Nehemiah Blake

Nehemiah Blake | notes, visions, prophecies

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:02:00 -0400

Nehemiah Blake | notes, visions, prophecies:

The website for London’s watchman.

Commercial routes, situationist drifts and pilgrimages

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:37:39 -0500

This answer to the question posed below comes from Will Self:

Could you explain the principles of pyschogeography and do you think it’s something that can only be applied to urban spaces?
Ooh, big question. I take my lead on matters psycho-geo from the Situationist fons et origio. It’s part of the tearing down of the Society of the Spectacle mandated by late capitalism; unstructured dérives or drifts across the urban landscape cut across the predetermined routes of commercial necessity which were best defined by a graffito I once saw on a supermarket wall outside Yate in Somerset: ‘Work, Consume, Die’. What I think of as ‘the man-machine matrix’ wants you tramelled on EasyJet watching a six-inch screen implanted in the back of another human’s head, wants you stuck in a car coughing out lead particulates, wants you staring at a VDU, doesn’t want you on foot, transgressing.

This version of psychogeography (very neatly defined I think) sets itself in opposition to the society of spectacle of late capitalism. Nehemiah Blake has been forging a third path, one that sits triangulated to the two opposites above (just as John Bunyan lies triangulated with Daniel Defoe and William Blake in Bunhill Fields): walking neither the paths of commercial necessity nor the transgressive paths of psychogeography, but a path of pilgrimage; not a stance for capital or of activist protest, but the stance of a watchman. I’ll be blogging his visions and watchman reports from this April at www.nehemiahblake.co.uk.

The coming re-enchantment of English Literature

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:54:58 -0500

The idea of ‘disenchantment’, of a devaluation of the ineffable in people’s lives, has always seemed to me better suited to the German tradition, capturing a Nietzschean insight. Though it is part of the English tradition, it is harder to see through an English literary or philosophical filter.

…Disenchantment is closely connected with secularism, which we are arguably further away from, in England anyway, than in Eliot’s day.

Been reflecting on that last statement on disenchantment and secularism by Anthony Brown on 3AM. Does it mean we’re moving back towards enchantment in English letters? Nehemiah Blake would certainly argue that. That is his vision —the coming reenchantment of English literature. I begin blogging his vision in April at www.nehemiahblake.co.uk.

The similar deaths of literature & Christendom

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:12:00 -0500

I find these two recent quotes from Symon Hill and Lars Iyer worth putting alongside each other because they express curiously simliar sentiments. Nehemiah Blake would say that the coincidence is not a coincidence, but that curiouser and curiouser, the restoration of both Christian faith and literature are intimately intertwined.

This is Symon Hill’s observation of Christianity:

For hundreds of years, Christianity was at the centre of power in Britain. Like much of Europe, it went through various forms of Christendom, in which the state gave political backing to the official Church, while the Church provided moral sanction to the state.

As Christendom fades in a multi-faith society, British Christians have largely reacted in one of three ways.

Firstly, there are those who respond by revering the cultural shell of Christendom. This is the attitude that turns cathedrals into tourist attractions, expects to see nativity plays at Christmas and wants people to get married in churches that they never otherwise attend. It is the approach of people who last year celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible because of its linguistic and cultural significance, as if the quality of a text could be considered independently of the message it conveys.

Here is Lars Iyer’s nostalgic desire for literature:

I certainly value the criticism my work has received. The fact that such criticism even exists is impressive to me. Spurious has received many appreciative reviews, including several dozen by readers of all kinds who had to write a short review of the novel in order to vote for it in The Guardian Not the Booker prize. For all that, I must admit, I’d like to see a backlash for Dogma, which is coming out in February. I dream of a detailed take down by Michael Hoffman, as he did for Stefan Zweig a while back, something really cruel … I have a desire to be told off, to be not allowed to get away with it. A desire for the order of the world to be restored, even as I know that it cannot be restored. This, of course, is really the desire for an older literary world, a world of tradition and security from which I feel utterly estranged. It is really a sense of nostalgia and mourning, which is, of course, very much part of Spurious itself. I long for a world in which Spurious itself could not exist, and which would never permit me to posture as a literary author.

