A View From The American Left- Which Side Are You?- Union Busting Coal Bosses, Sellout Labor Tops Harlan County Miners: Pay Them Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1160	6 September 2019

Union Busting Coal Bosses, Sellout Labor Tops

Harlan County Miners: Pay Them Now!

“No Pay, We Stay!” echoes across Harlan County, Kentucky, Appalachian coal country where heroes and martyrs of labor battles past lie buried. Since July 29, laid-off miners have occupied railroad tracks to stop coal from being sold off by non-union Blackjewel, the bankrupt mining company that axed 1,800 jobs without notice in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Court documents show that management knew there was no money in its accounts when it cut paychecks on June 28.

Now the determined former mine workers, who have no union to defend them, are being jacked around by the bosses’ bankruptcy courts and the bloodsucking banks, which heaped financial penalties on the miners when their checks bounced, forcing them to scramble to pay bills. Even unemployment claims have been held up because Blackjewel issued no pink slips. The company also failed to make proper reports to Social Security and payments to the health savings plan for its workforce. In Kentucky alone, miners are owed at least $2.5 million. Kopper Glo Mining has since bought the Harlan mines, offering a pittance of $450,000 to the miners and a paper promise to rehire some of them. Pay the miners now!

While the new bosses seek to tamp down the anger of the miners by offering them a few crumbs, finance capitalists feast on the main course as Blackjewel assets are liquidated. Riverstone Holdings stands first in line, having declared itself “super-priority senior secured debtor-in-possession” when loaning the mining outfit $32 million beginning two years ago. The very purpose of bankruptcy law and the courts that enforce it is to protect the interests of capital.

Bankruptcy proceedings have been used by the bosses in industry after industry to slash labor costs and gut unions, and coal mining is a prime example. In the 1970s, the coal barons hatched a plan to move production from the heavily unionized, labor-intensive coal fields of Appalachia and the Midwest to more efficient, high-profit strip mining in the West, far from the historic base of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Today, Wyoming is home to some 40 percent of U.S. coal production.

As the mine owners packed up and went west, bankruptcies became their favored weapon for busting the UMWA. Operations were reorganized under Chapter 11 to close union mines piecemeal and reopen them without union labor. This wave of bankruptcies, particularly over the past decade, goes some way toward explaining why the Blackjewel mines were non-union, including in Harlan County. “Bloody Harlan” was the site in the 1930s and again in the ’70s of pitched battles between miners fighting for union organization and the bosses’ armed attack dogs, both in and out of uniform. Immortalized in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., the 1974 Brookside strike was won when the UMWA ranks engaged in a nationwide week-long memorial strike in response to the murder of a union supporter by one of the Duke Power Company’s gun thugs.

In the course of the 1930s, the UMWA became the largest and arguably most powerful union in the U.S., with 800,000 members. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, representing 20,000 active miners, less than half of the roughly 50,000 remaining. As the coal bosses shuttered mines and slashed jobs over the years, the UMWA bureaucracy facilitated the decline in union power, preaching reliance on the bosses’ political representatives, especially the Democrats but also Republicans.

In a sign of the times, there is not a single working UMWA member in all of Kentucky. The state’s last union mine, the Highland Mine, belonged to Patriot Coal. That company, spun off by Peabody Energy in 2007, had been “set up to fail” in a bid by the mine owners to purge their books of UMWA pension and health care liabilities. After Patriot declared bankruptcy in 2013, the UMWA tops pinned the union’s fortunes on its status as a creditor, as well as on the good graces of Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then U.S. Senator from West Virginia and great-grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. The Highland Mine closed two years later.

The plight of the Blackjewel miners is emblematic of the plight of coal miners throughout Appalachia and beyond. The industry has for years experienced job contraction, a trend fueled by capitalist market forces and technological development, including greater resort to strip mining. With the boom in hydraulic fracking, natural gas is now abundant and cheaper. Last year, the electricity-generating capacity of natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. surpassed that of coal-fired plants for the first time. The accompanying devastation of laid-off mine workers and their communities is a testament to the irrational destructiveness of capitalist production for private profit. Miners who for decades put their lives and lungs at risk to perform backbreaking labor deep underground are now deemed expendable by the capitalists.

