THU., FEBRUARY 23, 2006
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Ruminations on Blake And Sufism
by Robert Phoenix
Cultural theorist and futurist William Irwin Thompson once noted that there was nothing truly new in the new age — it was merely a pastiche of belief systems and ancient mystical traditions resurrected and stitched into a patchwork culture. And while Thompson isn't far off the mark based on when he made his observation, there have been figures — mostly thinkers, artists, poets and musicians — whose knowledge, wisdom and body of work transcend their ages and continue to illuminate and inspire. And few of these stand taller than poet William Blake, a British poet who knew his place in history was the future.
As a poet and a philosopher, Blake's inspirations were the masters: Dante, Virgil, Milton and a near contemporary of Blake's, the Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg. It's from these figures that Blake began to craft a complex cosmology of his own making. In fact, Milton is the central figure to Blake's epic poem based on his spiritual mentor, Milton: A Poem in Two Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men.
But Blake was not content to merely put pen to page; he also crafted intense, almost psychedelic acid-etched prints to accompany his prose. To that end, Blake was a multi-media artist of the first order. He created new characters more like entities and demi-gods, such as Urizen (Your Reason), Blake's rendering of the ponderous and rule-bound vision of Christendom's 18th century God.
One of Blake's more decidedly new age tracts is his "All Religions Are One." Principle five in "All Religions" neatly sums up Blake's unified vision of religion: "The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy."
Breaking through "the mind forged manacles" Blake insisted that "he create a system of his own or be enslaved by another's." This desire to be free through the power of creativity and imagination inspired the likes of Aldous Huxley, who named his classic book of psychedelic mysticism The Doors of Perception after a famous Blake quote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it really is, infinite." It sounded good enough for Jim Morrison as he chose the name of the Doors based on Blake's famous line.
Musician Jah Wobble is another that has discovered the magic of Blake — and an unlikely follower at that. While a member of PiL, Wobble's industrial dub bass lines were the perfect counterpoint to Keith Levene's psychotic guitar and John Lydon's caterwaul of commercial dissent. Like fools plunging into an abyss of delirium and noise, PiL were agit-prop stars who officially detonated the post-punk era. Wobble eventually extracted himself from the noise and went on to become a global troubadour, working with the likes of Natacha Atlas, Chaka Demus, Jaki Leibizeit, Holger Czukay and others. Somewhere along the way, he became an adherent of William Blake.
Wobble set to work on putting the words and visions of Blake to music on The Inspiration Of William Blake. The tenor of Wobble's cockney narrative probably hasn't changed much since Blake captured the voice of the British working class in "London." Wobble uses Blake's poetry as a point of departure on jazzy excursions like "The Angel," ominous orchestral grooves on "Lonely London" (in which he incorporates Blake's "Proverbs of Hell") and soothing ambient lullabies on "Songs of Innocence." Wobble does the prophet of a new age right.
For a more traditional rendering of Blake's works, Ornella D'urbano's Visions of William Blake lacks the visceral punch of Wobble's homage, but falls much more neatly into the rubric of new age music. D'urbano's compositions are purely orchestral in nature, featuring harp, piano and strings on tracks like "Albion," "The Book Of Thel" and "Urizen." Quite elegant and tasteful, these renditions of Blake's poems are much more lyrical, even pastoral in overall tone — they're certainly not an unpleasant listening experience, but they lack the dynamism that fueled Blake's fusion of opposites; good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell.
Another key figure in the development of new age ideals is the 13-century poet and mystic Mevlana Rumi, whose teachings have become luminous markers to ecstatic liberation in an ocean of divine love. Both Blake and Rumi sought freedom for their souls through a mystical connection with the divine and their expression of that relationship through art.
Rumi was the first whirling dervish; rumor has it that he spun with his arms outstretched, head tilted at an angle towards heaven and sang the words that would become lines to his most famous poems. The Sufi and dervish communities have become an important strand in the new age movement, with books like Pir Vilayat's Towards the One having nearly the same cultural import as Ram Dass' Be Here Now.
