You should certainly click to make this larger.
Okay, here's what God looks like.
And where do you get that except Vleeptron?
Note immediately God is a He. About 12 years ago in my town, Northampton Massachusetts USA, we awoke on Easter Sunday to find a huge painted graffito on the Catholic Church across the street from the all-women Smith College:
SHE IS RISEN
I don't think the miscreant or miscreants were ever apprehended. What crime would they have been charged with?
I don't know what that thing is in God's right hand. If you know, please Leave A Comment. Nor do I know which particular Bible passage Blake is illustrating. Leave A Comment.
The question of God's gender raises the most fundamental issues of Entitlement. If God is indeed a male, that certainly is a strong indication that females are somewhat 2nd-class creations of God, and probably should have limited rights and privileges.
This also harkens to a major historical transition. People in huge swaths of Eurasia and Africa used to worship The Big Mother in a variety of names, all usually with big hips and large breasts. The ancients were not dummies. They understood males, and their amazing organs, were involved in Life in some significant but vague and fairly brief way.
But every human being grew inside and came out of a woman's womb, and likewise did all sheep and rams, and cows and bulls, and even things that hatched from eggs came from females. Then all mammals need mother's milk to survive infancy.
Obviously the Big Part of Life -- and the people we should be most grateful to for being Alive, and for having meat on the table, and wool sweaters -- were the females. At every birth, the whole show is about Her. Sometimes they can't even reach Him on the cell phone, he's busy at the office, or nobody even knows who he is.
Regular Vleeptron subscribers may have noticed I like William Blake a lot. Like Glenn Gould, we Earthies had no right to expect anyone like this would ever come along and do things like the things he did.
I hope when we send our radio messages and gold DVDs in space probes, we toss in some of Blake's poetry and lots of his startling and astonishing images. The Sentients out there deserve William Blake every bit as much as they deserve Mozart and Chuck Berry. Perhaps this is the last century in which we will even be able to send postcards and souvenirs of who we were and the good things we did.
But anyway, there's always all this talk about God, there's no escaping it. Blake believed he knew what God looks like, he believed he had seen and dreamed God, and left a lot of watercolors and engravings. Of course many religions and denominations who believe in God strictly forbid any visual or sculptural depiction of Him, and call all such idolotry.
Blake was -- to put it mildly -- a Non-Conformist though a deeply religious man (possibly with a bit of Swedenborgian thrown in).
If you read about Blake, you'll get the sense that he had a rough, hard-scrabble, difficult life, a series of regular rejections and insufficient wages. But that misses the point. As Babette explained to her guests after blowing all her Lottery winings on her Feast:
An artist is never poor.
~ ~ ~
One Of Us
Artist: Prince
Album: Emancipation
Words, music by Eric Bazilian
(We didn't write this song, but listen)
If God had a name, what would it be
And would we call it 2 His face
If we were faced with Him and all His glory?
What would U ask if U had just one question?
Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
CHORUS:
What if God was one of us?
Just a slave like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' 2 make His way home
If God had a face, what would it look like
And would U wanna see it
If seeing meant that U would have 2 believe in things like heaven
And Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?
Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
CHORUS
Yeah
Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob (slave) like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' 2 make His way home
Like a holy rollin' stone
Back up 2 heaven all alone
Nobody callin' on the phone
'Cept 4 the Pope maybe in Rome
But He ain't home, He aint home, He ain't home!
No, no, no, He ain't home!
No, no, no, He ain't home!
Oh yeah, oh!
What if God was one us?
What if God was one us?
What if God was one us?
What if God was one us?
7 comments:
From the website of the Tate Gallery London where this one (and the one with Satan plus pencil sketches of both works) can be found:
This watercolour evokes imagery from the Book of Revelation, Chapters 4 and 5. St John witnesses the glorious vision God, surrounded by a rainbow. Around his throne are twenty-four elders dressed in white and 'four beasts full of eyes before and behind'. The deity holds 'a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals'
oh man, i have been turned on to so much cool stuff here on vleeptron (i.e. Evolution, had to mention that in the presence of "God" or however he calls himself nowdays) and now William Blake. Very cool, way ahead of his time with all his visions and painting style, very modern. Do I have to read his Poetry as well now ?
Note to Bob, I still dunno how much you know about christian Myths: The Apocalypse is the last book in the New Testament if my memory is correct. It is basically a sort of vision by a lad named John (Johannes). It is full of mystic signs and allusions to numbers, figures, the Four Horsemen, the signs and coming of the Antichrist, Judgment Day etc. Conservative Christians who are into this sort of thing call it The Rapture, some of them are haavily obsessed about it see crap like Left Behind et al.
Complete Bollocks, but that painting style of William Blake is quite interesting.....
Yeah, I can confirm Patfromch's comment...I'd have gotten this one right.
Great movie a few years ago called "The Seventh Seal" The 'rapture' happens when all seven are opened.
Thanks Rev, good to know I got that one right :)
Without at least some elemental knowledge of the Bible things like Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare etc would only half as understandable. Thanks to the swiss school system I got at least the basics....I have to admit that, even as an Atheist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_seals
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buch_mit_sieben_Siegeln
Addendum obscurum: if someone says to you in german: subject xyz is like a book with seven seals to me, then that means that the person has no clue or that the subject is cvompletely alien to him/her.
It's all Greek to me so I'm heading over to the Tate - Tate Modern was designed by a CH architect if memory serves - name?
Yep, Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. The football stadium that they designed for Basel is a 10 min walk away from my flat. Other various buildings designed by them can also be found in the Basle area.
They have also designed buildings, stadiums, museums and whatnot in Beijing, NYC, Tokyo, Munich and other places.
Really useful info, lots of thanks for your post.
It's all wrong what you're writing.
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