PROPHETS AGAINST EMPIRE: BLAKE, THOREAU, GINSBERG AND THE TRANS-ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE
PROPHETS AGAINST EMPIRE: BLAKE, THOREAU, GINSBERG AND THE TRANS-ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE

Summary/Abstract: The following paper suggests new ways of looking at a few pivotal elements in the complex worldviews of William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and Allen Ginsberg, as representative voices announcing high modernity’s crisis of values. I will thus analyze mainly those elements in the thought of the three authors that form a common ground regarding their understanding of the nature and roots of the modern world's crisis, as well as regarding the solutions they envisaged for this question. The time-eternity equation seems to be a universal constant in the systems of the three authors mentioned, and it is in this equation that the worldviews of Blake, Thoreau and Ginsberg unfold a deep systemic binary architecture: a surface architecture (the material) and a deep architecture of reality (the transcendental, or trans-architecture). The result is a crisscrossing quaternary of total vision, combining the time-eternity equation with the architecture-transarchitecture equation (as in Blake’s “Sea of Time and Space”), forming the visionary architecture of the world, with roots in Piranesi’s labyrinthian hyper-perspectivism, which shall also be analyzed as a precursor anticipating the deep and troubled views of Blake and other romantics, as well as of Ginsberg and Thoreau, the latter’s relationship to Piranesi being as fascinating as it is neglected by criticism. Lastly, the paper also analyzes the solutions to the great crisis of modern man, offered in a way or another by the three great thinkers.

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