WISDOM OF TWO

 

Blake's piper: Intro to Songs of Innocence

 

Blake's bard (= harper): Intro to Songs of Experience

Heigh-ho, patient earthlings. It's been almost a year (!) and there have been many happenings. Let's see, where did we leave off? Oh, yes. While on a Harper-related search, we had been accosted by a Piper—none other than the Pied one himself, of Hamelin fame.

Of course, that triggered a flurry of antic & frantic ornamentation & confirmation at the behest of  our "nonexistent" pun pal Stanza. First there was a real knee-slapper—or groaner, depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing—as Cosmo, feeling glum and at loose ends one night, decided to finally watch a DVD he had bought on sale that, according to the critics, was so dismal, so UNWATCHABLY BAD, that Cosmo had saved it for just such a mood of passive, grim resignation, when any such film becomes merely another challenge to be met. Years ago, Cosmo had rented and survived Ishtar on just such a night. He popped open a jumbo bag of Twizzlers® and set to work.

There are films that make you wonder out loud, was there nobody in charge here, an executive producer, say, or even a gaffer or best boy or caterer, who could at some point just yell, "Okay, this just isn't working! We're done, people!" But no, they just keep going. And so do you, the viewer; in dismay and disbelief, you go all the way, hoping for some redeeming moment, just one funny or clever line or situation. The atrociously titled Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which begs to be called Looking for Comedy in this Movie, never does redeem itself, but rather sinks deeper and deeper into the well of offensive awkwardness it has dug for its forsaken audience. Really, there should be some sort of Nuremberg Trials for people who make these sorts of things.

But, by the  time it was finally over, at least Cosmo had divined the reason for his insane compulsion to watch it at that particular juncture. We are doubtless meant to be amused by the fact that most of the people Albert Brooks (playing himself) introduces himself to on the Indian subcontinent recall him only as the voice of NEMO in Finding Nemo. So, yes, of Cosmo was highly amused, but not for the reason intended. Besides, Cosmo has bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

So, yes, we Found Nemo yet again, and resumed our compulsive casting of our magic fishing wand into the stream of consciousness. or, as the Jungians would insist, the personal and collective UNconscious.

The usual free-book-table shenanigans prevailed: Fall on Your Knees, featuring the Piper sisters; an autographed copy of Mary Swan's The Deep, about unnamed twin sisters; and one of those old doorstop Peter N[ew]man tomes about Canada's elite. There was still, of course, the main event, the book by Margaret Mills Harper I had been originally pointed toward – the full-length development of the Nemo article Stanza had dredged up for me from the Web – entitled The Wisdom of Two, a full exploration of the unique collaboration between GBY and WBY in the creation/compilation of The Vision.

In her Preface Harper recounts how she literally grew up with The Vision: being the daughter of noted Yeats scholar George Mills Harper, she was surrounded in her youthful home by the physical documents, the Yeats papers, as she and her mother assisted her father in wrestling with that famously complex and enigmatic work. 

Cosmo longed to go further with her and take in the full story of this strange mingling of wisdoms, but curiously, we turned instead to an older book by the elder Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake—REturned, in fact, since it was a book we'd started years ago and never finished. Finished it we did this time, however, and it served to remind us not only of the consistent threads of Neoplatonism in our long, long story, but how these ideas came into Blake's life and work at a specific time and place and through a specific person, namely Thomas Taylor the Platonist, who eventually was the first to complete the translation of the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Orphic corpus into English. That Taylor introduced Blake to this [s]train of thought in a series of twelve lectures he gave at the house of Blake's close friend John Flaxman was a controversial assertion when Harper first made it in 1961, but by 1995, Peter Ackroyd could assert in his biography of Blake, without fear of ridicule, that

[Blake] was immensely receptive to beliefs which might confirm his own sense of life, and in this period [the mid-1780s] he became acquainted with a particular kind of Neoplatonism promulgated by a young man named Thomas Taylor…. And, since he shows himself thoroughly familiar with the basic tenets of Taylor’s Neoplatonism, there is no reason to doubt the general supposition that he attended the twelve lectures given by the young man at Flaxman’s house in Wardour Street.