There is a burning need for a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized, in the coal industry and throughout the entire energy sector, in order to bolster the fighting capacity of the workers against the bosses. Unions are vital to enforce safety standards on the job and to wrest real gains from the employers, like the cradle-to-grave health care miners once had. At the same time, though, trade-union struggle alone cannot stop the capitalist rulers from looting the wealth of society and discarding their wage slaves when operations are no longer profitable.

Such struggles must be linked to a fight to expropriate the mines, gas and oil wells and other means of production through socialist revolution, which would lay the basis for a rational planned economy. Crucial to this perspective is the forging of a multiracial workers party, the necessary instrument to bring the working class to power. When those who labor rule, production will serve human need, and only then will everyone be provided for, with new technology serving to better the lives of all, rather than to pauperize whole swaths of the population.

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

Earlier this year, the UMWA tops held a “30th Anniversary Pittston Strike Celebration.” Far from a “victory for the labor movement,” as was claimed there, the eleven-month strike was betrayed by the bureaucrats, especially then UMWA head and current AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka and his lieutenant, Cecil Roberts, who is today the union president. With miners industrywide champing at the bit to fight the coal bosses and their government, UMWA leaders instead threw everything into a toothless “corporate campaign” that appealed to the supposed good conscience of the ruthless capitalist class. Among other things, union members were sent to beg the big banks not to lend money to the Pittston Coal Company. After wildcat strikes broke out in ten states and a coal-processing plant was occupied, Trumka & Co. herded the ranks back to work, bowing before court injunctions and bending over backward to appease the “friend of labor” Democrats they supported.

Over the decades, the combativity of the miners often ran up against the UMWA bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist order. For example, a series of hard-fought strikes in the 1970s saw miners revolt against every wing of their union officialdom, from the despotic Tony Boyle to the treacherous Arnold Miller, notorious for asking the Labor Department to intervene against his opponent in a union election. In fact, the Great Coal Strike of 1978 was waged in defiance of both Miller and a Taft-Hartley back-to-work order issued by Democrat Jimmy Carter. (For more, see WV pamphlet “The Great Coal Strike of 1978.”)

Pittston proved a turning point for the union, as Trumka was able to hogtie the historically militant UMWA membership by playing by the bosses’ rules. His successor, Roberts, has followed suit. In recent months, the UMWA president invited the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls to coal country to drum up support for candidates of that party of the class enemy, while also praising the Trump administration for its efforts boosting the coal companies. Truth is, as the Blackjewel bankruptcy attests, Trump’s claim to have “saved coal” is a cruel hoax. But so is the “just transition” offered the miners by Democratic Party politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders under the “Green New Deal.” The transition in question is the pie-in-the-sky promise of job retraining for workers in the fossil fuel industries that these Dems want to wipe out in the name of combating climate change.

The Democratic Socialists of America and other “progressive” Democrats advocate this scam, which is little more than a ploy to garner votes, especially from student youth, liberal environmentalists and select union bureaucrats, by putting a “worker friendly” spin on anti-carbon bourgeois energy policy. The reformists of Socialist Alternative peddle the same rubbish, calling their version of how best to power the capitalist economy a “Green New Deal for working people.” The proposition that the capitalist rulers will provide miners with decent jobs outside the mining industry is ludicrous. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, coal communities have been totally impoverished.

The anarchic and crisis-ridden capitalist system not only devastates the working masses but also is the main obstacle to addressing human-induced global warming on the necessary global scale. Only in the context of a world socialist economy that relegates poverty to the past can a rational plan be hammered out to modulate climate change and minimize its human toll. At the end of the day, those touting a “Green New Deal” are using the issue of global warming to advance an anti-worker agenda.

Its backers place themselves in the tradition of liberal hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal legislation was designed to restore capitalist profits and contain working-class struggles within bounds acceptable to the ruling class. The 1935 Wagner Act, which is hailed by labor officialdom to this day, set up a mechanism to put union organizing under the thumb of the capitalist state. In so doing, FDR was intent on keeping the new wave of unionization from falling under the sway of avowed Marxists. The year prior, three victorious citywide strikes led by communists and socialists—in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo—had opened the door to the organization of the CIO industrial unions.

The UMWA and other unions need a leadership that won’t crawl on its knees for any capitalist politician but will fight on the picket lines. A leadership proceeding from the standpoint of class against class would break all union ties to the Democrats and launch important struggles, not least a concerted campaign from Wyoming to West Virginia to bring workers in the strip mines, the vast fracking fields and everywhere else into the unions. In the face of the catastrophe of joblessness, workers armed with a class-struggle program would fight for a sliding scale of hours to divide up the available work at no loss in pay, among other transitional demands aimed at uniting the proletariat and the unemployed in struggle to sweep away the capitalist exploiters. The Spartacist League/U.S., uniquely on the American left, has as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party to make a new society possible.

A Slice Of Teenage Life-Circa 1960s-With Myrna Loy And Cary Grant’s “The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer” In Mind

A Slice Of Teenage Life-Circa 1960s-With Myrna Loy And Cary Grant’s “The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer” In Mind    

By Guest Film Critic Prescott Blaine

[Prescott Blaine, now comfortably retired, comfortably for those editors, publishers and fellow writers particularly those who have tangled with him on the film criticism beats for the past forty years or so decided he just had to comment about his own growing up in the 1950s teenage life. I had done a short film review on a 1940s film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. Cary Grant the bachelor to Shirley Temple’s bobby-soxer with Myrna Loy more well-known as the helpful detective in her own right wife Nora Charles opposite William Powell’s Nick in the seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series of the same decade. I had in passing mentioned my reasoning for even touching this piece of fluff. The key was in the title, or part of it, the “bobby-soxer” part which represented to my mind one of the key terms from teenage times in the 1940s where bobby-soxers were associated with the fast jitter-bugging set since those socks made it easier to traverse those slippery high school gym floor where sock hops have been held since, well, since they started having school dances to keep unruly and wayward kids in check. I figured I would get a low-down on what was what.

I had followed a false lead though since despite the enticing possibility that I would learn something about teenage life in the immediate post-World War II period the real thrust of the film was the inevitable romancing between Grant and Loy’s characters. I should have sensed that if goody-goody Shirley Temple was holding forth I would learn less about that decade’s teen concerns than if I had asked a surviving elderly uncle of mine.

Oh sure I did learn that girls went crazy for guys with “boss” cars, worried, worried somewhat about their reputations meaning worrying about being known as high school sluts and that they were as perfidious when the deal went down as the teenage girls in Prescott’s and my generation and probably now too. When I mentioned that to him one day in his office at the American Film Review where he still shows up occasionally to do pinch-hit work when the editor Ben Goldman needs a quick “think” piece to fill up an issue he laughed at me. Laughed at me foremost because of my, his term, sophomoric idea that you could learn anything about teen life in any age when you had certified stars like Grant and Loy tangling just short of the satin sheets and because it would not be until the 1980s when Hollywood produced some films based on S.E. Hinton’s novels that you would get anything like an informative look at a slice of real teen life.        

Follow me here to get an idea of what Mr. Blaine is like when he gets on his hobby-horse. From that “profound” (my quotation marks) comment he asked, I won’t say begged because Prescott is not like that most of the time, or at least he wasn’t in the old days, to let me use my space here to go back into his teenage days in the 1950s, the mid-1950s when rock and roll came running up the road (although we are near contemporaries my coming of age teenage time was about five years later and reflected a drought period in rock and roll which I filled in by “discovering” the blues). Needless to say since this piece has Prescott’s by-line he sold me on the idea-for one shot anyway. Below is what he wants to share about 1950s teenage culture-Sam Lowell]    

WTF Sam (a term I would not have used in my professional career in print and certainly not to start an article but as Sam has mentioned I am comfortably ensconced in retirement and besides I am playing on his dime) even a wet behinds the ears kid in the 1950s who didn’t figure out what was what until sometime in the mid-1960s knows that when the fresh breeze of rock and roll hit the planet the whole thing opened up the big three that was on every alive and awake teenager, teenage boy (the girls can speak for themselves but they will tell the same basic story) mind-drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants and grabbing every loose girl not tied down. (Not literally but then we had a strange male-driven code honored I think more in the breech than the observance that if a girl had a guy that meant she was off-limits to other guys. Like I said honored in the breech much mother that the observance.)

