17 SOUTH MOLTON STREET
The building
Blake lived in between 1803 and 1821—during which time he wrote and
illustrated both Milton and Jerusalem ("I write in South Molton Street,
what I both see and hear / In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening
streets")—that very same address now houses a business called The
Ministry of Waxing, "a little outfit from Singapore" specializing
in Brazilian waxes whose founder, the self-dubbed "original smooth
operator," innovated pubic waxing techniques that are "significantly
less painful and embarrassing," which the website counts in McDonald's-like
fashion: "3,000,000 bushes pruned and counting." Now, despite un-prudish
Blake's passionate support for all forms of freedom, including sexual
liberty—his friend Thomas Butts even once came to Blake's place in
Lambeth only to find the Blakes completely nude, a fact which Blake
explained: "it's only Adam and Eve you know," since they were reading
Paradise Lost in character— and, further, despite his declarations
that "the body is a part of the soul made visible" and "all must love
the human form… [where] God is dwelling too" and "the nakedness of
woman is the work of God," there's still something particularly odd
about a company whose mission is "To help you conquer the body foliage
and achieve that baby smooth wax factor" occupying this particular
poet's former residence. Odd not just because the Blakes' body hair
was surely au naturale when seen by Butts or because Blake
also had misgivings about the body, which he denounced, on occasion,
as a Urizenic limit to humankind's divinity, one that imprisons our
Eternal portion in the Corporeal realm ("[Thou] Didst close my tongue
in senseless clay" and "For I will make their places of joy &
love, excrementitious," etc.)—but odd because the silliness of pube-removal
rhetoric—"saving virgin forests one Brazilian wax at a time"—couldn't
be more at odds with Blake's elevated language, which strives toward
Eternity through poetic imagination—"Still the faint harps & silver
voices calm the weary couch, / But from the caves of deepest night,
ascending in clouds of mist, / The winter spread his wide black wings
across from pole to pole: / Grim frost beneath & terrible snow,
link'd in a marriage chain, / Began a dismal dance." Blake no doubt,
were he to wander through London's chartered streets today, would
meet marks of weakness and woe, perhaps nowhere more so than along
Molton Street, but it's not just that Blake would disapprove of The
Ministry of Waxing living where he and Catherine lived for almost
two decades—the restaurant housed there in the 1970s and 80s couldn't
have bothered him too much, but the New York Nail Company in the 2000s
probably would have— in any case, it's not just disapprobation, it's
also the sheer superficiality of the waxing business, and the irony
of the religious term "Ministry," and the profound incongruity that
offends his memory, and the company's image clashing with the gesture
of the blue sign on the building that reads, "The Corporation of /
the City of London / William Blake / Poet & Painter / Lived Here
/ Born 1757 / Died 1827," which is how we have chosen to honor the
space he lived and worked in. Because of all of those things, the
Ministry of Waxing is more un-Blakean than just about any other business
in London, which is funny, I suppose, in the way that terrible things
sometimes are.
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