bread of life

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MV: “Blake’s famous image of Jacob’s ladder, with Jacob asleep on the ground and then the staircase with the figures ascending and descending, reaching into the heavens, you make the point that Blake’s the only person to draw this as a spiral…”

IMcG: “The reason that I think that the spiral is so important is that it is the only shape that brings two things together, the fact of an open ended process and the idea of contraries. Blake said “without contraries there is no progression” … it’s that idea that I see in Heraclitus, of the tautness of a bowstring or the tautness of a lyre string, and without the tautness of pulling in opposite directions there is no power to produce a note or power to let fly the arrow. Sometimes you get this idea that things are circular – T.S. Eliot gives famous expression to the idea that we come back to the place we started from and know it for the first time – but what I think is a better idea is that we go round on a spiral and we don’t come back to where we started from, we are higher up than we were, but we come back to the place that is over the other place and now we can see what it was and what we thought then. So we are making progress…”

MV: “…anamnesis, to return to something and make it present once more … is what a ritual does. The ritual repeats at one level but it repeats constantly to draw back the Source. The manner in which we inhabit our memories is really important, and that’s often a ritual, embodied practice, in order that memory and inspiration can then come together. The memory becomes re-inspiring – it breathes something fresh into us.”

IMcG: “We need something like that actually, which is structured enough to summon whatever it is, but also loose enough to allow it to live, not to pin down and utterly specify. That’s why a ritual has to remain implicit, and once it’s made explicit, a lot of that is lost. I find it interesting that at a time of great upsurge in left hemisphere thinking, which I associate with the Reformation, there was a lot of technical dispute about what was meant by a very important ritual of the body and blood of Christ.”

Transcript from a conversation between Mark Vernon and Iain McGilchrist on William Blake: Imagination and Inspiration, Science and Soul (posted on YouTube on 1st July 2025).