WTF sex is what I am talking about because all three things were connected by a million threads, a million threats that made up  1950s teenage life (maybe now too but since drive-in movies and restaurants and maybe access to girls too depended on the golden age of the automobile car, borrowed or sweated for, which today’s youth are not nearly as enamored of, hell, some of them don’t even have driver’s licenses that premise may be questioned). Tie all that in with rock and roll and the rest of what I have to say makes total sense even to a guy like Sam.

A lot of what was what then had to do with corner boy life something that has for the most part gone by the boards between the rise of the malls (and “mall rats” a totally different thing than on the edge, quasi-illegal corner boy life reflecting certain hungers that never could be satisfied in a strictly legal way which the denizens of the mall do not exhibit since they are fixed up pretty well) and the totally bizarre actions of local police departments to hustle kids off the street corners on behalf of  local businessmen and satraps. Let’s face it the whole mix had to be cemented with dough, dough anyway we could get it, or we would still be standing on those forlorn corners (or doing time in some state or county institution).

Not to belabor the point but it bears notice it is amazing how much our waking hours, maybe dreaming hours too centered on girls (and those dreaming hours included the then forbidden talk about masturbation, about what Father Lally up at Sacred Heart Catholic Church called “touching” yourself but we all knew what he meant even if we were not quite sure what masturbation was and would have never dared asked parents about such an evil thing (according to Lally who would later be transferred out because he “touched” boys and girls and was an early figure of interest in the breakthrough Catholic priest abuse scandal that rocked  the archdiocese of Boston, via the spotlight from The Boston Globe). Nor would they have voluntarily or involuntarily been forthcoming about sex issues and so we learned most of it on the streets-mainly wrong or stupid.                 

There were some funny parts, maybe not funny at the time but funny now and stuff I want to tell about for the record since not only are we fading from the scene but the two- generation social media-driven gap between my growing up time and today is far greater than between box-soxers of the 1940s and the cashmere sweaters of the 1950s. A staple of existence then for poor boys especially was the weekly school and/or church dance since we could not afford other pay dances held in various locations for the progeny of the town swells. The dances although touted by the school and church authorities as keeping us youth from going over the edge on the rock and roll craze which they saw as just an episode, a fade really were our lifeline into social existence. (That Father Lally mentioned early used the dances for laying a trap for his prey as it turned out and more than one teacher chaperone at school dances got a little over the top when the girls came along looking all sexy and serene.)   They at least got us to bathe, shave if necessary, use deodorant, slick our hair and wear something other than cuff-less chinos or blue jeans since sports jackets and dress shirts were required.

But that was all social graces stuff. What we craved, what we spent the week day-dreaming and talking about was who we would dance with (or who would dance with us). Above all else who would we dance the last slow dance of the night with after our night’s efforts. Most of the music of the times, mercifully in many cases, was geared to fast dancing which meant each partner was more or less free to do their own gyrations and keep a safe distance from toes and other vulnerable body parts of that partner but the last dance was always a slow one, one that those “going steady” immediately got up and danced to, and others who had some prior arrangement as well.

A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

A Writer’s Tale-Vincente Minnelli’s Film Adaptation Of James Jones’ “Some Came Running” (1958)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Josh Breslin  

Some Came Running, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, directed by Vincente Minelli, adapted from the novel by James Jones, 1958  

No question I was first drawn to Some Came Running, a film based on the novel of the same name by James Jones whose more famous novel Here To Eternity also was adapted to the screen and stands as one of the great classic films of the modern cinema, by the ex-soldier’s story and then by his plight as a blocked writer. The draw of the ex-soldier’s story reflected something that had been in my own experience about coming back to the “real” world after the military. That seems to be the character played by Frank Sinatra Dave Hirsh’s situation. That inability to go to the nine to five routine, to settle down after military service had shaken him out of his routine rang a bell. In my own military service generation, in my own service, I ran across plenty of guys who couldn’t deal with the “real” world coming back from Vietnam and who tried to hide from that fact as “brothers under the bridges” alternate communities out in places like Southern California. I see and hear about young Iraq and Afghanistan War service personnel having the same woes and worse, having incredibly high suicide rates. So yeah, I was drawn to Dave’s sulky, moody, misshapen view of the world.           

