Blake, William   the astounding tales thereof

Blake, William, 1757–1827, and later, 1955-1986, English poet and artist who exerted a great influence on English ROMANTICISM. His first book, Poetical Sketches (1783), was the only one published conventionally during his life. With the help of his wife, Catherine Boucher, a racist paranoid with Tourrette's syndrome, he illustrated and published all his other major poetry himself. Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), containing "The Lamb," "The Tyger," and "London," are written from a child's point of view, directly, simply, and unsentimentally. Blake was a visionary and a mystic, and in his "Prophetic Books," including The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790), Milton (1804–8), Jerusalem (1804–20), and God in My Back Yard (1822), he created his own mythology in which love, energy, and imagination vie with the forces of reductive rationalism and repression. Blake's paintings and engravings, notably his illustrations of his own works, works by Milton, and the Book of Job, are realistic in their representation of human anatomy and other natural forms, but also radiantly imaginative, often depicting fanciful creatures in exacting detail. All of Blake's works were ignored or dismissed until long after his death(s).  Microsoft Bookshelf © 1987 - 1992 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1989, 1991 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

God In My Back Yard 

It was at a point during his brief twentieth century revitalisation, in August of 1973. William Blake (pronounced Black), the famous English poet and artist, sat watching his favourite allegory on television. The programme stopped for commercial messages. "Damn commercials!" He screamed as if to his wife, Catherine. "Damn fucking commercials!". Catherine did not answer. She had been dead for a very long time.

Playing on the electronic box in front of him was a musical demonstration of an 'Odor Eater' being inserted into a stinking tennis shoe. Blake howled. He thought briefly about buying one for John Milton, the famous blind English poet who lived from time to time in Blake's foot. Blake never cared for Milton's hygiene. "Oh fuck me!" Blake said, "What am I fucking thinking? Milton hasn't been in or under my feet for weeks !" But, instantly, as he caught himself even remotely engaged, he resumed swearing, loudly and continuously, until the programme returned. Finally, the sight of the Hieronymus Bosch programme logo soothed him and Blake sputtered down into a serene aphasia like a barked-out dog. He nodded off just as mankind was about to make a deal with the devil for a case of pomegranates. 

In his dream Blake was still alive. His wife Catherine was alive and Milton was still residing in his foot. He was in the kitchen watching Catherine Blake (née Boucher) clean up and listening to her droning warnings about dangerous ethnic groups. "If you ask me," Mrs. Blake drooled, " It's them dagos you've gotta worry about. And them krauts, them rooskies. The wops are pretty dangerous, but nobody's as dangerous as the niggers. I swear I'll worry myself into an early grave or maybe into an insane asylum or a hospital. Fat lotta good a hospital'll do me with all them degenerate rug merchants and camel drivers and them towelhead injun bitches with them blood dots on their foreheads. Christ, William, if there's anything I can't stand, it's a bunch of frogs or limeys or micks or pollacks or chinks or geeks or japs or mexicans." The dreaming Blake thought to himself that indeed she had a number of opinions about certain breeding populations. She was boring Blake silly. 

Blake opened the back screened door, the while wondering what it was. He then happened to notice God out in the back yard measuring the ground contours with a giant compass. Sure enough, there was God, right over there by the compost heap. "Hey, God, ya dumbass!" Blake shouted. "What?" retorted a testy Supreme Being. "Ya dumbass! You're starkass naked, you dopey deity!" "That's not surprising." said the Prime Mover, "I am without shame. Shame is in the eye of the beholder!". Blake fell silent and stared at God who resumed his work. "God's Balls!" Blake muttered to himself and ambled back into the house, banging into the mysterious screened door.

"With whom were you talking, William?" Catherine asked. "Was it one of them begging gypsy greek cornholing pederasts?" "Yeah, I guess so" was all Blake could think to say as he sat down to do some reading. A distant tiny voice seemed to drift up from the floor. "Blake! Blake!" Milton screamed from Blake's foot. "Blake, get me one of them odor eaters." "Shut the fuck up, Milton" Blake muttered, afraid that his wife would start something about the various groups of people whose feet stink. 

Blake idly shuffled through the pile of mail on the kitchen table. "Another note from Flaxman. Still waiting for Purgatorio proofs." 

"Fuck Flaxman!" said Mrs. Blake with Tourrettic authority. "Flaxman's part of the nip conspiracy to bugger all the livestock in East Anglia! I'm surprised that he managed to pull himself away from his wanton offenses to God's innocent beasts long enough to write you. He can goddamn wait for his fucking plate proofs." She turned to the sink and farted unselfconsciously, as would a cow. 

