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the way to the center, now seen as nuts-and-bolts public utility, as basic as electricity, light, gas, and water, a means of articulating and disseminating news of the common weal, a barometric project that is always measuring and announcing the culture's weather. In today's electronic era of instantaneous and encyclopedic information gathering, we find nothing remotely comparable to the collective utterance brought about in this poem. The Internet can tally heads and bodies
and data, but it does not have the "accessing reach" to tell us what is going on inside. Moreover, recent research has confirmed that traveling on the information highway is experienced by many as a lonely enterprise, reinforcing the anomie of modern life, contributing to a culture of data-drenched self-enclosure quite at odds with the empowerment rhetoric that heralds this new technology. Blake's poem moves toward solidarity.
I claimed that we think ourselves alone in our misery, and whereas this is true in general (even if banal), it is still truer, and less banal, when it comes down to those victimized and abused in society, those whose hurt is systemically caused and just as systemically ignored. In the second half of his poem, Blake gets down to business, spells out just whose pain and misery he has in mind.
He starts with the chimney sweepers, those very young children and orphans who often died in London's chimneys, sacrificial victims commemorated in some of his finest lyrics. Once again, the paradox leaps out at us: the cry of the small child is what we customarily fail to hear, and in this instance it is not fanciful to imagine this cry coming actually from the chimney-coffins themselves, transformed by Blake into an indictment d'outre-tombe, from beyond the grave. These voices, largely unhearable in reality, become terribly potent: they "appall" "every blackening Church."
Here, again, we encounter the potency, muscularity, and reach of art. The physical setting is transfigured: the cry of the child-victim alters the landscape, both frightens and makes pale the sooty church, makes graphically and obscenely visible the power relations (as Blake saw them) between religious institution and victims of society. The following lines extend this revolutionary logic, this weird boomerang that cries out for justice for the weak by showing exactly who is doing them in: the hapless soldier's sigh—a sigh that takes place far away from London, somewhere in the empire, a sigh that cannot possibly be noticed in any realist scheme—is not only heard (given Blake's sensibilities, we expect this much), but is stunningly translated into an elemental script: it
"Runs in blood down Palace walls." This line carries, for me, some of the terror associated with the Greek oracle: a voice becomes fate, a noise becomes destiny, an institution turns reality into language, and language into reality.
In recent years our TV screens seem to overflow with images of bodies buried under rubble or uncovered in mass graves, of silent, stony faces trekking out of war zones, and we, in our living rooms, take this in as the obscene underside of our history. As we have learned, it can sometimes even happen on home ground. But for the most part it comes to us, even on today's TV screens, as silent film, as distant as the news-reels of another era that were called The March of Time. Is it too much to say that our grasp of history itself—including its most unprocessible chapters such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima or even the twin towers at New York's World Trade Center—is finally a set of images depicting mute victims, or (worse still) pure rubble that guards its secret, that entombs its silent dead?
To sum up, have we not learned, over and over, that cries go unheard, that the powerless are indeed powerless? New York, in the wake of September 11,2001, was dotted with posters of the missing, and The New York Times, for months afterward, published thumbnail sketches of the
and data, but it does not have the "accessing reach" to tell us what is going on inside. Moreover, recent research has confirmed that traveling on the information highway is experienced by many as a lonely enterprise, reinforcing the anomie of modern life, contributing to a culture of data-drenched self-enclosure quite at odds with the empowerment rhetoric that heralds this new technology. Blake's poem moves toward solidarity.
I claimed that we think ourselves alone in our misery, and whereas this is true in general (even if banal), it is still truer, and less banal, when it comes down to those victimized and abused in society, those whose hurt is systemically caused and just as systemically ignored. In the second half of his poem, Blake gets down to business, spells out just whose pain and misery he has in mind.
He starts with the chimney sweepers, those very young children and orphans who often died in London's chimneys, sacrificial victims commemorated in some of his finest lyrics. Once again, the paradox leaps out at us: the cry of the small child is what we customarily fail to hear, and in this instance it is not fanciful to imagine this cry coming actually from the chimney-coffins themselves, transformed by Blake into an indictment d'outre-tombe, from beyond the grave. These voices, largely unhearable in reality, become terribly potent: they "appall" "every blackening Church."
Here, again, we encounter the potency, muscularity, and reach of art. The physical setting is transfigured: the cry of the child-victim alters the landscape, both frightens and makes pale the sooty church, makes graphically and obscenely visible the power relations (as Blake saw them) between religious institution and victims of society. The following lines extend this revolutionary logic, this weird boomerang that cries out for justice for the weak by showing exactly who is doing them in: the hapless soldier's sigh—a sigh that takes place far away from London, somewhere in the empire, a sigh that cannot possibly be noticed in any realist scheme—is not only heard (given Blake's sensibilities, we expect this much), but is stunningly translated into an elemental script: it
"Runs in blood down Palace walls." This line carries, for me, some of the terror associated with the Greek oracle: a voice becomes fate, a noise becomes destiny, an institution turns reality into language, and language into reality.
In recent years our TV screens seem to overflow with images of bodies buried under rubble or uncovered in mass graves, of silent, stony faces trekking out of war zones, and we, in our living rooms, take this in as the obscene underside of our history. As we have learned, it can sometimes even happen on home ground. But for the most part it comes to us, even on today's TV screens, as silent film, as distant as the news-reels of another era that were called The March of Time. Is it too much to say that our grasp of history itself—including its most unprocessible chapters such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima or even the twin towers at New York's World Trade Center—is finally a set of images depicting mute victims, or (worse still) pure rubble that guards its secret, that entombs its silent dead?
To sum up, have we not learned, over and over, that cries go unheard, that the powerless are indeed powerless? New York, in the wake of September 11,2001, was dotted with posters of the missing, and The New York Times, for months afterward, published thumbnail sketches of the
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