William Morris, creation & will

To Lichfield today, for the day of the Lichfield Festival when they have a market in the grounds of the cathedral. To me Lichfield is a place which has ideas above its station; the simple fact is it is a small cathedral city, & to me the fact that is has Walsall postcodes means it will be forever a suburb of Walsall.

It has an independent sports shop, which sells actual sports clothing, rather different from what you can get in Brum. It is owned by a blond man: why oh why are all the best men straight? I did go round the market: the high point was an old stoner selling stuff from the hippy trail round Nepal who called me 'man'. On the way back I got off the train in Erdington & did the rounds of the charity shops - strangely given the subject of today's post it was a relief for me personally to be back in the city milieu: clashing music coming from cars, people of colour, & the smell of weed.

In Lichfield I found a Pitkin guide about William Morris in one of the charity shops & it has caused me to think again about him. The Arts & Crafts movement & the associated back to the land movement of the early 20th century are not usually considered part of the 'recipe' for modern witchcraft. Certainly it seems the contributors of the really early days in 40s & 50s came from much more occult/masonic interests than from an interest in the dignity of work, the respect due the worker & the (re)sanctification/remembrance of the sanctity, of work. Yes, Gardner worked throughout his time in the east, but don't forget that work for old colonials always meant a position of superiority to the worker, & I don't doubt that the majority of the early members of the coven were never really in the position of being a wage slave.

That said, this tradition is present in the later incarnations of witchcraft. Surely the essential Work of the witch is to seek what Morris called the Earthly Paradise, & what Eric Gill called 'a cell of good living in the chaos of our world'?

And let us not forget that our religion, if it is one, is a Craft, it is something you do, not something you believe in. To misuse a quote from Morris:

'A good way to rid one's self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.'

In fact Morris's pursuit of beauty (it's no use, the one Wiccan virtue I could not get my head around is not going to go away) does make him sound like a witch in his pursuit of what he envisaged:

'With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.'

The first picture on this post is of an attic at Kelmscott Manor. The second is of now-obliterated grafitti at Cardross seminary. The text from Herbert Read exactly depicts what Morris warned against:

'Art will utterly perish, as in the manual arts so in literature...; Science will grow more & more one-sided, more incomplete, more wordy & useless [so] that beside it the theologies of old time will seem mere reason & enlightenment. All will get lower & lower, till the heroic struggles of the past to realise hope from year to year, from century to century, will be utterly forgotten, & man will be an indescribable being - hopeless, desireless, lifeless.'

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