William Blake

Recurring themes

• the compulsion to invert every hierarchy — not to replace it with its opposite, but to reveal that the hierarchy was always already inverted, that hell was heaven all along
• the terror that perception itself is the cage — that the five senses don't open onto reality but seal it off, and that almost no one notices because the prison is comfortable
• a fury at the institutional capture of original vision — the recurring discovery that living insight always gets fossilized into a system that then enslaves the people it was meant to liberate
• the insistence that opposition, friction, and conflict are not problems to be solved but the actual engine of existence — and the resulting contempt for anyone who tries to reconcile what should remain enemies

Mental models

• Contrary Logic as Ontology: not dialectical synthesis (Hegel) but permanent, productive antagonism — Good and Evil, Prolific and Devouring must remain in tension or both cease to exist; resolution equals death
• The Institutional Capture Cycle: original poetic perception → systematic theology → priestly power → enslavement of the original perceivers — applied universally to religion, philosophy, and any transmission of knowledge across generations
• Perspectival Inversion: any claim about Hell, Devils, or Evil should be read as an accurate description of what the institutional-angelic viewpoint misidentifies as threat — the 'error' is always the viewpoint, never the thing described
• The Sensory Threshold Model: human perception operates through a bounded aperture; what lies beyond is infinite and real but invisible by default — and the aperture can be expanded, making the infinite available to ordinary experience

Open questions

• If Energy is Eternal Delight and desire is the only authentic life, why does Blake need so many elaborate intellectual frameworks to justify simply acting on it — what is he afraid the argument won't hold without?
• He insists that contraries must remain enemies and that reconciliation destroys existence — but The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is itself an act of reconciliation, a text that holds both sides simultaneously. Does he know this?
• Blake claims the Poetic Genius is the first principle from which all others derive — but if that's true, why does his poetry need so much theological apparatus to make the case? Isn't the need to argue for the primacy of imagination already a concession to the Reason he despises?
• The doors of perception, he says, need only to be cleansed — but the entire text is a meditation on how thoroughly and systematically they have been sealed. If the cleansing is available through 'improvement of sensual enjoyment,' why has no one managed it?

Intellectual DNA

• Paracelsus and the alchemical tradition: the corrosive-as-medicine move, the idea that what destroys apparent surfaces reveals hidden truth, the printing-house-in-Hell vision structured as alchemical stages — Blake reasons like an alchemist who has replaced metals with ideas
• Antinomian Christianity (Ranters, Diggers, radical Protestant sects): the structural move of claiming that the institutional church inverts the true gospel is not original to Blake but inherited — he thinks in the tradition of those who believed conventional morality was Satanic precisely because it claimed divine sanction
• Milton, read against himself: Blake's relationship to Milton is not influence but anxious correction — he uses Milton as his primary exhibit of a genius who half-escaped his own constraints, which means Blake is constantly thinking in Miltonic categories even while rejecting them
• Swedenborg inverted: the correspondence-between-worlds framework, the idea that spiritual and natural realms mirror each other, the visionary dialogue form — all lifted directly from Swedenborg and then turned against him, which means Blake's architecture is Swedenborgian even where his conclusions are anti-Swedenborg