PROVERBS OF HELL

Caption: "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."--Blake (Note: God was not available for comment.)

Welcome to William Blake Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned yesterday, one of Blake's strongest and oddest works is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To put it mildly, Blake had a unique way of looking at the world. He saw Heaven as representing passivity and reason and hell as representing energy and activity. He thought we needed some of both.

Some of his oddest sayings from this work are called The Proverbs of Hell. Yesterday's post included a few of these. Here are some more:

The tigers 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!

As the caterpillar 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.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

Some of the rest are even odder than these. Check them out and enjoy!

And here's a parting shot:

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

ANTHROPOLOGY UPDATE. El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology is actually a practical college major these days. Back in the Paleozoic era of my days at (we are) Marshall, being an anthropology major meant you weren't thinking too hard about a day job. Recently, as blogged here, social scientists and ethnologists have been recruited both by major corporations (from science to marketing) and by the military.

However, a new ad hoc group has formed called the Network of Concern Anthropologists. They have issues a statement urging fellow social scientists not to participate in the war in Iraq. Excerpt:

The War in Iraq has created a dangerous situation not only for the nation but also for the discipline of anthropology. The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

I think our so-called leaders might be a little less inclined to imperial hubris if they had a better understanding of other cultures and of social science generally, but I doubt that social scientists could play a critical role if they just another part of the system.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of people converged on Jena, Louisiana protesting the treatment of the "Jena 6" high school students by the criminal justice system after a series of racial conflicts was sparked after white students hung nooses from a tree.

IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED how baby sea turtles spent their formative years, the answer is here.

SPEAKING OF THE IRAQ WAR, which was a really bad idea, the number of internal refugees there is now estimated at 2 million.

I KNOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ECONOMIC JUSTICE BLOG, but remember those Indonesian "hobbit" bones found a few years back? Well, on the basis of more discoveries, they appear to have been a distinct species that branched off from our kin around 800,000 years ago and lived in caves 120,000 to 10,000 years ago.

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, here's an article on WV's "revamped" Medicaid program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED