When I sit down with my diary, the most important thing is to not spend much time staring at a blank page. Today I made a comic grid and started copying lines from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Seemed appropriate, with the solstice and all…)
There’s a wonderful bit in episode six of Ken Burns’ Country Music when singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson — a former Rhodes Scholar who studied the Romantic poets! — is explaining his decision to turn his back on a distinguished military career and move to Nashville to be a janitor and write country songs:
I love William Blake…. William Blake said, “If he who is organized by the divine for spiritual communion, refuse and bury his talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, shame and confusion of face will pursue him throughout life to eternity.”
He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.
His mother was so disgusted with his decision that she wrote him a letter disowning him for embarrassing the family. (Johnny Cash read it and joked, “Isn’t it nice to get a letter from home?”)
Elsewhere, Kristofferson liked to quote other Blake lines to describe what he was doing. “The Road of Excess leads to the palace of wisdom” or “If the fool persists in his folly, he will become wise.”
The quoted Blake passage from the documentary comes from a letter he wrote to Thomas Butts, a patron and friend, in January 10th, 1803. He talks about his wife’s poor health, declines an offer of money, and then talks about what he’s working on out in the country, away from the city:
but Patience! if Great things do not turn out it is because such things depend on the Spiritual & not on the Natural World & if it was fit for me I doubt not that I should be Employd in Greater things & when it is proper my Talents shall be properly exercised in Public as I hope they are now in private. for then I leave no stone unturnd & no path unexplord that tends to improvement in my beloved Arts.
He then talks about being torn, basically, between commerce and art:
But if we fear to do the dictates of our Angels & tremble at the Tasks set before us. if we refuse to do Spiritual Acts. because of Natural Fears or Natural Desires! Who can describe the dismal torments of such a state!—I too well remember the Threats I heard!-If you who are organized by Divine Providence for Spiritual communion. Refuse & bury your Talent in the Earth even tho you Should want Natural Bread. Sorrow & Desperation pursues you Thro life! & after death Shame & confusion of face to eternity — Every one in Eternity will leave you aghast at the Man who was crownd with glory & honour by his brethren & betrayd their cause to their enemies. You will be calld the base Judas who betrayd his Friend!— Such words would make any Stout man tremble & how then could I be at ease? But I am now no longer in That State & now go on again with my Task Fearless and tho my path is difficult. I have no fear of stumbling while I keep it
Then, without attribution, he quotes four lines (as two lines) from poet Thomas Tickell:
I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.
Kristofferson could’ve quoted that bit back to his mother!
I’m thinking now about Keri Smith’s now-classic list, “How To Feel Miserable as an Artist,” which includes two references to family:
2. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on
8. Only do work that your family would love.
But back to Blake: I need to learn more about him, and here is a start.
Alternative Moons is a book of moon photos with a surprising twist: the moons are actually pancakes.
Kelli Anderson posted this flip-through on her twitter:
“Alternate Moons”, a completely gorgeous photography book by Robert Pufleb (that completely disguises the fact that its subject matter is pancakes.) ?? pic.twitter.com/gusI9IKJ90
— kelli anderson (@kellianderson) September 22, 2018
At the end of the book is a recipe for cooking up your own batch of moons.
I immediately felt them akin to my grounds galaxies — photos of coffee grounds on my kitchen counter, manipulated in the Photoshop Express iOS app and Instagram:
I love making these images during breakfast — thinking about the cosmos in the most mundane, domestic, earliest moments of the day…
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
(There’s a good flour/flower pun there, but I’ll leave it.)
This is an engraving by William Blake called “The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam.” It was done around 1820, but to me, it looks like it could be a graphic for yesterday’s New York Times magazine.
The graffitti scrawl on this is really nutty: Blake is spouting off a manifesto about Christianity and art:
A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect, the Man
Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian
You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art
A little extreme for my tastes. I think that pretty much all that stuff is more important than art. (That’s probably why nobody will be reading my comics in 200 years…) And what about weddings? He goes on to say, “For every Pleasure Money Is Useless.” Tell that to the cake baker!
Maybe it’s the huge bags of currency we’re throwing into the celebration fire for this wedding, maybe it’s the Christmas season, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol in bed, but I’ve been thinking about money.
Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” (Luke 18:24) I guess that means that you should give everything away. Eat, drink, and be merry. Ebenezer’s life sure got better when he started burning through his savings…
And what about charity? What is our motivation for giving to others in need? It’s not necessarily the promise of getting into heaven. Dig this excerpt from an Nytimes article by Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?”
Interestingly, neither [Bill] Gates nor [Warren] Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning?? than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact.
“The staple reading for all children in the period of Blake’s infancy was the chapbook — stories from British history, the true confessions of criminals about to be executed at Tyburn during ‘Paddington Fair’, myths and legends of uncertain provenance such as The History of the Two Children in the Wood — printed on cheap thick paper and accompanied by clumsy if vivid woodcuts. These ‘cuts’ show children dancing ‘in the round’, chasing butterflies, and spinning hoops; but there are also images of forests ‘dark and drear’, of crippled beggars and wayfarers offering an appropriate subject for infant contemplation, of deathbed scenes to remind the little children of mortality. Blake may also have read such illustrated books as Pine’s Horace and Croxall’s Aesop, and his later interests suggest that he had at least glanced at The History of Jane Shore as well as at The History of Joseph and His Brethren; but it is important only to note that, from the beginning, he saw words and images together in the morbid mid-eighteenth-century equivalent of comic books.“—Peter Ackroyd, Blake: A Biography, (emphasis mine)
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