Baffling Combustions

In this second installment on Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" we touch on Swendenborg and his influence on this work and then touch the electric wire of a single proverb: "No birds soars too high, if he soars on his own wings."

In this fast-paced, semi-spontaneous, testy analysis, we examine the poem "Spring" by Ishion Hutchinson, published in the June 7th, 2021 edition of the New Yorker magazine. This session includes Hutchinson reading his work, courtesy of the magazine, the link to which (and its text) is here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/spring

"Steal from the rich and give to the poor " - words we hope we may all come to thrive by - is in no figure better exemplified than one Robin Hood, for whom no introduction is necessary or adequate. Here we look into his historical origin in not-so-merry old England, sloughing through the Dark Ages of feudal society " - as well as what this beguiling Green Man might represent for us today in our lives stuffed with gadgets, distractions and more than anything else crises - including our imperiled natural world, the felicitous co-habitation with which (at least in imagination) Robin and his band in Sherwood Forest stand out as a happy model.

The first part of an ongoing treatment, we look here at the poet, printer and radical William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," a prose poem first published in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, arguable his first attempt - written between the years 1798 and 1803, coincident with the start and subsequent bending of the French Revolution - to articulate a personal philosophy. In these sessions, we do a granular - and maybe even (in keeping with Blake) infinitely so - reading of this perfect articulation of things were still working out.

This is our 2nd half of our light on "hell"--its sometime reality and persistence and future within our Western Civ. twist. We go into its historical analogs out of Europe and try to figure what it's place might be today.

Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn't involve walking, in Walking 2 we continue our reading of Thoreau's essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau's sense of a new literature " or we haven't seen nothing yet.

"Walking" is from Henry David Thoreaus essay of that name, though alternatively he called it The Wild," so Walking the Wild takes us to what lurks inside it all, including the origins of revolution and ownership in the tyrannies of industrial time and privacy. We also here (in this first of a two-part discussion) talk about walking itself as an act and about getting lost as well as how, Thoreau writes, In wildness is the preservation of the world" which was to become the motto of the Sierra Club. Thoreau is a bewilderer who postulates things about 150 years ahead of his time and saw this work as an introduction to all I may write hereafter.

Here we turn our light on "hell"--its sometime reality and persistence and future within our Western Civ. twist. We go into its historical analogs out of Europe and try to figure what it's place might be today. To note, in our second transmission we will commit ourselves to an analysis of Blake's PROVERBS OF HELL.

In this last for now session of fan-proposed topics for examination we look at "blue" and all the ways this English word for a color is deployed in our everyday and extraordinary lives with particular emphasis on The Blues, including its mysterious origin and on-going persistent in what keeps us from totally cracking up. Great good thanks to the inestimable connoisseur of suchness Matthew Morse for the assist!

This is the second part of our "Unabomber" (Theodore Kaczynski) session. Again, special thanks to Paul Sigismundi for offering us this topic, which we seem to have fielded without totally losing it. This session concludes and is dedicated to the memory of Samson Gruber, the "Icarus of Bronx Science."