Fiery the Angels Rose
Andy Wilson, My Big Brother
Andy Wilson, the traveller in the evening, has gone to the realm of pure imagination to be with God.
But that realm is no different from what happens here on Earth, which Andy filled with creation and creativity, striding the blast like an angel, burning with the fires of Orc.
Andy Wilson is my big brother, I longed for him since I was small. When I met him, Andy Wilson was about the same age as my grandfather was when I was born, also a communist. George had been in the Battle of Cable Street (October 4, 1936), where communists and Black people and Jewish people fought Blackshirts and police. I have always been extremely proud of that. In the absence of a father, I looked to George.
So when I found out Andy had been reading my work and when I found out Andy was a communist and when I found out he had been so ACTIVE in politics and art and when I found out just how deeply Andy had been engaging with me yeah, I figured he was that same energy, returned as my elder brother.
Andy was a punk and I was from the lineage of punks on ecstasy otherwise known as acid house. Andy is a musician, I say is because wherever he’s at right now, he’s playing that music. So much music. And such music. Ornette Coleman and his plastic saxophone flying free through the heavens when the stars threw down their spears and Frank Zappa threw down solos of galactic drool oozing from the soul of a working man driving a truck across the abject endlessness of the Mojave desert, Joseph and Mary looking for a place to give birth across that desert until they found a trough in a cowshed (“manger” is French for eating), the inn wouldn’t take them, go figure.
Andy galvanized me. Elec-tri-city. I started being up front about politics and morality and art in ways I had always yearned to. I was going there in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, and this is what attracted Andy to me, the sheer idea of it. He had heard about it and knew what it was before he read it, and lo, it was: What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.
The comma is important. What logic now proves to be true WAS, in actuality. And its actuality was “only” but not in the sense of “merely.” “Imagin’d” is in opposition to “proved”--same participle. Blake is very precise. VERY. Every comma, every word. He wrote in backwards copperplate on his precious work materials and he had no money to do his thing so he was fucking PRECISE. Like Andy.
So it’s “only” in the sense of “rather,” “instead,” “conversely.” Imagination is logically prior to logic. To cast logic, which is made of sentences, back into the fiery flames of volcanic, divine imagination, that swirl of visualization, back into the esemplastic activity of my brain, the very way my brain “brains,” that lava of social ferment (“the social imagination,” common to Jamican philosopher Sylvia Wynter and to Cornelius Castoriadis, the latter being a non-marxist communist whom Andy taught me to love) ... that furnace of the imagination that sees the Tyger burning bright in the forests of ideological common sensical blindness ... casting those sentences inscribed as subroutines and logic gates into those little plantations for electrons, silicon wafers, is the only way to destroy the One String to Rule them All, etched in golden circuitry, to wit, a ring of electronic signal now powering Satanic mills called Artificial Intelligence, batallions of horses of memory that will trample us like the police horses trampled my grandfather in the Battle of Cable Street.
Forcing us into the endless round and round the prison yard of some putative tech bro heaven on earth made of our misery.
If you’re caught in that prison yard and you’re alive, not not-dead but quivering, vibrant, alive like Andy is alive right now, alive in the sense Jesus means, not bios or zoe but chayyim, thumos (Tharmas), wanting to die, to be exempted from the compulsory exercise yard is the minimal resistance:
The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks, All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air. To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day (Blake, The Book of Thel, 1–3)
Thel wants to kill herself because Thel is a young woman living in patriarchy, and why wouldn’t that be a realistic reaction to that situation. Andy and I both want to die, at the very least, when we see what those daughters of memory (“Mne” as in “mnemonic”) do to our Jesus and our Blake, leading their social media flocks round and round the mulberry bush in the Parsonage garden for a spot of tea and oppression as they lecture you, in mild Satanic tones of hushed propriety, on the importance of never deviating from the status quo of imagining a bit of freedom while you waste away in their prison built with bricks of religion.
There are so many Parsons. The Black genius Robert Wedderburn, contemporary of Blake, wrote that they should all be replaced by mechanical droids (“Cast Iron Parsons”) because basically they’re all mild mannered Daleks exterminating you with nice comfy prison sermons that make you admire their brilliant knowledge that they dangle like gilded carrots while they hit you with that stick.
Andy and I react like that when people extract and distill the shrieks of pain in this world into refined sipping whisky, but more than wanting to die, we want to burst into volcanic rage like miniature suns. To die to be reborn. To rise.
Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc (Blake, America)
Our man Roy the replicant (“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it means to be a slave”) changes “rose” to “fell” because his crew came from the starry heavens where they worked as slaves in the colonies Blake knew as Jamaica et al, across the hyperspace ocean of the Kongo Kalunga, the Afrofuturist Atlantic bridge between the worlds, the one visible in every teardrop and raindrop:
“Kinship!”
