AND DID THOSE FEET?

‘Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld

The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah’

Well, it could happen to anybody, couldn’t it?

Yes, I went to the blockbuster William Blake show at Tate Britain – that quotation from ‘Milton a Poem’ can be found on a wall of the exhibition.  

As I staggered out after 90 minutes or so, I’m pretty sure I was displaying marks of weakness, marks of woe. It seems I have a bit of blind spot for Blake.  I mean, yes some of the paintings and engravings are OK, some of the poetry is fine, it’s just is his personal mythology that really gets me down.  I mean I have enough trouble with the convolutions of basic Christian mythology, but when I’m confronted with Orc and Los and Urizen and Nobodaddy and indeed the Daughters of Beulah, and all the other stuff he just you know made up, I want to say enough already.

Clearly this is a minority view, my own failing no doubt, and one not shared by the throng packing into the Tate.

But really, did Albion have to be quite so effete?

And in the illustration below from ‘Paradise Lost,’ what exactly is Adam doing? Saying ‘Hello clouds, hello trees’? And what's with the jazz hands? One thing he’s not doing is paying attention:

And as for what Eve has in her mouth – well I think we know what it’s supposed to be, but I think we also know what it very much looks like.

Incidentally, should you ever find yourself in Manningtree, in Essex and you feel the need for the lineaments of gratified desire, you can always to walk up to Blake close: the walk will do you good.

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

At the moment I’m spending a couple of afternoons a week at the British Library.  I get off at Euston Station tube and then make the shortish walk from there to the library.

It seems that the powers that be at Euston Station want to encourage you to walk, not only to the library but to St. Pancras and King's Cross stations, and there are marked walking routes that supposedly help you to avoid the pollution of the Euston Road.

As a natural subversive this is troubling to me.  Yes, I want to walk, but I don't want to be told to walk, and I certainly don’t want to be told where to walk.

So I’ve been taking short cuts through the Ossulton Estate, a collection of council flats built in the late 1920s and early 30s.  When I first walked walked through, it all seemed very east European and ruined, movie-set-ish, and you know me, I like that sort of thing.

And I was reminded of Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna which is a fine building made much less grim, though no less cinematic, by being painted red.

But now I see that the part of the Ossulton Estate I walked through - Levita House - wasn’t really in ruin.  It was apparently just being stripped down in preparation for a new paint job, so that it now looks like this.

Me, I’d have painted it red.

This being the winter, it’s generally dark when I leave the British Library, and as I walk out I look up at Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue, widely known as “Newton After Blake” which looms over me, without quite making eye contact.

Of that triumverate - Paolozzi, Newton and Blake - I think only the last had much interest in walking.