One of the earliest cultural outputs of Sufic wisdom meeting new age musicality can be heard on The Best of The Sufi Choir, a group that formed around a teacher named Samuel Lewis back in the late '60s. Their music is anything but traditional; it is somewhat unsettling and yet deeply inspirational. Listening to it now is like taking a trip back into a time when all things seemed possible. There's a touching innocence in their version of sacred polyphony, graced by the occasionally camp flourish that only adds to the recording's quaintness, devotion and nostalgia.
For those looking to dose on some real Rumi and Sufic recordings, there are two releases on Buda, one by Aqnazar titled Rumi and the other, Dances and Trances Sufi Rites and Berber Music from Tarodannt Morroco, by the Sufi Brotherhoods and Street Musicians of Tarodannt. The music of the Sufi Brotherhood and the Berbers is sparse chanting, clapping, drumming and call and response punctuated by a flourish of a ney. These field recordings are as close as one can get to an open-air ritual happening at street level.
Aqnazar's Rumi is equally sparse, but being recorded in a studio, it's Aqnazar's rough-hewn voice, wrapped around doumbek and oud, that gives these odes to the great mystic an almost mournful quality, not one usually associated with the ecstatic Rumi.
To experience a slightly more westernized, yet deeply authentic fusion of classical styles, Sufi Splendor — Music for Whirling Meditation by Manish Vyas and Dina Awwad, strikes an appealing balance between traditional styles and more contemporary production and rhythmic groove. The intricate interplay between flute, hammer dulcimer and sarod on "Ya Rabbi Salli alal Habib Mohammade" is high-quality musicianship from start to finish.
Moving yet further out from the tradition of Rumi and Sufism's cultural moorings, the recordings of Turko-Canadian Mercan Dede are an inspiring fusion of electronic soundscapes and devotional Sufic song. On the title track of Journeys of a Dervish, Dede fuses the passion of the Dervish's hunger for the divine, replete with vocal lament and deep ambient production. This are Rumi-inspired sounds for the 21st century.
What do Blake, Rumi and the artists that have recorded and interpreted their music have in common? In a time of high global tension and potential conflict, these recorded works, from the naïve to the sophisticated, speak to a unity that transcends our differences and affirms the ability to forgive one another for our humanity.
As a poet and a philosopher, Blake's inspirations were the masters: Dante, Virgil, Milton and a near contemporary of Blake's, the Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg. It's from these figures that Blake began to craft a complex cosmology of his own making. In fact, Milton is the central figure to Blake's epic poem based on his spiritual mentor, Milton: A Poem in Two Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men.
But Blake was not content to merely put pen to page; he also crafted intense, almost psychedelic acid-etched prints to accompany his prose. To that end, Blake was a multi-media artist of the first order. He created new characters more like entities and demi-gods, such as Urizen (Your Reason), Blake's rendering of the ponderous and rule-bound vision of Christendom's 18th century God.
One of Blake's more decidedly new age tracts is his "All Religions Are One." Principle five in "All Religions" neatly sums up Blake's unified vision of religion: "The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy."
Breaking through "the mind forged manacles" Blake insisted that "he create a system of his own or be enslaved by another's." This desire to be free through the power of creativity and imagination inspired the likes of Aldous Huxley, who named his classic book of psychedelic mysticism The Doors of Perception after a famous Blake quote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it really is, infinite." It sounded good enough for Jim Morrison as he chose the name of the Doors based on Blake's famous line.
Musician Jah Wobble is another that has discovered the magic of Blake — and an unlikely follower at that. While a member of PiL, Wobble's industrial dub bass lines were the perfect counterpoint to Keith Levene's psychotic guitar and John Lydon's caterwaul of commercial dissent. Like fools plunging into an abyss of delirium and noise, PiL were agit-prop stars who officially detonated the post-punk era. Wobble eventually extracted himself from the noise and went on to become a global troubadour, working with the likes of Natacha Atlas, Chaka Demus, Jaki Leibizeit, Holger Czukay and others. Somewhere along the way, he became an adherent of William Blake.
