Don Mabie and William Blake, Part 3

Parody and even satire feature in the work of both artists. The several sections called A Memorable Fancy in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794) contain a guffaw or two. I think especially of the fourth Memorable Fancy in which Blake and an Angel converse about the eternal lot of each of them. In the same year, Blake also wrote An Island in the Moon, another satirical treatment of the culture of his own day. Perhaps Blake’s best-known poem, “The Tyger,” illustrates Blake’s acerbic sense of humour as well as anything. The poem, as engraved and illustrated by Blake, shows a marked contrast between the tyger in the poem and the soft-toy tyger Blake draws for the illustration. Mabie too gives us parody and satire, but his sense of humour is more robust than Blake’s. One of Mabie’s more hilarious works contains the words, “PART OF ME SUSPECTS THAT I’M A LOSER AND THE OTHER PART OF ME THINKS I’M GOD ALMIGHTY.” I am reminded of Blake’s “All Deities Reside in the Human Breast,” only Blake is serious, whereas Mabie is decidedly tongue-in-cheek. Mabie’s humour is Dadaist in its irreverence and audacity.

            The presence of satire in these works might serve to indicate that both artists are products of the Enlightenment, but perhaps in different ways. For Blake, “Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. Is not the same that it shall be when we know more” (“There is no Natural Religion [b]”). Blake is reacting to what he sees as the excessive dependence upon reason in the Enlightenment project. His attitude is famously expressed in the monotype “Newton” (1795-1805). Here we see the great seventeenth-century scientist naked, seated on a rock, bent down over a scroll upon which he manipulates a compass, thereby measuring a ration for some purpose. Measurement, however, only gives us material information, not imaginative (or spiritual, if you will) information. For Blake, only imagination can create, and only by creating can humans build a better world than the one they find themselves inhabiting here and now.

            Mabie’s take on reason has the benefit of over two hundred years of development since the Enlightenment. He follows Juergen Habermas in both understanding valid criticism of reason, and arguing for reason’s continued importance to the human enterprise. In his article, “Pushing Art Out the Door” (1994), Mabie writes:

In sum then, Habermas agrees with the radical critics of The Enlightenment that the paradigm of consciousness is exhausted. Like them, he views reason as inescapably situated, as concretized in history, society, body, and language. Unlike them, however, he holds that the defects of The Enlightenment can only be made good by further enlightenment. The totalized critique of reason undercuts the capacity of reason to be critical.

We might draw a distinction between reason and ratiocination here. Reason, in the sense of ratiocination deals with what we can see and measure; it does not, as Northrop Frye points out, “create new images or forms.” Frye goes on to say that “Art proves the inadequacy of abstract and rational ideas by the rule that examples and illustrations are more powerful than doctrines or precepts” (86). Another way of putting this might be that humans prefer stories to instructions, images to directives. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” I suspect that both Blake and Mabie are wary of complete dependence on formal logic, while they accept the crucial findings of reason, reason understood in the sense Wordsworth gives it in the Conclusion to the final book of The Prelude, when he says that Imagination is “Reason in her most exalted mood.” This is the Romantic amplification of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason. The Enlightenment makes a binary out of the head and the heart, privileging head over heart. The Romantic project aims to crumble this binary and prove the essential connection between head and heart.

            Both Blake and Mabie have produced art that is large in the sense of dense, filled with detail. Take Blake’s “Fall of Man,” for example. This watercolour dates from 1807, and contains some sixty-three human figures, plus seven creatures, some eight scenes ordered in panels both vertical and horizontal, both linear and rounded. The scene depicts Adam and Eve’s ejection from Eden and the flaming cherubim that block any re-entry to Eden. The scene also reminds us of familiar depictions of the Last Judgement, a scene Blake drew several times. In Blake’s unique vision, the Last Judgement and the Fall are simultaneous. When Adam and Eve eat the apple, they initiate what was to Blake that Judgement that leads to the fulfilment of desire. The problem comes when they refuse to see that error may block the way to that fulfilment. Blake puts it this way: “whenever any Individual rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”

            An example of Mabie’s large works is “Off Centre Centre,” a tryptich crowded with lettering that consists of various gnomic sayings both Mabie’s own and quotations such as “We gotta get out of this place” from the song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The tryptich is a form of art dating back to early Christian art, and often seen in altar pieces, and in Mabie’s hands it becomes both homage and parody. Like Blake’s large works, “Off Centre Centre” is crowded with detail, some clear and some less clear. It offers a swirl of words both political and non-political. It offers words that dance across the visual field. That quotation from the song by the Animals reminds me that music is important for both Mabie’s and Blake’s work. Their graphic art displays a rhythm that serves up a visual dance.