The story line is a beauty. Dave, after a drunken spree, finds he was shipped by bus back in that state by some guys in Chicago to his Podunk hometown in Parkman, Indiana, a town he had fled with all deliberate speed when he was a kid orphaned out by his social-climbing older brother Frank because, well, because he was in the way of that social-climb after their parents die. Dave was not alone in his travels though since he had picked up, or had been attached to, a floozy named Ginny, played by Shirley MacLaine, who will make life hell for him in the end. As he became accustomed to his old hometown and while deciding whether to stay or pick up stakes (the preferred fate of his brother and his also social-climbing wife) he was introduced to a local school teacher Gwen, played by Martha Hyer, who will also make hell for him in the end since he was quickly and madly in love with her but she was seriously stand-offish almost old maid stand-offish since she had had a few tastes of his rough-hewn low life doings. Doings which were encouraged by a gambler, Bama, played by Dean Martin who became his sidekick.        

But here is the hook that almost saved Dave and almost lit a spark under dear Gwen. Dave was a blocked writer, had some time before written a couple of books that were published and had gathered some acclaim, were well written. Gwen attempted to act as his muse, and did prove instrumental in getting a work of his published. To no avail since Dave was not looking for a muse, well, not a muse who wasn’t thinking about getting under the silky sheets. No go, no go despite Dave’s ardent efforts. Frustrated Dave turned to Ginny and whatever charms she had-and the fact that she loved him unconditionally despite their social and intellectual differences. In the end Dave in a fit of hubris decided to marry Ginny after being rebuffed by Gwen enough times. The problem though was that Ginny had a hang on gangster guy trailing her who was making threatening noises about putting Dave, and/ or Ginny underground. In the end they were not just threatening noises as he wounded Dave and killed poor bedraggled Ginny.

Watch this one-more than once and read James Jones’ book too which includes additional chapters about those soldiers who could not relate to the “real” world after their military experiences. This guy could write, sure could write about that milieu based on his own military service. (There is a famous photograph of Jones, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, the three great soldier-boy American literary lights of the immediate post-World War II war period with Jones in uniform if I recall.)                

Afterward by Greg Green-site manager:

When I first assigned Josh Breslin this film review my intention was for him to discuss a bit his own, Dave-like, writer’s troubles and more importantly, his troubles with the “real” world when he came back from his military service in Vietnam during the 1960s. Josh had initially agreed to put some material about that in to bring the reader into the picture about what was eating at Dave (really author James Jones), what drove him over the edge. When it came time to do so though Josh balked, said he couldn’t do it, couldn’t  bring back those hard times without serious mental disturbance even fifty years later.

What I did not know at the time but which when I confronted Josh about breaking the terms of our agreement it turned out those hard times had a name, a name which I have since become painfully familiar with-Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe as his old hometown growing up guys forever called him. Josh was not one of them but had met the Scribe out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 when he had just graduated from high school and before he was to start college at State U up in Maine, his home state in the fall. That led to a big-time friendship which was only broken up by the Scribe’s own military service the next year.

No, that is not right. Their friendship in the final analysis was broken up a few years later by that fiendish war in Vietnam which took its toll on both of them. The Scribe, like Josh, had his problems coming back to the “real: world, got seriously into drugs, dried out a bit, did some great stories on those “brothers under the bridge” for which he won a bunch of awards which helped for a while. Josh made the turn but the Scribe, for wanting habits, for his own hubris, for kicks, for his whole freaking overblown life to hear Josh tell the story didn’t, got caught up in the cocaine craze and made the cardinal mistake of using what he was trying to sell. For his efforts he got a potter’s field grave down in Sonora, Mexico courtesy of some ill-advised and deadly busted drug deal with the emerging drug cartels that went awry. So Josh, maybe someday you will tell us Josh, you are right to balk on your part of this assignment now though.      

