William Blake’s visual art and poetry are intrinsically bound within the context of Blake’s "vision." It should be noted that this "vision" is not the glorified product of insane ramblings and hallucinations. Blake possessed a very real and discernable world-view, which consisted of quite intelligible philosophical and psychological premises. Blake’s work is visionary on the basis of its content and motivation, not because of eccentric habits or false inferences surrounding the artist. Blake was concerned with reality as it pertains to the transcendent mind and body of the human animal. Because he was so focused on the intellect and imagination as well as the bodily senses, it is not surprising that he would create within the context t of the mind and body. Blake wrote, engraved and painted because these mediums are different aspects of the same imaginative force innate in the human mind. There is no necessary distinction of emphasis on one or the other. It is a grand unified process of engaging the imagination and translating thought and feeling through the hand onto whatever takes the ink. It is in fact a pure manifestation of thought. One can paint a picture or write a poem and say, "That was in my mind, that’s what I imagined you see." Vision and the word are different perspectives of the same object or objects of concentration and, perhaps most importantly both are able to convey ideas that cannot be perceived by the senses. One cannot draw a picture of love and it is even harder to describe it in words. But this is the beauty of art of vision and the written word and every form of creativity imaginable, namely, it is within our capacity to think about the cosmos and create. To create is the most divine act and this is what Blake loved.

Engraving is laborious. It requires grit. The muscles strain and ache and the mind recoils at the thought of one more jab of the tool, one more scrape at the plate. But this is why it’s done. The plate will endure. The plate is indomitable. The plate is a landscape of dulcet sound and expansive beauty that agrees with the ink that swims through its rivulets or leaps off its precipices. The mind winces and the muscles give because creation requires effort and a giving of oneself to the vision, which is not simple but necessary. "Despair in the Abyss" is the title I gave my engraving because it is a summation and it sounds ominous. It is the closest likeness of an actual vision I had in a dream. After seeing this beast lunge upward towards me through the murky darkness in a terrible helix I immediately awoke and sketched the image down to the best of my memory’s ability. It was scary and lucid so I thought it was neat. The poem that accompanies the plate is a linguistic attempt to describe the kind of words and feelings the imagery conjured. No immediate significance really, just beautiful and dangerous thinking.

Despair in the Abyss

Darkness glosses over bleak downward swirlings into the despair of the abyss. Soporific ruminations swell up in dreamy indolence and squelch the need to think hard about this and that and the pitter pat of weak hearts. But it comes closer in the dreamtime. It agitates and bubbles in the muck at the bottom of the mind. A viscid vapor of murky filth sways back and forth in an anxious dance and then soars up or away from the coming of the fear. It’s thicker at the bottom. Impossible to see or breathe in the density of thought speedily looking for an escape. Swiping hands in front of straining eyes become radical in their motion to remove the brackish fear, the diaphanous film of abstruse obscurity. It’s simply too hard to manage you see. All the rushing momentum of the stealthy beast surges upward to obliterate hope in these gray straining eyes. Swampy green stares and terrible apparatus murder any pathetic struggling minutia of sanguine reflections bouncing off of crystal surfaces or thick blue sleepy time gardens of the deep-mind castles. Sanguinary potentials thrust upward with white bellies and black bodies and breathe mossy green smoke in liquid habitats. Mark for the coming of the slippery breathers. The tide is out and the ledge slides fast into glossy blackness. The inky bleakness waits in horror for the filthy ones to wake and take the sleeper from the timid surface. Despair in the abyss waits patiently for languid swimmers.