"I will not cease from Mental Fight"

Halfway through November there's a distinct feel of winter in the morning air. We are all given to pattern making to try to make sense of the variegated world we're swimming in. The spin of the planet and the change of the seasons represent to our thoughts a larger truth about the immutability of time and our brief purchase in it. One of my favorite quotes when looking at the morning fog rising slowly on the fields or a line of hills in a certain light at a certain season of the year, is Blake's formulation:  "Eternity is in love with the productions of Time," because it seems a great insight perhaps into the mind of God, simple words won at great expense of living, struggling, the sacrifices made in the pursuit of visionary art.

Blake was an engraver who struggled most of his life to make ends meet. His world was London and its immediate environs at the turn of the seventeenth century. There were tremendous changes afoot, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, industrialization of the countryside and the enclosing of the commons, the uprooting of entire peoples and entire visions of society that had served the interests of civilization. It was as if great forces had been unleashed on the world of the simple peasants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, families, parents and children who labored to keep themselves together. Blake became a spokesperson for the dignity and holiness of all people despite race or gender against the institutionalized corruption and profiteering of powerful and entrenched institutions including the church and the state apparatus. To me, he is also the patron saint of individual expression, as he worked most of his life in obscurity and misunderstanding, with an unwavering belief in the value of his work despite the lack of recognition and downright rejection by the cultural "curators" and taste-makers of his time.