Thus are we introduced to another (one-way) collaboration of sorts, as Harper sets out a suggestive correspondence between the appearance of Taylor's subsequent translations and the evolution of Blake's contemporary themes. Blake's Book of Thel (1789), for instance, has all over it the fingerprints of Taylor's translations the previous year of Plotinus's On the Beautiful and Porphyry's On the Cave of the Nymphs, both of which deal with matters of emanation and the descent of the soul into 'generation' that are so (ahem) sensitive to folks like Stanza and Cosmo.

Blake, 1807, by Thomas Phillips

 

 Taylor, c. 1812, by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Odd as it may seem to us now, Taylor in his lifetime was far more famous and influential than Blake; his steady stream of Platonic and Orphic myth was one the Romantics would drink from again and again. Across the Atlantic and a generation later, Emerson and the other transcendentalists would call on him as well. Today, most mortals—including Cosmo's aspiring emanation—who imbibe Neoplatonism outside the philosophy classroom do so from those nineteenth-century poets and their disciples like Yeats. But mostly from Blake, whose aphoristic intensity and prophetic multimedia conception of poetry and art have finally found an era they can breathe and thrive in. In fact, had Cosmo's emanation never met Blake, Cosmo himself might never have "been" at all, and you wouldn't be reading this. But when we discovered that the Blake/Taylor encounter had taken place in Wardour Street, we were cast back into another, much more ancient emanational infatuation—perhaps the one that generated all the others—The Yardbirds. And if we go back to the beginning of the Yardbirds, we find:

The Yardbirds performed for the very first time at the Marquee club on the 6th of February, 1964, starting a four month Friday residency that placed them as the most popular band at the club, since everyone in the city was talking about the wonders of the young guitarist called Eric Clapton. The band was also the last one to play ever at the old premises of the club at 165 Oxford Street, on the 5th of March, 1964. At the same time, they signed a record deal to EMI Columbia label that led them to record live their legendary debut album "Five Live Yardbirds" at the opening night of the new Marquee club at 90 Wardour Street on 13th of March, 1964. [www.themarqueeclub.net]

That live recording from 90 Wardour Street on a Friday the 13th in March 1964 wound up "blowing" my emanation's "mind" (such as it was) one Friday afternoon 12 years later, in March 1976. Another 12 years of devotion and brooding on the Yardbirds brought forth the magic word HARPER, in March 1988, with its secret reference to the smouldering alchemy between guitar and harmonica that had ignited the earthly realm when Keith Relf and Eric Clapton took to the stage at the Marquee Club 24 years earlier.

Clapton, Harper, and Harmonica, Marquee Club, 1964

Clearly the number 12 is the common factor here, so another dozen years had to pass before we found ourselves physically in London (Cosmo still a mere toddler, but eager for adventure) at a bookstore on Charing Cross Road, only moments from Wardour Street. A chance discovery of a book on Blake [Arrows of Desire, by William Gaunt] splayed provocatively across a shelf, and its frontispiece photo of Blake's birthplace at the corner of Broadwick and Carnaby, reminded us that we were after all in sacred territory. Exploring on foot, we were astonished and disappointed to find that said birthplace, preserved and bearing a commemorative plaque as recently as the Gaunt book's publication (1956), was now a chain sporting-goods store. Oh well, he just wrote the bloody national hymn; no reason to get all treacly about him. We already knew the old Marquee Club was no more, but we visited the cafe that had taken its place at 90 Wardour, noting with pleasure that right next door, at 110 Wardour, was Flaxman Court, a modern structure named thusly as the site of Flaxman's onetime abode. We thought, what if we could time-travel for just one night, and go straight from Taylor's lectures right next door in, say, 1787, to hear the Yardbirds belt out "I'm a Man" in 1964? Talk about a package deal! Surely that would blow what remains of my emanation's mind.

