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