“... if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”
“Fell” has a nice Satanic feel to it, but you have to realize (you really have to), when Blake talks about Satan that way, he’s painting the good guys, that is to say you and me and Andy, in the colors of the opposition, the oligarchic establishment. That’s the REAL Satan, it can always afford to sound mild and reasonable (“common sense solutions”), because it is IN POWER. It’s the principalities, the powers. The structure. (Those nouns are feminine in Greek, denoting realms and substances, not people. This is NOT your Nobodaddy’s gnostic vision.)
Those fiery angels are RISING. In revolution.
Against that common sense, Andy and I are “reprobates,” dirty nasty prophets screaming in the face of the mild Satanic “elect” people. The Satan of common sense presides over a concentration camp invented by established religion called Hell, a plantation where human beings are forced to act like droids whether or not there are silicon wafers yet.
Fiery the angels rose. Arise. Rouze up! Yesterday Jeremy from Yellow Submarine popped in my head unbidden: “Where ground is soft most often grows, arise! Arise! Arouse! A rose!” Precognition.
Some mild Satanic Parson wrote a Blake book called Awake, and those two words rhyme, but there the resemblance ends. Apart from the fact that awake rhymes with Blake, the guy doesn’t know awake from Newton’s sleep. Awake? We’ll show you awake. Johnny Rotten, not that fraud John Lydon, was still alive when as the lead of Public Image Ltd he wrote “Rise”:
I could be wrong, I could be right I could be black, I could be white I could be right, I could be wrong I could be white, I could be black Your time has come, your second skin The cost so high, the gain so low Walk through the valley The written word is a lie May the road rise with you ... I could be wrong, I could be right I could be black, I could be white I could be right, I could be wrong I could be black, I could be white They put a hot wire to my head 'Cause of the things I did and said They made these feelings go away Model citizen in every way May the road rise with you Anger is an energy
Anger is an energy is eternal delight.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Though I’m Thel trudging through that valley of endless rules, don’t yell, don’t get upset, don’t let them see what you really think. Though. I’m gonna walk through that valley fearing no evil, knowing that “the written word” inscribed in big fat Bibles of rules for how to obey and inscribed on little golden rings of algorithmic power, One String to Rule them All, IS A LIE.
My very desire to be dead is a spark that sets that death valley of oppression ablaze. A teardrop gateway. It’s the little things:
When I’m free of my “white cloud” and my wife Treena is free of her “Black cloud,” the Satanic commonsensical perceptions of racism, and we stand before the Lord in our golden naked beauty, we could both sing “I could be white, I could be black” and just to rub home the arbitrariness of sexual selection, “I could be black, I could be white,” the deliberately stupid messed up rhyme of the first one resolving into the deliberately stupid cliche of the second, overlapping exactly with the sentiment of Michael Jackson in that powerful contemporaneous hymn.
“I’m afraid your father’s going to be very upset when he gets back”
We will “joy” in all the fullness of joy’s activity and feel, like musicians doing free improv, me and Andy and Treena, around the tent of God, like lambs, skipping and bouncing around that rave tent, that perfect paradise scooped out of the chaos and bullshit of endless mindfuckery scrawled on the toilet walls of human existence, now visible as “the internet,” all the endless thoughts of good and evil, angels and demons, to which God yelled, in the quietest and stillest voice imaginable,
... shut the fuck up.
The start of something new; a volcanic eruption.
Silence, ye troubled Waves, and thou Deep, peace, Said then the Omnifick Word; your discord end! (John Milton, Paradise Lost)
Peace is the best and only image of the other world, utopia, a genuine land of the free and a genuine home of the brave.
... the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease. (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
Empire is no more. The lion is monarchy and the wolf is capitalism. Creation starts with negation and negation starts with a tiny flip, a little tiny flick of the switch. “No” is the basic creative word, a flexible portable tent of no, the tent of God. The feel of that arc, that Orc, that plasmic spark, is anger, a tiny flicker or gigantic tongue of fire licking the universe into being. Ululating, vibrating, like the name of the female spirit of Milton, Ololon: brainwashed Milton gets knotted and out comes Ololon, sparking into Blake’s left foot (as in “my left foot” as in “you gotta be fucking KIDDING”) in his back garden, easy as that, like a bee sting.
Sparks everywhere, says Andy:
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find This Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed[.] In this Moment Ololon descended to Los & Enitharmon Unseen beyond the Mundane Shell Southward in Miltons track (Blake, Milton)
You can find the no in every grain of sand, in every moment of time, underneath the noise, underneath the towering inferno of skyscraper capitalist bullshit scrawled in bloody ink over the surface of this godforsaken world. Every single fucking grain. Every facet of every grain opens onto Oothoon’s palace, that is, the palace of the Black woman, a multidimensional hyperspace of freedom and creativity and love, these are all the same word.
