Universtatea Bucuresti Facultatea de Limbi si Literaturi Straine

The Principles of Absence and Plenitude in Blake and Their Postmodern Reflections

Alexandrescu Luisa
Engleza- Hindi

Prof. Coord.: Conf. Dr. Mihai A. Stroe

Dios mueve al jugador y ste, la pieza. Qu dios detrs de Dios la trama empieza De polvo y tiempo y sueo y agona? Jorge Luis Borges

Contents: Introduction / 5 1. The Age of Reason versus Romanticism and the Battle between Absence and Plenitude / 12 1.1. Fragmentation: The Status of Knowledge in the Postmodern World / 12 1.2. Sleepwalking: The Role of the Human Brain in the History of Knowledge / 13 1.3. Single Vision and Newtons Sleep: The Enlightenment as a World of Absence / 16 1.4. Gravity- The Force that Pulls Everything Together / 20 1.5. Re-enchanting the World: The Romantic Revolution / 26 1.6. Teach These Souls to Fly: The World of William Blake / 29 2. The Religion of Art and the Art of Religion / 45 2.1. To Gratify Senses Unknown: The Power of Imagination in the Works of Blake and Yeats/ 45 2.2. Were All Golden Sunflowers Inside: William Blake and Allen Ginsberg / 55 2.3. Where Man is Not, Nature is Barren: William Blake and Miguel de Unamuno / 56 2.4. Tho it Appears Without, It Is Within: Blakes Jerusalem / 60 3. Infinity of Infinities and the Most Absent of Absences: Blake versus Borges and the Postmodern Paradigm / 74 3.1. The Fearful Symmetry of Blakes Tyger / 74 3.2. The Postmodernist Chain of Command versus the Romantic Chain of Being: Pynchon and Blake / 86 3.3. Mirrors and Fatherhood are Abominable: The Postmodern Idea of Plenitude According to Jorge Luis Borges / 90 4. Steps Towards the Romantic Temple of Plenitude and Its Relevance for the Science of the Twentieth Century / 95
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4.1. Sweet Science Reigns: Blakes Fractal Geometry of Nature / 95 4.2. The Relevance of Blakes Works for the Contemporary Scientific Paradigms / 103 Conclusion / 107 References / 112

Introduction The purpose of this work is to investigate the way in which the principles of absence and plenitude operate at both the structural and ideological level in a few of the major works of William Blake. Subsequently, the role of these two principles will be analyzed as part of the opposition between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Revolution. The conclusions will then be extended so as to incorporate the postmodern reflections of the dichotomy between absence and plenitude, in both postmodern theory and postmodern literature, through the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon. It will be shown that these two opposite principles, absence and plenitude, are actually intrinsically present in Blakes major works, and not something that we need to apply from the outside to interpret his texts. Thus, the major theme of Blakes Prophetic Books is the fall of man from his initial state of unity and wholeness into division and fragmentation. It will be observed thus that, for Blake, paradise can be reached as a state of things, and therefore it is not seen as a separate space in the universe where men go after their death, as the traditional view would have it. Also, the division of man into four different mental faculties, or the four Zoas, is the equivalent of the fall of the whole world itself from absolute plenitude into a state in which spiritual absence, ontological plenitude and ontological absence chaotically merge. In Blakes mythology, inspired primarily by Ezekiels vision of the merkabah, the divine chariot, the eternal man Albion splits his own self into four separate parts, corresponding to the four major faculties of the human mind: Tharmas, the parent power, representing desire or sexuality in man, Urizen, the reasoning power, Luvah, the emotions or passions and Los/ Urthona, the creative imagination or the poetic genius in man. The divisions continue in the same fourfold manner, with the dissevering of the four Zoas from their specters and from their female counterparts or emanations. The pairs made up of the Zoas and their emanations are as follows: Tharmas has Enion as his counterpart, Urizen has Ahania, Luvah has Vala and Los/Urthona has Enitharmon. The most interesting thing about Blakes system is arguably the way in which this fourfold complexity is maintained at all levels of his philosophy: he provides us with a map of the human mind, made up of the four main faculties, as already seen, but then he creates corresponding maps for the human body of the physical world itself. Thus, the Zoas correspond to the four organs of perception: Tharmas is the tongue, Urizen the eyes, Luvah the nostrils and Urthona the ears. Also, they correspond to the four cardinal points in space: Tharmas is placed in the West, Urizen in the South, 5

Luvah in the East and Urthona in the North. Moreover, the Zoas have the four continents, America, Africa, Asia and Europe as counterparts and the four elements as their equivalents: Tharmas is the water, Urizen the air, Luvah the fire and Urthona the earth. As it can be seen, Blake creates a complex structure based on a system of correspondences: he draws superposed maps of the human mind, of the human body and of the physical world at the same time. This fourfold structure identifiable at all levels of existence and representation, at the same time, is Blakes idea of plenitude. The man has to be whole, united in his four faculties of the mind and in his four senses, so as to be able to perceive the world in its wholeness. The fourfold vision and the fourfold structure of everything there is are inseparable. This strong bond between perception and the perceived, between subject and object is one of the most significant aspects of Blakes work. Thus, first of all, this is a common Romantic trait, that Blake shares with many of the poets who were contemporary with him. The relation between the subject and the object must be first of all analyzed as the relation between the self and the whole. The Romantics attempted to create a synthesis between all the separate parts of the universe, and then between the self and the whole of the world. At the same time however, Romanticism tended towards diversity and individuality, as Arthur O. Lovejoy observed, for example. These contrary aspirations towards individual delimitation on the one hand, and towards fusion of the self with the whole on the other, form one of the most prominent of the Romantic paradoxes, recognizable in Blakes works and in those of the other Romantic poets as well. Gerald Izenberg, in his book The Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood , observes that in fact, the contrary tendencies illustrated above are one and the same feature: whether the self wants to dissolve itself into the whole or whether it attempts to dissolve everything else into itself, the same conclusion is reached the union with the whole is dependent on individuality, on subjectivism and on empathy. 1 The same relation between the self or the subjective perception and the whole of the world can be seen in Blakes works. Blake emphasizes the self, the individuality and the minute particulars, as well as the whole, the fourfold structure of the world. Also, he praises everywhere in his works the outline that delimits the self or the form of all the objects, insisting that there can be no ultimate plenitude without the fulfillment of all the parts. His plenitude starts from the infinite perceived in the minutest objects, such as the world that he sees in a grain of sand, and then continues with an infinite of infinities perceived at a greater scale. Thus, as Izenberg concluded, Blake, as a Romantic poet, understood that plenitude and universality are dependent on the individual, on the subject that can empathize with the whole. This is why a delimitation of the self is essential in the perception of the whole. While Blake insists on the importance of the self and of individuality, on difference in general, he intransigently opposes selfhood.
1

Gerald N. Izenberg, The Impossible Individuality : Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1992, p. 20.

According to him, the selfhood that attempts to dominate the world is the same as the self-absorbed Luciferic knowledge that actually caused the fall of man from his paradisiacal state. This is why, when the Universal Brotherhood of the four Zoas is broken, and one of them takes control over the others, trying to assert its selfhood over the whole, the absolute plenitude is disrupted, and absence intrudes on the world. Blakes meaning thus becomes obvious: plenitude, as an absolute state which is fulfilled both epistemologically and ontologically, can only be obtained through organic unity of the self with the whole. When the selfhood attempts dominion of everything else, it unavoidably separates itself and it denies the existence of the unitary whole. At the same time, if Blake argues against the separation from the whole, then the contraries have to be admitted. Thus, in his view, another necessary condition for the attainment of plenitude is the belief that contraries must coexist so that any progress may be achieved. This is why, in his work, Heaven and Hell unite in marriage and experience dwells with innocence. Not accidentally thus, Blake lays the blame for these divisions on the supremacy of reason in man. In this sense, Blake seems to agree with Percy Bysshe Shelley and with other Romantics, who see reason as the faculty that dissects, distinguishes and puts things into categories through the analytical method, while imagination is the faculty that finds the similarities between things and therefore is able to see the whole as well.2 Therefore, while for Blake opposition is absolutely necessary, negation is the one that causes absence and void to break the initial plenitude of the universe. Another problem that should be discussed with reference to Blakes system is the way in which he manages to bring particularity and universality together without an ensuing contradiction. As he denies selfhood, the poet also denies what he calls general knowledge, to which he opposes particular knowledge. For Blake, general laws that blur the outline of identity are again negations and a cause of the fall form the initial plenitude. It should be observed however that by generality Blake understands only the tendency to abolish distinction and reduce the whole to a singularity. At the same time though, Blake believes in the universals, in the archetypes or the innate ideas that are to be found in everything that exists. The difference that Blake sees thus between generality and universality is very important: to generalize is to apply external laws to the objects we perceive, and therefore to fall into an absolute uniformity of perception, whereas to see the universal ideas in everything (and at the same time to perceive the difference, the particularity), is to see and grasp with our understandings that which is innate in everything, as a reflection of the absolute reality. Moreover, Blake sees humanity with all that it represents as the only common genus for everything, the only universal form. 3 This is
2

