Bowlby

This Summer I have been reading John Bowlby’s three volume epic examination of the psychology of ‘Attachment and Loss’ – reading them backwards, for some reason, starting off with ‘Loss’ going back through ‘Anger and Anxiety’ and ending up back at the start with ‘Attachment’. Somewhere around the centre of the middle book, I found the kernel. Bowlby writes “ Perhaps the most fundamental lesson to be learnt by anyone who wishes to understand the situations that other people fear is that forecasts of future dangers are as often as not strictly individual. Though forecasts of some sorts of event are public and shared with others, forecasts of other sorts of event are intrinsically private and personal. In particular, forecasts of how our personal relationships are likely to fare are not only of vastly more concern to ourselves than to anyone else but are based on past experience and present information that are ours and ours alone. Thus, as regards the future, each one of us has his own personal forecasts of what good and what harm may befall. This is the private world of future expectations that each of us carries within.”

Future Reading

I had my future read again yesterday. I didn't mean to but ended up going into the shop anyway, just to test if it was different from the last time. I want to know what is going to happen, or at least to stop thinking about it so much. If I knew, I wouldn't have to worry - one way or another.

Meeting with John

Dear Polly,

I was very interested to read your flyer included with the new Blake Soc programme.
When your on-going performance at the Museum was announced at the last Meeting I made a note to attend. My talk there was on MacDonald's seditious literature and Blake and I am interested in your proposal to "generate a bigger narrative" on Blake and seditious literature.. My colleague Fernando Soto and I have more and more begun to realise that the greater part of the previously unrecognised insights that we are finding in MacDonald's work derives from Blake. In America, sadly, this has been subconsciously recognised by the bible-belt fundamentalists, whose apocalyptic thinking has enormous influence in the White House, and virtually all MacDonald's works have been cut and rewritten to make them conform with this crazy theology. Bookstores have been flooded with these editions to such an extent that they outsell unexpurgated MacDonald works many times over.

Sincerely

John Docherty.

Deathday Blake's Grave

Yesterday I joined the members of the Blake Society for their annual remembrance of Blake’s death at Bunhill Fields near Old Street. The caretaker’s office had notices and photocopied newspaper articles taped up in the window that had some connection to the dead and buried in the cemetery. There was a photo-copied article about a long deceased mathematician, neighbour in death to Blake, whose formulas are know being applied by members of the CIA to refine there predictions of events such as the likelihood of terrorist attacks.

The Houses of Parliament

Last week I booked in for a tour of the Houses of Parliament. You can see it from Lambeth Palace, across the river. I realised that I had never been inside the place that is the locus of power in this country. We were instructed to stay close at all times. No photography. The building was re-built in the 1830s by the Victorians, and is an extraordinary fantasy work and pastiche of the past. What struck me most was how church-like the architecture was. On my departure I asked the guide why it was so. They explained that those who commissioned the architectural competition had specified Neo-Gothic or Tudor as the prefered styles in order to assert a British style; excluding the Neo-Classical as too French. On leaving, there was a lively historical display on the Gun Powder Plot and Guy Fawkes, a bomb- maker motivated by faith to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

MYSTIC, VISIONARY, PROPHET

Last week (the interloper that I am) I attended a William Blake Society Meeting at the Westminster Archive Centre situated behind Parliament Square. A visiting academic, Morton D. Paley, was delivering a paper on Coleridge and Blake to a gathering of about fifty members. After his talk, there was time for questions. They spoke eruditely, and with an sense of intimate familiarity with the names and places involved. A mystic, a visionary, a prophet.
Morton Paley described the pejorative notion of the imagination that was held by Renaissance thinkers, with an example from Shakespeare's use of 'fancy', and how this must be seen distinct from imagination as the 'imaging faculty', with its connection to prophecy. He pointed out that prophecy is not about foretelling the future, so much as speaking the truth of a present reality. Blake the visionary, Blake the mystic, Blake the prophet.
One woman cited Blake, "Every Christian is an artist." And went on to comment on what comfort this gave her as she thought of her beliefs as a Christian moulding her entire life into a work of art.

