Take-two Tuesday — William Blake Month: the torments of Love and Jealousy

This entry originally appeared on June 12, 2010 at 11:14 a.m.

Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy

Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea I know
That I have sinned & that my Emanations are become harlots
I am already distracted at their deeds & if I look
Upon them more Despair will bring self murder on my soul

O Enion thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful
to draw me to destruction

(William Blake, excerpt from “Part I: Enmion and Tharmas,” in Vala, or, The Four Zoas: the torments of Love and Jealousy in the death and judgment of Albion the Ancient Man.)

All photos are screencaps from a collaborative short film put out by Lula magazine and the ubiquitous UK-and-now-THE-WORLD clothing store Topshop. Here is a linky to the video, which is unusual and beautiful and freaky, but as you are watching this artistic short film remember it is designed to sell faux-Bohemian low-quality overpriced clothes that will be out of style in six months to impressionable and likely self-loathing young women with eating disorders and disposable income. The fashion industry is so cruel with its kindness that I go back and forth on appreciation and hate.

I’m sorry, I went to the mall earlier to pick up some comfortable summer shoes with my grandmother and now I’m in a low mood. Nothing puts me out of sorts like that snake nest. Like, everyone is slithering over the top of each other and accidentally biting their own tails and dropping money on shit they don’t need, finances they have gained from the jobs they keep specifically to make a weekend trip to a goddamned mall and drape shiny fabrics over the viper shitpit of the system so it looks all pretty and coordinated while they sip complacently from some kind of frapped coffee bullshit drink packed with sugar and empty calories that they store in the cupholder of their child’s stroller. Their kids are with them, of course, because children must be taught to want made-up food like chicken nuggets and aspire to own over three pair of shoes. Seriously, I want to watch it burn, burn, burn.

I know that my Emanations are become harlots.

I think I’m going to go take ten and paint with the kidlet or something.

William Blake Month: the torments of Love and Jealousy

Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy

Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea I know
That I have sinned & that my Emanations are become harlots
I am already distracted at their deeds & if I look
Upon them more Despair will bring self murder on my soul

O Enion thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful
to draw me to destruction

(William Blake, excerpt from “Part I: Enmion and Tharmas,” in Vala, or, The Four Zoas: the torments of Love and Jealousy in the death and judgment of Albion the Ancient Man.)

All photos are screencaps from a collaborative short film put out by Lula magazine and the ubiquitous UK-and-now-THE-WORLD clothing store Topshop. Here is a linky to the video, which is unusual and beautiful and freaky, but as you are watching this artistic short film remember it is designed to sell faux-Bohemian low-quality overpriced clothes that will be out of style in six months to impressionable and likely self-loathing young women with eating disorders and disposable income. The fashion industry is so cruel with its kindness that I go back and forth on appreciation and hate.

I’m sorry, I went to the mall earlier to pick up some comfortable summer shoes with my grandmother and now I’m in a low mood. Nothing puts me out of sorts like that snake nest. Like, everyone is slithering over the top of each other and accidentally biting their own tails and dropping money on shit they don’t need, finances they have gained from the jobs they keep specifically to make a weekend trip to a goddamned mall and drape shiny fabrics over the viper shitpit of the system so it looks all pretty and coordinated while they sip complacently from some kind of frapped coffee bullshit drink packed with sugar and empty calories that they store in the cupholder of their child’s stroller. Their kids are with them, of course, because children must be taught to want made-up food like chicken nuggets and aspire to own over three pair of shoes. Seriously, I want to watch it burn, burn, burn.

I know that my Emanations are become harlots.

I think I’m going to go take ten and paint with the kidlet or something.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Qui è dove dormo

Florence, Italy.