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelleys Prose: Or, the Trumpet of a Prophecy , 1966, p. 296. William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 43:20, p. 672: Humanity who is the Only General and Universal Form [].

also apparent in his system of thought, where the human microcosm and the cosmic macrocosm are undistinguishable. To account for the importance that the Human Form Divine acquires in Blakes system and the way in which he sees it reflected as both the microcosm and the macrocosm, we have to look at how he conceived of humanity and subjectivity as such. It is obvious that Blake extended subjectivity, consciousness and life to everything that exists. There is no corporeal nature of things and of course, no Cartesian dichotomy between the body and soul and no dichotomy between the material and the spiritual as such. Instead, everything is imagination in Blakes view. At first sight, this seems to be an idea that is common to all the Romantics in general and therefore a very obvious conclusion in Blakes system. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also distinguished between fancy and imagination for example, emphasizing that imagination is the supreme faculty that can make a synthesis of everything that exists and then, after mingling the contents, re-create the whole into something new. 4 The idea that the imagination, the greatest creative power, is the supreme faculty in man is clearly something common to all the Romantics. Nevertheless, Blakes view is much more complex than that. For him, imagination is more than a mere faculty that can apprehend and re-create the whole: when Blake posits that All is Imagination, and by all he means literally all - divinity, man, the physical world, he implies that the whole universe resembles the structure of imagination, with its infinite possibilities and its absolute subjectivity. There is thus no objective out-there, simply because the without and the within actually meet. However, another distinction should be signaled: when Blake says that everything is imagination, he does not mean in any way that the world is illusory or merely a production of our senses or of our minds. Here, Dan Millers contribution in his article, Blake and the Deconstructive Interlude, is very important: the critic points to the necessity to distinguish Blakes philosophy from the extreme idealism of George Berkeley, for instance. Blake is not just an absolute idealist, comparable to Berkeley, who posited that the world is a creation of our senses, through perception. It is true that for Blake perception is as crucial as it was for Berkeley, as it is active and it influences the perceived objects as it can be seen all through his work. In The Gates of Paradise, plate 11, for instance, Blake warns against the sings of what he calls aged ignorance: once we close our senses, the objects are closed as well.5 Also, in his Prophetic Books, the Zoas that wander divided through the ages, become what they behold, restating thus the inevitable relation between the representation and the object of representation. Yet, somehow, Blake never completely detaches himself from the material dimension of the world, he rather uproots the world itself and lifts it in his imagination because he cannot leave it
4 5

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in Brian Hepworth, The Rise of Romanticism: Essential Texts, 1978, p. 350. William Blake, Complete Writings, The Gates of Paradise, 11, p. 767: Aged Ignorance: Perceptive Organs closed, their Objects close.

