I wasn't going to even come onto Dev'art today, I have a lot of work to do, and I am catching up because I've been feeling sick and basically incapacitated for two days. However, I read something and just had to put it somewhere for one or two to read.
So I've loved English for a long time, but mostly because of the way it ties into History, and how, when investigated alone, turns up so many amazing things - and this is how I came into contact with poet and prophet William Blake. I say prophet, because if I was ever going to stake my soul on any theological belief it would truly be his; only one god, but all religions (even pagan ones) are simply deviations from an archaic singular true faith (and thus none is below another, but all are equal paths to god; my whole what kind of god sends one million brilliant budhists to hell? argument). However, that's not the point I'm making. I've always found aspects of literature which I can relate to; I can see a distorted indiviudal system of morality in myself similar to that of Yossarian, the calm but confusion detatchment of Alexander Petrovich, the rage inherent in Beowulf and the passionate love felt by Keats - but Blake has continually come up with things which so often reflect exactly who I am to myself - passages which define me, how I have felt, how I behave. It's the same old story; someone finds artist, identifies directly with them, because subjectively it's like we can have our own private conversation with them. To everyone it's different, art isn't facts and figures, only revelation.
What I really came to put here was this quote from Blake's work Jerusalem;
"I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's. I will not reason and compare; my business is to create."
That, to me, is just increadible, and something I have believed in even before reading.

1,000,000

Kind of hard
Hard to see
When you crawl
On your hands and your knees
With your face
In the trough
Wait your turn
While they finish you off
Don't know when it started
Don't know how
Should have found out
Should have happened by now
Got these lines
On my face
After all this time
And i still haven't found my place

I jump from every rooftop
So high so far to fall
I feel a million miles away
I don't feel any thing at all

I wake up
On the floor
Start it up again
Like it matters anymore
I don't know
If it does
Is this really all
That there ever was?
Put the gun
In my mouth
Close your eyes
Blow my fucking brains out
Pretty patterns
On the floor
That's enough for you
But i still need more

I jump from every rooftop
So high so far to fall
I feel a million miles away
I don't feel any thing at all

^{Nine Inch Nails}

Soliloquy of the Solipsist

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

^{Sylvia Plath}