You can see that the homeless person who wrote this had written on this spot in the past, and the building’s owners have painted over several times. The most recent repaint is just beneath this message, and instead of saying it is where he or she sleeps, it says “Qui è dove vivo.” What happened to make his or her “living”-place identity more fluid, so that he or she only associates this clearly well-liked spot with sleep now? I suspect it came as a result of being driven away during the day by whomever keeps painting over the writer’s small and painfully human attempt at address-establishment, some workaday person concerned with appearances and light, complaining to friends at a dinner at a restaurant about how he feels badly for the homeless people outside his building, but they drive away customers or reduce the value of the property so what can you do? and everyone clucks sympathetically; some mouthpiece of empty it-sounds-good-to-say-so pandering about the importance of charity who gives to collection at church and feels kind of good about it but is still secretly freaked out by the different and eager to shunt everything “ugly” off into the night where they don’t have to look at it and contemplate such ugly things’ place in their own life and God’s plan; some brainwashed apologetic dick who buys in to the system and has completely fucking forgotten that the whole world is half night.

That got away from me. Sorry. Carità è veleno. Except when it’s not, because I know that’s not true, and not everyone is false or a liar or hypocrite, they’re just struggling with problems so big that even Eleanor Roosevelt’s small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change this thing. It has to come from the top, who would never choose it for themselves, so must be rushed by barbarians at the gate, as has always happened throughout history to the elite (who get conquered by the rough who then form over time their own elite whose own rough rise against them in turn and on and on, so what’s the point of any of it?). Now I sound like an anarchist. Which I’m not. Mainly. Blargh.

William Blake Month: “The Divine Image”

Robert Demachy. “Mignon.” 1900.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.

via smokeandacoke on the tumblr.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

Cairo, Egypt, photgraphed by Philip-Lorca diCorcia for W.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.


(William Blake, “The Divine Image.”)

“All must love the human form — there God is dwelling too.” We say things like this all the time, but consider that Blake wrote in the 1700’s. He prefigured all the poseur Romantics and social reformers, but transcended their work, too. And he really was disgusted by the inequities of life on earth in the Western world at that time.

Ryan McGinley, “Jake.”

Blake writes all the time about how his visions lead him to see that people truly, genuinely, are the same beneath, that plants and animals and even handmade objects hold a universal grain of likeness to people, being all made directly or indirectly by God and inhabited by a hierarchy of spirits, demons, and angels — that everything around us, ourselves and nature and all the things we make, are reflections of God because of our being made in His image.

Ryan McGinley, “Hysteric Fireworks.”

Logically, it followed to him that to raise your hand against these fellow creations was wrong and could not be God’s will; therefore all systems that enforced human governance over one another or intrusion in to nature was against God’s plan and was a sinful conception of man which had nothing to do with redemption — this included most organized religion, education, and politics, all of which he felt were offensive, grasping human attempts to control and oppress one another, which was the same as to try to bully God.

McGinley again — a Morrissey concert.

He really saw with the eyes of his heart: and almost more than anything else he truly did not understand why there would be starvation, child abuse, and especially war. And he knew well enough that he was unlike his countrymen in that way to write poems reminding them that violence and injustice were not the right paths. They all assumed he was crazy, of course. But look at his message, especially his emphasis on religious tolerance (an easy jump for him since he believed all people were equal plus his visions told him all religions had it all jacked up to begin with). It pretty obviously is still relevant and resonant today.

Ryan McGinley, “Fireworks.” He’s my new fave, if you couldn’t tell.

It is a reasonable enough message. If God created us and all things, then we must be peaceful and loving to one another and the animals and natural resources around us, and love them for being reflections of God. It is the only right way to be. So why is it such a challenge, again and again? Everyone claims to want it, so why it is always out of reach is depressing and mystifying. Kind of like how “the one thing we’re all waiting for/ is peace on earth and an end to war” to quote Queen’s “The Miracle.” I know I just went from Blake to Freddie Mercury, but I’m a maverick! Good people quote the Beatles. Great people quote the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Queen. Take it to the bank.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Eat the rich with hummus edition

Ali Ali Salem Air Base, Kuwait.

