if Blake were alive.

IT IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN that the designers of London’s Underground Tube Map “borrowed” heavily from William Blake’s early attempts to diagram his own cosmological system. Blake soon abandoned this effort as being incommodious to the three- and four-dimensional representations he would ultimately need to make, and so he set about writing his 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 gradually less evil and more banal the further one moves toward the circumference. If you stand back, 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 in this piece at first glance. Notice the figures drifting around the peripheries; it is as if the artist were saying that salvation for us all will come, not from organizations or policies, but from the visions, insights, efforts, and the sacrifices of individuals.

We’re still building a site (this is fall of 2024) 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, which apparently has fallen apart and also needs a handyman.