            First, Blake. His most famous works are the sets of engravings known as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. These are “songs,” and they have been set to music several times over the years. School children in England will also know the lyric set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916, “Jerusalem.” The poem derives from the Preface to Blake’s epic work, Milton (1804), and it has become something of an alternative national anthem in Britain. Perhaps more pertinent are more recent musical renditions of Blake’s work such as “Jah Wobble presents the Inspiration of William Blake” (1996) or the various Blake-inspired songs by Patti Smith or Van Morrison. This musical connection nicely brings Blake’s poetic and graphic art into the world of music; his work appeals to eye and ear. At least one famous rock band alludes to Blake in its name; the band in question picks a word from a Blake aphorism: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

            The case differs with Mabie, although his performance art, as well as his stint as a DJ remind us just how he too marries eye and ear. His work contains many references to music, most obviously to Bob Dylan, but also to an array of famous Blues musicians from Robert Johnson to Howlin’ Wolf to John Lee Hooker to Muddy Waters and so on. Repeated references to these Blues artists signal a connection between the Blues and Mabie’s art. Like the Blues, Mabie’s work is, or seeks to be, popular in the sense that it speaks to the average person about average things, love and death, survival and hard times, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the good times and the bad, hard living and easy pickings. The Blues are most often associated with the downbeat, Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday,” for eample, but they are also have their positive moments, as in Blind Boy Fuller’s “Walking My Troubles Away.” In other words, the Blues are a celebration of life in all its messy conditions. The Blues is art at its most communal, its most basic, even elemental, visceral. The Blues is an art of survival. To sing the Blues is to assert that we gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. To sing the Blues is to celebrate the body in all its raw glory.

            Celebration might bring to mind one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “Exuberance is Beauty.” Exuberance has something to do with fruitfulness, from the Latin “uberare,” be fruitful. “Ex” carries the meaning here of thoroughly. Be thoroughly fruitful or ebullient, full of life and activity. Celebrate. High-spiritedness is another way of saying this. The work of both Mabie and Blake is active, energetic, full of fruitfulness, whether mellow or not. Their work celebrates line, language, shape, colour, and motion. It gives us energy at work. As Blake has it, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body,” or “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Energy well describes the works of Mabie and Blake.

            And so we have celebration. As I set out writing this piece, I really did not know what I had for a thesis. A thesis is that thing or argument that holds a piece of prose together. I was bringing together two artists who lived some 200 years apart, and whose work is, on the face of it, so very different. But I find both their work attractive and energizing, and consequently I want to celebrate each of them. I found a few points of connection – their attitude to money, their commitment to art, their conjoining of text and image, their political vision, and so on – and I allowed the writing to do its thing, its thing being to take over and go where it will. It went in the direction of celebration as I had intended, but the celebration turns out to be not only for these two artists, but also what these two artists accomplish in their work. Their work is testimony to the human condition. It tries to unite, to trouble, to open eyes, to bring art into connection with the chaotic experiences of everyday. Blake, for his part, created a system rather than be enslaved by another’s. His system takes the form of a mythological universe with a cast of characters unique to Blake – Los, Enitharmon, Urizen, Orc, Urthona, and the rest. Mabie, perhaps without forethought, creates a world, a world filled to the brim with bric-a-brac. In Mabie’s various works and activities, we see the bricoleur at work. Using a great range of materials and a great variety of things, Mabie fashions his own world, he creates his own system. 

            We have, then, in William Blake and Don Mabie/Chuck Stake artists who offer us both respite from the cold world and possible entry into a warm world, a world brought into connectedness through art. This is work that participates in the forging of links in time and across places, that gives us material for the building of what Blake called Golgonooza, that city of art that brings clarity to the human enterprise, the human hope for tolerance and goodwill and peace.

 

Works Consulted

Blake. William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982.

Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971.

Don Mabie/Chuck Stake: Aspects of Practice: 1969-1996.Calgary: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, 1997.

Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. New York: Dover, 1954.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967 (1947).

Mabie, Don.  “Pushing Art Out the Back Door.” Artichoke (Calgary), Summer 1994: 13-14.