"I do not know whether Shakespeare the man was Protestant or Catholic, skeptic or occultist,..."

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:48:23 -0500

““I do not know whether Shakespeare the man was Protestant or Catholic, skeptic or occultist, Hermetist or nihilist (though I suspect that last possibility), but the dramatist regularly drew upon the arch-Protestant Geneva Bible throughout the last 17 years of his productivity. Milton also favoured the Geneva Bible, though increasingly I wonder whether the final Milton was not a post-Protestant sect of one, anticipating William Blake and Emily Dickinson.””

- Harold Bloom, quoted by John Banville on Harold Bloom | Books | The Guardian

"If we believe in God, he claims, we can take any situation and, by means of our own behaviour,..."

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:01:11 -0500

“

If we believe in God, he claims, we can take any situation and, by means of our own behaviour, transform it into what he calls ‘the kingdom of God on earth.’ He tells me that the Church is the only voluntary association in our country which eludes the control of the state. I wonder whether he’s joined the Church because it helps him to oppose the regime or because he really believes in God.

Why don’t you ask him?

I used to admire believers, Tomas continued. I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son’s experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

”

- From Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being

"In Yoder’s view the proper model for the church’s relation to empire is to be found in Jeremiah’s..."

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:11:33 -0500

“In Yoder’s view the proper model for the church’s relation to empire is to be found in Jeremiah’s instructions to the diaspora community in Babylon: Jews were to “seek the salvation of the culture” of Babylon by accepting their dispersion as a call to mission. They were to retain their separate identity by adherence to a peripatetic moral and liturgical life—they defined themselves by a “text which can be copied and read anywhere,” centered their worship on “reading and singing the texts,” established places of worship without priesthoods wherever ten households gathered, maintained their international unity by “intervisitation, by intermarriage, by commerce, and by rabbinic consultation,” found the “ground floor of identity” in “the common life, the walk, halakah,” and confounded kings and emperors “with the superior wisdom and power of the one authentic God.” There was no “Jewish emperor,” and they were not to hope for one; their leaders might be in king’s palaces, but it would be as “intermediaries” between “the community and the Gentiles.” (294) This is an “invigorating” vision, as Leithart notes; and as “a historical thesis, it accurately describes the experience of the church in the first three centuries” (295). It is even a “key vision that should guide the twenty-first-century Christian response to empire in a world after Christendom”. But it does not tell the whole story. Jeremiah hoped for a renewed Davidic dynasty; Daniel prayed for a return from exile; there is no criticism of the programme of Ezra and Nehemiah; and Isaiah ‘goes so far as to designate the temple-building Persian emperor Cyrus as Yahweh’s “Christ” and “shepherd” (296). The biblical vision does not leave the people in perpetual exile.”

- Peter Leithart: Christian Empire, Christian Mission | P.OST

"Pretty close to my view: “cut-ups, mosaics, found objects, chance creations, assemblages,..."

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:08:45 -0400

“Pretty close to my view: “cut-ups, mosaics, found objects, chance creations, assemblages, splicings, remixes, mash-ups, homages; the author as ‘a creative editor, presenting selections by other artists in a new context and adding notes of his own’. The novel is dead; long live the anti-novel, built from scraps: ‘I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.’””

- From a Guardian review of David Shields’s Reality Hunger

"Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods..."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:27:15 -0400

“

Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle “neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he clarifies the final word:

“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it means that it does not base itself on something which already is … It points toward the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

It does not base itself on something which already is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind of literature that does not engage with current events or familiar social relations, and where the style, language and subject matter - or lack of it - resists the utility of common understanding. Is modern literature, then, prophetic?

”

- Stephen Twitchelmore on Maurice Blanchot

"In my view, the novel is one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa..."

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:35:31 -0400

“In my view, the novel is one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We’ll call it even. The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it. At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. Joyce and Woolf broke it open again but, after them, the novel went back to the safe precincts it occupies till this day. It’s too bad. I’m grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson’s books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully. The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields‘ recent novel take on the art of the novel.”

- Teju Cole

"If we step back a bit, I think we then see how the Bible as a whole points the people of God always..."

