if Blake were alive.

IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN that the designers of the London Underground Tube Map “borrowed” heavily from William Blake’s early attempts to diagram of his own cosmological system. Blake soon abandoned this effort as being incommodious to the three- and four-dimensional representations he would need to make, and instead set about writing the Prophecies.

Here nevertheless you will find his predictions for our current times uncannily spot-on; he missed Trump, though it appears he did envision Trump’s Wall. The worst bits of Hell are to be found at the center; they become perhaps less evil and more banal the further one moves toward the circumference. If you stand way, way back, you can see the face of Satan, which appears elsewhere in an undated Blake engraving done in the style of Henry Fuseli.

The Hell of the twenty-first century was not to be quite as hellish as it may appear here at first glance. Notice the figures drifting around the peripheries; it is as if he were saying that salvation for us all would come, not from organizations or policies, but from the visions, insights, efforts, and sacrifices of individuals.

We’re building a site (this is February 2021) for HELL 21.c, which in actuality was not Blake’s work but Nog O’Shaugnessy’s* effort in collaboration with his brother Bry. In the meantime, you can learn a little more about it at our temporary quonset retail website, smallwhiskyhouse.com.