Becoming A Yes Sayer

August 29, 2024 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

A friend pointed me to this poem by Wm. Blake. How important is friendship, a few associations that are mutually cultivated for years, over an arc of time. I owe my growth as an adult to the recommendations received from friends, the books, poems, film, – all of that, the deposits in the bank of culture, payed for by many who are now dead, have made a difference.

The Garden of Love

By William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

It seems to me that the poet recognizes the innocent play of childhood as nothing less than a redeemed, transcendent form of life for our species. Perhaps you can remember what it was like to play as a young child? The wonder ignited by the imagination was effortless, and endless. And now, on that expansive green playground, is discovered an institution constructed to valorize play. We’d call that development.

But wait, – access is obstructed, closed, and why? Rules, ‘do this and don’t do that’ a many-layered regimen that only an elite who have taken vows seriously attempt. You can see them there busy among the tomb-stones…

And their work is to weave a ‘Thou shalt not’ with briars for my joys & desires. Momentarily I am without words, a sensation of WTF…

In my imagination I know what Nietzsche would have replied to the scene depicted by Blake.

I want to learn more and more
to see as beautiful what is necessary in things;
then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.

Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

   I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.
      I do not want to accuse;
         I do not even want to accuse those who accuse.
Looking away shall be my only negation.

And all in all and on the whole:
some day I wish to be
only a yes-sayer

The Gay Science by Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman, aphorism 276