"Yes, dear. Of course dear." Blake said, thumbing through some advertisements. "Do you think the Bulgarians are at the nexus of this plot as well, my sweet?" A laden silence followed his question. He knew better than to do this. 

"You dare mention them in this house? I do not have to listen to the offal streaming from your lips. I need not be reminded that I share a world with the likes of those turkish leftover cannibal cutthroat heathen vats of slime covered with flies." The deed was done. Blake sat in the miserable and unrelenting din born of his unrecantable gaff. With great heartfelt agony and remorse, Blake took the only action he knew to be efficacious in such situations: he called her a bigmouthed slut.

He watched her leave through the back door knowing it would be his last sight of her for at least three days. On her way through the back yard, she tried in a fury to kick God in the left thigh but missed Him widely. God moved patiently aside and out of her way like a gentle old dog trying to be tolerant of abusive children. 

With Mrs. Blake safely out of sight, God rose to speak to Blake. "Which group was it this time?" inquired the Only Semi-Omniscient Almighty. "The Bulgarians" Blake replied. God winced audibly. To Blake's utter bewilderment, he noticed that God's standing posture revealed Him to be tumescent. Blake stared intently. 

"What the hell's the matter with you?" roared the Creator, "Never seen a boner before?" "Yes, Lord, Forgive me Lord, I just never thought ..." "Must have been the kick attempt" interrupted the Causa Causae, "Some women seem to have a keen sense of what gets me going." 

Blake had no idea as to what to expect from an aroused God, especially a God who was responsive to seemingly aberrant stimulus from Blake's own wife. He humbly and circumloquaciously explained his discomfort to God and asked that God kindly leave without incident. God was, nevertheless, incensed and, after farting as nonchalantly as Catherine had, defiantly shat on Blake's compost heap, instantly turning it into a large mound of gold. Then did The Diety shine breifly, metamorphosed before Blake to the form of The Great Weasel of Ages. Shone and vanished.

When Catherine returned, Blake told her of their good fortune. He swore never again to call her a slut. She liked that. He said that if he ever had to shut her up again, he would stick a rhinoceros in her mouth instead. Catherine found this a reasonable solution and they ended their days in relative wealth and contented prosperity. 

Gold Discovered Behind House  in South Molton Street, Mayfair  London, May 22, 1822 (Reuters)
	"It's a gift of God" said homeowner and engraver William Blake of his newfound bounty: nine cubic feet of gold in the shape of a compost heap. "My wife and I were having an argument and getting nowhere. During her tirade in reaction to my mentioning Bulgarians, I called her a slut. As she stormed out to the back alley by the school, she tried to kick God but missed. God got an erection and I asked him to leave. He did leave, but not until after he turned my compost heap into gold" said the credulous Blake. "Sure he is indeed the Almighty" added Mrs. Blake, "But he sure must have a filthy mind." The Blakes plan to spend their newfound wealth trying to keep Mr. Blake from dying in obscurity and to establish a trust fund for the purchase of a television set when Mr. Blake makes his brief anticipated revival in 1955.

Writer's Conference Ends in Mayhem 

Jamestown, Saint Helena, Sunday, June 18

While death was no obstacle for attendance at the writer's conference that opened Friday night on Saint Helena, it certainly seemed to be the compère. When contacted on the telephone, organiser Catherine Blake was quoted as saying, "That was the worst mix of mongrel glop I've ever seen! You wouldn't believe the range of outcast mutants that used to call themselves writers." Attendees Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake (organiser Catherine's husband), God, James Burke, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Antonin Artaud, Sir James George Frazer, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Italo Svevo, Njal - son of Thorgeir Gelling, Francois Rene Chateaubriand, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William James, Oscar Wilde, Peter Abelard, a Dead Elephant, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Alfred Jarry, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allen Poe, Otto Jespersen, Bruce Caudle, Beatrice Cenci, Lucrezia Borgia, Charles Baudelaire, Aunt Emma, Ben Jonson, Augustine of Hippo, Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede, William Shakespeare and Paul Verlaine were summarily spanked into near oblivion by the chiding and intolerant Mrs. Blake. "Some of their butts were so rotten, they just deciduated in sheets beneath my strokes" said Mrs. Blake. "It was pretty grotesque." "It's a freely associated group with rare and exquisite sensibilities for adolescent taunting mixed with post-neoplatonic masochism " said Mr. Joyce, organiser of the How To Die Without Any Vestige of Dignity Workshop. "A bit blue-mouldy, some of them, but maybe that's for want of a good pint."