THE QUESTION ANSWERED
"What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire"
William Blake (1757-1827)
THE CLOD AND THE PEBBLE
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the Cattles feet;
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet,
Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight;
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.
FROM
NOTEBOOK POEMS
AND FRAGMENTS
C. 1789-93
When a Man has married a Wife
he finds out whether
Her knees & elbows are only
glued together
From
Encylopedia Brittanica
1956
In 1781he (William Blake) met his future wife,Catherine Boucher. They were married in August 1782, and lodged at first at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields. The name of Catherine Blake will go down to posterity as that of an almost perfect wife. She learnt to draw and paint well enough to be able to help Blake in his work. She remained childless, and survived her husband only four years, dying in 1831.
"You can end love more easily
than you can moderate it."
Seneca the Elder, Controversiae (1st c.),2.
The Myth of Mental Illness
BIG LIE
"In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they (the masses) more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big."
Adolph Hitler,
Mein Kampf, vol.1, ch. 10, 1924 tr. Ralph Manheim, 1943
"Bodily illness is something the patient has, whereas mental illness is really something he is or does... Actually, we use the words "neurotic" and "psychotic" (and other psychiatric diagnostic terms) to characterize persons, not to name diseases."
Thomas Szasz The Second Sin, Doubleday, 1973. page 87.
COMMENT: Thomas Szasz, M.D. is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Upstate Medical School in Syracuse, New York. He is a seminal thinker and brave critic whose clear thinking will outlive the dominant mythology of our times.
Macbeth: "How does your patient, (lady Macbeth) doctor?"
Doctor: "Not so sick, my Lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest."
Macbeth: Cure her of that!
Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor: "Therein the patient
Must minister to himself."
Macbeth: "Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it"
Doctor (aside): "Were I from Dunsinane away and clear,
Profit again should hardly draw me here."
Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3,
IRONIC COMMENT: As viewed from our "superior" medical perspective, Lady Macbeth has obviously developped at least two separate mental illnesses: obsessive-compulsive handwashing (the damn spot) as well as clinical depression with organic signs like early morning awakening.
Like Moliere's imaginary doctor who, when caught listening to the heart on the right side of the chest, nimbly countered:
"Mais, nous avons change tout cela."
We've changed all that.
Today Mr. Macbeth would still call the doctor but now he can actually DO SOMTHING. He can drug unhappy wives with a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) like Prozac or Paxcil or Effexor or Zoloft (note that even Z's and X's have proven anti-depressant action). Poor Mr. Macbeth calls the doctor who, crippled by the abysmal ignorance of his time and a rising panic, can come up with no more than a bunch of silly words.
We've even got a sure-fire, low-tech means of "razing out the written troubles of the brain"
"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good." Robert Graves
Samuel Clemens
better known as
MARK TWAIN
"IN THE SPACE OF 176 YEARS THE lOWER mISSISSIPPI HAS SHORTENED ITSELF 242 MILES. tHAT IS AN AVERAGE OF A TRIFLE OVER ONE MILE AND A HIRD PER YEAR. tHEREFORE, ANY CALM PERSON, WHO IS NOT BLIND OR IDIOTIC, CAN SEE THAT IN THE oLD oOLITIC sILURIAN pERIOD, JUST A MILLION YEARS AGO NEXT nOVEMBER, THE lOWER mISSISSIPPI rIVER WAS UPWARDS OF ONE MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND MILES LONG AND STUCK OUT OVER THE gULF OF mEXICO LIKE A FISHING ROD. aND BY THE SAME TOKEN ANY PERSON CAN SEE THAT SEVEN HU8NDRED AND FORTY TWO YEARS FROM NOW THE lOWER mISSISSIPPI WILL BE ONLY A MILE AND THREE QUARTERS LONG, AND cAIRO AND nEW oRLEANS WILL HAVE JOINED THEIR STREETS TOGETHER AND BE PLODDING COMFORTABLY ALONG UNDER A SINGLE MAYOR AND A MUTUAL BOARD OF ALDERMAN. tHERE IS SOMETHING FASCINATING ABOUT SCIENCE. oNE GETS SUCH WHOLESALE RETURNS OF CONJECTURE OUT OF SUCH A TRIFLING INVESTMENT OF FACT."
fROM lIFE ON THE mISSISSIPPI.
"Truth has power in the age of the lie.
We are in the age of the lie."
Jerry Brown, Asilomar, January 21, 1998
keynote address to a meeting of organic produce growers
The zen master lay dying.
The end was very near.
His disciples bent forward
as he spoke
his final words:
"Give me money."
Cited by Timothy Ferris in The Mind's Sky
And a last fragment
from
WILLIAM BLAKE
INFANT SORROW
My mother groaned
my father wept,
Into the dangerous world
I leapt.
Naked, helpless, piping loud
like a fiend hid in a cloud,
struggling against my father's hands,
straining against the swaddling bands,
bound and weary I thought best,
to sulk upon my mother's breast.
to
