Blake Star

Andy Wilson has passed into the next room

This morning, on the way back from dropping the kid at school, I discovered that Andy Wilson had died. If you’re reading this now then you must have at least a passing interest in my guy William Blake, and therefore you should be reading Andy. Andy Wilson, The Traveller in the Evening - punk, intellectual, rebel, contrarian, philosopher, Communist (?), born-again-Christian, anti-fascist, surrealist, and most importantly the most consistently interesting contemporary (argh, that word sticks in the throat) writer on Blake.

I first encountered Andy as a fellow trustee of the Blake Society. His passion for Blake and his intellect were inspiring and a little intimidating and we became friends and sometime antagonists. Andy didn’t stay a trustee for all that long - he exemplified (even beyond your average Blakean, should such a thing exist) the contradiction at the heart of the Blake Society - a membership society built around the ultimate non-member. Lest we forget, the only organisation that Blake joined was the New Jerusalem Swedenborgian church and he soon decided that was bollocks. Andy and I fell out, among other things, over John Higgs’ book William Blake vs The World, which I rated and he hated. Andy was singularly unable to tow the line or compromise, which made it hard for him to work for a society that, by necessity, has to work on the assumption that there are multiple Blakes, seen through the prism of its members and guest speakers.

Andy was always determined to convince you of his Blake, but this wasn’t done in a tyrannical or puritanical way. I always thought Andy’s ideal place was in the midst of a conceptual bunfight (a preference that I presume came partially from his background in disputatious leftwing politics). Once, when we were still trustees I wrote a conciliatory email to him, apologising for being ‘a bit aggy’. He responded along the lines that his brain was held together by a metal wire and that he certainly wasn’t going to bear a grudge. Fucking hardcore!

I think that Andy often (always?) found The Blake Society to be frustratingly conservative and insufficiently radical, but I was always grateful that he continued to interact and collaborate with us, notably facilitating and/or hosting wonderful events on zoom with Brian Catling and Timothy Morton, with whom he became great friends. When I was hosting a Blake Society event, I would be simultaneously thrilled and anxious when Andy’s virtual hand was raised, as it often was, during the Q&A. Andy would always have something brilliant and incisive to say in response to what had gone before but if he didn’t agree with the speaker, you could be sure that they were about to hear about it, at length!

He also wrote frequently for our journal, VALA, but The Traveller in the Evening was where you went (and where you can still go, so go, go!) for undiluted Andy Wilson. Here his Blake stretched out, luxuriated and danced big brainy dances in book-length essays that took in Blake (of course) but also political critique, consciousness, surrealism, ecology, radical Christianity and quite often all of the above (and more). I can’t compete with Timothy Morton’s fizzing and cosmic description of Andy’s take on Blake and everything else, but suffice to say that when a new Traveller essay dropped you were best to clear your schedule for a few hours and brace for intellectual impact.

Not the least of these essays was the absolutely remarkable piece that Andy published in April, in which he faced his probable approaching death with not only remarkable bravery and candour but with visionary cheer and enthusiasm. Not for nothing had Andy been studying Bowie’s late rumination on mortality, Black Star. Andy was obsessive about music (as well as literature, art, politics etc) and like me, he was a late convert to the band, Cardiacs. My last communication with Andy was on 30 April when I messaged him on Facebook to say that I’d spotted an actual Blake quote, ‘In every cry of every man / The mind-forged manacles I hear’, amidst the musical maelstrom of Cardiacs’ I’m Eating in Bed. I presumed that Andy had already spotted this, because he knew everything, but he replied ‘I had not! That earns you about 1000 points in the music quiz they call life. Well spotted, man!’ I was disproportionately pleased to be able to share a small piece of musical Blakeana with him.

Andy was also unfailingly positive and encouraging about LOS, my Blake graphic novel. There’s a fair chance that if you’re reading this on my substack he sent you my way. I’m sad that he won’t get to read the whole thing. We’re so close to the tree of angels!

Right now, it seems bizarre, inconceivable that we won’t have Andy’s vigorous, insightful, sometimes needling voice to inspire, impel, critique and provoke all Blakean things that happen from now on. It was quite simply a fantastic, strange miracle to know Andy, one of the oddest, most brilliant, Blake-like people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. If I try to imagine what Andy is, or is up to, after his ‘vegetable’ body has stopped, then the best I can do is to think of the end of Blake’s Jerusalem, in which the apocalyptic finale (heaven?) is imagined not as a passive eternity, but as vigorous existence, ‘all / Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied’, and some kind of cross between cosmic debate club and jazz improv poetry event:

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright

Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions

In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect

Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine

Of Human Imagination.

Andy is right at home.