I took note of the crosses hanging around the necks of some present, and wondered silently, "If every Christian is an artist, is every artist then a Christian?"

FLYER

BEWARE

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Matthew 7:15

THE NON-JOINERS

I am intending to ask the members of the Blake Society what it is that they 'join' when they join it. Blake is often held up as a committed non-joiner of institutions; he joined the Royal Academy for a few days and then left it, the Church was another institution that he pointedly avoided. Members seem attracted to this non-conformism, and paradoxically, they seem to want to gather together with other like-minded non-joiners, to create a community around similar interests. I am intrigued by the broader questions this raises about all our desires to belong and not belong; to identify with a society or Society at large; of how we understand ourselves to be part of something among others, or to feel marginalised and alone.

UNDERGROUND

Today, I was on my way to meet with another member of the Blake Society at the Museum, and found the shutters closed on the entrance to the underground. The flower seller had been evacuated, and was standing on the pavement surrounded by his buckets of lilies and other flowers. I stopped by the coffee booth outside and asked them what they knew. I bought a coffee and listened to the radio with them. A series of bombs on tubes and on a bus. All the stations closed. I went home.
I turned on the TV news and watched a repeat of two weeks ago. The phone rang and A. was speaking. I said " It's happening again." He said " I just saw a horrific traffic accident - No, what do you mean? - Just outside the school, a child just ran out into the road and got hit - What happened? What did you do?" A child, half-day , first day of the Summer holidays, and he ran out in front of a car, his face all cut up, his eye swollen. Big bloody gash across his cheek and the skin of his forehead torn away. A. waiting with him, with the boy, talking to him, waiting for the ambulance to come. He said " I didn't know what to do. He will be alright. He was conscious. But I didn't know what I would have done if it had been worse - I am going to learn First Aid."
Listening to the radio as I write this, travel news and the voices phoning. They say - "It's not a safe place anyway. You could walk down the street and be run over. Life is about taking calculated risks." Always the comparison - the risk of being struck by an act of terrorism next to the chance of being hit by a car. The woman on the radio phone-in says, "It is dangerous to let you children walk across the street."

Incitement to Terrorism

I.M. asked me about how my seditious literature was coming along. I said that I was not so much attempting to write sedition myself as to ask for contributions from others. He asked what sedition might consist of? I said it seemed like a rather old fashioned notion and quaint in its way, but it occurred to me that we are currently and topically engaged with a closely related issue with regards to the Incitement to Terrorism Act. As attention moves form the 'foot soldiers' who carried the bombs the question arises as to how such ordinary young men could have turned to such extraordinary acts? The idea is that someone was behind them, 'brainwashing' them, persuading them, indoctrinating them, promoting certain ideas, inciting through words and conversation. After the event, their local bookshop is surrounded by police, and identified as a locus for this idea mongering. Blake was accused of sedition, tried for it and acquitted, in the years after the French Revolution. He was accused in an atmosphere of great nervousness and sensitivity in Britain lest she too should fall under the bloody scope of France's libertarianism.

The William Blake Artisans School

Last Thursday 14th July I met with Jay Harris, Director of Edunomics, to talk about his involvement with the Blake Society. He is working on establishing a new school called the Blake Space, “A living memorial to Blake” he called it. Thinking with hands

At midday we left the building to gather on the street for the two-minute silence to remember the victims of Thursday 7th bombings in London. A police officer quietly signalled for vehicles to come to a halt. Some of the drivers stepped out of their cars. A boy cycled past us as we stood on the pavement. We stood there; parents and children form the nursery school, the workers from the police investigation offices next door, the shop keepers, the drivers and pedestrians, and it was kind of quiet, for a short while.

