The Sick Rose by Big Willy Blake

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you can't love god's creation but at the same time be a devotee of God. It has never really been possible. conversely hating God's creation, that's to say total sexual aesceticism (even to the extent of being anti-natal) is also heavily discouraged. this is the principle contradiction that the religious have to deal with. I'm dogmatic and catechistic and even gnostic but never religious, ever.

I don't think sexuality is taboo to Blake and the christian tradition so much as it's unspoken jouissance. after all, what more sublime and rending act could there be than being a conduit for the reproduction of god's creation? This is also why the christian belief system collapsed in the capitalist age. precisely because it was far too sexual. sex had everything to do with it, the british were not sexual prudes. if they were, they would talk it in such a trivialising way that it would be as inconsequential as a glass of water. that's the sickness that blake is eluding to. a sickness that one did not know that was sick because one lived under the domination of the nobility and did not need or want to know it was sick, what today we would call self-deception. and hence the society-wide general intellectual knowledge was not dispersed to the populous. It'es always why I've seen romanticism less as optimism and recovering of innocence but a stubborn defence of privileges to the bitterest end. the conventional approach is to see the fall of adam and eve as the unmasking of their bodies, I.E: adam's cock and eves cunt, but I rather think it's more oblique than that, the fall has in it the encoded nature of gender. prior to the fall from paradise we did not need god in domination but only god as pure communion. I.E: whether one was straight or gay would not matter a jot.
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Don't entirely understand everything there but an excellent post nonetheless.

https://ultraculture.org/blog/2014/09/26/william-blake-sexual-rebellion/

Blake’s mother belonged to a radical Christian sect known as the Moravian Church. An off-shoot of Methodism, the Moravians were led by the charismatic Count Nicoulas von Zinzendorf, who preached of mystical marriage, blood-and-wounds mysticism and antinomian sexual practices. Zinzendorf wrote many sexually charged hymns for the congregation to sing for the purpose of entering liturgical ecstasis. Many of his sermons dealt with sucking of Christ’s side-hole puncture wound, which serves as a symbol of a vaginal or womb-like portal birthing purified souls.

Indeed, even Blake’s mother was enraptured with the blood and wounds upon applying to the congregation, in which she wrote: “My dear Brethren & Sisters,…at the love feast our Savior was pleased to make me Suck his wounds…and I trust will more and more till my fraile nature can hould no more.”
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As a child, Blake regularly attended the Moravian with his mother, and as an adult he became a follower of Swedenborg for a time. The sexually liberated philosophies of these men left a great impression on Blake, who was already predisposed to visionary experiences (there exist many reports of a young William Blake witnessing angelic figures). The influence on his work, particularly the Prophetic Books, is undeniable. An explosive glimpse of Blake’s sexual radicalism can be seen in his paean to free love, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in which he wrote:

The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin
That pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from
The lustful joy. shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence?
The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude,
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire.

Blake wrote Visions of the Daughters of Albion as an “instructional” manual for his wife, Catherine Sophia Blake, an illiterate servant with whom William never sired a progeny. His fascination with esoteric sexuality put great strain on his marriage—at one point he famously declared to Catherine his intention to bring a concubine in the house, which did not completely violate Swedenborg’s “conjugial love” so long as William held that about all else. Much of the books’ later parts are dedicated to the tensions in Blake’s marriage and how that impacted his work.

It is important to note that for Blake, sexuality and politics were intrinsically linked. “For Blake,” writes Schuchard, “egotistic repression of sexuality leads to military suppression of liberty.” In his lifetime he saw the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but he also saw pacifist Lord George Gordon thrown in the Tower of London for holding revolutionary views, as well as the Reign of Terror that ensued after the French Revolution.
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sus

sus

Moderator
Corpsey said:
The rose now has none of its old symbolic power, does it? Its associated with romance in a rather tacky way. Surrounded by the distractions of the city and if not the city the internet, does anybody really look at a rose anymore? Or perhaps it's that the Christian belief system has collapsed, so a rose is no longer an image of intelligent design, it's just something that happened to happen.
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Yes I have a strong visceral negative reaction to this poem, and to any poems that use roses as symbols. I'm totally repulsed. I have no interest in rose symbolism, it is anti-interesting to me. I'm not saying this is right I'm saying this is how it is.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was reading some imagist poetry recently and I noticed (perceptive as I am) that the moon kept popping up again and again
 
sus

sus

Moderator
"The rose is the mandala, the symbol of the center towards which we are going to move" (Campbell, on Joyce's "O, the wild rose blossoms")
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Corpsey said:
There is an obsession in romanticism with sickliness, isn't there? Keats worked at Guy's Hospital, of course.

Palsied/sickly etc.

There's a lot of the use of the word 'sweet' in Blake and the other Romantics, which is sickly for us, but also does have connotations of sickliness (the sweet smell of death).
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I read a DH Lawrence essay recently where he opines that syphilys (aka 'the pox') was a big driving factor behind elizabethan drama/poetry.

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