Repost: Refuse to be normal

Have to stop slipping and letting the waves roll me under like a coward. Must remember.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” –Ellen Goodman

Yes, Ellen Goodman, that is just exactly what normal is. And I tried to be normal, and I tried to pretend like I liked trying, and I tried to pretend like I wanted to succeed, but in the end I couldn’t stomach it and I quit. I believe more often than not in some kind of a god, and when I do believe in a god, I do not believe this system can possibly be that god’s plan, that we do such stupid, repetitive, horribly mundane things which affect nothing and only prop up the necessity for their own repetition, my mind completely revolts against the possibility that this is what we are born for.

Honestly, how can such a thing as serving as a cog in the wheel in the blade of the sharpener for the grinder that is meant to squash you flat and dice you up even possibly, remotely, be the intent of any kind of creator, when all this potential crackles in your every joint and synapse with each breath you draw? No way. No way is this the plan. I refuse that reality. I refuse to be branded normal.


So I quit. I really do. It happens that way sometimes, I think, that the lunacy of this western world thunderstrikes you and you have to stop putting aside that instinct that you are paying in to an empty account, and accept that you know it is all simply funny money upon whose value we agree to agree because discord makes us all uneasy, and just say the hell with the bank of bullshit and walk away from the whole shebang.

It happens. Join me. Let’s figure out a different way: maybe we will come up with one so much better-suited to ourselves that everyone will agree it should definitely be the new Normal, and we can end this crushing misguided misery. I think that might be a lot closer to that possible god’s potential plan than the way we’ve been doing it. So let’s get on this, okay? Let’s make this be what happens.

Brands for the veal and baby steps

“I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behavior, but we are also the police force of it.” –David Icke

I’m taking the bus this weekend not only to ease the impact on the environment in these sludgy-skied last days of summer heat but also because I’m sick of my Ford full of crushed Diet Cokes and empty packs of Newports. I’m a lazy, disorganized, falling-apart fruitbasket and even I am actually doing something about this ridiculous branding and materialistic nonsense: please join me.

Resist this climate of corporate mind control, please. This does not have to be the way it is. Materialism is a tide that can be stemmed and even turned, if every individual person agrees to try. Be yourself instead of trying to be what it is sold to you that you ought to be. Break away from the pack, even if you can only do it for a second. Baby steps!

Remember to refuse, I repeat, refuse to be “normal.”

It happens: Refuse to be normal

Normal. “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” –Ellen Goodman Yes, Ellen Goodman, that is just exactly what normal is. And I tried to be normal, and I tried to pretend like I liked trying, and I tried to pretend like I wanted to succeed, but in the end I couldn’t stomach it and I quit. I believe more often than not in some kind of a god, and when I do believe in a god, I do not believe this system can possibly be that god’s plan, that we do such stupid, repetitive, horribly mundane things which affect nothing and only prop up the necessity for their own repetition, my mind completely revolts against the possibility that this is what we are born for. Honestly, how can such a thing as serving as a cog in the wheel in the blade of the sharpener for the grinder that is meant to squash you flat and dice you up even possibly, remotely, be the intent of any kind of creator, when all this potential crackles in your every joint and synapse with each breath you draw? No way. No way is this the plan. I refuse that reality. I refuse to be branded normal. So I quit. I really do. It happens that way sometimes, I think, that the lunacy of this western world thunderstrikes you and you have to stop putting aside that instinct that you are paying in to an empty account, and accept that you know it is all simply funny money upon whose value we agree to agree because discord makes us all uneasy, and just say the hell with the bank of bullshit and walk away from the whole shebang. It happens. Join me. Let’s figure out a different way: maybe we will come up with one so much better-suited to ourselves that everyone will agree it should definitely be the new Normal, and we can end this crushing misguided misery. I think that might be a lot closer to that possible god’s potential plan than the way we’ve been doing it. So let’s get on this, okay? Let’s make this be what happens.