We went back inside to continue our conversation.

What is Blake to you?

Was Blake a 'creative visual problem solver' or an 'artist genius'?

The Future of the Art School

Rethinking Arts Education for the Twenty-First Century
Saturday 16th July, Symposium, Tate Modern, London

On a hot Saturday afternoon, full of people wandering around in the sunshine on the South Bank, I chose be shut away in a cold and dim auditorium to attend 'Rethinking Arts Education for the Twenty First Century'. Someone said that Art Schools used to offer a place for those who would not be able to get into other institutions; that art schools should still try to “produce nothing.” “ We provide them with the new technologies and actually want them to be cross-disciplinary, a-disciplinary, and do you know what, they won’t go near it. They all still just want to be artists." They want to be artists. Are they foolish dreamers, hung up on a redundant model, soon to be over-taken by the newly evolving, stronger, fitter, better-adapted visual creative problem solvers?

THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY

PRINTING IS A SLOW PROCESS
Yesterday, I was printing at the Museum of Garden History. Making leaflets “Request for Help - Are you Seditious? Do you like Literature? – 34 year old woman seeks partners for printing press” and “ Please Help – Can you write Backwards? Are you Visionary? – 34 year old woman seeks members for secret society”. A quiet and slow process of inking up the copper plates and laying out the damp paper to pass it through the old cast iron printing press. I need to pull on the star wheel, putting my foot on the lower spoke for some extra force. Inky black and red hands, a pile of damp prints and tissue paper to put in my folio.

Private Members Club
Packing away at the end of the day and Michael Phillips arrives and invites me for a drink. Some wondering and hesitation and then we take a cab from Lambeth Palace over the river to The Chelsea Arts Club. “Have you ever been?” M. asks. “ No, never”, later I admit that I am a sucker for Private Members Clubs, but like marriage celebrations, I don’t get half the invitations I would like. It is pretty in Chelsea. I am not dressed for the West of London; my hands are dirty, my jeans are shabby. Michael is an expert on William Blake’s printing process. He is an academic interested in empiric research; trying out the mixing up of ink for the prints, putting them through the press himself; getting his own hands on experience; a forensic historian currently working on a biography of Blake; a specialist in 18th century studies. In the cab on the way over I take my chance to ask for his help and advice on the question that concerns me. A). Can the model of the Romantic Genius still work for a contemporary artist, indeed is it the only one that might present some hope of a space of freedom? And, B). Can I hope to be one, or is it still the bastion of the European, white male?

LONDON BRIDGE
The other night in Bermondsey I gave away my copy of Battersby's Gender and Genius to C. “ Do you want me to read it?” I nod, “I will then.” Having read it as I fell asleep the night before, I had meant to underline some short sentence that succinctly put the 18th century creative woman’s dilemma – not to hope to be the creative genius herself but to love and admire the genius in their beloved- the Romantic ideal for the self turned into a worldly romance with another. What a beautiful dream; Romance with a capital R and romance in the lower-case. Both of them a dream; an act of the imagination, a vision, a fantasy, a phantasy. Must we choose? Either or? One but not the other? Self-expression or love?
He said, “But this is a feminist aesthetics?” I say “ You can be a feminist too, darling.”

CHELSEA
With Michael in the garden of the Chelsea Arts Club, with a jug of Pimms on the table, I feel very West London. We talk about the artist and the academic. The current shift in university funding, the movement away from a confidence in practice in art, educationally, culturally and the rise of enthusiasm and money for collaborations between disciplines. The notion that what artists are and should be engaged with is ‘research’. But this is a scientific terminology, best suited to scientific methodology, but transposed to the humanities in terms of the demand to ‘generate new knowledge’ then most awkwardly imposed upon art schools, art practice and artists. We hear ourselves put forward quite reactionary sounding notions that seems to support the Romantic model as the one that can perhaps still preserve something of value in our current society; The call that art should be useless. As my dear friend K. said, “ I don’t think artists are very good at creating new knowledge, and I don’t think academics are good at making art. The push towards collaborations between the two, points to a lack of confidence on both sides, and a reduction of the difference that is their value.”

