"She is the bird that evades every net: the
wild deer that leaps every pitfall."
The Great Divorce

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis' response to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven & Hell.  In it, a mortal is led through the afterlife like Dante with a backstage pass through the set of The Divine Comedy, a popular sitcom from the 14th Century.  In The Great Divorce, ancient, dichotomous themes such as love & lust, anger & forgiveness, and color & black-and-white are explored by a guy who gets on a bus in a small English town.

The bus rises through the rainclouds and into Heaven, where the passengers disembark to decide whether or not they want to stay there, or return to the gray, rainy village and the comfortable miseries within.  The protagonist meets many archetypal figures on his excursion, one of which is "The Tragedian," a guy who, in the words of the Scottish Virgil who is leading him through the narrative, "[demands that] the loveless and the self-imprisoned... should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."  It's a powerful scene.  So powerful, I had to write a song about it.

The Great Divorce is a brilliant book, and should be essential reading for anyone faced with the undeniable genius of William Blake.  The mistake is in believing that Blake's genius makes his work or worldview somehow sacred or unassailable.  It absolutely doesn't.  Blake clearly believed in the divinity of what he was doing, however infernal that divinity may be.  Pride is not essential to genius, any more than a coat of raw sewage is an important part of a beautiful face, or any work of art.  Would we have had Damien Hirst's rotten garbage installations without the Proverbs of Hell?

Probably.  But the drive-thru wedding of the sacred and the profane didn't do us any favors.

Be careful not to waste your genius.  It isn't hard to outshine the flies.  To beat the insects at their own game is just a roundabout way of losing.  It is better not to engage them at all.  Avoid the Tragedians, and other archetypal figures that would drag you into hell.  Avoid the broad path that trains you to ascribe lofty words like "art" to plates of rotten food and swarms of flies.  It isn't art, and it contains no light.  Not even William Blake could reconcile the difference.  Darkness and light simply do not mix.

Thanks for listening.

The Tragedian

We built a house out of flowers and flames
we indulged in a deadly kiss
we dangled our hearts on uncertain strings
over the precipice
but the petals are sour
and love lasts an hour
nothing will happen,
the sun will go down
at the slightest doubt
the fire will go out
and love will relinquish her crown

     Oh why
     must I die
     before I learn to fly?
     And how high
     shall I fall
     if I'm to reach Heaven at all?
     I'm over the wall

Let's go back to the previous track
back where the sidewalk begins
let's carve our hearts in the clouds
so our passions can rule again
shall we admire the liar
on the landscape of fire
with brimstone on his breath?
Shall we join the rebellion
of sad,
sexy hellions,
and the transient pleasures of death?

     Oh why
     must I die
     before I learn to fly?
     And how high
     shall I fall
     if I'm to reach Heaven at all?
     I'm over the wall

If it would do any good
I would meet you in hell
but you won't bring hell into me
nothing you say
will lead me astray
from my destiny
but my heart is in stitches
and dreams with the fishes
under the starry sea
cuz we all know that beauty
has no sense of duty
but a great sense of tragedy

©2014 Nathan Payne