Wobble set to work on putting the words and visions of Blake to music on The Inspiration Of William Blake. The tenor of Wobble's cockney narrative probably hasn't changed much since Blake captured the voice of the British working class in "London." Wobble uses Blake's poetry as a point of departure on jazzy excursions like "The Angel," ominous orchestral grooves on "Lonely London" (in which he incorporates Blake's "Proverbs of Hell") and soothing ambient lullabies on "Songs of Innocence." Wobble does the prophet of a new age right.
For a more traditional rendering of Blake's works, Ornella D'urbano's Visions of William Blake lacks the visceral punch of Wobble's homage, but falls much more neatly into the rubric of new age music. D'urbano's compositions are purely orchestral in nature, featuring harp, piano and strings on tracks like "Albion," "The Book Of Thel" and "Urizen." Quite elegant and tasteful, these renditions of Blake's poems are much more lyrical, even pastoral in overall tone — they're certainly not an unpleasant listening experience, but they lack the dynamism that fueled Blake's fusion of opposites; good and evil, right and wrong, heaven and hell.
Another key figure in the development of new age ideals is the 13-century poet and mystic Mevlana Rumi, whose teachings have become luminous markers to ecstatic liberation in an ocean of divine love. Both Blake and Rumi sought freedom for their souls through a mystical connection with the divine and their expression of that relationship through art.
Rumi was the first whirling dervish; rumor has it that he spun with his arms outstretched, head tilted at an angle towards heaven and sang the words that would become lines to his most famous poems. The Sufi and dervish communities have become an important strand in the new age movement, with books like Pir Vilayat's Towards the One having nearly the same cultural import as Ram Dass' Be Here Now.
One of the earliest cultural outputs of Sufic wisdom meeting new age musicality can be heard on The Best of The Sufi Choir, a group that formed around a teacher named Samuel Lewis back in the late '60s. Their music is anything but traditional; it is somewhat unsettling and yet deeply inspirational. Listening to it now is like taking a trip back into a time when all things seemed possible. There's a touching innocence in their version of sacred polyphony, graced by the occasionally camp flourish that only adds to the recording's quaintness, devotion and nostalgia.
For those looking to dose on some real Rumi and Sufic recordings, there are two releases on Buda, one by Aqnazar titled Rumi and the other, Dances and Trances Sufi Rites and Berber Music from Tarodannt Morroco, by the Sufi Brotherhoods and Street Musicians of Tarodannt. The music of the Sufi Brotherhood and the Berbers is sparse chanting, clapping, drumming and call and response punctuated by a flourish of a ney. These field recordings are as close as one can get to an open-air ritual happening at street level.
Aqnazar's Rumi is equally sparse, but being recorded in a studio, it's Aqnazar's rough-hewn voice, wrapped around doumbek and oud, that gives these odes to the great mystic an almost mournful quality, not one usually associated with the ecstatic Rumi.
To experience a slightly more westernized, yet deeply authentic fusion of classical styles, Sufi Splendor — Music for Whirling Meditation by Manish Vyas and Dina Awwad, strikes an appealing balance between traditional styles and more contemporary production and rhythmic groove. The intricate interplay between flute, hammer dulcimer and sarod on "Ya Rabbi Salli alal Habib Mohammade" is high-quality musicianship from start to finish.
Moving yet further out from the tradition of Rumi and Sufism's cultural moorings, the recordings of Turko-Canadian Mercan Dede are an inspiring fusion of electronic soundscapes and devotional Sufic song. On the title track of Journeys of a Dervish, Dede fuses the passion of the Dervish's hunger for the divine, replete with vocal lament and deep ambient production. This are Rumi-inspired sounds for the 21st century.
What do Blake, Rumi and the artists that have recorded and interpreted their music have in common? In a time of high global tension and potential conflict, these recorded works, from the naïve to the sophisticated, speak to a unity that transcends our differences and affirms the ability to forgive one another for our humanity.
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