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The second quotation above is excerpted from The Practical Visionary (Hercules Editions, 2018), a visual poetry pamphlet by Chris McCabe and Sophie Herxheimer. These lines occur at the beginning of a letter written in the imagined voice of a reincarnated William Blake. Mirroring what both writers have called the “anti-chronology” of Blake’s own visions, this Blakean voice addresses the present-day “citizens” of London, using the language of interactive digital mapping. Initially puzzling, the image of William Blake gazing at the “blue dot” and beam of “source light”—visual features familiar to users of the Google Maps platform—creates a dynamic mesh of cartographic imaginaries past and present. The framework of modern technology dislocates Blake from his own time, literally placing him on the map for the present day. Reduced to a disembodied and anonymous blue dot, “absorbed into the mass” of modern urban life, the anachronistic prophet experiences a lapse in his visionary consciousness (as conjured by the Blakean phrase “red globule”). This scenario may seem rather dystopian, but the pages of The Practical Visionary also contain the hope that Blake’s work might itself offer a “source light” of sorts for today’s poets, artists, and metropolitan wanderers. Combining poetry and pictures in a way that recalls in spirit Blake’s illuminated books, McCabe and Herxheimer rekindle Blake’s cartographic imagination through the prism of today’s London. The titular phrase “practical visionary” fittingly draws together some key coordinates of Blakean mapping, namely an asymptotic reaching for spiritual vision that is simultaneously grounded in material places and practices. As this book has charted, for all its radical strangeness and criticality, Blake’s poetry and visual art was indeed grounded in the streets of London. And despite not quite achieving the scale of a “mass mailing” in his own lifetime, Blake’s cartographic imagination has come to exert a powerful presence in the present day, as we have seen on a local scale in the work of McCabe, Herxheimer, and the other London Blakeans discussed in the preceding chapter.

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Conclusion

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Caroline Anjali Ritchie

摘要

The second quotation above is excerpted from The Practical Visionary (Hercules Editions, 2018), a visual poetry pamphlet by Chris McCabe and Sophie Herxheimer. These lines occur at the beginning of a letter written in the imagined voice of a reincarnated William Blake. Mirroring what both writers have called the “anti-chronology” of Blake’s own visions, this Blakean voice addresses the present-day “citizens” of London, using the language of interactive digital mapping. Initially puzzling, the image of William Blake gazing at the “blue dot” and beam of “source light”—visual features familiar to users of the Google Maps platform—creates a dynamic mesh of cartographic imaginaries past and present. The framework of modern technology dislocates Blake from his own time, literally placing him on the map for the present day. Reduced to a disembodied and anonymous blue dot, “absorbed into the mass” of modern urban life, the anachronistic prophet experiences a lapse in his visionary consciousness (as conjured by the Blakean phrase “red globule”). This scenario may seem rather dystopian, but the pages of The Practical Visionary also contain the hope that Blake’s work might itself offer a “source light” of sorts for today’s poets, artists, and metropolitan wanderers. Combining poetry and pictures in a way that recalls in spirit Blake’s illuminated books, McCabe and Herxheimer rekindle Blake’s cartographic imagination through the prism of today’s London. The titular phrase “practical visionary” fittingly draws together some key coordinates of Blakean mapping, namely an asymptotic reaching for spiritual vision that is simultaneously grounded in material places and practices. As this book has charted, for all its radical strangeness and criticality, Blake’s poetry and visual art was indeed grounded in the streets of London. And despite not quite achieving the scale of a “mass mailing” in his own lifetime, Blake’s cartographic imagination has come to exert a powerful presence in the present day, as we have seen on a local scale in the work of McCabe, Herxheimer, and the other London Blakeans discussed in the preceding chapter.