As Easter approaches, well at least in our supermarket chocolate aisles, it’s nice to reflect on the delightful little chocolate crumbs of meaning that our subversive sign writing friends leave for us.
As the movement of rampaging atheists is also growing, at least on my news feed on facebook, I thought it fitting to reflect on what is perceived as the miraculous.
As a writer and song-writer, the fact that ideas spark and tumble into my stream of consciousness is something I find amazing and inexplicable. As is the fact that human beings can fill me with frustration and loathing one moment and then overwhelming joy and love the next. Some would no doubt rationalise these to chemical activity in the brain &c, but I will place my self in the devil’s camp and agree with Blake who said there is no separation between Body and Soul, but rather that the senses are merely the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
To close ourselves off to mystery is to lose connection with what makes life brilliant and bearable. Those mysteries do not need to be earth-shattering or sky-splitting. They can, and usually are, as this beautiful stencil states, small miracles.
It may pay to drop the judge at the boozer the next time you go for a walk, and see the world through the eye’s of the little child that still lives inside. This is how we learn to hear the voice of the divine, and see and appreciate those small miracles.
AFTERWORD by the Author and Printer Will.m Blake. 1793
“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”
Tags: Abbotsford, aphorisms, facebook, graffiti, Melbourne, religion, small miracles, stencil, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake
Random Insults Day 15 – This is so not cool!
14 NovIt’s nice to know I’m not the only one who finds playground defacement with pictures of dicks a little on the nose.
This old school comment stream was scrawled on the inside of a wooden playground train at the M Walker Playground in Cramer Street Preston.
It’s interesting to reflect that the now ubiquitous experience of commenting on people’s messages, ala Facebook Wall, has an earlier counterpart in graffiti on toilet walls & c.
Human’s have always enjoyed leaving their mark, all the way back to pre-literate hunter gatherer cultures. I imagine that there was disagreement even back then as to the appropriateness of what was etched onto the cave wall with charcoal and animal fat. Grug may have coped a bit of flack from his brethren for depicting his own spear striking the wooly mammoth first, or for drawing the mammories on his Venus or the phallus on his Horned God just a little too big.
Perhaps the fact that comment streams are everywhere may make this little exchange seem trivial (compared to the brilliant insights one can read about lunch-time fare and other literate-bowel movements on FB) but this is a slice of insight I feel needs recording, if only to make me nostalgic about the streams of toilet humour that I have seen in pub and public loos the world over.
I also like the second comment, “You right it’s gay” (sic), for its unPC condensation of the issue into a curious psychological insight. Why do some people draw dicks in public places? Purileness? Black magic? Asserting their male vigour in the face of repressed homosexuality? Or just a way to mark an onanistic accomplishment – another day, another wank (metaphorical or literal)? Oh and what’s with the date?
Tags: comment streams, graffiti, insults, phallus tags, playground vandalism, prehistoric art, Preston, toilet humor