Proverbs of Hell 20

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

Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!

The standard news response of thoughts and prayers immediately springs to mind here. It’s a basic admonishment, all the prayers and meditation and goal setting and vision boarding and visualizing and manifestation and planning and journal keeping and warming up and taking a class and setting intention and taking a poll and reading the room and listening and hearing and all the glorious preparations in the world doesn’t equal a single row, even poorly, plowed.

Similarly, no amount of praise or rewards or awards or derision or harsh reviews or sanctions or collectors editions or features or retweets or shares will equal one reaped gourd. They will not help the labor be finished, and they cannot offer a greater reward than the internal satisfaction or a higher praise than a self-determined physical result.

I don’t want to spend more time grousing about the times we live in, but it’s easy to see the difference in the satisfaction of completing a difficult task and the hollow rewards of praise and notoriety. As well as the material difference between solemnly intoning your prayers and best intentions and actually grabbing a trash bag and piling in to help. No amounts of shares on Facebook will fill a single post hole and no amount of money will equal one single well crafted cup made for yourself or by someone you love. That our world is oriented around the opposite is obvious and hack to talk about but please remember it if you can.

Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not! ~

This one puzzled me. It’s another easy one to one to one to one, and proclaimed like it’s self evident and clear. Yet the first half says that Joy does not laugh. As anyone who’s ever felt or seen someone feel joy can tell you, laughter is usually present. What does laughter represent?

Laughter typically comes from either the revelation of a connection or the resolution of a conflict. It’s the water slamming shut after the rock falls in, the SPELUNK of the soul. There are of course, countless versions of insincere laughter, both cruel and kind, but the authentic physical response of laughing is rarely under our control.

Joys as the plural subject of this short sentence doesn’t necessarily mean the emotional experience of Joy. It can mean physical objects, events, or even states of mind that bring the emotion of joy with them. These are very often not in our lives because of some involuntary connection or dissonance, but because of planning, work, or even another’s agency. Joys as discrete things, do no laugh.

Using that set of perceptions, the second half becomes much less strange to read. A scientist once said on a video that was retweeted into a blog that was digested into AI and then written about in a newspaper that tears, and crying in general, are the result of the brain being overwhelmed by emotion. That’s why laughter and despair can both bring tears, because they are the brain’s overflow system for neurotransmitters. Turning our attention to Sorrows, which can be events as much as they can be physical burdens or obstacles, we see that like “a Joy,” the concept of “a Sorrow” is malleable and not necessarily connected to a total breakdown.

Taken as a whole, it’s a reminder that just because something is a Sorrow or a Joy, it doesn’t dictate or responses nor our attitudes for that response. Just because we see a Sorrow in a lives, doesn’t mean there is some inherent negativity attached to it, we can choose the laughter instead of weeping, just as we can collapse in a wet puddle after witnessing someone else’s Joy. These are things, and we are not things, we have the choice.

This is the last page of the “Proverbs of Hell” and the first one in a while with an actual illustration. The three figures on the bottom seem to be scribes of some sort, with the center being depicted with batlike wings. I would imagine the being to be a demon, but that doesn’t make the other two angels. They seem to be average, androgynous, and really concerned with whatever the figure to the left is writing. This could be a representation of the proverbs we have been reading being written, but I’m going to hold off on reflecting about it more until we have seen what the rest of the written text has to say.

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.

Starting off with another hefty one, we have four capitalized concepts related to four different body parts.

I’ve mentioned the Romantic period’s obsession with the Sublime before. It was seen as the terror/joy of witnessing forces of nature and time that are completely beyond our comprehension, much less control. Pathos is every introduction to literature’s first stop at the dour old warehouse of Formal Logic. It’s the rhetorical elements in a piece of human work that are designed specifically to appeal to our emotions, it’s the Arms of an Angel playing over sad puppies, it’s the crying Native, it’s the rousing speech, it’s the satisfying revenge. Beauty barely needs explanation, but it’s always good to remember that it applies to both aesthetic appeal and internal integrity. The last being Proportion feels satisfying because it brings the others together. All things must be accurately related to each other or there is no hope of ever cohering them into a single work.

To draw the crayon lines between these concepts and the body: The head grapples with the Sublime, being overcome and overcoming in turn. The heart is both buffeted by and produces Pathos, an essential part of living among others and communication. The genitals both chase Beauty and are Beauty in themselves, another form of relation to others and a reminder of our personal divinity through both reproduction and unification of purpose. Lastly, the hands and feet represent the actual physical reality of living in a world where the rest of our bodies are struggling against ideals and perceptions. All of these are important, and proportion is the part that reminds us of our limitations and obligations, just as each of the others is both the motivation and the struggle of the part Blake chose.

It’s a coherent conception of the human body as a meaning-making, acting machine, gelling with contemporary ideas of health and morality, and a reflection of the agency imparted to us by providence. Your mileage may vary.

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