Proverbs of Hell 23

This is the twenty-third and final close reading entry in my series on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” please see this post for details and background.

Where man is not nature is barren.
This is an interesting line because it feels like it would be intuitive to a person with a certain set of assumptions while running completely counter to what I personally believe about the world. Blake is indirectly stating that the purpose of all nature is to produce “man” (man as in mankind or all humanity) and if it has failed to do so then there it has no purpose. This reeks of the old colonial attitudes that were pervasive at this time, soaked in justifications for circling the globe raping and pillaging. Living in the Imperial seat of Britain, it’s easy to see how those attitudes may be so omnipresent that they sink into conceptions of reality itself.

The reality is that man is not the crown jewel of nature, and is frequently the direct cause of nature being barren rather than a flowering fruit that leads to new life. Blake himself would have been mindful that the Bible tells its readers to take stewardship over the Earth, to protect it like an absent master’s garden. Yet, when he surveys the sublime glories of London (which we have record of him leaving only once or twice so he was clearly an outdoors-man of authority) he can only see manhood as the sole justification.

I don’t want to harp on this too long, because I do genuinely think there is no meeting this sentence halfway, and we’re nearly at the end. It’s a shame that this is an attitude that Blake would share with so rapacious crooks bent on exploitation and abandonment.

To take a more charitable position, these Proverbs are meant to be sourced from a part of the afterlife, so perhaps those who received “man” as the dropped and seeding fruits of Earth might have a different view of geological glory.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Blake one hundred percent believed in what he wrote with the fervor of a gospel writer.

Unfortunately for everyone, he took that belief all the way to the grave, and his wife did to hers, but as I mentioned before, it would be decades before he was discovered by the larger public. Eventually he was believed, but it took decades of being “misunderstood” by readers and caretakers.

When you have a zeolot’s fervor, it’s easy to assume others have the same drives. That little hard edge of truth that belief provides allows one to take all sorts of stances that others would not because there is a solid referent for your own positions. Without that, there is still the “ring of Truth” which is when something you hear clicks neatly into your own perceptions and biases and it comes with an emotional payoff. It’s similar to the satisfaction of watching someone else realize that you were right all along. Both of these are motivations that allow one to believe completely false things while so self assured that they will stand in the street and berate strangers.

Actual perception of Truth, especially in the glorious digital age of communication, is a hard process that demands both knowledge and experience. There are endless frauds and endless self assured assholes who are waiting around to claim that they themselves could never be fooled thus anyone who is fooled must lack character or wits. Anyone who’s ever seen a movie about crime, let alone actually attempted a swindle, knows that the easiest marks are the ones who are always on guard for it. If you think you cannot be fooled, then you will not talk about it to others or take basic precautions someone more mindful of their fallibility might take. No one is prouder of their purchase than someone who was clearly cheated, because their ego demands at least that if it has to take the wound.

So I do not agree with Blake here, even if the notion is romantically appealing. There is a neat symmetry and beauty to a world where Truth has some sort of self-evident proof contained within it, and I do not hear the Truth in this. Perhaps I have misunderstood it as well.

Enough! or Too much!
With that the Proverbs of Hell are complete. The reader of the Proverbs has been sated according to the writer, and there is no more to say. I appreciate the tone of the ending, because it implies both an incomplete work and that whoever instructed the Proverb writer to stop had different opinions than the one collecting these. It invites the reader to imagine what more may have been written, and also to inspect those already written to see which are “too much.”

As I said before, Blake was careful to differentiate what he wrote from Scripture. Even the Bible itself is a testament to how far people will search for truth, being ultimately a collection of different kinds of works ranging from poetic allegories to direct letters of advice. Blake would have not wanted his work to be included in any such body so he introduced such devices to prevent the stone faced dogmatism that strangles appreciation for any work deemed “important.” This also is in keeping with his theme of Heaven and Hell being reflections of each other, a similar place, but with Hell being the living space of doubt and uncertainty. It makes sense that the wisdom from such a place would have a few caveats.

Tune in next time for the last entry in this series where I will reflect and summarize some of what I’ve learned over this process. Don’t die before that, but if you do, well, uh, don’t eat all the snacks before I get there.

Music: