William Blake, Remote by the Sea

Article excerpt

William Blake's turbulent relationship with the sea, from a drowning vision in his youth to a mystical encounter on the Sussex coast, offers an unlikely counterpoint to our current technological moment. The Romantic poet saw oceans as realms of transcendence and terror, places where the mechanical world dissolved into visionary chaos. Today, as algorithms colonize our attention and artificial intelligence reshapes how we perceive reality, Blake's oceanic imagery resurrects an older question: can we still access states of consciousness that machines cannot quantify, mediate, or replicate? His work suggests that remoteness, geographic, spiritual, imaginative, might be the last frontier.