Proverbs of Hell 12

This is the twelfth edition of my series on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” see this post for context.

I haven’t been mentioning how the ink changes color from line to line because I’m not sure if it’s an intentional choice or a limitation of ink availability. There doesn’t seem to be a consistency to it. However, today all three are in the same color and only the three we are doing and that feels satisfying to me.

The cistern contains; the fountain overflows
I don’t know that they get much more straightforward, both systems are intended to do exactly what they do and would make bad versions of the other.

One thought, fills immensity.
Since there is no period between these two lines I am tempted to put them together, but with the capitalization, and the way the grammar doesn’t flow, I think this is a separate thought.

When I first was reading this one, I thought it read “fills immensely” but in fact it was a completely different word. Immensity sounds like it could mean something else and, because English is a language made from scraps and fragments, I chased it down to see what it meant. According to the wise oracles Merriam and Webster, it just means immense, again, even though the suffix turns it into a quality that an object can have. Like how ravel and un-ravel both mean the same thing, it’s a situation where the verbal use of the word will be identical but the spelling gives it a slightly different quality in print.

But there is a difference, the thought does not fill something “immensely,” what is described is something that has the quality of “immense,” which has been filled by “One thought.” I think anyone who’s watched a store full of customers go nuts over a slightly reduced price knows that there is no floor on how minor a thought can be and still animate hundreds to commit crimes and violence. Now that anyone can yell online, entire movies get scrapped and redone because the internet preferred the way an underpaid art grunt drew a character twenty years ago, late on a Tuesday.

Now that I’m in the same number of paragraphs about this line as it has individual words, I think it’s important to note that using “fill” in this sentence was not necessary. There are plenty of ways to describe “it only takes one thought to occupy an entire mind” or similar statements that don’t connect directly back to the line before it. The cistern and fountain are both vessels that are filled, one fills and retains, the other fills and continues filling. This line states that it can take as little as one thought, no matter how huge the cistern or fountain might appear.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Advice to speak up is everywhere all the time, especially in a world where the most valuable companies on Earth make their money by putting ads over people speaking for free. Yet that is not the tone of this line. “Speak your mind” has a specifically negative tilt, or in the modern tongue: It’s giving Karen. The consequence of this is that a “base man” will avoid you.

To keep talking about “slang theze dayz,” the internet has converted the word “based” from something only said by 4chan trolls and dark web cretins to identify their own, to a term that means both “honest” and “cool” in a specifically judgement free way. Like “you gotta hand it em” in one word. A celebrity complaining about airport toilets is as “based” as a fringe conspiracy theorist with a clever spin on reptilians. It is a state of sincerity and authenticity that is opposite its contemporary: cringe, the dark side of being too real. The important part is that both of these are reactions to behavior that would be occurring either way because it’s not “fake.” The person being called this is being judged on two different axis and they are being judged as “real” and “cool.” There is still the ironic, right wing troll version rattling around as an in-group signal, but expect that to slide away as more talk show hosts and grandmothers learn the word.

Contrast this with what Blake would have understood about the word “base.” In this line he is using it specifically as an adjective modifying the noun “man” (which here would best be understood as “all humans” thanks to “woman” being a relatively recent entry to English grammar. It started as a northerner modification loosely meaning “wife-man.” Poetics love old stuff, and getting into why Middle and Early Modern English specifically was slow to accept modifications coming from Northern European languages is a whole extra topic) so I went searching for the meaning of the adjective from that time. Here is the Oxford English Dictionary which goes by year back to the 14th century. The one we need is the one pertaining to abstract qualities, since I doubt Blake was giving advice in how to avoid short men or curvy women. To select the most applicable: “Morally low; despicable, ignoble; reprehensibly cowardly, craven; selfish, mean” some of my other favorites are “cheap” and “alloyed.” If you scan the other definitions, you’ll see that most of the uses of the word in the time around when Blake would have been writing match this definition. Using it specifically gives the judgment a spiritual and moral quality, that this is a person of “low” as opposed to “high” character and all the fun connotations that can mean in the burgeoning Imperial Colonialism of that time.

To return to the line, Blake is specifically stating that if the reader speaks their mind, then “base” characters will avoid them, because their character will not be compatible.

With my earlier disclaimer in mind, I now think it’s very sensible to view all three of these as part of one piece of advice: Some people are filled with thoughts and some overflow with thoughts, some with many and some with one, if you are the sort to speak up and “spout” about your mind, then you will not be liked or well received by people who prefer not to do that. The judgement that happens when Blake uses the word “base” to describe those of a more cisternly nature is not my favorite, but the man was a Romantic, cut him, and yourself, some slack. To him, a “base” man (which also meant of low born, poor, or banned from higher society) was the worst thing to be, so becoming fountain-like was the way he found community in others like him, who also wished to be overflowed. This advice could just as easily have been addressed to the “base man” as “if you don’t want to be overwhelmed with a sense that you’re failing, then maybe stay away from people who do what you call failing all the time.” Boundaries are self care people, and the best ones are the ones so evident from your behavior you don’t even have to explicitly lay them out.

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