William Blake and the .. oh look, a hare

Neurodivergence. Bats and hares. William Blake.

This is a double exposure of Thomas Hardy’s cottage, near where I grew up in Dorset (a lovely place)

The playing fields are tinder, cropped short, bleaching around the unwatered edges. I performed the most powerful of the rain magic: going into the garage to finding the spare hose, tediously unfurling it in order to stretch to water the front garden, which does not normally need watering. It certainly didn’t last year. It resulted in a small rain shower overnight. It’s not really sufficient. Some rumbles of distant thunder, a few drops of rain. The weather teases me.

At dusk, I sit and wait for the bats to come out, listening to the water fowl squabble for the best roosts. Part of the lake is covered by a strange floating green mat, so dense that a baby coot can walk along it like an island. It squeaks belligerently at its mother, but there is not way to get to her without swimming, which it doesn’t want to do. It strongly feels that it should be able to walk along the surface of all water. It seems contrary to the ways of coots to not want to swim.

The Egyptian geese* herd their mighty tribe into the water, which enrages the male swan. He comes running across from the other side of the lake, a flapping, honking rage splashing across the surface of the lake in his haste to destroy some little babies. The goose chicks flee the water, shrieking. The parental geese try and take on the swan but fail, and having subdued them the swan launches a land attack on the defenceless chicks, hotly pursued by the two geese parents. All birds involved are making an immense noise. People think I come to sit at the lake because it is peaceful there. They are wrong. I come because it is noisier than my head.

‘Swans are very territorial’ says a passing boy, which is true, but some swans are also arseholes, and that swan is an arsehole. They are like people in that respect. Far, far away I can just see his partner, a speck of white in the distance. That’s where the nest is, and he’s over here roughing up neonates and pretending he’s protecting his family? An absolute dickhead. His partner probably desperate for some proper help, but she can’t trust him not to run off on a quest to drown the innocent while leaving the cygnets to be eaten by foxes, so she’s stuck holding the nest while he’s swanning around looking like a love boat. Arsehole.

‘This is why all your babies got eaten last year’ I tell him

I wonder why he hates the Egyptian Geese so much. He doesn’t mind the mallards or the coots. Then I wonder why there are suddenly so many housemartins- swarms of them wheeling in the skies above the mansions. It must be too early for fledging, but there seem to be suddenly twice as many, or more, working on building and repairing their inverted mud huts as if a Saharan wind had blown them in. Where have they come from? What wonders have they seen? Antelope? Zebras? Isn’t it marvellous that there are so many mysteries, so many unanswered questions to ponder?

That afternoon I had sat in an hot room with the blinds pulled over a slightly open window listening to a psychiatrist explain the things I was doing right at that moment that were clinically relevant. It is not a surprise, as no one has ever thought that I am normal, but I’m starting to think that I do not have a special and unquantifiable neurodivergence as a response to my unique genius. I’m starting to think that I am actually the Mr Burns of neurodivergence; that all the conflicting ways my brain is wrong are working to create a homeostasis, the sort of effect of a real functioning person, who is gradually becoming unable to hold them all in place, falling into a shifting sea of symptoms. He asks me if there is any other neurodivergence in my family, things like dyslexia. ‘Oh god, they’ve all got that’, I say in an off hand manner ‘I mean. Not me. The others’ I can see that this is something thing that I should have mentioned three months ago. My family is so dyslexic I had genuinely forgotten, or maybe just not realised, that it wasn’t normal. It did make scrabble games interesting though.

He asks me what is happening outside. I tell him that there is a man with a big umbrella. Every now and then a breeze lifts the blinds enough for me to see the tip of it. I cannot see the man, but he’s talking to a woman. The psychiatrist is not aware of any of that though, because he’s paying attention to the job in hand the way I’m not. He writes about hyper-vigilance on a little note pad.

There are questions. I could ask why, if it’s so obvious, did no one notice sooner? Or why does one need a special psychiatrist to diagnose you with that particular disorder? Wouldn’t it be better to think of it more holistically, since I seem to approaching psychiatric diagnoses like primary school children approach Pokémon? Instead I ask if it’s absolutely necessary to get a proper assessment since getting one on the NHS seems to be a monumental chore, and doing things is really not my forte, especially things that involve forms. It’ll only make daily mail readers hate me even more. I am very tired, and it seems like a lot of work.