behind, as he himself notices in one of the letters addressed to Thomas Butts. 6 Blake indeed takes the whole world with him in his flights: he does not soar by himself, forgetting about the world and drowning himself in his own imagination, but he is careful to transport the universe with all its contents into the regions of imagination. Thus, the material becomes as the imagination, and the whole world is alive, including what the scientists would teach is only dead matter. The fact that every part of Blakes works, even the most visionary, still preserves the fourfold structure, as well as the material dimension, indicates that the material never completely disappears from his system. Rather, as Steve Vine in Blakes Material Sublime and Dan Miller in the article already mentioned above propose, Blake attempts a revelation of the sublime in the matter itself, through active perception. The method of etching that Blake uses, with corrosive substances, also indicates that the infinity is to be revealed inside the material itself, and not necessarily as a transcendence of the material. In a similar way, Blake does not wait for God to come and save humanity; he thinks man should meet God halfway, since the human, in its true form is also divine. 7 Thus, the integrity or wholeness of man is the first step towards a fusion with the divinity and, implicitly, towards a realization of the wholeness of the world. This is why the Human Form Divine is the archetype that Blake sees as inherent in all the things in the world. Divinity resides in man, as the infinite itself resides in the material world. Blakes mysticism comes close to that of the Spanish modern philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno understood, like Blake himself, the fact that man can never escape his own aspiration towards universal consciousness. It is very hard for man to accept the stance adopted by classical science, according to which the world is made up of dead matter and of void, in the midst of which the wonderful human consciousness appears as something accidental and unimportant. Man essentially sees the I, the subject in everything, even in what should be deemed as inanimate. The very idea of a God can ultimately be explained as mans longing for spiritual companionship in the world. Thus, for Blake and for Unamuno at the same time, the universe itself is a form of supreme, absolute subjectivity or consciousness; otherwise, no dialogue would be possible between the object and the subject. Once again, the plenitude of the world must reside in the merger between the spiritual and the material dimension of the world. If the spiritual is seen merely as a form of transcending the visible, an abstraction, man ends up feeling alienated. This brings the discussion back to the way in which the principles of absence and plenitude structure Blakes work. As already mentioned, these principles act both at the epistemological and at
6

Ibid., Letter to Thomas Butts: With my whole might I chain my feet to the world of Duty & Reality. But in vain! the faster I bind the better is the Ballast for I so far from being bound down take the world with me in my flights & often it seems lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the wind. 7 Ibid., Jerusalem, 43 : 12-16, p. 672 : The Los grew furious, raging: Why stand we here trembling around/ Calling on God for help, and not ourselves, in whom God dwells,/ Stretching a hand to save the falling Man? Are we not Four/ Beholding Albion upon the Precipice ready to fall into Non-Entity?

the ontological level. Blake represents absence as being manifest both spiritually and ontologically in the state of Ulro or the single vision. Also, when he prescribes wholeness, he emphasizes both the fourfold vision as a means of perception and the paradisiacal state, as a state in which everything is fourfold and therefore integral. This structure, which is epistemological and ontological at the same time, can be explained in the context of the previous discussion, as Blakes attempt to join once and for all the spiritual and the material dimensions of the world. This idea is evident in the way in which Blake depicts the four major states humanity can be found in: Ulro is the state of utter darkness, in which man only has single vision, Generation, the two-fold state of fire or energy related to artistic creativity and to the two-fold vision, Beulah is the threefold state of light, achieved through threefold vision and finally, Eden, the fourfold state of the fourfold vision illuminated by the spiritual sun. All these four states therefore, correspond to certain visions of the world, which can be more or less complex. The connection between the material and the spiritual realities in Blake is further emphasized by Blakes famous notion of Spiritual Sensation, a term he uses as an alternate name for Imagination: But there is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation [] 8 The phrase spiritual sensation is obviously an indicative of the extent to which Blake merges the material with the spiritual in his works: the spirit can actually palpate the material world. Also, Blake believes that by contracting or expanding the senses, one can contract or expand the space and time respectively. Through active perception, the objective reality can be modified at will. Thus, when humanity closes its senses the material world is closed as well. The state in which Urizen or the Reasoning power alone rules over the world, is therefore a spectral, anti-world, a world of spiritual and ontological absence at the same time, a non-entity. As opposed to this state, the wholeness of man and the balanced use of all the faculties he was endowed with make the world itself whole, a world of plenitude, in which every possibility can be realized. It can be argued therefore that Blake built his system, at least in part, as a reaction against the reductive science of the Enlightenment, common to so many other Romantics as well. The faith in reason, the only thing that the thinkers of the Enlightenment era were able to believe in, was of course, in its turn, a reaction to the superstition and religious fanaticism of the previous ages. It can be said thus that the Enlightenment was characterized by a state of spiritual absence, since the clockwork universe seemed to function just as well on its own, without any aid from either God or the spirit of man. In the mechanist world, the plenitude was merely ontological and it referred only to the fixed hierarchy of all the beings and all the objects in the universe. The chain of being did not allow for anything new to be created or invented in any way. The Romantic Revolution took place because the need was felt for a new synthesis of the things that the Enlightenment thinkers had separated and dissected. The
8

