Proverbs of Hell 17

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

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.

This is only the fourth time Blake has dispensed this advice, so I would say that he recommended minding your own business over most other ones. Even two trees, who intuitively would have mostly the same procedures for life, do not solicit input on their process. Let alone a horse, a nomadic herbivore, should advise a territorial carnivore, a lion, on the finer points of antelope hunting. Eyes on your own work, and believe people when they tell you about theirs.

The thankful reciever bears a plentiful harvest.

Be grateful, even if they misspell your name.

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

History is a long list of good ideas turned into catastrophes. Anyone who’s built anything or programmed anything or even tried to bake a cake knows that reality does not meet us halfway. The world is unbelievably complex and chaotic, and the human world twice so, and I would be shocked to meet anyone who’d done anything worthwhile without a string of failures, fuck-ups, and farts trailing behind their golden statue. Some might have enough money to insulate themselves from their own foolishness for now, but eventually everyone falls for something. There is no perfect plan or execution, so the only choice is to try and then to adapt.

I’m reminded a lot of yesterday’s entry in which Blake called Fool a kingly title. There is a long string of fools stretching back to the first human to pick up a strange looking plant and take a nervous bite. Some fools died to make sure we knew which mushrooms killed us, some fools died to figure out how not to build an airplane, some fools died because they didn’t know that was how municipal governance worked in their area and they really should have review the rules of this Trial by Combat. There are two sayings I hear a lot in industrial settings: “safety regulation is written in blood” and “it wouldn’t be a rule if it hadn’t happened at least twice.” You can’t control when the title of Fool descends upon your brow, just like a king can’t, but you can be sure that you would have been the Fool much earlier if someone else hadn’t been doing it already. Maybe they have good advice, but it is foolish advice, so take it or leave it as your fool heart demands.

Try and bear it with a smile, but if not, start your epic foolish journey or rant to the camera, there are plenty of examples of happy fools out there.

Music: