We’ve lost a giant.
Category: zettel
scraps of paper
Bypassing gatekeepers has been a dream ever since there were gates. In the late 18th century, William Blake devised a technology to bypass the gatekeepers and make his visions directly available to a universal public. He believed this technology could be used by all poets and artists to achieve the same goal. The technology still required a high degree of skill and none but Blake ever mastered it.
Real-time social media platforms have made publication to a universal public simple. The skills required are minimal. The trap hidden in these platforms is that there’s a corporation that owns the pencil and paper with which you write. And more crucially, determines the visibility of your publication within the real-time stream. The gatekeeper has not been bypassed.
I wonder if William Blake ever imagined the result of universal access to a publication machine with distribution to a potentially universal public?
In his introduction to the volume “William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books”, David Bindman discusses the inherent potential of the printing process that Blake invented.
“William Blakes’s ‘Illuminated’ books, as we called them, were a challenge to the way books had been made since the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, and continued to be made until recently. …once the plate was completed it could, in theory at least, like a woodcut be used for a limitless number of impressions. For this reason Blake was able to persuade himself that his method could empower and liberate all writers, enabling them to express themselves freely to a universal audience without leave from worldly authority. …His new method offered the hope that poets and artists would finally have the means to drown out the ubiquitous message of Satan, carried by religious and state ritual and the printing press.”
WILLIAM BLAKE’S PROSPECTUS TO THE PUBLIC
October 10, 1793.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.
unconsumed
One of the great difficulties of the first reign of terror was the degree to which it consumed all thought. For the duration of this next era of terror, my goal is to remain unconsumed.
Yesterday, I listened to three full operas: Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”, and Wagner’s “Die Walkure”. I was not tempted to switch on cable news or check the algorithmic real-time feed to see “what was going on.”
Instead, I employed this simple trick. I tuned in to Met Opera Radio and didn’t turn it off or switch away from it. I let it play.
This worked remarkably well in establishing an unconsumed world within the confines of my house.
Comments closed
There’s an extraordinary interview/profile of the poet Jorie Graham in the New Yorker magazine. The publication date is January 1, 2023. Depending upon when you were born, it’s date that has a feeling of a far-off future. And yet, here it is. Another year has come—perhaps this is the year when the feeling of “too lateness” will become palpable to the masses.
Here’s a passage from Graham’s interview. It’s heartening to hear a poet taking on and exposing through words the world lying beneath the simulacrum.
The distractions come in increasingly enticing forms: fantasy facts, conspiracy theories, end-time narratives, V.R. worlds, and the ultimate (albeit also ancient) wish to become utterly other than one is, the fantasy of total escape from one’s self. We see this in situations as starkly clear as young girls addicted to apps which change their faces and bodies, until they are made ill with toxic self-hatred, bafflement, and shame. We know we are in a potential death spiral when so many solutions seem to involve some form of total escape—from one’s flesh, one’s spirit, the planet, the real world of work and love, from the time it takes to learn, from bodily knowledge, friendship, nature, from the uncanny feeling nature gives one of being only one species among other species. That feeling should excite us—it used to. Or mesmerize. Or terrify. The unknown in a life is still a gigantic terra incognita toward which every soul can make its pilgrimage. The unknown is not a “not known”—it is mystery, not a function of information. It is the unknowability embedded in the question that Tolstoy suggests we are to ask of life: What are we to do? You cannot ask Siri for the answer. You cannot take a shortcut to it, as much as our systems, and their new powers, want us short-circuited.
It’s a long interview, so prepare yourself for that. You may need to read it several times to pick up all the threads. It’s a picture in words of the ocean in which we swim.
Jorie Graham Takes the Long View
The poet talks about distraction, ecological devastation, and the future of her medium.
By Katy Waldman, The New Yorker interview, January 1, 2023
Comments closed