#chariots of fire
Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert, as usually known as Ian Holm, was an English actor - who died today, age 88. He received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in The Homecoming, and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear.
He won the 1981 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role as athletics trainer Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, for which he was also nominated for an Academy Award [oscar].
His other well-known film roles include Ash in Alien, CS.Lewis in Dreamchild, Father Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element, Chef Skinner in Ratatouille, and Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series.
Eve Naming the Birds by William Blake, 1810.
Open marriage, sexual equality, gratification, free love: these are the Christian virtues that inspired William Blake (1757-1827).
Critics in his own time called him a lunatic, for his non-conformity and his visions, which included appearances by angels. Blake, in turn, thought he lived in a mad world, How else to explain the tendencies toward violence, cruelty, selfishness and repressive morality?
He was an engraver by profession and very accomplished. Someone who knew him as a young man might have assumed his fame would come from his art, not his poems. He was prolific in his writing, but his talent with words wasn’t appreciated by most of his contemporaries. Blake is read today because future generations of scholars rediscovered him. In his own time he was a silly eccentric, mostly harmless, though his radical political and religious views were cause enough for a charge of high treason. (He was acquitted.)
The rehabilitation of Blake is demonstrated in the idiosyncrasy that one of his poems (with music added by Hubert Parry in 1916) has become England’s unofficial national anthem. God Save the Queen is sung to represent the United Kingdom as a whole, but at events where athletes compete under St. George’s Cross (not the Union Jack), And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time plays in the background when England wins a gold medal (for example, at the Commonwealth Games.)
The poem, seen above as Blake originally published it, includes the biblical image of the Chariot of Fire, which was modified to become the name of the 1982 Oscar winner for Best Picture. Its rhyming partner, however, is a more interesting line: “Bring me my Arrows of desire.” For Blake, the liberation of sex from morality and the triumph of the imagination were preconditions for England becoming a new Jerusalem–essentially, heaven on earth.
Parry composed the music during World War I at the behest of a militarist group. Almost immediately, he had misgivings. In 1788, Blake had written a poetic essay with the title, All Religions Are One. On another occasion, he asserted “all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various.“) The poet would have been horrified by the slaughter in the trenches. When the song started to become popular, Parry gifted the rights to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in early 1918. Blake admired Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, so he probably would have been pleased with that outcome.
Though he advocated for sexual freedom, Blake was happily married to his wife Catherine for 35 years and by all accounts they were monogamous–though he did ask if she could be persuaded to try a threesome.
(Additional source: English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins.)
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