Monday, December 17, 2007

The Notebooks of Orokie.


Notebooks offer glimpses of private worlds. Often, through picture and word they speak to both sides of the human brain: the left which controls writing and the right which controls drawing. A double language. William Blake remains one of the most important visionaries and alchemists of the human spirit. In his work, word and picture speak together. They look at the world through double-vision. In his notebooks, his mental processes can be seen in operation. Blake mistrusted the education given by scholars (Reason, the enslaver of mankind, which he named Urizen, You-reason) which he feared took away the gift of intuition. Last night, Orokie wrote this about a new painting for his notebook and his belief in the world of spirit:


“that me ought to try, defend and protect it from preachers and teachers that would always try to put the unseen energy of my spirit in chains cause that was their job.”


His view is the same as Blake’s! In his notebooks on Afriboy—The Moleskin is a good place to begin— Orokie reveals a series of sketches that open up a world of signs and inner thoughts. This world belongs to innocence and experience. For Blake, the universe was dynamic, a cosmos, a seed to be viewed in a grain of sand. And the poetic-art-image as it appears…in Orokie’s notebooks… is something to be viewed in this way. It requires involvement and contemplation.

4 comments:

gayuganda said...

Many have to be taught, and benefit from it.

But to some, maybe few, maybe many, the teaching, dogma is a series of constraints and chains that have to be thrown off.

Trail blazers. They may not new rules make. But the teachers will make them of their work. That is their function.

Trail blazers. The rules they may need to know so that they can break them, and break them well. But the rules and regs are in truth chains and constraints there.

gug

Afriboy said...

You are right. Your view is like Blake's. Regulations, from Latin for King, are colonial rules. Chains of reason go against emotion and love (in Blake's world).

BronzeBuckaroo said...

I don't even know where to begin in writing. Reading this, I think about how so many well intentioned ....who have manacled the imaginations with rules and regulations or, for me, the status quo.

Afriboy said...

The status quo...Blake's fear. That deadness which kills creativity. You are so right, bronzebuckaroo.