Songs divine and moral, working drawings, related works, 1988–90
Of nights, and when alone, she had stealthy and
intense raptures of motherly love, such as God's
marvellous care has awarded to the female
instinct—joys how far higher and lower than reason
—blind beautiful devotions which only
women's hearts know.
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
The title Songs Divine and Moral is evidently a reference to Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, itself a study of moral statis and an assessment of religious evolution. No doubt it rests within a tradition that is supremely and proudly English: the morality of the Anglican Church, only the tradition is a little crestfallen, a little less proud. It is with impish humour that David Godbold attests to an imperial and moral legacy and poses himself as mock-mystic; the lyric prophet on the purlieus of society.
Writing is the law. Upon the establishment of free and compulsory education there was no excuse left to those who transgressed the lawmakers The law without violence, the Oedipal law, is always the most forbidding for it instates itself within trust; indeed the mechanisms at work are innocent of their real function. Nietzsche called his book on the morals and prejudices of humanity Daybreak, positing that the courageous abandonment of a morality and its typically middle-class promise of security is the hardest of all breaks but is rewarded by a fructifying renaissance. Like Blake, or Spinoza, Godbold attempts an ethic where the incapacitating divine visions (images of constant deferral) and insipid moral edifices are outrageously debunked, perpetuating a critique launched by Gilbert and George