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

By Liam Leahy

When the deal went down the hell with street ruffian and gangster of words and thefts Gregory Corso, the hell with Zen Buddha lotus flowers sulks Gary Snyder, the hell with bright lights in the headlights like some virgin Bambi Mike McClure, double the hell with clear the coffeehouses and jazz bars out with his primal wailing to Keil, devil servant, Phil Larkin, ditto double the hell with trying to hit that high white note that only jazz boys and girls can aspire to MaJohn Dupree, back to single hells for Dante boys all choir practice glow bum-tucked like Kenneth Rexforth (and don’t forget Rexforth’s daughter who everybody took a run at and why not even gay boys like Ginsberg), to hell as well the drag queen artless Tim Riley before he fanned the flames of Miss Judy Garland’s hem and made bluegrass green in ocean spray to the China seas bays filled with oil tankers and sodomites sing his naughty boy praises. And in the end, the bookend three hot dog fucks like Miss Julie Johnson in some Joe and Nemo alley.

More retrospective, more circumspect rumbling fullback out of some Merrimack estuary looking hot dog hungry, looking like some holy goof displaced out of European DP camps and he only Icelandic run bound dropping to the titanic seas.  So Jack, Jack, Kerouac, the fuck with that Jack stuff Ti Jean of ten million Allan Ginsberg dreams and Neal Cassidy lost father’s gets some play, okay  Very much more circumspect and there is no way around it this time Moloch of modern times stripping poor Tom Eliot of everything but his shoddy bedding and his lost in the hills and trenches of Eastern France cursive language as wave after wave fell to complete one square yard Carl Solomon’s dear friend and his mother howler in the dust for all the good it did him, or her, Allan Ginsberg. Yeah, the beat down, beat around, beat sound, beatitude beat to hear holy goof Jack tell it in his Tanqueray funks, crowd that took up plenty of air come 1950s in the states come desolation row time.

Then there was the glue, the guy who kept the torch bright, the guy who had enough knowledge of business which almost to a man (or woman of that matter), beats heating squares up like toast, scorned except come poetry reading time some foggy and rainy nights, book signing when Random House said piss off, putting money in the bucket for the Thunderbird struck nights, back room shacking up to keep from the coldest days in August world. Yeah, Happy Birthday Baby, Buddha in cowboy boots and tepid wrangler jeans Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the magic 100 years. Connection,  brother, connection. 

Click on the heading to link to the William Blake Archives to view some of his illustrations and other artwork for which he was also famous.

Markin comment:

Okay, here is the chain of thought to this entry. I recently posted some work by the "beat" poet (and San Fransisco City Lights Bookstore creator)Lawrence Ferlinghetti (from Coney Island Of The Mind). And that made me think once again of fellow "beat' poet Allen Ginsberg. And if you think of Allen Ginsberg you have to think of mad poet Walt Whitman (singer of 19th century America as Ginsberg sang of the 20th century). And if you think of Whitman you have to go back to the "max daddy", mad, mad William Blake. Simple, right?


Milton [excerpt]
by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!


A Divine Image
by William Blake

Cruelty has a Human heart
And Jealousy a Human Face,
Terror, the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is forgéd Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd,
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

Proverbs of Hell
by William Blake

From "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"


In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.

All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.
Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
A dead body, revenges not injuries.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Folly is the cloke of knavery.
Shame is Prides cloke.

~

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the
destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool, shall be both thought wise, that
they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse,
the elephant, watch the fruits.
The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.
One thought, fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

~

The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse,
how he shall take his prey.
The thankful reciever bears a plentiful harvest.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
The soul of sweet delight, can never be defil'd.
When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius, lift up thy head!
As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest
lays his curse on the fairest joys.
To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
Damn, braces: Bless relaxes.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!
Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

~

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands &
feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird of the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement,
are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
Enough! or Too much!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.