Saturday, November 06, 2010

Blake's Tyger

From my novella BAUMHOLDER 1961:

Sullivan disliked sentiment and sloppy thinking and
sometimes performed a routine that demonstrated as
much. With a few drinks in him, he was known to recite a
portion of a poem by William Blake to much delight and
hoopla from his inebriated colleagues: “Tiger, tiger,
burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair
short but long enough to comb, which really meant long
enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the
shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he
began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his
forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night,
what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful
symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by
the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the
hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what
furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this
precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into
an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if
the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere
mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of
human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding
the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet
another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his
forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that
never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the
fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”

1 comment:

Gerry said...

I was just writing about your blog in my blog Daughters of the Shadow Men where I embedded the video of the poet Dave Lee yesterday, when I saw your new entry on my blog list. I embedded Dave Lee because he came to a writer's workshop in Boulder, Utah, my hometown, in October at the behest of my nieces who along with my son founded the Boulder Heritage Foundation. I have been partially disabled since the age of 20 after being incarcerated in a psych ward while I was attending the U of U. I landed there on my terms as the quote at the bottom of your entry says and was nearly killed for it, but was also successfully launched as a playwright and have been a playwright ever since but on You Tube since I am too radical for most people in theaters. I am 79.