PARODY ON A BLAKE ESSAY

ASSIGNMENT ON WILLIAM BLAKE. UNIVERSITY 1996 Not really Humour. Parody. I was really annoyed at some silly woman professor that I dumped marks… got a 62% and then appealed explaining that this bit was not part of my assignment.. it was a bit of mischief. Appeal upheld and a credit!

This was something I would LIKE to have written and was tacked on to the real assignment for a giggle. Tutors comment after a mark of 62% “I didn’t mark this as it didn’t seem to invite assessment, but I must say that your parody of Blake’s Tyger gets closer to the purported topic than almost anything in the essay itself. (Now there’s an object lesson!)

William Blake was not a genius.
He invented a wonderful and sacred set of symbols which he hid so that scholars in another time could delve into the wonders of his work and view his genius. (DOH!)
He produced exquisite works using symbols undecipherable by ordinary folk, to sell at a price only those who would vehemently oppose his views could afford.

He hoes into his work with the zeal of a fat man at a Lamb roast. He rides roughshod over the real rights of the poor and oppressed in his haste to do nothing at all.
Condemning with such compassion.
Condoning with such vehemence..

Within an allotted span of three score and ten, he produced less work of less value than Lennon/McCartney produced in a decade. (Who can deny the massive social significance of Eleanor Rigby, Nowhere Man, and Working Class Hero?)

Because time is not linear, but made up of wheels within wheels (as fortold in the Lyrics “Windmills of Your Mind” sung by Noel Harrison, son of Dr Doolittle, for the film “The Thomas Crown Affair” . Because time is not linear Blake’s molecular structure scattered the sixties like stardust. He became Alan Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, and most of the Grateful Dead. (Or was it James Joyce who became most of the Grateful Dead!?)

He became the influence for the sleazy, brain-dead smack freak called Jim Morrison who named the band the Doors, but who’s only perception was through glazed eyes. By the Time Aldous Huxley boarded the bandwagon, Blake’s lysergic visions had adorned the covers of at least a dozen supergroup’s albums.
Rumour has it that a young reporter from the New Musical Express (Symbolised by the cryptic NME: See my work “Satanism in Pop Culture” NME = en-em-y) discovered Blake’s unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, and in a midnight grave robbery dug up the entire lyrics to “Stairway To Heaven” which he sold to Led Zeppelin who were at the time messing around with the mind of Alistair Crowley.
Robert Plant (the Vegetative World) and Jimmy Page (The Knowledge brought about by books and reading etc) were also single-handedly responsible for the interpretation of the lyrics about a ‘lady who knows/that the bars are all closed/though she’s climbing the Stairway To Heaven.”

It is this work alone, recorded by such icons as Rolf Harris, and Barry Crocker that has done so much to bring the work of William Blake to the modern public.

It is well known that Blake wasted his talent, and his life in the selfish pursuit of immortality. For his is the immortality of waste, and as important and vital as the artists who perfected the method. We cannot give credit to Janis Joplin, Mama Cass, Gram Parsons, and Kurt Cobain? Can we?

This ‘immortality of waste’ is the waste of the revolutionary. And each time a revolution impends, out comes William Blake and his cronies for a while, and a bit of self indulgent reverence.
Blake is a drudge and a boor.

His work is ‘ohwowoutasitewhatafuckinfarouttripman!” It is best read in the company of one or more chemistry students who can supply large quantities of psychotropic substances. Any person wishing to study Wm Blake in depth should ideally be advised to consult a very expensive psychologist first, and discuss the possibility of early castration/lobotomy.

THE POEM

What did Blake pretend to see
In his Tygers fearful symmetry?
The hand? The mind of God? The eye?
To offer truth of Christ’s telegony?

If the sun and moon should doubt
They’d immediately go out
Says Blake amid his augerie.
Dear Mr Blake, the cosmic shout
Is now. I doubt. I doubt. I doubt.

Yea Mr Blake, our telescopes
Have put a dash to your fond hopes.
Still Grey the monk, and Black the priest.
Salvation comes NOT from the East
And every cry of every child
Has never yet been reconciled.
And science takes yon God’s delight
In Shewing Isaac Newton right.
And Tygers now are specters, sprite
Hid in forests of your night.

Luvah, Beaulah, Enion
Behemoth, Leviathon,
Los, Eno, and Albion
Rintrah, and Palamabron…
CURSE your names and symbols Blake!
Thou madman, genius, master-fake.
Born with words beyond your station
You took revenge on education.

NB ‘Pretend’ Used by Blake to mean ‘Profess’

And so in conclusion Mr Blake… All art is fake. Art is caught in the imagination. Imagination is fancy, lies, and wishes. To become real, they must be brought into creation by the artist. And what is revealed is thus fake.
These words are not mine.
They came to me in a vision!