The psychiatrist assures me that there is neurodivergence which needs assessed. He explains that the systems I use to hold myself together take energy to maintain, and I am tired because other people are not spending energy that way. He seems to be good at his job. I should probably trust him. I might just go live with the bats though; nocturnal and perpetually manic, they suit me.

The bats come out at 9.18. I hear the pipistrelles emerging from thier summer roosts in the trees behind, and then ten minutes later, the daubentons skim quietly over the surface of the inky waters hoovering up midges with a deftness that defies imagination if you think hard about what they are doing, the blips of their echolocation speeding into a raspberry fart as they approach thier prey. Now the birds have gone to sleep it’s just me and a whirlwind of bats. It is as if their frantic wingbeats have become my thoughts, externalised. My mind becomes quiet, smooth like the surface of the lake.

The pipistrelles come out of the woods and race up and down the path, snatching the bugs that gather, attracted by my body heat, above my head. Across the lake, some boys are playing football. I can see my son, wearing his yellow shirt. The water is calm, the darkness is calm, the mind is calm; the bats are furious energy.

Workings

I know I said that I was going to carve out that stinkhorn in an attempt to make a print no one could possibly want let alone pay money for, but I got side tracked by the desire to carve this hare. You saw the drawing last week. I’ve nearly finished the key block, it’s coming along well. It’s nice to be working properly again.

I have printed a bunch more blackbirds and they have come out rather nicely, if you want one. I’ve resisted a bunch of stuff actually, if you care to look

Findings

I have been interested in William Blake so long I can barely remember when I first came across his work. It happens in stages; first, the easy poems. Lambs and Tygers. Alright, I suppose. As a teenager, I got into his more mystical paintings, which I liked sufficiently to go to London to see properly. Later I came to enjoy him as a printmaker, using innovative techniques that aren’t always properly understood. William Blake made his living engraving works for others; he only had 16 patrons that bought his own work in his lifetime** but is so beloved in our culture now, it’s quite inspiring for the luckless artist. I should probably dedicate a whole post, or maybe substack to my obsession of William and Kate Blake.

Phillip Hoare has a new book out: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. I listened to it on Spotify as I carved out that hare. Or rather, I listened about half of it. I am not very good at listening to things, and I concede that I might be the problem here, but I found myself confused, jumping between centuries, unsure of who was being discussed. It doesn’t help that the audiobook doesn’t seem to be broken up into chapters, but has tracks that begin and end at random.

I have questions. Why does Phillip dislike Dorset so much? I’m a Dorset lass so I take offence to this and also, why are we in Dorset, a place William Blake never visited? Derek Jarman and Paul Nash visited Dorset, and they liked Blake, but that doesn’t seem reason enough given that Blake is quite influential and Dorset is hardly remote. Most British artists that like Blake have probably been there. And the ones that dislike him too, I expect. There’s a lot about Paul Nash, but I don’t personally draw many similarities between the two artists. I have limited interest in Paul Nash.

Phillip wrote a book about whales, and that doesn’t seem to dampened his ardour, because there is quite a lot about whales in this book too. And some elephants. Maybe I need to listen to the end of the book to find out how it all ties together, but I feel there’s a genuine risk it doesn’t, and even if it does, I’ll miss it. I’m starting to feel he’s just writing a book about his current obsessions, and people in glass Substacks shouldn’t throw stones, so I should probably shut up.

Anyway, I can’t listen to the end of the book for 18 days because I’ve run out of Spotify audiobook hours, which means I also have to wait 18 days to find out how to thrive with neurodivergence. In the meantime, this is a really intresting book about William Blake that doesn’t involve any whales, Nash or hating on Dorset (it’s also available on Spotify).

Once again, sorry I am not keeping up reading your newsletters, your comments, or personalising thank you emails for orders. I am overwhelmed most the time. Thank you for your concerned messages. I hope to be back more online too. Love x

*FUNK DUCKS

**this is the reason we have such complete collections and regular exhibitions of his work at the Tate. Basically one guy bought everything, and that collection wasn’t really broken up.