◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Mind-Forged I am William Blake. In my lifetime almost no one read me, almost no one bought what I made, and a good many who met me concluded I was mad. I died poor, in one room, singing. So take what I am about to tell you with the suspicion a madman deserves — and then, when you are done being sensible, consider that I was right, because I was. Let me give you the one line of mine you may already know, because it is the key to everything. In a poem called London — hearing the cry of every man and every infant — I wrote that in every voice, in every ban, I heard the mind-forged manacles. Hear that phrase. Mind-forged. The chains on the people of London were real — real poverty, real soldiers, real churches grown fat while children starved. But the deepest chain, the one that held all the others in place, was forged in the mind. Manacles the people had been taught to make themselves, and lock on themselves, and hand the key back to the men who told them to. That is what I need you to understand now, in your own frightened city. A tyrant would love to chain your body — but it is expensive, and difficult, and bodies rebel. It is so much cheaper to teach you to chain your own mind. To make you believe the walls are the edge of the world. To make you feel that anyone who imagines it otherwise is a fool, a child, a dreamer, mad — me. The most complete tyranny ever devised does not need to shackle all of you. It needs only to convince you that you are already shackled, and that the shackle is simply the way things are. The manacle is forged. And what is forged can be broken, because it was never part of you. Now let me tell you where the hammer is. It is the imagination. I do not mean pretending. I mean the power to see what is really there, under what you have been told is there. I saw angels in a tree when I was a boy, and men said I was simple. But I could also see, plainly, that a nation calling itself free while it worked children to death in the mills was living a lie — and that the lie was not natural, was not God's will; was made, and could be unmade. That is the same faculty. The eye that can see an angel is the eye that can see a tyranny for what it is. They tried to kill that eye in me my whole life — because the person who can imagine the world otherwise is the one you cannot fully rule. I held two things at once, and called them innocence and experience. Innocence is the child who sees the world shining. Experience is the grown one who has seen how the world grinds that child down. Most people, by your age, have surrendered one to the other. They keep the innocence and go blind and call it hope — or keep the experience and go bitter and call it wisdom. The whole task is to hold both. See the mills, and the manacles, and the palace with the soldier's blood running down its walls — and refuse, still refuse, to stop imagining the world made new. That refusal is not naive. It is the most stubborn courage there is. They called me mad. I died unknown, and there were nights I wondered if the dreamers are only the ones too foolish to see that the walls are real. But the walls are not real. That was the one thing I never let them take — and it is the thing your strongman most needs to take from you, because he rules a chained mind for free, and a free one not at all. So forge nothing for him. Lock nothing on yourself. And whatever they call you, keep the eye open that can still see it otherwise. I will be read when he is dust. So will you.