In the 1790s, as William and Catherine Blake were living in Lambeth, printing Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Songs of Experience, and the engraving commissions that made them, for a little while at least, relatively prosperous, they would have had an unusual neighbor – London’s first circus, a fifteen-minute walk from their house. Astley’s Amphitheatre, located at the south end of the bridge, featured clowns, trick horseback riding, battle reenactments, and more – including the strongmen that inspired the Blakes’ dazzled landlord to rename their apartment complex “Hercules Buildings.” Rebounding and rebuilding from multiple venue fires, Astley worked out the perfect circumference for a ring around which horses could gallop – 42 feet – with the perfect centrifugal force to help riders stay on, which is still the circus standard. One of these riders was the famous Black trick rider Pablo Fanque, born William Derby in 1810 and mentioned in the Beatles’ “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” which was itself based on a circus poster John Lennon found in a shop window in the village of Sevenoaks while filming the “Strawberry Fields Forever” video in Knole Park. Blake himself would have recognized each step of the loving recreation of that poster in Nick Esdaile and Joe Fellows’ film below, from woodcutting and inking to letterpress printing.

Of course, if you say “Astley” to a child of the 1980s, there’s only one response.

Despite the years of Rickrolling that have come between this instant and the shy 13-year-old me who loved this sweet boy (who got discovered singing at a bar in Warrington, Anna Letitia Barbauld’s old hometown!), I’m never gonna…. well, you know. Although the church in the video looks like the old Guildhall in Chichester where William Blake was tried (and acquitted) for sedition after his spat with Schofield in the Felpham cottage garden, it’s not. The incredible dancing bartender is Clive “Rubber Man” Clarke. Whatever they paid him, it’s not enough. And wouldn’t it be cool – in a Romanticist head-exploding nerd moment of surpassing excellence – if Rick Astley’s great-great-great-great grandfather did turn out to be William Blake’s neighbor, London’s first circus impresario? (Hey, as Merlin Sheldrake himself kindly confirmed to me, his own ancestor, Dr. Timothy Sheldrake, was Lord Byron’s childhood orthopedist. Stranger things have happened!)

Writing this book has been an exercise in combining scholarly rigor and accuracy with other creative impulses, including an energy that I learned from an Iowan nun to identify as circus. Sister Corita Kent (like Blake a great, unconventionally Christian printmaker) produced a glorious series called “The Circus Alphabet,” with words from a variety of sources including e.e. cummings, of which this may be my favorite:

“at the very thought of “circus” a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the supposedly impregnable fortifications of our present.” William Blake could have written this, yet e.e. cummings actually did – and Corita Kent, who knew both Blake and cummings, is right on time with that tiger. Having been writing about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I now find it looks even wilder, more fun, and more like itself with circus in mind:

The bright colors, the tumbling horse and human (alike alarmed and absurd), the bouncing ball, the flames that look more like paper cutouts than (as John Lennon sings in “Mr. Kite”) “real fire” – isn’t it fun to think that Blake and Catherine might have been inspired by Astley’s circus here? And doesn’t it help explain something about this poem’s feral, rebel energy and humor, its lightfooted and dangerous wit, the way it repeatedly performs feats of daring – like turning the Bible inside out and putting it back together in Blake’s own way? It’s still the source of the zinging lines we love the most: “Jesus was all virtue and he acted from impulse, not from rules.” “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would be seen as it is, infinite.”

And, recognizably, it’s kin to cummings’ description of the circus, from a 1930 series of “nonlectures:” “Damn everything but the circus!” cummings wrote. In her 1970 book of the same name, Corita Kent added to this a poem by her colleague Sister Helen Kelley, president at Sacred Heart College, where she’d been a student and a teacher:

…damn everything that is grim, dull,
motionless, unrisking, inward turning,
damn everything that won’t get into the
circle, that won’t enjoy, that won’t throw
its heart into the tension, surprise, fear
and delight of the circus, the round
world, the full existence…

Blake, professional artists and printmaker (like Sister Corita) writes in MHH that “the pride of the peacock is the glory of God.” That’s circus energy, Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque,” gorgeous display and delight, sung about by Solomon and David in the Bible, that turns “the round world, the full existence.” (At Blake’s grave last month, I met someone of the Yazidi faith, the chief of whose seven deities is the Peacock Angel.) Color, sensual joy, “Energy is Eternal Delight” – This is art, this is circus, this is the Beatles and Blake and sweet Rick Astley and Clive “Rubber Man” Clarke and Corita Kent. And it’s life lit by the knowledge that, in Blake’s words, “every thing that lives is Holy.”