--William Blake
Since my college days (now some twenty five years behind me) I've felt an attraction to the work of William Blake and especially to an early work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It's one of his illuminated books, the words and designs to all of which he etched painstakingly backwards onto copper plates, then bathed in acid to create a negative that could be inked and pressed to paper in order to print a limited number of copies. Then after printing he embellished each page (lovingly, resplendently) with water colors.
These books--beautiful compelling throwbacks to the medieval illuminated manuscripts--did not sell. But today they are recognized as true masterpieces of composite art. And the Marriage of Heaven and Hell is maybe one of the easiest of the set to enjoy. It's a sort of multimedia broadside against imperialism and dualistic philosophy. Its purpose is to wake folks up, politically, metaphysically, religiously. The secret to understanding and interpreting it? Well that lies in being in on the joke that Blake here has turned traditional Christian cosmology on its head, so that hell is the place we're meant to aspire to and heaven a state of soul most assiduously to be avoided. Heaven is rational metaphysics and allegiance to the imperial state and just in general a state of being in which the creative imagination is limited and controlled by all the powers that be. Whereas hell! Hell on these vibrant pages is life-energy and sociability and political liberty and nakedness and innocence and good hot sex and unity of body and soul and the pure wonder and multi-dimensional strangeness of conscious existence. So down with empire. Down with philosophies that exclude the passions. Up with living it up and getting it on. Up with skylarks. Up with flowers.
In any case, somewhere about the middle of the tract (and as beautiful and artistically stunning as the book is, that's what at bottom it is--a propaganda piece, a tract) there's a set of proverbs, called "The Proverbs of Hell," which I've come to think just have to be the sweetest set of aphorisms in English imaginable. I certainly haven't come across their like anywhere else; no, for vigor and concision they're pretty much matchless. And I'd like to spend some time with them on and off here in this blog, not just because they are beautiful and meaningful, but because I think they have a great deal to say to any would-be nine volt nomads who want the greener more elemental life, but who are nevertheless afraid to let go of what they currently have in order to have that life. We all have our expectations, some of which are just going to have be unlearned and released, but lucky for us the mind that birthed these proverbs had little use for material wealth or jet-setting or being someone big and famous in the world, and so the proverbs focus on the realest wealth that is (or ought to be) every human being's birthright: friendship, imagination, time itself, the creative intellect at play, the gaining of wisdom by pathways of energetic foolishness: all of which can be embraced as nine-volt nomadic virtues and gifts because in cultivating them, nothing has to be burned or consumed or thrown away. Quite the opposite! Moreover they are key to living the low-energy, high-imagination life in grace and style!
But hey before I go on effusing and declaring without a shred of quotational evidence from the pen and watercolor brush of the master himself, let me just meditate for a short space and a short while on just one of these proverbs, namely of course the one at the head of the post, illuminating it: "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."
First thing that happens as the proverb sinks in, is I think of certain human faces that really do seem to shine, and not just when a smile brightens them but pretty much most of the time. Not movie stars. Not tall beaming politicians with machine-polished shoes. I mean ordinary everyday people whose faces just radiate the generosity and warmth that really is present in their lives as a gift to give away. Being with them is like coming up to a warm fireplace on a dreary day. You feel like a different person in their presence. Or at the very least you feel that in the space around this person there are other possibilities besides continuing on with dreariness, besides just making do or muddling stoically through your troubles. Maybe in the presence of such people you even pretty much forget you have troubles.
Now a question: what happens to such people from OUR perspective, when either they die or just in a practical sense have to exit from our lives for good? Think a minute. What happens?
Why they become stars of course! They become stars by something like the method that the Greeks were getting at in those myths of theirs, those myths in which certain mortals after their deaths were made into stars and constellation and given the honor of placement in the heavens. One of my favorites in this category is the story of the twins Castor and Pollux. The one twin was immortal, the other mortal, and when the mortal one died, the immortal one begged Zeus to confer the gift of immortality on his brother, he missed him so much. And Zeus, moved by the brother's evident love and sorrow, granted the request. Love effected the transformation there by means of the power of a brother's memory. And so it is for us. Whoever the shining faces of our lives are and however they serve us--hiking companion, soul mate, teacher, lover, friend--it's all the same. They become stars of creative recollection, points within us of perpetual light.