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find This Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed In this Moment Ololon descended to Los & Enitharmon (Blake, Milton)
The guy means that that flick, that plasmic arc of imagination, is hyperspace glinting through the gate that is everywhere. Don’t discount it just because the status quo sees it as tiny.
Even uneducated fleas know it:
Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell, Withinside wondrous & expansive; its gates are not clos'd, I hope thine are not: hence it clothes itself in rich array; Hence thou art cloth'd with human beauty O thou mortal man. (Blake, Milton)
“Withinside”: what a lovely word that is. Andy found that fly for me as we fell in love with each other’s soul over the issue of Blake as the surrealist prophet of a future love paradise right here in the biosphere, made of it, imagined by brains that grew out of it like googly eyed mangos:
We wrote hundreds of pages of messages to each other. I’ve saved them all. All. They’re going in my books. Andy will soon be a coauthor with Dominic Boyer of the book I’m writing called HYPOSTITION, a counterspell to the Nick Landian horrors of Satan’s AI watchfiends.
Andy was fully down with the paranormal and I had witnessed miracles as soon as I moved in keyed to his writing, giant plasmic Jesus fish visions of pink light (yeah, it was THAT PKD, and I had never read VALIS, not ever) just before reading his incredible post on Blake’s mum and her Moravian desire to live in the vaginal spacecraft of Jesus’s side hole, in the sacred shape of the vesica piscis (“bladder of a fish”), two overlapping circles opening a gate into the block universe.
In 1754, one Moravian called Zacharias George Caries sailed from Germany to Jamaica to be with enslaved people. They called him Obea, conjure-man. A tiny victory against the war on the Holy Spirit known as the war on animism aka colonialism.
Blake called the block universe Eternity:
There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it: tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven But should the Watch Fiends find it, they would call it Sin (Blake, Jerusalem)
Oothoon’s palace: the palace of the Black woman, subatomic, everywhere. I have a dream. Beulah is the brain in dream mode, a place where contraries are true, because brains don’t do negation, so you have to dream something really weird to tell yourself that you don’t really care for Parsons. Last night I dreamed (or was it a dream) that I was a aboard a craft of grey Visitors (classically dark and dank and portholed) and they were telling me that human beings are fascinating to them because they can all flick that switch and vanish from Satanic respectability into imaginal realms of wondrous creativity just like THAT, Satan calls it individuality and Satan calls the aliens a hive mind, but that’s not it, said this alien to me. And then I read that Andy had died. Our friend John Riordan, fellow Blake fan and genius Blake graphic novel artist, told me. He texted at 3:11am. That was just after the REM sleep during which the Visitors came.
The Visitors often show up around death. They say.
These Visitors ... They confuse categorization. They confuse common sense. Are they us from the future? Are they extraterrestrials? Do they come from the ocean or do they come from inside the earth? Are they devils? Are they angels? Which is which anyway:
Since you read from left to right, Blake forces you to see that the demonic blind one is the “good” one and the nice guy is the “evil” one. That’s Blake being dialogical. What seems demonic in the eyes of the establishment is actually the nice guy. It’s the demonic angel who blindly follows common sense, enslaved to ideology, maniacally creating a heaven on earth that I experience as hell.
The “evil” one is looking in dismay at the “good” one, like “Wow, you aren’t even pointing the right way, dude. You’re surging forwards into the world of horrible progress, and I’m curving back into the sunlit paradise inside a grain of sand. Jesus. Look at you ‘fly'. And no. Nobody touches this child, motherfucker.”
My grandfather rolled ball bearings into the path of the oncoming police horses of instruction. That image of the colonizer police on horseback terrorizing Black people. Andy did nothing but make those ball bearings all his life. Those ball bearings are all that Andy ever made, he spent his entire life making little ball bearings, out of words, out of sounds, out of walking with Stan (this is perhaps the best name for a dog), each little sphere a gateway into Oothoon’s palace of creation and love, downwards, not upwards into the VIP lounge of heaven at the top of the skyscraper but downwards, always downwards into the Paradise that is everywhere, the beach beneath the street, the crystals of silicon whose role in hour glasses and integrated circuits does nothing to destroy the hyperspace within.
Love you Andy. Rest in power.
Beautiful tribute to Andy, which I know he would appreciate. I knew him for 43 years and he was the most brilliant person I ever met.
What a piece! Thank you for all these threads to ponder and ponder and feel and feel. I feel really lucky to have stumbled on Andy's work here on substack. Fiery Angels Rose!