K E V I N F I S C H E R
appear as it is: infinite’,87 clearly echoes the propositions that appear repeatedly in Boehme’s writings; so much so as to suggest that he was consciously reaffirming Boehme’s exhortations:
If . . . thy Eyes were opened, then, in that very place, where thou standest, sittest, or lyest: thou shouldst see the glorious Countenance or Face of God and the whole heavenly Gate.88
Paradise
is not in this World, yet as it were swallowed up in the Mystery; but it is not altered in itself, it is only withdrawn from our Sight and our Source; for if our Eyes were opened, we should see it.89
Through imagination we experience a far greater sense of the full reality of existence—that is, we truly see, feel and know how astonishing, how utterly extraordinary it is to be alive in the world. And as the outward world is not shut off from the imaginative and creative life of the inward, the reality of the world comes more to life. As ‘every thing that lives is Holy’, the outward world ‘reflects back’ the life of the spirit. In Blake’s poem Europe, a Fairy evokes this living interplay. The narrator asks, ‘What is the material world, and is it dead?’ Having sung of ‘the eternal world that ever groweth’, the Fairy promises ‘I’ll . . . shew you all alive/The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy’.90 The same vision is expressed in Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.91
As Boehme perceived, ‘if a man be born of God, he may know in every Spire of Grass his Creator in whom he lives’.92 This is a perfect expression of the dynamic unity of the outward and inward, and of the necessity of being imaginatively alive to the unique and individual: alive, in Blake’s favoured phrase, to the ‘minute particulars’ of life.