drafted in Blake's notebook and was later revised for as part of publication in Songs of Experience. Expert critics of William Blake’s work have noted the poem as being particularly demonstrative example of Blake's metaphysical poetry and its emphasis on the tension between the human and the divine.

The Human Abstract by William Blake 1794

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain

The picture below, hand painted by Blake himself, portrays the supreme God of Blake's mythology and the creator the material world, whom Blake named ‘Urizen’ (probably derived from the words 'your reason'), struggling with his own nets of religion, under the Tree of Mystery, which symbolically ‘represents the resulting growth of religion and the priesthood (the Caterpillar and the Fly – both agents of death in Blake’s poetry), feeding on its leaves’. Irish scholar, linguist and Blake expert, John Sampson interpreted the 'Tree of Mystery' as signifying 'Moral Law'.

Poetry critic, essayist and writer Robert F. Gleckner observed, ‘….in the world of experience such a human-divine imaginative unity is shattered, for the Blakean fall, as is well known, is a fall into division, fragmentation, each fragment assuming for itself the importance (and hence the benefits) of the whole. Experience, then, is fundamentally hypocritical and acquisitive, rational and non-imaginative. In such a world virtue cannot exist except as a rationally conceived opposite to vice.’

Gleckner concluded his analysis of the poem The Human Abstract with the statement that, as a whole it is ‘…a remarkably ambitious experiment in progressive enrichment, and a revealing document for the study of Blake's two contrary states of the human soul’.