Me and William Blake

I had a few hours to kill one afternoon last week, so me and my dodgy hip went on a small adventure together. My hip sometimes decides it would rather be alone and tends to wander in a different direction to me, but with some coaxing we find a way to rub along together, and so it was we got on a bus and went to Old Street.

Back in the summer I had gone on a walk and wandered past Swedenborg Gardens. Emanuel Swedenborg was an Eighteenth century, renaissance kind of guy. He had a brain the size of a planet which he used to explore all the cool, new learnings that were coming out of Europe and synthesise them into his own, clever ideas that he took back to Sweden to wow his countrymen with. In later life he had a spiritual awakening and eventually wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in which he created a cosmology that incorporated all his mystical learnings. He was quite the guy and was charismatic enough to gather a fair, few followers. One Swedenborg enthusiast was William Blake.

You can track Swedenborg all over London. There are churches and road names, societies and plaques. For a man not many people know about these days, he is punching above his weight, memorial wise.

I felt, having crossed Swedenborg’s path more than once on my travels, that it was time to go and find Blake, who is the reason I know anything about Swedenborg in the first place.

Blake and I first got acquainted when I was in Sixth Form. We had a general studies teacher who became an important influence in my life. Mrs Webb was the first adult I heard using the word ‘fuck’ in a casual conversation. She also introduced me to art history. Both have become important in my life going forward. I particularly enjoy combining the two interests, e.g., ‘Look at this massive, fucking picture.’ etc

One of our general studies assignments was to explore a genre of painting or an artist that she allocated us and write an essay about it/them. We also had to attempt to copy a painting in the style or by the artist. If we failed to do the artwork, she failed the assignment. I got Cubism, which I hated because I was seventeen and very much into Impressionism, which Mrs. Webb did not approve of. She told me that learning about Cubism would change the way I thought about art forever. She wasn’t wrong.

Blake was neither a Cubist nor an Impressionist, but he was the artist that my best friend, Rachel was given to write about. Rachel had been traumatised by early efforts to make a bird of Paradise in primary school which got laughed out of the playground, so when it came to recreating an artwork, she asked me to give it a crack. I had spent a week wrestling with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon and was happy to drop it like a hot rock and give Blake a go.

Surprisingly, given that Les Demoiselles all looked like they’d fallen out of an avant-garde children’s television programme about some women made out of a collection of boxes and set squares and should have been easy to draw but weren’t, I found Blake’s figurative work more in my wheelhouse. A big part of this was down to the fact that a) he really liked a smudged line and b) he couldn’t draw for shit. It played to my strengths. I recreated The Ancient of Days. Rachel passed the assignment. We were all happy.

I then forgot about him until we got to university where Blake was a big deal in poetry circles and nobody worried about the fact that the people in his paintings have arms like Mr Tickle. I had done with the pictures. Now it was time to get to grips with the words.

Everyone knows The Tyger, burning bright with his immortal symmetry. It’s one of those poems most people can quote at least a line from. I have always hated it because it annoys me beyond reason that the word symmetry is supposed to rhyme with eye. It just doesn’t.

The Tyger is old news by the time you get to university. Nobody cares about the forests of the night any more. I was relieved. I had hoped that this was one of Blake’s early poems, written when he couldn’t spell tiger properly and didn’t understand how rhyming worked. When I cracked open Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was our set text, I was full of youthful optimism, which was sadly short-lived. I loathed the poetry, absolutely loathed it.

And yet, here I am, decades later, wanging on about the man. What is it about him that got me, that meant that all those things I learned have stuck in my head like burrs in a dog’s coat when I can’t remember my own PIN number half the time?

For me it has to be what Tayce would say. It’s ‘The cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity and the gumption.’ Blake was a rebel. Anarchic and unrepentant, he blazed a path through life that was both singular and strange. In his own lifetime he was largely thought of as a madman and his work was overlooked. In the years since his death, his work has become more and more lauded and he has been a hugely influential figure for so many radical thinkers and makers.

He was intensely religious, but when traditional religion and even Swedenborg’s teachings were not enough to capture everything he thought and believed, he created a spiritual vision, unique to himself which he explored in his writing and art. He was a fierce critic of the class system and the exploitation of the poor. He believed that marriage was a form of slavery, despite the fact he was married himself. He believed in the freedom to love who you chose, regardless of the law. He abhorred slavery and had a strong belief in a universal humanity. He was also mad keen on getting naked all the time, presumably to get blood flowing more freely and allow for more radical thinking. The more you find out about him, the madder and more interesting he becomes. Despite his smudged lines and his terrible rhymes, his life and work has a beauty and purpose which is bigger than the sum of its parts.

He also had visions throughout his life. When he was a child living in Peckham Rye, he saw, ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.’ I’m so here for that. I went to Peckham Rye and saw some cracking art, and also a lady on a bus who had a headscarf that said: ‘I love Jesus.’ I thought I was doing well, but I’d give a lot to see a tree full of spangled angels.

Blake is buried in Bunhill Fields, which is a few minutes walk from Old Street roundabout. As he has been on my mind a bit lately, I thought I’d pop and pay my respects. I love a good graveyard and I liked the fact that this one was on a handy bus route for my ailing hip. It is also opposite John Wesley’s house, another person who tinkered with religion and rubbed people up the wrong way. I love that they are kissing cousins as it were.

I wanted to love Bunhill Fields. In my mind’s eye it was full of trees festooned with dancing angels and had the radical, hip quality of Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere La Chaise in Paris. I envisaged people like me rocking up and leaving manuscripts hand typed on paper made of bees wings or poems threaded onto branches. Kites with mad ideas like Mr. Dick’s in David Copperfield, swooped through the air, their strings held by musicians and visionaries. It was a wild ride. In my mind.

In reality it was municipally tidy with lots of notices about all the things you couldn’t do and a great many railings cutting you off from actually doing any wandering among the stones. You had to keep to the designated paths and there were no people running around, throwing their socks in the bushes and howling lines of iambic pentameter to the ether. I was gutted.

Also buried in Bunhill Fields are Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe and more importantly, Journal of the Plague Year fame and John ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ Bunyan. I have issues with Bunyan, but the blame lies firmly at the feet of Louisa May Alcott. I was obsessed with Little Women as a child. All four of the girls receive a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress at the beginning of the book and adore their copies fiercely, trying to emulate the pilgrim’s progress in their own lives. As they led quite exciting and romantic lives, I thought I would love Pilgrim’s Progress and it was a horrible and lasting shock to me that it is very, very dull and extremely religious. I passed Bunyan with a sniff but gave Defoe a good pat because he is top at describing buboes and we all need that.

The best, non famous grave I found was an extremely large, stone edifice for a woman called Dame Mary Page. The inscription reads: "In 67 months she was tap'd 66 times, Had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation." No wonder the grave was so chunky. I have many questions, none of which I am sure I want answering.

There are two stones for Blake, both of which are free of railings but which have been slabbed over and round, which I felt was restricting and just plain wrong. I wanted to crow bar the stones up and plant a riot of wildflowers in the dirt. I wanted to hang rope ladders from the branches of every tree and leave bins on the ground for people to throw their clothes into before shinning, naked into the foliage above. I wanted spangles and angels and something of the chaotic force for good instead of neat and tidy lines and notices. I hope he gets up at nights when the cemetery is closed and dances.