Soar High — Blake Heretics Journal

Blake engraved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by hand, plate by plate, in 1790 — a book no publisher would touch. The "Proverbs of Hell" weren't satire. They were his actual position: that energy, excess, and the willingness to fall are the conditions of anything worth building.

William Blake

"No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings."

Blake wrote this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c. 1790 — a book of proverbs designed to overturn every safe assumption it touched. This one lands differently on a journal than it does on a tee. On a tee, it's the declaration. In a journal, it's the practice.

Writing with your own voice — not the voice you think you should have, not the one you've borrowed from everyone who came before — is exactly what this line describes. Blake engraved and printed his own books by hand because no publisher would touch them. He built the thing himself. That's what your own wings look like.

The Soar High Tee carries the same line into the world. The journal is where you figure out what it means for you.

The Design

Two warm burnished rules bracket SOARS on the cover — one above, one below — the word elevated out of the sentence and given its own space. The premise sits above the upper rule; the consequence sits below the lower one.

Blake didn't write about the act of flying — he wrote about the decision to try.

The design separates the risk from the reward with two thin lines.

About This Journal

• Size — 5.5″ × 8.5″
• Pages — 80 lined, cream-colored pages
• Cover — hardcover
• Closure — built-in elastic band
• Ribbon marker — sewn-in page keeper
• Inner pocket — expandable, fits loose notes and cards
• Print — professionally printed

Who It's For

For the writer who's still finding their voice. The thinker who fills notebooks not because they have answers but because writing is how they find them. The person who keeps coming back to Blake because something about the defiance feels exactly right.

Your wings. Your ceiling. Your pages.

William Blake, in Plain English

• Born London, 1757. Died 1827. Never left England.
• Poet, painter, engraver — did all three simultaneously, often on the same page
• Rejected the Age of Reason while everyone else was celebrating it
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790) — his most subversive work, written as a series of proverbs that inverted conventional morality
• Printed and hand-colored his own books because publishers found him too strange
• Largely ignored in his lifetime. Now considered one of the most original minds in English literature