Ibid., Letter to Rvd. Dr. Trusler, August 23, 1799, p. 701.

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Romantics opposed the values promoted by the Enlightenment, showing that, without imagination, no revelation was possible and no truth could be attained. Blake reacted mainly against the exclusive use of reason by man as an instrument of knowledge, correcting the world view held the Enlightenment thinkers, and showing them that the rational power by itself will only bring chaos and destruction to the world. The trinity that Blake most often targeted in his works was formed of Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton, three of the greatest and most influential minds of the Enlightenment. Newtons mechanical view of the universe, Lockes empiricist claim that all knowledge that man accumulates is derived from the senses, and that nothing is innate in the mind, and Bacons doctrine of perfecting nature through artificial means, all these were horrifying for the Romantic poet who was searching for absolute plenitude. For Blake, the dissociation of the human faculties into different entities is a state of single vision that blinds man and keeps him away from the truth. Thus, in Blakes major Prophetic Books, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, we are given a literal description of the effects that the Enlightenment had on the world. The dichotomy between absence and plenitude that is manifest in Blakes works is also reflected in a very interesting way in the postmodern thought. Thus, in the Postmodernist world, absence, presence and plenitude become major structuring principles at both the cognitive and the ontological level. In Blakes system of thought, there is a clear opposition between the anti-world, the world of spiritual and ontological absence at the same time, and the world in its state of absolute plenitude. According to Derrida and Baudrillard, there is no truth and there is no reality, there is only play, an absolute game that involves absence and plenitude. What is interesting is that, although absence of meaning and even of reality become crucial aspects of the postmodern world, pointing therefore to a certain sense of a hyper absence, it cannot be denied that another, although very different kind of plenitude still subsists. Thus, the plenitude in the postmodern world is that of the infinite number of games, of the infinite systems of oppositions, the infinite paranoid connections or even of the infinite simulacra. The world is thus on the verge of hyper-absence and an infinity of infinities, although paradoxically, the infinities seem to be empty. The hyperreal denies the real precisely because of its prolificacy. All there remains thus on the postmodern scene is the non-sense of this world which seduces and absorbs the observer into an infinity of sings without reference.

1. The Age of Reason versus Romanticism and the Battle between Absence and Plenitude
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When a man's tipsy (that's one extreme, you know), he sees one thing as two. But, when he's extremely sober (that's the other extreme), he sees two things as one. It's equally inconvenient, whichever happens. Lewis Carroll It is true that we have really in Flatland a Third unrecognized Dimension called 'height', just as it is also true that you have really in Spaceland a Fourth unrecognized Dimension, called by no name at present, but which I will call 'extra-height'. But we can no more take cognizance of our 'height' than you can of your 'extra-height'Even I cannot now comprehend it, nor realize it by the sense of sight or by any process of reason; I can but apprehend it by faith. Edwin Abbott Abbott 1.1. Fragmentation: The Status of Knowledge in the Postmodern World Theories of knowledge have changed widely with the turn of every cultural epoch. Postmodernism has brought a whole new perspective on knowledge: according to Jean- Francois Lyotard, knowledge has become a commodity, disputed among nations and institutions and used for totalitarian purposes. The cultural paradigms of the other epochs, such as Enlightenment or Modernism, were inclined to build grand narratives, which were either speculative or emancipative. Knowledge had an ultimate, unifying goal that could be defined in terms of truth or justice. The postmodern paradigm shifted from the unifying, generalizing view of reality to a fragmentary and particular perspective. In Lyotards view, all knowledge is thus narrative knowledge, that is, any human community will employ a form of narrative to introduce its ideas about the world. This means that neither of the sciences or arts can claim supremacy over the others: For Lyotard, narratives are the stories that communities tell themselves to explain their present existence, their history and ambitions for the future. Although the term 'narrative' is commonly associated with literary fiction, all forms of discourse employ narratives to present their ideas. Examples of this might include History that constructs narratives of the past, Psychology that tells stories about the self, or Sociology that depicts different social formations and their effects on individuals. In the same way, scientific statements are presented through types of narrative that describe the physical world. In order to explain and justify their discoveries, even mathematical sciences are forced to turn their equations into narratives that explain the implications of their findings. In this way, narrative stands at the basis of human experience and society: it tells us who we are, and allows us to express what we believe and aspire to.9
9

