William Blake's version of the Demon Futnuckery, circa 1800 AD; remembrances.

(excerpted from "The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Innocence)

....And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!--
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy....

I come, mayhap, dreadfully so, dread and want of my own sillinesses and gray gooses, for want of a horrid smile turned toward that youngling face; do I come to eulogize?  Demonstratize?  Evoke?  Persuade?

Come perhaps, on my own time, to say something of the dark corners in our well-worn halls, mayhap, of something which we express, so often, but not so well, for we wrestle, we grapple at it, trying to grasp what is the very liquid of the air.

I lay, like a corpse, sleeping approximately ten minutes, during a sort of "mindset show", kind of lulled to sleep by the armaments of the conversational games we play, the little runtime and memory stack of the life daily, sort of a hardware/software/firmware update, feeling along blind with my somewhere lodged in those dark corners of those well-worn halls.

There were, from my point of view, little grains, tiny beads of sand, and a webwork of nicks in the checkerboard, that so old and expertly laid, but worn, the clack-clack of senior citizens coarsing those halls, and they, I could but look and see, but turn back to my own kind of perception of the discourse, how the nicks and small cracks in the checkerboard looked like a sparkle of shattered glass over the mirror-glass finish of the whole thing.

They were on about QAnon, and sort of a cryptic clue of the whole thing, and I was cringing, thinking of how the old terrorist coordination flowed freely through the popular conversation; it was already there, and they set their watch and warrant, and now, the political aiming of the thing.  Much more to be said of QAnon, or better yet, ignored, still, and I see a way to work against it, not a real strategy, but kind of a sub-layer pattern that breaks their discourse; they want so much to be empowered and in control of their own lives.  Methinks it unChristian in the long view, that we are in fact guided and maneuvered by a bigger hand that controls a billion other things.

Perhaps on my own time, not calculating this time my own merits, but embracing a kind of dignified anonymity, that at once was undignified, and nor was it particularly anonymous: I had my name on my shirt; I self identify, in a sense.

Come to look at the smooth mirror glass of a sarcophagus and with a rose in my lapel, too numb to remember, but memories like frost along the edges of a window light, come to stick in the firmament my own cut oak limb of a sort of common humanity.


"The Chimney Sweeper," from Songs of Experience

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying " 'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? say?"—
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

"And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."

.............................................William Blake

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