Non-Fiction
Walking the lunatic fringe: Blake at Bone Hill
There is a fine line between lunacy and genius. The Romantic poet William Blake walked that fine line. As a child Blake reportedly saw God's head at his window; he and his wife were so fascinated by Milton's Paradise Lost that they used to roam naked in their house at Lambeth Palace in London; he said 'damn your king' to a police constable that led to an indictment with sedition charges'; and he considered Milton (like him) as a member of the "Devil's Party". This is the same man who created a body of work that includes Jerusalem, Four Zoas, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the ostensibly simple Songs of Innocence and of Experience. While Blake's lunacy is considered a matter of dispute, his genius is recognized beyond any doubt. A larger than life bronze bust in Poets' Corner of the Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1957, two hundred years after Blake's birth, confirms his niche among the greatest of all English poets, and testifies to his genius. However, the presence of Blake's body in an unmarked pit, which was once the burial site for 120,000 plague victims, tells us a different storya story of a marginalized madman who was always at odds with the establishment. Unlike the bust in Poets' Corner, the grave-marker of Blake seems less certain of Blake's status. It reads, 'Nearby lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake (1757-1827) and his wife Catherine Sophia (1762-1831).' The anti-establishment sentiment that runs high in Blake's poetic career somehow is vindicated by the visible negligence showed by the authority towards Blake's burial site. A couple of years back, I visited Blake's grave that allowed me an insight into the lunatic fringe in him. The location of his grave helped me locate the dichotomy that exists between the symbolic and the real vis-à-vis the presence\absence of Blake's body. Blake was buried in Bunhill cemetery according to his own will as it was the resting place for both his parents. However, he did not leave enough money for his own funeral that led his wife Catherine to borrow from a friend. In his biography of Blake, the novelist Peter Ackroyd describes the rather unceremonious burial of the poet: 'It was a small elm coffin, some five feet nine inches in length, of the English kind that tapered from the middle like the case of a violin. He lay in a common grave, which cost nineteen shillings, and was buried nine feet under the earth and gravel; and already beneath him lay the remains of …[many others].' Ackroyd's account of the burial is probably coloured by the imagination of a fiction writer or supported by circumstantial evidence. After all, Blake's actual burial site had just been spotted. Interestingly enough, the discovery of Blake's grave was made by two Portuguese (no offence to English archival supremacy). After years of painstaking research, the Portuguese lawyer Luis and his partner Carol Garrido finally located the actual burial spot. Luis was introduced to Blake as a child by a family friend in Portugal who reportedly urged him to learn English so that he could appreciate Blake. Luis did learn English and became obsessed with Blake. Together with his landscape artist partner Carol, Luis conducted an intensive study of old grave records and made intrinsic calculations to determine the right location of Blake's grave. They submitted a 100-page dossier to the local council in August 2004, requesting the erection of a headstone for William Blake. Unfortunately, the site is on a public walkway, and is trampled by park visitors on a regular basis. I talked to the park curator, J. Hatton-Gore, who showed me the actual spot where Blake's body was evidently buried. He also gave me a local newspaper article that detailed the efforts of the Portuguese couple behind the rediscovery of Blake's grave. In order to make sense of why Blake's grave got lost in the first place, we need to know a little bit about Bunhill Fields. The field spreads over an area of 4 acres right outside the Roman wall at Moorgate. It was known as Tindall's Fields in Elizabethan times. In 1549, Tindall was commissioned to dig out old graves and make room for fresh burials. Tindall's Fields were set apart as a common cemetery for the interment of bodies for which there wasn't room in church cemeteries during the Plague. Reportedly, a thousand cartloads of old bones found a new heap as home under a thin layer of earth. It got a new name, Bone-Hill field. In course of time, the name became Bun-Hill. The non-conformist Protestant Sects, who had a church on the nearby City Road, continued using the field for their burial. Prominent dissenters, who did not belong to the Church of England, such as John Bunyan (the author of Pilgrim's Progress) and Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) were buried in Bunhill. Later, it was used for anyone who had lost the favour of the church (the Cromwells, for example) or did not have any particular faith in religion. In 1854, Bunhill Fields ceased to be a burial ground. It was then designed as a public park and memorial. Accordingly, monuments for Bunyan and Defoe were raised, but somehow Blake was missed. The gravestone marker that stands today was relocated near Daniel Defoe's obelisk after a private Act of Parliament allowed the City to reorganise Bunhill Fields in the 1960s. Quite symbolically, Blake's eternal resting place lies outside the wall of Roman London that once defined the shape and size of the city. The Romans built their garrison Londinium in 43 AD to protect themselves from Saxon attacks on the strategic north bank of the Thames. Over the last two millennia, London has grown into a mammoth city covering an area of 610 square miles. Still, the location of Blake's body outside the inner wall is quite telling of his anti-establishment status. Historically, located just outside the city limits near Moorgate, Bunhill Fields allowed the authorities to export all their undesirable spectacles to this area: madmen in cages, cudgel fights, public whipping of thieves and jugglers. With a pest house and a mental hospital in the vicinity, Bunhill Fields became the virtual circus of the margin. I have reason to think Blake's body has both supplied and derived energy from what George Bataille would have called heterology. "Heterology" is the Greek word for difference. For the French philosopher Bataille, it is the difference that must be expelled from the same in order for the same to be the same. Through an ultimate inversion of order, disorder becomes order, and order disorder; the sacred becomes the profane, and vice versa. The reversal of order thus defies the logical impulse of reason to homogenise everything. But what is reason to do when it encounters what it excludes? Blake is the excluded Other of our sane Self. His body outside the city limits thus symbolically portrays an unlikely meeting of reason and "unreason". Blake's grave is the site for the celebration of the margin. Trampled by common men, it offers a symbolic defiance or reason (or what we may call the real). While reason holds reverence for the genius, the bad-mad Blake rests in a city park where prostitutes and dope-users frequent the night, where the homeless ones take refuge in the park benches, where patrolling police officers sigh, where officegoers in pinstripe suits come for a quick lunch and where children laugh over a weekend picnic. Blake's lunacy does not follow the romanticized pattern in which madness is seen as an absence of institutionalized reason. With the creation of asylums for the treatment of madmen, the nineteenth century presented madness as the chosen victim of modern medicine and its reason. The unreason championed by William Blake confused his contemporaries and posterity alike. Thanks to critics like Northrop Frye and others, Blake's deep religiosity and his earnest belief in Jerusalem that eschews the oppressive reason (Urizen) are beginning to make sense. The body of his work is a constant source of energy for Blake lovers who are likely to feel the same vibes in proximity of the place where the body of the poet lies.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments