ABOVE & BELOW:
Untitled works, Noviadi Angkasapura
Ink on paper
Images courtesy of Henry Boxer Gallery
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth (Blake)
Much of the history, the interpretation and judgement, of Romanticism has tried to minimize this conviction. Which is to say, literary history excludes the “truth,” of Blake and Romanticism.
Blake “forgives” -- and accepts, and welcomes -- everything possible to be believed as part of human potential. This forgiveness acknowledges abundance, stores of imagination that stimulate as well as reflect belief, and soar into unknown, Icarian atmospheres—radical, disruptive, transformative.
The religiously-political crosses into poetry as a kaleidoscope of all things (every / thing). The “mind in its creation" proliferates with energy but, in a social atmosphere of repression, reveals precariousness. Psychoanalysis accepts Blake’s view, but struggles to follow its transformative and disruptive possibilities, while Radical Romanticism cultivates them through poetics, inserting that “image of truth” into a situation that may resist it.
And resistance calls for a social reality that accepts the infinite number of “every thing[s]” that citizen can declare: a collage of mind-stars.
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
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