For the Blake-Shelley chapter draft in progress, which also includes Derek Jarman.

On a hot July day just after my visit to Blake’s cottage at Felpham, the spirits of three related artists – Blake, Shelley, and Jarman – strike me, Milton-in-the-tarsus style, right outside the St Pancras tube as I’m hustling to the British Library. As usual, in front of the $400/night St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, there’s a metallic hot-pink McLaren “supercar” worth £150,000, which can reach top speeds of 200 mph yet has been parked in that same spot almost every time I have ever walked past it in the last decade (and that’s a lot). Having toured Blake’s cottage, which has now had its roof stabilized but needs a total interior rebuild plus a new visitor’s center (more soon on this blog), I can think only that the cost of this car, the Lamborghini next to it, and a nearby Mercedes or two (alone) would save the interior of Blake’s cottage for 200 more years. Your average tech bro could find that as spare change in his sofa.

Looking at that pink McLaren – the back of my neck crisping like the Sussex wheat fields in the heat and drought that will only continue to be accelerated by rich men’s choices and all our phone-addicted habits as data centers suck water from the earth and pump carbon back into the sky – I’m flooded with the prankish, sharp-pointed impulse that is the prologue to, shall we say, political action. I wouldn’t smash any windows. But I could make a flier for the Blake Cottage Trust with its URL and leave it under that pink car’s windshield wiper like a ticket, to be seen by the dozens of people who stop to take their picture with it every day and then maybe – maybe – go on to read about William Blake. Delight fizzes in me. Issue parking tickets from William Blake on the Road of Excess, which in our society’s case has not led to the Palace of Wisdom! Scatter my words like sparks (or, in Mary Shelley’s rendering in The Last Man, Sybilline leaves) among mankind! Prank, play, act up, make words and pictures and feelings: how else do artists ever change the world? I’ve even got the perfect image for it, with a pun that will delight only me and, like, ten other humans on earth. (What a winning political strategy! Andy Burnham, watch out!) Promptly, I made a few little fliers, printed in the basement of the Waterstone’s on Gower St (although I did choose an image of the cottage itself.) “Who’s William Blake?” asked the young woman helping me. So, of course, I had to give her a 25-word version (250-word versions and higher available on request!)

Yet a spectre of my own Scolfield the Accuser – a flag on my American passport, a hook to hang me on (in Timothy Snyder’s words), no matter how small, the Kafkaesque Orwellian fear that keeps even well-meaning people choosing the better part of valor – tugged at my sleeve. This is the country where even holding up a sign saying “I Support Palestine Action” has been illegal, despite the student encampment carrying on down near SOAS and planning a Downing St. march. Not that the US has so much to be proud of, to be very clear. Technically, I wouldn’t get arrested for putting a flier under the McLaren’s windshield wiper, but misdemeanor notices might pertain, and “the council doesn’t really like” the posting of fliers even on posts outside the British Library, despite the lost-cat plea I hearken to each time I cross the street. (There’s a lost lovebird near Tavistock Square. If you see Bagel and Princess, help get them home.)

Overall, my little experiment showed me, again, that when you try to enter into the public space of discussion and social change in print, you run straight into not just all the Orwellian Kafkaesque power/fear questions but the mind-numbing wall of bureaucracy itself and the question of what public spaces are left for the exchange of ideas and conversation, uncontrolled by rich men’s interests – all of which are questions Blake, Shelley, and Jarman explored as we do now. In the end, I left some fliers at bookshops and talked to several very interested people, but the British Library no longer has a public posting space. Helpfully, they recommended I post an image to what used to be Twitter with the hashtag #BritishLibrary; it’ll get great audience reach, sure, but isn’t it sad that the major public square we all still recognize is controlled and monetized by Elon Musk.

In 1812, as Byron was making his maiden speech to the House of Lords, when Percy Shelley felt like this (however ineffectual it may actually have been), he, his then-wife, and her sister copied out a hundred pamplets of his “Declaration of Rights” and attach them to fire balloons, then launch them forth. This image recurs in “Defense of Poetry” and “Ode to the West Wind:” “Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind.” Especially where I sit, just a few blocks away from Gandhi – inspired by Shelley’s famous “Masque of Anarchy,” which also epigraphs Mike Leigh’s great film Peterloo — Shelley’s fire balloons feel nobler than a social media swamp now controlled by a trillionaire, and a rebuke to my timidity. Artists and pilgrim changemakers: aren’t we all doing the same thing. Little pamphlets, paper messages and books and zines and fliers (and this blog post?) and films and paintings and sketches and prints and cries of laughter and rage against the great unknowing that you see in even the eyes of the kindest people who notice your handful of fliers: Who’s William Blake? What’s this for, then?

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air,” said the sentimental poet Thomas Gray, 6 years before Blake’s birth. The world doesn’t owe you anything; artists, alas, aren’t an exception. Good ideas and worthy causes go unexpressed and unheeded every day, no matter the unheeded lost lives on the other end. I really wanted to slip that flier Banksyishly under the McLaren’s windshield wiper, as a golden thread-tip for anyone with a smartphone to follow into Blake-world via a single URL (in a measure of my total fitness for this world of ours, I have no idea how to generate a QR code on paper). But hey, I wouldn’t want strangers putting random things on my car. (“Security of property!” the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft snorts, reprovingly, in my brain. “Behold, the definition of English liberty!”) Although if I did care about my £150,000 car, I wouldn’t leave it in public to be gawped at by every Tom, Dick, and Hortense who wants a photo or goes stalking by, head full of dead poets and old-school Methodist grumbling, muttering about all the hundred better uses for £150,000 than a rich man’s garish toy.

In the end, I compromised, with a photo that drew some very strange looks:

One of the people who saw my flier after all in the bookshops where I did leave it – including a Californian interested in the history of printmaking — was a young teacher named Rachel. “I tell my students that William Blake was a man out of his time,” she said, speaking about how he showed them what originality and persistence could look like. I’m still hoping to help the Blake Cottage Trust raise more money for the Felpham restoration. I will be bold when I can. But mostly, I will continue to do what Rachel and I have committed ourselves to: changing the world, one heart and mind at a time, by writing and teaching. We do what we can, laboring upward into futurity.