William-Blake-and-the-Indigenous-Imagination-A-Review

the experience of alienation and marginalization can paradoxically invite (in both Malouf
and White) the alternating gyre of reconciliation and inclusion, and just as dis-ease and
sickness can sometimes become the harbingers of ‘ease’ and the vehicles of wholeness,
so Janet’s encounter with the cloud of honey-making beings is what unexpectedly opens
up to her an intense apprehension of oneness and aliveness, of peacefulness. She deeply
connects to “bee-ing”, to the multitudinous, exhilarating, astonishing presence, through
her engaged attunement to the powerful Otherness within life, and the perception of the
ordinary miraculousness of things. Isn’t that also what Blake said the task of both poets
and prophets is - to see the infinite in everything? As he notes in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, this vision is common to both the poets and indigenous people: it is “the desire
of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes
practise”. 21 Be like bees.
Roderick Tweedy is author of The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and
the Myth of Creation, editor for Karnac Books, and an enthusiastic supporter of the userled
mental health organization, Mental Fight Club.
21 MHH Pl. 13.
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