About me
Given life is a journey, the first question we should ask of anyone is 'how did you get here?'
I was born in the 70s and I got here via the fire escape. Currently I spend my working day moaning about sub-literate documentation and the fact I can't understand the accents of 75% of my co-workers. I suspect I am aging badly.
However, once upon a time I was a young man who was so hungry for experience I regularly made decisions that risked either violence, humiliation or even death - so regularly, in fact, that I'm still looking back and processing what could have happened, and comparing it to what actually did.
This blog is one result. My book, 'SUNG: a ghost story' (extracts available on this site) is another.
You'll find a lot of William Blake here. If you're familiar with Blake then you may well have already heard the term 'Blakean' - I gather it gets used as a noun in London these days. The working title for this blog was The Four-Fold Files, as 'Fourfold' is the highest state of consciousness in Blake's world, a state of all-seeing epiphany where events are eternal and exist as something way more than the sum of their parts. That's the kind of thing I want to write about (they'll be more mundane stuff too, I promise), but a friend pointed out a certain Mr Cave already ran a similar operation with a similar name. So, whether you see it as adjective or noun, ‘Blakean’ is now the title for this blog.
I'm not going to apologise for classing myself as a Blakean, even though I'm the only one I'm aware of within the perimeter of my life. William Blake has served as my spiritual adviser since I was 12 and I've loved him ever since - I even sport a number of Blake tattoos. I have asked myself 'What would Blake do?' on many occasions in my life, and, although the answer invariably left me poorer and more defiant than ever, it did occasionally leave me in interesting company.
If negatively-geared real-estate and bitcoin investment had been things in Blake's day I suspect he would have been just as bad at them as I am. Yet Blake knew - and taught me - two things that are of priceless value.
First; he knew that the greatest privilege we have in this world is to create, not consume or destroy. And when we create, we connect with our eternal selves. And, like me, he was addicted to exploring this connection.
Second; he knew that infinity is not something that can be measured, but rather something that should be felt, everyday - as a sense of wonder running through the world. And, everyday, when I shift my gaze from that curl of a weed, peeking above those paving slabs, to the wide sunlit skies above, I am flooded by this wonder, and feel grateful to be alive.
I guess this itch to document it all is just a small part of the price of entry.
Mat Sullivan