Blake, Rollins, and being queer

Blake’s magic:  A reader-response class on Blake

These days of late October and early November, when autumn reaches its pinnacle and the weather turns cold, when one mid-term just gives way to another and that to a term paper and then another can be both the hardest and the best for teachers and students.  We know each other now and the ideas we have regarding what we might expect from each other are starting to settle.  We’re on a friendly level -- the teaching and the learning happen in both directions and are mixed with conversation and engaged debate.  I have laid the foundations for the rest of the year and together we are ready.

For three weeks we have been discussing and wrestling with William Blake’s amazing work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  We have seen his art, marvelled over his effort, questioned his visions, and tried to come to grips with his contradictory, profoundly paradoxical poetry, fancies, dialogies, stories and arguments.  Last clas I had them ban together in groups and pick one of the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ to analyze, interpret and present visually.  For the shy ones this is a great opportunioty for them to be heard, while for the more boistrous this is often a chance to sit back and listen.  During this class I just sit back and listen, helping here and there, but mostly just hanging back:  for Blake to do his magic, you have to make some room for it to happen.

Today they present -- and they each, in their own ways, having struggled with what their short line says, do not fail to impress.  They are pleased with themselves, as am I -- they have listened closely to the words as they pried out possible literal, metaphorical, and cultural readings and have learned a great deal about themselves, genre, critical thinking, and working in a group.

Now for the cap.

For years I have thought about how to explain this point -- how to sew it all together, how to link these Proverbs to Blake’s larger project and now, listening to these students do their presentations, I think I’ve got it.  We’ll see right now.

“What is Blake trying to do with these Proverbs?  What, in his larger project, is he up to?  What does he want to do to you?  It took him a looooong time to create every word, so he must’ve had something in mind.”

“He wants us to think?”  Everything is still a question.

“Yes!  He wants us to think!  And he wants us to think because...?”  Sometimes it seems that everything I say is also a question.  I am, however, about to surprise myself.

“Because we’re not paying enough attention to things?  Like Don McKay said?”

Right!  Because he wants us to pay attention -- and this because, fuelled by what he saw as the power of the individual to overcome tyranny, embodied in both the French and American Revolutions, he is out to wage war ginst the systems of belief that seek to weaken and destroy the human sprit.  And in order to do this he has chosen poetry as his weapon.  Poetry -- not the verses that we write to express emotion, but language sharpened and used to cut through the politics and metaphysics of those who would seek to keep us down for their own ends... But wait, there’s more!”

I’ve said all of this several times over the past couple of weeks and now, inspired by their various attempts to understand the poet’s words by drawing them into their own worlds, I have realized that there is more.

“Blake is speaking to us, right now, because while it’s easy for us to criticize the authorities of religion and government, what authority do we need to fight against?  What system of belief is trying to kill our spirits in this age?  We, the religiously agnostic and politically bitter -- what authority is ruling our lives?  What convention do we need to challenge?  What do we fear?  In Blake’s time, the people feared Hell; in times and cultures of governmental control people feared exile, incarceration and execution:  what do we fear now?  Who holds judgement over our heads?

“Popular culture, my friends -- we fear the judgement of the masses, we fear that we will not be accepted.  Imagine!  In a world of seemingly endless individual freedoms, we have chosen to be stifled by social acceptance.  I challenge you today, just as a small example, to find me a man on this campus, this bastion of liberal arts and open-minded thinking, who has hair halfway down his back.  You can’t.  Or how about a woman with a shaved head; no, you won’t find one of those either and the reason is that we are all afraid of being ostracized for being who we are.

“I promise you that each and every one of us in this classroom has something inside of us that we are hoping and praying nobody finds out about, because if they do we’re convinced that we’d be doomed.  We were born Jewish, we have a child, we had an abortion, we lost our virginity at 12, we drink too much, we have suffered with anorexia, we are queer.  There’s a good one actually:  we’re queer.  You know, Henry Rollins, ex-lead singer of punk band Black Flag and now professional spoken word performance artist, was talking one time about being on tour and an interviewer asked him how he felt abouyt being ‘being outed’ in San Fansisco.  ‘I’ve got not problem with gays,’ says Rollins, ‘but I’m not gay.  If I was, however, there’d be no ‘outing’ me because I would busted out of that fucking closet at 12 years old, yelled ‘hey, I’m fucking gay!’ and made a fire out of the wood to warm my hands over.’

“Blake says that ‘Prisons are built with the Stones of Law, Brothels with the Bricks of Religion’.  Now let’s add to that -- ‘Closets from the Wood of Pop Culture’.  Blake is speaking to us, right here, today, and he is telling us that the system of belief that seeks to weaken and harm the human spirit is the one that is the hardest to see because it is right here before us, pervading everything.  And it is that system which we must wage war against with the artist weapon that is our lives.

“So, the next time someone says to you ‘hey, did you hear that so-and-so came out of the closet?’ you say ‘yeah?  Let’s make a bonfire from it and roast some marshmellows over it.’

“We, the liberal arts students, the thinkers of the world, inherit the legacy of extreme tolerance from the likes of William Blake.  What are you going to do with it?”

I have been reading, studying and teaching William Blake for so long that most of the pages are loose, it is duck taped together at the spine and the margins are crammed full of my notes.  It took that long, that much effort to get here -- and there is no doubt in my mind that my opinion will change again and that, more importantly, this will come about as a result of long conversations with my students, filled with fresh insights, seemingly simple questions, and the power that comes with working together:  a marriage of heaven and hell.