Here's a fact to chew on: evidently we all possess madly specific neurons in our brains that fire every time we see a photograph say of Obama. And by that I mean any photograph. In other words you might be shown hundreds of different photographs of Obama one after the next, taken from all angles and on any number of occasions, and every time that neuron will recognize Obama and fire.
I like to think about this fact when I picture within me the faces of people whom I really truly love. I like to think that every time I see my wife or my son or say my gentle and artistic grandmother Brooten, somewhere within my brain a certain very specific point bursts out in recognition, a neuron whose task it is to recognize and remember and fire away in salutation and celebration, an inner neural star. You see they really exist. Some of them I suppose are baleful ones. But of course right now, to quote another poet, we're thinking of the ones that shine on us "graciously, with fair aspect."
One such remembered face (luminous with affection) was part of my life in my early childhood. It belonged to a woman who happened to have had her nose pierced, so that she wore a piece of jewelry there on one side of her nose that even reminded me of a star. Her name was Pushpam and she worked in our home during my family's nine years in Southern India. Again, this was back when my age could still be measured in the single digits, yet my memory of her is anything but dim.
Most of what Pushpam did was cook for us: a labor that in that place and time was no easy one, there being no reliable electricity to keep a refrigerator, and no packaged foods available, and no automobiles in the driveways to just conveniently hop into every time you needed to go to pick up some coriander or curds. No, all the ingredients had to be bought from the open air town bazaar almost daily, and our stove was fueled with wood, and our water, to be made potable, had to be relentlessly boiled. Nor were there any of those labor saving gadgets, no blenders or digital scales, no food processors. Certainly no dishwasher. All of which meant that the principle ingredient to any prepared meal was in fact not rice or spice or meat or vegetables or fruit but honestly time.
So Pushpam was to be found mostly in the kitchen; I would go there and sit on a yellow bench near a kitchen island (or really peninsula) painted yellow to match my bench. And I would talk to her. Well sometimes maybe I would do some little task to help her: maybe pick stones out of the rice and the lentils or maybe sort through the tangled underworld of the utensil drawer like a private eye for the coconut grater. But for the most part I just sat around and talked and asked to sit closer to the stove. These days I like to think that my own pretty easy-going attitude about the amount of time most tasks around the house are just going to take has its source in enjoying that time with Pushpam, who was friendly and kind without ever coming anywhere near spoiling me. I like to think that she enjoyed talking to me. I like to think that I entertained her as least half as much as she entertained me. She taught me the Tamil names for the animals. I told her about what I learned at school. I asked her lots of questions about her family. She was a widow. Her husband who in life had been a perpetual ne'er do well had died just a few years after she started working for us, so she was the primary provider for her several young children. In any case she liked to talk about her kids.
Now I'm sure I will have much more to say about Pushpam as time goes on, but for now what I want to say is how amazed I am at how often even to this day she returns to my field of inner vision in all her sturdy kindness. It has been more than thirty-five years since I last saw her and yet I am sure that not a week goes by in which I am not gladdened by a happy recollection of her face. So her face is like a star to me. And those regular glances into memory in which I see her--they're like looking up at night to see some bright and easily recognized constellation like the Big Dipper or Orion.
"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."
But here's the simple proverbial point: would I remember Pushpam at all so happily, so pleasurably, if during the time in which I was actually with her in those days she had shown me neither attention nor kindness nor love? Of course not! Her face had to shine outwardly day after day, hour after attentive hour for it to shine inwardly for me here and now. And so it is for you and all of yours and for me and all of mine: love-in-the-present is the key to ever gracing anyone's memory. After all the only time in which we can cause anything to happen is the present time, the past being all too solidly over and done with, and the future nothing but a cloud or a mountain fog!
Take heed. Love now. Shine far.
HB, WB
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