RUSSELL SQUARE
“I am conflicted,” I admit, as our conversation draws to a close. I explain that I am heading towards Russell Square to attend a lecture by Professor Terry Eagleton, the celebrated Marxist literary theorist.
As we are leaving, Michael says he must just show me this.
“The Whistler Room.” A small room of leather chairs and the walls covered in portraits, sketches and cartoons by and of the artists who have frequented this place. Francis Bacon among friends. “This used to be the only part the ladies were allowed in, before they got full membership, here and upstairs of course”.
“Oh yes! What was that for?” The artist and his whore.


TRAGEDY,LAW AND TERROR
Professor Terry Eagleton, Ernest Jones Lecture Wednesday 6th July 2005
School of African and Oriental Studies, Russell Square
The British Psychoanalytical Society

The French Revolution – liberty and terror and the bourgeoisie.
T.E. starts with the French Revolution and the birth of the idea of Liberty, intimately entwined with state terror. The vision of the guillotine and the threat of state sanctioned violence in the name of freedom. I am delighted to hear this as we are there with Blake in Lambeth at his printing press and wearing the red hat of revolutionary sympathy. Terry goes on to explore the intimate involvement of freedom and terror in bourgeois western values. He is smooth and erudite and witty in his delivery. He makes critical swipes at the state of the United States and its half-blind championing of freedom that legitimates a range of other violences. He comments on the phenomena of global terrorism and the war against terror. He deconstructs the liberal bourgeois values that create its own monster. He is sophisticatedly Marxist in his analysis. It is a pleasure to listen to him, in this company of psychoanalysts; those people dedicated to the talking cure, the unravelling of the conflicts of the mind and heart.

Artists as integral to the bourgeois order – founded on terror. And Baudelaire.
He mentions Blake and this Romantic genius and his cosmology and ideology in which the two terms are interdependent – a useful progression from projecting all of the other term onto the other. Innocence and experience – etc.
I asked my question
“Let’s perhaps try to shift the discussion to psychoanalysis?”, suggests the chairman.
A pause, I raise my hand
“This is not strictly a psychoanalytical question although I am asking for some kind of help. You mentioned at some points in your talk the persona of the Romantic artists self-expression and individuality, freedom form necessity, and the art-for-art sake of this model, and how intimately dependent this is on the bourgeois world.
A dilemma, as an artist and deeply complicit with bourgeois values, is it enough that I can imagine artists to function with some mode of freedom, and enjoy and exploit this, is it still valid in contemporary society? Or should we just give up?”

Terry Eagleton replied. Repeating the notion of art-for-art sake, being complicit with the bourgeois order. He said that the bourgeois burger imagined the artist in this way and needed the artist to play out this role against his suburban values. He described it, made an amusing analysis and seemed to say it was how it was. I didn’t feel the urgency of my enquiry satisfied, but the debate moved on.

As the evening ended and thanks were offered and short applause, the lecture theatre emptied. I left the room, then thought again to open up my folio. Eagleton had just mentioned Blake as a thinker that wanted to maintain divergent values in tandem – innocence and experience, freedom and terror, the two terms in any dynamic being interdependent.
I returned to the man, as he signed some of his books for eager fans.
I asked him to accept this leaflet “Please Help” hot of the press, still damp, and explain the purpose of it. “ Are you a Blake enthusiast?” “ “No, not really.” I say. And leave him there, awkward, encumbered with a piece of damp paper.

Then Blake was there in his red hat while the Revolution raged across the Channel. Easier at a distance.