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:31:07 -0400

“

If we step back a bit, I think we then see how the Bible as a whole points the people of God always towards the prospect of new creation, of which it is both a concrete embodiment and a prophetic sign.

But this narrative trajectory—this pointing—can be thoroughly described without introducing a ‘disastrous’ schism between theology and history. In scripture theology is grounded historically; history is interpreted theologically. This is why prophecy is such a critical component in biblical discourse—it is the realistic theological interpretation of historical events, past, present, and future.

”

- Andrew Perriman

"…an absolute nothingness has been deeply and comprehensively envisioned by Blake, Goethe,..."

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:45:12 -0400

“…an absolute nothingness has been deeply and comprehensively envisioned by Blake, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, and Mallarmé, just as it has purely and even totally been called forth by Joyce,
Kafka, Stevens, and Beckett. Yet it has not yet been theologically understood, and not yet fully confronted theologically, and this despite the fact that those thinkers and visionaries who most fully engaged an absolute nothingness thereby clearly established truly new theological horizons.”

- Thomas J. J. Altizer from Godhead and the Nothing

"a systemic failure in evangelical thought to recognize the the narrative shape of biblical theology...."

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:40:11 -0400

“a systemic failure in evangelical thought to recognize the the narrative shape of biblical theology. Modern evangelicalism constructs its belief-system abstractly and a-historically, arguably mythically; but biblical thought is always the community’s response to the contingencies of its political existence.”

- Andrew Perriman

Nicolaus Copernicus. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:42:24 -0400

Nicolaus Copernicus. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI. Nuremberg: Ioh. Petreius, 1543.

"What a commission it is to express a future that none think imaginable! Of course this cannot be..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:04:03 -0400

“What a commission it is to express a future that none think imaginable! Of course this cannot be done by inventing new symbols, for that is a wishful thing. Rather, it means to move back into the deepest memories of [the prophet’s] community and activate those very symbols that have always been the basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness.”

- Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination

"The post-Modernist too puts his finger on a real problem: Modernists do occassionally give the..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:56:15 -0400

“The post-Modernist too puts his finger on a real problem: Modernists do occassionally give the impression that they are fighting old battles with inadequate tools. But the best explorations of the issue…are undertaken with full awareness of these pitfalls, while at the same time denying that we can simply choose our traditions as and where we want them.”

- Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism

"We must get to grips with the idea that we don’t contribute anything to God, that God would be..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:50:33 -0400

““We must get to grips with the idea that we don’t contribute anything to God, that God would be the same God if we had never been created. God is simply and eternally happy to be God. My reason for saying that is to push back on what I see as a kind of sentimentality in theology. Our relationship with God is in many ways like an intimate human relationship, but it’s also deeply unlike. In no sense do I exist to solve God’s problems or to make God feel better. I know it’s counterintuitive, but it’s what the classical understanding of God is about. God’s act in creating the world is gratuitous, so everything comes to me as a gift. God simply wills that there shall be joy for something other than himself. That is the lifeblood of what I believe.””

- Archbishop Rowan Williams

"Until we can imagine a future in which our unique god – “the voided truth of Western nihilism, of..."

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:31:56 -0400

“Until we can imagine a future in which our unique god – “the voided truth of Western nihilism, of its secularized Christianity” – is given freedom from our oppressive political ideology, we will not be able to imagine prophetic futures that fill us with more than just saccharine hopes that things might be able to change.”

- From the Nehemiah Blake blog

"Political monotheism – the idea that there must be a unique king and a unique kingdom to comply with..."

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:06:04 -0400

“Political monotheism – the idea that there must be a unique king and a unique kingdom to comply with a unique god – expresses the actual essence of the most violent version of the immunization: the closure of the borders which tolerate nothing outside them.”

- Roberto Esposito

"Our common twentieth-century understanding of both evil and God is more prosaic and banal than ever..."

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:38:52 -0400

“Our common twentieth-century understanding of both evil and God is more prosaic and banal than ever before, and is truly challenged neither by philosophy nor theology, but only by the purest
expressions of our imagination. …There is no truly major work of twentieth-century art or literature which can openly envision God, or which can fully call forth a God who is not a truly distant, or empty, or alien God.”

- Thomas Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing