Stigmata in the Plate @ Queen Mob's Teahouse

Jerusalem

This became a parable with the premise that life is like the plate marred by the artist and that all poets and people mar their lives with events that are simultaneous. Said to the extreme, birth and death,  these poles are not the boundaries of life for the before birth and after life also simultaneous to an eternal being, which let us say we are, if unknowing. The bulk of the parable concerns the inbetween. Memory is the key. We look back on our simultaneity after the fact and remember events of a childhood and every stage that highlight all the phases. They group themselves in patterns as we mature. The patterns do not transfer to another because the memories are formed by differently wired personalities that condition them. Events create the illusion of chronology in time, but there is no chronology. There is no time and it all happens at once, which we only learn after the fact.

 Here

 The structure of Stigmata in the Plate is of a musical composition where the simultaneity of events  expressed in the notes as word sounds and images, allusions and themes, evoke a building with simultaneous celebrations together and in counterpoint with each other. So Blake and Hopkins, Yeats, Van Gogh and the long sonorous moan of the earth as it pines for its redemption from torture, age, sorrow and sin, are all taken out on the surface of the frontis plate of Jerusalem in the background. You can think of the plate as your life and hear and see the pounding and scoring of the Roman soldiers and Blake's chisel that build to the redemption of the world. So the structure is of a rhapsody as a one-movement work, episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, color, and tonality, with an air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation  freer in form than a mere set of variations.

 The specific plate here in our analogy of life refers to the gouges Blake made in the plate of To the Public when it was not given its due. Only one copy of Jerusalem, filled with the most extreme illustrations, was ever truly finished and colored. No other major text exists in only one finished state, so again the analogy, each life is unique, 10 to the 26, and that marred by the passion of the artist. Reference made to the typography of the modern editor Paley says he must puzzle it out but resist the temptation to invent new signs.  I was long consumed with Blake's Jerusalem long before the William Blake Archive issued such perfect reproductions online with magnification. I cultivated W.W. Pratt for my committee just to have pretext to ask him to allow me to make copies of his slides of all Blake's works, some twenty years before the Archive came online,which he had and did allow, that I then obtained. I had some idea of issuing a Blake comic.
 
If I had it to do over I would be tempted to title this Stigmata in Plato, because the simultaneous experience and perception of reality contradicts every pyramid level and layer of analysis, as much as enthusiasm of love overwhelms the ordered senses, which you can see from what's left of "the Enthusiasms of the Poem"  after the reader is expunged the way every poet must be from the Republic of the fallen Order: 'I also hope the Reader will be with me wholly One in Jesus our Lord, who is the God and Lord to whom the Ancients look'd and saw his day afar off with trembling & amazement...yet i pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily as man with man

"I found a cello fallen from the upper story of Van Gogh's head." It was pushed out from the attic soffit next door and hit the ground with the sound I heard the earth make in The World's Body.  "A sea of tildas descended in fiery sparks" like a blacksmith's hammer writes at the forge where "the immortal hand or eye" begins this life where  "Ordinary people with stigmatas express their forms to give up everything." All of us ordinary and immortal choose life, the life, This Life and when we do what amazing prayer and thanks this grace! So here is offered that same enthusiasm of Blake as when these views occured at the start at the House of Austin and elsewhere. Andrew Reiff also thanks Queen Mob's Teahouse.  HERE 

 

But no, the Teahouse is defunct and Wayback did not save, so: Here, below:  https://www.queenmobs.com/07/misfit-doc-stigmata-in-the-plate::

 

Stigmata in the Plate

I wonder to contemplate what you say Señor, that you are "no scholar of the Lamb to

pay for Van Gogh's ear or Shelley's heart." The list must be long of those so taught,

whose manuscripts upon the ruined pyre burn as "wounds that never heal." You write for

some future time the heart gouges in the plate. Will you take this day an ear for the heart?

I was given to listen as one being taught.

 

There was never a hole in that plate alone. Why this one whose coppers met the gouge?

He gouged out "friendship," he gouged out "blessing," he gouged out "love" between

himself and the reader. "Entire passages that suggested intimacy" to separate the public

sheep and goat, "no longer Dear Reader asked to forgive what he did not approve, & love

me for this energetic exertion of my talent."

 

He shook artists from their ladders where I found a cello fallen from the upper story of

Van Gogh's head, broken, every follicle dead. It made its music falling down. The wind

blew the strings in this dissonance with Hopkins' burned mansion and the manuscripts

burned in Blake's grate behind his house where those gouges which belong to us

celebrate the suffering.

 

There in this basket I carry Sir the distinction of high art, the Lamb without a spot, which

fellowship the author must understand with the hand gouged text to invent whole new

typographical signs. Were you a hawk upon a cliff to launch the blow that pierces would

join a colon launched below a period, a sea of tildas descended in fiery sparks, nimbuses with comma heads and question marks that land in a bed. The talk on Black Ridge above the shrubs where he slept a stretch among hard fighting men in rows that died. Open the basket of those flutter shrouds. Can we revive the bones? I have been up late my patron.

 

We prize the wounds and get beyond false art that shames to gouge a plate. Who survives

the sudden night, expired escapes? The gouge is not "a broken text," it is a line torn from

the Achilles tendon, swollen cartilage flesh where art's smooth body was thick. The

gouges mark the path.

 

When we meet them in the other life by the Rock that overlooks Abyss we understand

coincident with the heartfelt purpose and response, two centuries late, the illustrations in

the art of light that move the soul. We had the text, a dark gloss nothing like the sense to

see the Giant Forms to save the world.

 

The gouges go down where all the ladders start. You are expected to complete the line

that admits only those who enter, “Jesus only” ostracized. Do you mean not all accepted?

Oh none, save if this miracle have might! The Giant forms the spirit portend. “He who

waits to be righteous before he enters will never enter there.” On ocean’s bank the title

page admits only those who true prophesy, whose enemies are their advocates at end,

unless they are his stool.

 

Discriminate the false from true or be tried for sedition. No credit for the naked eyes of

all who will stand in the judgment, who owe homage of the greater from the less.

 

Ordinary people with stigmatas express their forms to give up everything to burn on the eternal pyre. Extraordinary oppositions found in the one who meditates asunder.

Who crucified his son? Hopkins spent so long with Jesus the Roman soldier thought to

pound his oppositions like nails to hang him more. Intense introspection, scrupulosity, a

strict conscience enflamed the wags who burn self abnegation of conscience to burn.

 

If only we could find a building large enough to house and strong enough to bind the

cords and drugs to burn. Not a pretty sight, melancholy, nervous, brilliant, extreme, a sun

spot reaching temperatures unknown, charged with desolation, but not enshrined,

mocked, deprived. Only the gift so mortified does not live up ideals. The torturers’ real

paradox, stigmata beyond intellect in the symbolic wounds of the world and its shed

blood. War, accident, disease, old age make us conflict with death who attempt to

reconcile life, the man unjustly suffering. One who dies for others, we think it of

ourselves, owns his sins with sorrow in that struggle to be sanctified, the strength that

comes from acceptance, immolation, destruction, gouging, injury, rejection stigmata not

to speak the mockery of success. Throw out that plate “if you can’t write the way we

teach forbid.” Van Gogh is on the canvas for the count.

 

We meet by the Rock those who take the other side in this Abyss, but understand not. Nostanding Señor. Your penchant to understand confounds relief, but centuries late. Why rave? Why speak? It is later yet. I wake to read.

 The scholars had the text's dark gloss, but nothing like the sense. They did not see eternity the other night, Jerusalem and the Giant Forms. The gouge goes down where all the ladders start. Fundamentalist, come away! You expect to complete that line Jesus Only in Greek of the crescent moon, inscribed upon the page, transfigure light of the Great Morning, where all beings pass in the common street transformed to the epitome of beauty, or of all joy or sorrow. Admit only those who enter. It shall come from the soul. It shall be love.