I walked through Russell Square to the Tube. In the lift down to the platform, a man asks. “You asked that question, didn’t you?” “Yes’” what did you think. A little light hearted. Yes, I said, he was eloquent and humorous but …..”, he turned south and I turned north.
I had wanted answers. I wanted to know what to do about this all. I didn’t know what I should do. On the tube homewards and out of central London I thought about my change of scene from printing in the Museum of Garden History, to the Chelsea Arts Club to a Marxist lecture on terror in Russell Square. On liberty and freedom, state terror and terrorism, the French Revolution, liberal bourgeois values William Blake and his genius, the suburban burger and the urbane artist. London.

YOUNG WOMAN RUNNING
Leaving the exit of the tube and a few steps out on the pavement, I see a big red bus stationary in the road. My own thoughts still and the big red bus standing still, in that split second, I see a young woman, light and quick, running free, set off across the road, into the path of a moving car. I see her hit. Hear the dull thud of the unnatural meeting of metal and soft body. I see her lift light and free, up in the air and fall back hard on the ground. One moment is all. I saw her tossed up into the air, hang there, and fall down onto the tarmac, head first. I see it all before I can cover my face, too late, against what I have already seen. “Oh God!” I run over to her. Her friend is already kneeling at her side. I reach for my phone but hear the voice of a young man, already speaking on his mobile to the 999 operator, giving directions. I am the second person beside her, looking at her startled expression, she is badly hurt and slowly, so slowly writhing on the ground. I hear myself say out loud” I don’t know what to do.”
And then a few others come. Someone takes her head in his hand. Another man approaches, saying, “Don’t move her. Just keep her still – is she your friend? What’s her name? Keep talking to her. Don’t let her close her eyes.” She is mouthing replies weakly to the questions put to her. Startled eyes. The bus is still there, big red backdrop to the scene. The small group of us stand around protectively, keeping the streaming cars from her. She is lying in the middle of the road, a busy intersection and the cars keep moving. Only the bus stands still, waiting to turn right – not turning now. The driver of the car that hit her is whining and distressed. “ What are you doing, please, do something. Where’s the ambulance. We need help. Do something. Please.” The young man, who called the ambulance earlier, says sternly, “ What have you done? You didn’t call the ambulance. I called it. It’s on the way. Can you please stand back.” The woman travelling with the driver is standing by the car with her crying baby. The driver wimpers, holding a piece of broken off bumper in his hand. Entreating, asking, moaning, saying nothing. I turn to him and say, “You need to tell the police.” He wanders off again, fretful and distressed. The girl is bleeding. We need to stop the bleeding. I grab my cardigan from my bag and hand it to the man who is cradling her head.” Put this under her head to stop the blood.” Her head is bleeding onto the road, dark shining black-red. The wait for help seems long. Ten minutes, fifteen. We are standing around her. Someone asks, “Is she getting cold?” so I take off my coat and put it over her, so does the man beside me. We try to cover her and stand around her, shielding her from the traffic, until the ambulance arrives. The wait seems very long, time is slow, as slow as the pitifully slight movements she makes, as she lies, uneasy, knees bent up, shoe fallen off, on the cold night road. Once the medical people arrive and the police, they set to work. I give my details as a witness, and move away. I can't help anymore and don't want to be a helpless witness, looking on, staring. I turn right down the road that leads home, where I would have waited for the bus which is still there, standing still, unable to turn, with the hurt girl in the road.


That was the day before yesterday. Then yesterday. And today the caption in the paper reads, "The wall of the British Medical Association offices in Tavistock Square is splattered with blood after an explosion rips the top off a bus."

