Moderating Clod and Pebble

Pebble: Your readers are idiots.

Andrea: I disagree. Different people have different perspectives on these things, depending on their own experiences and expectations.

Clod: I'm still right.

Pebble: Shut up.

Clod: You think that because I'm just a kid, I don't know anything, I don't know any better, but I do. And I'm right.

Andrea: You're both wrong.

Clod & Pebble: (silent)

Andrea: Sorry. But in the first instance, neither of you actually exist. You are inventions of a very smart man called William Blake who was trying to make a point about love....

Pebble: Right, so. Let's pretend this Blake person really existed and I am just a figment of his long-dead imagination. What is the point he was trying to make?

Clod: That I'm right and you are evil!

Pebble: Shut up!

Andrea: That love is a choice.

Clod & Pebble: (silence)

Andrea: That any one of us can choose either perspective. It is a choice.

Look, he included this, first of all, in his Songs of Experience. As many have argued, this puts the emphasis on the voice of the Pebble, the experienced and hardened one, who has seen and survived and been burnt badly by love in the past, and is protecting itself. Yet the structure of the poem defies this simplistic interpretation: in other instances there are matched poems, The Lamb in Songs of Innocence and The Tyger in Songs of Experience. If the Clod's viewpoint was simply intended to be superseded by a more intelligent or wiser Pebble, then they would not have both been included in a single piece in the second volume. The Clod would be in the first, and the Pebble in the second.

Secondly, the Pebble's vision of love is not one that Blake seems to advocate anywhere else. Elsewhere, he is a proponent of free love, openly opining that the experience and expression of love should not be caged by any conventions. So it's hard to reconcile the Pebble's viewpoint with Blake's other works, for instance, from A Little Girl Lost, "Children of the future age,/ Reading this indignant page,/ Know that in a former time / Love, sweet love, was thought a crime." This is also from Songs of Experience. So where to put the Pebble?

Pebble: I'm quite happy in the brook.

Andrea: Right. Sorry. I meant metaphorically.

I think what he was getting at was that the Pebble's viewpoint was a result of certain experiences, making it wiser and tougher, but not necessarily endorsing it. I mean, building a hell in heaven--that's pretty damning. (No pun intended.)

What he's done is presented readers with the two choices: love for others, love for self. Free love, bound love. Heaven in hell, hell in heaven. Now pick one. Where do you stand?

Clod: Who could possibly choose to be a narcissistic Pebble?

Pebble: Who could possibly choose to be a foolish Clod?

Andrea: That's where it gets interesting, isn't it? Every parent knows (as Mary G pointed out) that the job of being a parent is being a Clod. Your kids walk all over you, and it's your job to let them do it and love them anyway. The test of your love's strength is in your ability to put their needs ahead of your own, to value their happiness more than yours, even when the little shits take you utterly for granted and push every button a thousand times an hour.

Clod: Ha!

Andrea: But romantic love is not so simple. It seems that way when you're younger, but then you get trodden on by a few cows, and you turn into a Pebble and run away to the brook. Then what? Do you stay a Pebble, eternally making heaven into hell by trying to tie someone to you for your own pleasure at the expense of theirs?

I think the presentation of both viewpoints in the same poem within the second book means that the reader has a choice of how to respond to their experiences. They can allow the pain of love gone badly to harden them, or they can do something much more difficult: know what you are risking by keeping yourself open, know what the pain is like when you are wrong, know what the cost will be, do it anyway. Pay it anyway. You've learned more than the Pebble--that you cannot actually bind anyone to you, people not being objects; that a love which makes heaven into hell is not worth it.

Anyone can be a Clod when they don't know any better, and anyone can be a Pebble when they do. But knowing better and choosing to be a Clod anyway, having experience and choosing innocence--that's hard.

Which doesn't mean you have to choose innocence or that, having chosen it, you are obliged to be blind to when you are being taken advantage of. Then you have the option of being two adults who are making choices and being responsible for them. Who are not together because they have to be, or believe they have to be, but because every day they wake up and look the other person in the eye and choose to be.

Pebble: You're crazy.

Clod: Bonkers.

Andrea: I've never actually met Mr. Blake, so I could be wrong.

Clod: You are definitely wrong. Pebble is wrong but you are much, much wronger.

Pebble: Wronger? Is that a word?

Clod: Love conquers all! You just have to believe.

Pebble: You are delusional and you are going to get your heart broken.

Andrea: (shrugs) Well, maybe.

Posted by Andrea at October 11, 2007 5:55 AM under Fiction

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