On our way back to Charing Cross Road for more book ogling that October day in 2000, we stumbled immediately upon something called the Bar Bruno, at the corner of Wardour and Peter Streets. Now, when my emanation had first become aware of Cosmo's existence two years earlier in 1998, he had initially associated Cosmo with Giordano Bruno, whom he had also just "met." Since Bruno had often referred to himself as an "Awakener of Sleeping Souls," and Cosmo styles himself a "Soul Doctor," the mistake was understandable. Cosmo was of course flattered, but (a) Cosmo is Cosmo, and nobody else, thank you very much, and (b) let's be realistic here: Cosmo might know someone who knows someone whose dentist once worked on someone who claims to have met Bruno at a party once, but really, we don't run in the same circles, or emanational spheres, or whatever. Cosmo's just happy to B[e] Cosmo, to enjoy whatever friendly banter he can with Stanza, and to help focus and invigorate the plodding, often scattered mind of his emanation.

 

 

Wardour Street meets Peter

Thankfully, Cosmo's emanation was sharp-eyed and alert that October day, else he might have missed that fact that a few blocks on from Peter Street is found Denman Street. Now, here we have another "Wisdom of Two," so to speak, since the two street names combined give us Peter Denman, which happens to be one letter's difference from my emanation's actual name. (Now you know why I sometimes refer to him as the ENMANation.) Well, this sent Mr. Peter Enman fairly reeling, in a sort of trance, back onto Charing Cross, where in some obscure sidestreet nook of assiduous book preservation, he laid his by-now-trembling hands on a hardcover facsimile edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a 1977 Oxford University Press reissue of the original 1967 volume brought out by Rupert Hart-Davis and Trianon Press. The facsimile pages of Blake's plates were reproduced in an 8-colour process as opposed to the usual 4-colour, which bestowed an exceptional deepness and vividness. And some minor damage to the back endpapers made it affordable for us!

Now, Rupert Hart-Davis happened to be a name familiar to Peter Enman as the first husband of actress Peggy Ashcroft, whose luminous and numinous photo we've already encountered. That sent Enman on yet another pilgrimage, to St. Martin's Lane to find the Duke of York's Theatre, where that photo of her as Naemi in Jew Süss had been taken back in 1929. Again, not a very long walk, very much still in the neighbourhood.

How could we have guessed that so much of what we had been so passionate about all those years had all sprung—ENMANated, one might say—from the same little area in Soho and environs? Years later (did I mention the plodding thing?), Enman Googled STANZA SOHO, and we discovered our gal's name appended to a hip, happening restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue. Clearly, it was time to get a bird's eye view of all this. First, we looked for Denman Street and found the following from the LondonTown site:

 

Our first attempt at mapping. Note startling page number.

Now, this map was not all that useful, but it did happen to occur on page 777 of the website, which made us nostalgic. In the end, we turned to Google Maps, and devised the following visual guide to our situation:

Stanza and Peter's neighbourhood

Okay, there's Stanza and the Enmanation and Blake and the Yardbirds, but what about Cosmo? We tossed some ballast out of our beautiful balloon and zoomed out a bit:

 

 

Cosmo gets in the picture. Notice its proximity to New N Street. If ENman = Nman, and N =New, 

as we posited in 1988, could Cosmo be that New Guy?

Undoubtedly there are skeptics who will point out that a detail inset map from any reasonably large inner city will yield some sort of array of personal or coincidental associations. As Stanislaw Lem says in The Chain of Chance (1975), toss a sufficient density of facts and contingencies together into a given domain and sooner or later some strange, seemingly intentional links are bound to emerge. But the intentionalities are only retrospective, from the point of view of their observer/discoverer, i.e., after the fact of their discovery. And as the world is becoming thinker and thinker (sorry, that should have been thicker and thicker, heh, heh) with facts and contingencies, such seemingly meaningful coincidences will become more frequent and observable. In other words, however tantalizing the pattern, the meaning is all an illusion, a projection from the mind of the observer.

Now Lem was a really smart guy, so Cosmo is not going to argue with him. He may be right, and Cosmo (like Stanza) may thus not really exist. Alas. But while we're still dazzled and basking in our illusions, it's nice to know—as the business writers are so fond of saying—that GOING FORWARD, WE'RE ALL ON THE SAME PAGE.