Yet wedlock becomes the titular and guiding motif of Blake’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a document which would appear to be the effluvia of a narrator undergoing a semi-veridical hallucination which gradually leads to his recognition of the fundamentally dialectical nature of the universe. It is, to put it more broadly, a manuscript which details, visually and verbally, an intensely psychedelic experience—if it were anyone other than Blake, you would assume copious drugs were involved. The “marriage” itself has obscure alchemical undertones, alluding to the pseudoscientific principles by which the essential properties of various minerals combine to perform astounding transformations on uninteresting materials. But the late 18th Century was not the era of magic, and Blake was not a moron; in his work alchemy becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of the rigid material world in the flux of abstract creativity engendered by the thinking mind. Blake’s marriage was the resolution of the contradictory influences of structured society and fluid consciousness in an individual’s life.
Moreover, Blake got married himself, and quickly, and in a church, and there wasn’t a bulging belly at the altar, either. In order to understand how this poet-artist could have hated the institution of marriage but valued it as a metaphor and loved it in his own life, I went down to the place where the wedding actually happened. (This, incidentally, is one of the many pleasures of life in London: the city is its own encyclopedia; the data bleeds from the stones.) St. Mary’s of Battersea dates back to Saxon times, with a church having stood on the same site since the 7th or 8th Century. Its latest manifestation, which still stands today, would have been quite new in Blake’s time, an exemplar of the stately, measured architecture which characterized the height of the Georgian era in Great Britain. The site, which sits right on the south bank of the Thames, is now adrift in an array of askance council towers and luxury flats trying to find berths in the unordered web of streets which conform to the fluid contours of the river; you get the feeling that a tidal backwash might set the buildings bobbing and knocking, low-emissivity glass crushing against a corner of Thatcher-era concrete. Across the Thames, the derelict Lots Road Power Station is crying out for occupation by lit ravers and destitute anarchists. But the church still stands: you can see the very doorway where William and Catherine must have walked in together one Sunday in August of 1782, and, very shortly thereafter, walked out to very little ceremony as Mr. and Mrs. Blake.
And the relationship would last for many happy years: Blake is notably one of the most uxorious figures in the history of literature and art—though he’s admittedly competing against a fairly weak field of contenders in this regard. Nonetheless, there is abundant evidence that Mr. and Mrs. Blake loved each other dearly. Catherine was known to assist Blake in his artistic endeavors, bringing him his image-making tools when his visions came upon him, even learning how to operate his press despite her own illiteracy. She was attendant to Blake on his deathbed, on which occasion he produced a final sketch of the woman he had spent his life loving. Catherine indulged Blake in his radical world view, and participated in the unique and often bizarre mythology which he constructed around himself: the two were known, later in life, to go about their garden together and entirely nude, visiting various tree stumps and mounds of dirt which they would instill with deistic significance. And, when Blake did suggest that the couple introduce a prostitute into the relationship, ostensibly with an eye towards producing elusive offspring, Catherine was reduced to tears—and Blake promptly desisted.
What could marriage have possibly meant to this strange genius? Having rejected religion and the government, having defied every other expectation of society, why would he then turn around and make this commitment to his lover in such a conventional way? On the other hand, is the question even worth asking? After all, we know Blake first as a writer and an artist; the nature of his life and his marriage are only of interest to us because of what he made. But when Blake married at the age of 24, he was just a young ideologue living through one of the strangest eras of history, trying to find his place in a city characterized by clandestine cults, roving mobs, and a ubiquitous black market. Perhaps at the time, Blake sensed that the marriage would outlive the man, and would leave some residue of the best aspect of his life for posterity.
This line of reasoning has given me occasion to reflect on the nature of the persistence of reputation more broadly. Who, for instance, was William Shakespeare? It’s a question which has provided fodder for many a semi-academic exposé in recent years, but that fact remains that someone in London wrote some awfully good plays around 1600, and the politics of identity, sexy or sexualized as they can be, seem somehow secondary to this; the name “Shakespeare” encompasses the works adequately. And Socrates exists now only as a participant in the dialogues written by Plato, who is himself primarily preserved in statuary, and Homer is only a shade which can be seen dimly haunting the other side of a couple old poems. With time, the details of these ancient lives fall away, and what remains is the information: the words and the pictures which these famous people used to describe the world are now the only thing which we have to describe them.
And why do we need to know, anyway? From where does this mania for knowing the private lives of great people arise? Isn’t it enough to have what they gave to the world, without needing to understand their own privations? And if the features of the greatest poets of the ages are fated to become worn and dulled by the perpetual revisiting of history, what more can I hope for in my life? The documents which record us, the thousands of sheets of paper which we produce, must eventually become us: some day, all that’s left of me might be reduced to a folder in an archive somewhere. If I am to be eventually classified as an exhibit, and artifact, anthropological data, I want what’s left of me to be that I loved and was loved, that someone found me and gave me a little happiness in my life and that I turned around and made a little more happiness with the small amount of time I had. If my life is going to be forgotten, then I want some element of the love I have to be what’s left behind.
This is what I thought about while I was sitting down by St. Mary’s on a dreary Wednesday afternoon, imaging what Blake had done there 230 years earlier. Perhaps Blake’s decision to marry was ultimately an act of pure rebellion which ran so deep that it was even targeted against his own ideas: it was a rebellion against the constraints of the self, against the obsession with identity imposed on all of us by society. Blake’s marriage ran against everything, against conventions, against expectations, and even against his own system of beliefs; it was more radical and more liberated from the constraints of analysis than anything he could have written or drawn. This is the beauty of Will and Kate Blake’s love, that it was against everything, even against themselves.
And then something occurred to me about St. Mary’s itself, too, this stately old building which has survived wave after wave of regeneration. The church is now a Grade I listed building, protected by the government from the uncertainties of human enterprise, but this status and the very perseverance of the church itself is surely one of the many externalities of Blake’s actual marriage, for if William Blake, this favorite son of London, hadn’t chosen to marry a little girl from the neighborhood there, it surely would have been toppled more than 100 years ago to make way for whatever was coming next. But if Picasso could use his signature on a napkin to pay for dinner in Madrid, then surely a Blake marriage is enough to preserve a building in London’s tumultuous cityscape. And so the church still stands, and, though the pilots and passengers of the trawlers and river taxis and rubbish barges which float past it every day would hardly know it, the building itself is ineluctably a monument to the event which sustained it, just as every bomb crater is a memorial to war.
I’ll probably never be famous, certainly not for anything anyone would be proud of, but maybe my love for Nora will become bigger than I am, will become something of note in itself somehow, even if I’m long forgotten. My marriage will be like a listed building: inside it, something spectacular has happened, and it’s worth preserving, even if everything around it starts changing. It will be my own greatest work, and 1,000 generations from now, someone will excavate it and marvel at it and theorize about how someone so primitive could possibly have conceived of something so incredible.