Cloud & Vision: William Blake in Lambeth

‘Anyone passing Hercules buildings would see, through the single large window that was only a few steps back from the road, William and Catherine at work together, at the bed and wheel of their press. It would not have taken long before it was known locally that a printmaker was working in the neighbourhood.’
Michael Phillips, William Blake in Lambeth , published in History Today November 2000

The period of Blake in Lambeth was a politically volatile one, with the French Revolution shaking the foundations of British institutions. I like the idea of working with seditious literature, the thought of Blake being set up as an independent printmaker and purveyor of inflammatory texts, produced on his own press in view of the local community. Blake’s prints and publications were produced in very limited editions, partly as a response to the political sensitivity of the time, and he circulated them amongst fellow artists and patrons. Known as much for his political radicalism as for his unorthodox views on sex and marriage, his visibility as a printmaker was not only that of being seen at work with his wife in his printing studio, as mentioned in the above quote, but a public exposure of his private life, and a dissemination of his extraordinary beliefs and cosmology.

In this endeavour, I work at a copper-plate printing press, such as Blake would have used, on view to the public and circulating hand-printed editions amongst a self-selected coterie. This heavy immoveable historical printing press is connected to a virtual press in the form of a ‘blog’, the web as a space of contemporary self-publication; of personal diaries and electronic pamphleteering.

In conversation with The Blake Society, a self-identified group of admirers of Blake, a new ‘floating press’ society is generated, part parasite, part acolyte. Can something seditious and literary be freed from the mausoleum of History? Is there more than a quaint nostalgia in these acolytes and might Blake’s tiger have teeth still? Red and black and white: Red for the revolution, black and white of the printed word; that writing might be something to fear, that it might inflame, that it must be controlled, that images might incite. The French Revolution: seditious and salacious made up of free thinkers and the writer in the prison cell. Black and white and Blake in his red hat.

Ratio

I wonder, what is the ratio of male to female in the William Blake Society? More men than women I presume.

Please help

CAN YOU WRITE BACKWARDS?
ARE YOU VISIONARY?
34 YEAR OLD WOMAN SEEKS MEMBERS FOR SECRET SOCIETY

Blake was on my mind

Blake was on my mind as I left the house yesterday evening. I picked up a book from the pile by my bed, left there since Easter. I had been reading blogs, diaries on the web, browsing between family histories, information points and pornographic sites. I read the words of some American ex-patriot woman in Egypt telling us all of the ordinary day when she rode out on her horse, then spoke to her husband on the phone, only to find this was to be the last time she ever heard his voice. The next day he was dead. She wrote something like “ I still miss him and don’t yet know if there is room in my life to love again.” The ‘next’ button jolted me from her thoughts of loss five years on in her long seasoned grief to – “cum in her face” I surfed, slipped, slid across these self-presentations and started to get a feel for the style of writing. On the way to the bus with the book in my bag, I thought to myself that I really ought to seek out a book on Blake, not let myself get distracted form the topic. I sit down at the bus stop and leaf through ‘Literature and Evil’. And find what I new already but had forgotten, a chapter on William Blake. Bataille names him as one of those English writers that moved him most. And begins the second paragraph with the sentence “William Blake’s life seems almost banal: it was regular and unadventurous.”

Today was my first time

Today was my first time reading blogs since I posted my own on the 9th of May. I see that people do not respond very often in the comments sections. I read quite a number of them and let myself be drawn into the narratives that the writers put out. And I couldn’t help feeling that they end up being victims of style; that the writers and how they write might be modelled on some train station and airport pulp fiction voice. I wanted to read something that I felt I was not supposed to read but was baffled by the public and private ambiguity of these things. Baffled by the fictional feel and bored by the banality.

Please help - argument on the train

I had an argument on the train. He was telling me about a letter of complaint he had written about the state of untidiness and filth of a train that he had taken. He said he had it in mind that he would make a hundred copies of the bureaucratic reply and distribute them around the station to let other passengers know about it. I said that he had stopped short of this because he was not interested enough to take it that far. This became explosive territory. I said “How do you want to change the world?” which for me was not a rhetorical question, but one that touches on every person's struggle with the realm of their own agency. He heard me say, “What makes you think you can change the world?” or some similarly negating and derogatory rebuff. He said, “Don’t be so fucking patronising.”