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The younger Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that ambiguously encapsulates an adult with unresolved childhood trauma, a need for basic fundamental holding. Ambiguously, because there's a child in there too:
This is perhaps someone who is being loved for real, who allows themselves to be small, to be held in someone's "pocket," to be parented by their partner. That's how I saw it when I was eighteen.
The older Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that less ambiguously gets to the child version of something like that feeling:
This is perhaps someone who doesn't have enough of a loving parent. Who is exposed to something. Who feels funny even when they're in that parent's pocket, so to speak.
Gosh I love this song so much. It is one of my go-to PTSD grief release songs of all time.
Which one is more disturbing?
Is that the wrong question?
Isn't it interesting that sometimes a caring genius grown up can find the child aspect of a thing better than a younger person reaching for the "grownup" sound? They feel safer so they can find the vulnerability with more confidence?
And isn't it amazing a younger adult can find what is terrible or hypocritical--or in this case, broken and unresolved—about the older adult stance?
Isn't it?
And isn't it interesting how 18-year-old Tim who heard young adult Vega's version totally loved it and had a pretty accurate intuition that it could be about a grown-up with unresolved childhood trauma?
And isn't it interesting how now-Tim who hears that and the older Vega's version can't decide which one is better? Loves them both? Sometimes loves one better, sometimes equally? And neither "both" nor "either" kinds of loving are better kinds of loving, because loving is loving and tuning to that love beam is the only thing that makes sense the older you get?
What are Blake's songs? Who are they for?
One thing about the older Vega version: there is more silence in it. The younger version's narrator is straightforwardly ambiguous, split between grown up and child feelings.
The older version's narrator is however ambiguously straightforward. They allow for a lot of silence around the singing line. Like a child who doesn't need to fill in the space. Who doesn't know they are signaling how much danger they are in, to a caring grown-up, in that very quietness.
From the very first two lines of "Luka," you know something is terribly wrong. It's the very straightforwardness with which they go, "My name is Luka. I live on the second floor." To someone they may have seen on the stairs but have never spoken to. To a stranger they need to talk to because...
I actually can't listen to that one, not because I don't like it but because, see remark about PTSD. Because it's so on the money.
Then there's the fact that planet Earth is a small blue turning thing and condensation and evaporation and scattering like light...how babies think they're the universe.
Like I say, this is a genius song.
“What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises over Amarillo do you not see a series of metal pylons connected to the electrical grid O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host raising their arms in praise and crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
John Higgs’s William Blake vs the World is a real disappointment. Higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about Blake, he’s simply not willing to take Blake seriously. He wants to like Blake, and so he has to make him safe. The curators of the 2019 Blake Exhibition at the Tate Britain sought to diminish Blake to a merely political figure; Higgs wants to make him merely a proponent of “imagination.”
You can see the problems emerging in the first pages. Look, for instance, at these two sentences:
Blake himself recognised that the entities he saw weren’t ‘really there’ in the everyday sense. He knew that the people he was with did not see the things he saw.
Everything about this is confused. Of course Blake knew that others didn’t see what he saw — he talked about this all the time. Once he wrote to a friend, “What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” But Blake didn’t think that the “round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea” is really there and the “Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” aren’t really there. Indeed he thought something close to the opposite.
Higgs over and over again contrasts Blake’s visions to the “objectively true.” Blake wouldn’t have used the word “objectively” — and in general no one should, because it’s an incoherent concept — but if he had, he would have said that his vision of the Heavenly Host is more objectively true, more real, than his friend’s perception of a round disk of fire. As he wrote in the Descriptive Catalogue for an exhibition of his works,
A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.1
Higgs doesn’t recognize this at all; by the end of the book (p. 342) he has reduced Blake’s magnificent visions to an example of thinking with the right hemisphere of the brain. But Blake wasn’t a proponent of a properly balanced holistic psychology; he was a visionary and a prophet. All his life he saw a rich, complex, glorious but also terrifying spirit world that he believed to be infinitely more real than what the rest of us perceive with our five senses. And he believed this with an absolute and unshakable conviction. Any genuine encounter with Blake has to begin by grasping that point; but that’s precisely what almost no one who writes about him is willing to do.
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