Proverbs of Hell 9

This is another entry in my series on William Blake’s “The Proverbs of Hell,” please see here for context.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

This one has the fun F-looking Ss twice. I honestly don’t have much to say about this one, it’s straightforwardly true. Everyone has been so desperate they have to laugh, and everyone has been so overwhelmed with good chemicals that their body has to let some out through the tear ducts. Something something, cyclical nature of the balance of life, you meet yourself leaving when you arrive, grasshopper, etc.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

Do you remember when I mentioned the Sublime a couple days ago? This is exactly what Sublime meant to Blake. Things that cause a jerking knot of terror and awe in the pit of your stomach. There’s a lot to say about how this particular emotion has slowly vanished from common discussion, and how it’s such a singular point of fascination for artists in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I’m no expert. It’s clear for Blake though that the important part of this proverb is that these are portions of eternity (for Blake this can be understood as the influence of God) we cannot even completely understand. There is a whiff of the ineffable as an annoying person would say. You can understand what is happening in a storm, you can see the wolves open their jaws to howl, you can feel the sword, but none of those experiences can be understood well enough to be conveyed in any way that imitates the experience of it. I would say that if he saw them, he would agree that even videos and recordings are not sufficient to understand or feel the sublime about these things. I feel a temptation to pontificate about how consumer culture denies the value of things that inspire fear except in specifically consumable contexts, but I think I’m just gonna move on.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

Speaking of inspiration to pontificate, this simple saying is effective and packed. Foxes are understood to be mischievous creatures intent on taking lives creatures by cunning. If a creature of such character is in a trap, they will blame everything that happened except their own actions, believing themselves to still be in the midst of a scheme and waiting to see how they can finally reverse it. It doesn’t matter if they are literally in a trap that they only could have gotten into by their own actions, the mere hint that they may escape consequences by denying the validity of the trap, the fairness of it, the construction of it, the malice behind it, how ugly the trapper’s spouse is, how they definitely never meant a word of what they said seriously, how the trapper secretly wants to eat the bait too, the excuses will not end until they escape (in which they will crow about their cunning and perception) or they are finally stopped for good.

The version of this I’ve always heard is crueler and more ambiguous: “a hit dog will holler.” It doesn’t matter the reason for the hit, if it was deserved or even loving, the hit creature will scream as if they are innocently persecuted all the same. I think this is a very important thing to remember when navigating the stormy winds of internet discourse, where no claim of innocence actually is one.

It’s a Saturday, if you’re working, you should think about what that means. Have a piece of fruit.

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