“Blake Oblique”
by
David Ohle
(from Io #29, 1982)
When Blake was eighteen, he was sent to the United States where he attended Oral Roberts University. He solved the problem of school expenses by constructing his own portable home at the edge of campus. It consisted of a covered wagon built on an old auto chassis, the wooden sides being covered with a canvas roof. Inside, there was a bunk, a stove, table, chair and a rack for books. He managed to live on about $5 a month by doing his own housekeeping and eating vegetables and fruits sent to him by his wife, Catherine, all the way from 3 Fountain Court, Blake’s London home.
If one visits the Historical Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, even today, one can see Blake’s cozy wagon, reconstructed in painstaking detail, down to the chamber pot and its darkly waxen contents.
There was a time, after his trial for sedition, when Blake learned to be idle. He wandered about from house to house, asking for crusts at back windows. He tattled and became a busybody, speaking things he oughtn’t. Arrested, he was publicly spanked, to no avail. In short order, he was haunting the alleyways, selling tobacco to innocent children, spreading gossip like butter. Again arrested, his poor feet were clubbed senseless with billy bats. He was then set loose in the icy streets. He fell asleep sitting on a gutter’s edge. By morning his feet were frozen, a sickening blue. He made his way to the Strand and begged a surgeon to take them off by any means at hand. The surgeon obliged, blowing an analgesic powder into Blake’s face before going to work with a bonesaw and a chisel. When the feet were freed of their stumps, the surgeon, one Joan Anglicus, head them into a nail keg and, for the moment, that was that. Exhausted, she lay in her bed to nap, where she dreamt of a Dutchman in wooden shoes. Waking, she went to a closet, selecting a pair of stout, birch shoetrees. Using metal clamps, carriage bolts, an auger, and tap-screws, she affixed them to Blake’s protruding ankle bone.
After a period of hopping around, Blake grew accustomed to his new feet, walking with ease, swimming in the Thames. He had no further idle inclinations, and soon was at work on the Book of Urizen.
Last Spring, while engaged in clearing out a body of marsh land, Blake came across a den of terrapins. He lined a wooden box with cotton. The terrapins were laid in rows on the cotton and covered with another cotton layer. On top of this was placed a second row of terrapins, and so on, until the box was filled. The box was covered with a blanket and stored in the cellar. There the terrapins slept through the winter while, upstairs, huddled near his stove, Blake illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress.
Mr. Labouchère tells a remarkable story regarding the heart of Louis XIV, and how it came to be buried at Westminster Abbey. It seems that one day Blake was having his morning tea in a cafe in Lyons in the company of another emigré, by the name of St. Denis, when St. Denis produced from his pocket something that looked like a piece of dried leather an inch or so long, which he presented to Blake. “I was,” he said, “in the cathedrals when the royal tombs were broken open and the contents scattered to the winds. This heart is that of Louis Quatorze. It was kept in a separate receptacle, and I managed to sneak away with it.” Blake, moved by the scientific spirit, wet his finger and rubbed it on the heart. He put the finger to his mouth after that, and before he could be stopped he put the heart into his mouth and swallowed it, whether by accident or design will never be known.
Very shortly afterward Blake died and was buried in Westminster Abbey. It is impossible he could have digested the thing, as age had almost petrified it. Consequently, the heart of the French king now reposes in the Abbey, enclosed in the body of Blake. Blake’s funeral orgies, arranged by Frederick Tatham, raised some dusty eyebrows in the sacred precincts, as he was buried just as he’d asked to be—dressed in lace nightgown and seated in a red Ferrari, with the seat slanting comfortably. To quote from his will:
Though fuel is plentiful in the afterworld, distances are great. If one needs to drive, say, from Bowlaoola to Lake Udan Adan, one needs a good, fast car. If you arrive in the afterworld without wheels, it’s tough buns. You then take your chances thumbing rides. It’s horrible. You never know who’ll pick you up. For Christ’s sake, it could be Bill Hayley, the Butcher of Litchfield, who beheaded, skinned, quartered and smoked a dozen plump women, including the sheriff’s mother, and wore a vest made of the skin of a woman’s torso. On the good side, though, it might be Mitzi Gaynor, the choicest trollop in the afterworld, a favorite of all dead men. No, one wants to have one’s own wheels. And then, when you get ready to shift back, why you can sell the thing at a steep price.
Biblioklept 