K E V I N F I S C H E R
right hemisphere that is in direct contact with the embodied living world: the left hemisphere is by comparison a virtual, bloodless affair.’ As a result, it
deals with what it [already] knows . . .. The difficulty is . . . that once we have . . . decided what the world is going to reveal, we are unlikely to get beyond it . . .. Whatever . . . the left hemisphere deals with is bound to become familiar all too quickly . . .. This process eventually becomes so automatic that we do not so much experience the world as experience our representation of the world. The world is no longer ‘present’ to us, but ‘re-presented’, a virtual world, a copy that exists in conceptual form in the mind.
Ultimately, the mind can become ‘disconnected from everything that is outside it.’ And then, to the ‘Reasoning Power’, ‘the world . . . becomes merely things [that are] seen’.19
As Blake saw, the ‘Reasoning Power’ is an ‘Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing’.20 He wrote of those who are isolated and alienated by it: ‘Beyond the bounds of their own self their senses cannot penetrate’.21 ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.’22 For all its claims to be our primary means of gaining access to reality, this ‘Reasoning Power’ can therefore distance us from full, living knowledge and understanding; and the more it functions in isolation, in an enclosed ‘virtual’ world, the more it can slip into solipsism and fantasy. As Blake acknowledged of himself in a letter to Thomas Butts, ‘my Abstract folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over Mountains & Valleys which are not Real in a Land of Abstraction where the Spectres of the Dead wander’.23
Blake and Boehme both saw imagination as something profoundly different from fantasy. Contrary to common conception, this imagination is not about make-believe, the creation of the fantastical, nor is it wish-fulfilment. Blake and Boehme regarded it as an essential part of life, a means of breaking out of the ‘dull round’ of the ‘ratio’ of abstract reason, of the already known, and through to that which