Sunday Pages: "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

A passage by William Blake.

Dear Reader,

Strange days have found us, strange days have tracked us down.

What divides us, as a nation, is not disagreement about the finer points of Christianity, as in Europe during the Wars of Religion, or attitudes toward slavery, as in the United States of the 1850s and 60s, but rather a consensus reality. Right now, there are (at least) two versions of reality: the actual truth, and whatever Orwellian doublespeak horseshit Trump/Q/MAGA happen believe at any given time.

If the Union is ever to re-unite—if America is to be made great again—we need first to agree on a single, shared reality. Fortunately, this shouldn’t be that hard. Because, like, there is only one reality, despite what the self-important guy who made What the Bleep and then joined NXIVM avers. While 70 million people voted for Trump, not all of them suffer from folie à MAGA. The cult is much smaller than that. In five and a half weeks—four full weeks fewer than Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke got their kink on in the New York art world!—Joe and Kamala take the wheel, the New York AG descends on the Trump crime family, and alternative reality becomes significantly harder to maintain.

To be sure, the cult will die hard. A foundational belief of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that the world will end in 1914, which has not stopped many an earnest soul from knocking on my door while I’m trying to watch football, 100+ years later. Past a certain point, however, cold hard reality becomes unavoidable. Election results: unavoidable. Indictments: unavoidable. DNA turned over in the rape case, financial documents turned over in the fraud cases: unavoidable. Three hundred thousand covid-19 deaths caused by Trump, Pence, and Kushner’s malefic negligence: sadly, tragically, unavoidable.

This business of conflicting realities brings to mind a passage from the great British poet, painter, and prophet William Blake—the snippet that inspired the wonderfully pretentious Jim Morrison to give his rock band such a weird name. This is from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was composed during George Washington’s first term as president. The last two lines are the most important:

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

If we cannot fully cleanse the doors of perception, we must blast through the cavern in which MAGA nation has siloed itself. We must apply infernal corrosives and melt away the disinformation and propaganda at Fox News, at OANN, at Newsmax, and elsewhere.

Ready the flaming sword! Come to the light! The truth is marching on.

Thirty-eight more days.

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Photo credit: “Pity,” by William Blake, now at the Met.