Simon Malpas, Jean Franois Lyotard, 2002, p. 21

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The postmodern theories of knowledge thus unite the long-separated discourses of science and art, under the term narrative. It is argued, therefore, that both science and art are essentially discourses that describe different aspects of human experience, through the use of specific languages or systems of signs. Science, in all its forms, is no longer seen by Postmodernism as an objective and fixed form of knowledge, but as a particular story, that conveys mans vision of the world at a certain moment in time. Although science may be based, up to a certain extent, on concrete facts, on observation and experiments, it is still mans interpretation of the universe, therefore a story even if it is an objective one. The facts and data of science may be real or true, but it is obvious, at the same time, that the language and the specific means of expression used are entirely constructed by man. Science is a narrative describing other type of events than the ones of fiction or literature, namely physical or real events, but its objectivity is greatly undermined by the fact that man is the one who constructs the system of signs he will use in order to reveal the truth about reality. Both art and science are ways of looking at the world and describing it, or telling stories about it, and both are subjective in their presentations of reality. Knowledge is fragmented in the postmodern world, but somehow the pieces still hold together and, out of the many divisions, there arises a hidden order. 1.2. Sleepwalking: The Role of the Human Brain in the History of Knowledge In his Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler makes significant observations regarding the status of science and the way in which mans mental evolution influences its progress and objectivity. According to Koestler, it is obvious that scientific discoveries and theories are entirely dependent on mans mental evolution. Reason, as the instrument that scientists use to search reality, has a crooked evolution throughout the ages, and it can be seen that mans progress in science is certainly not done in a straight line. Koestler suggestively entitles his book The Sleepwalkers, using thus a psychological term to define the evolution of scientific knowledge over time. He implies therefore that reason is not always the illuminating and unerring faculty that it is supposed to be, and that most of the scientific progress is characterized by a dream-like state, where the scientists move like sleepwalkers, occasionally bumping on an important discovery in their way: We are in the habit of visualizing mans political and social history as a wild zig-zag which alternates between progress and disaster, but the history of science is a steady, cumulative process, represented by a continuously rising curve, where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height. Or alternately, we think in terms of organic growth from the magic-ridden, myth-addicted infancy of civilization through various stages of adolescence, to detached, rational
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maturity. In fact we have seen that the progress was neither continuous nor organic. The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares [] The mad clockwork of epicycles was kept going for two thousand years; and Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes time.10 Furthermore, speaking about the evolution of scientific narratives, Koestler identifies the human brain as the main hero in this evolution, also pointing to its particularity and quaintness among the other organs the animal species have been endowed with in general: This is a very curious paradox indeed. The senses and organs of all species evolve (via mutation and selection as we suppose), according to adaptive needs; and novelties in anatomical structure are largely determined by those needs. Nature meets its customers requirements by providing longer necks to graze off the top of the trees, harder hooves and teeth to cope with the coarse grass of the drying steppes [] But it is entirely unprecedented that nature should endow a species with an extremely complex luxury organ far exceeding its actual and immediate needs, which the species will take millennia to learn to put to proper use-if it ever does []The habits and learning potentialities of all species are fixed within the narrow limits which the structure of its nervous system and organs permits; those of homo sapiens seem unlimited precisely because the possible uses of the evolutionary novelty in his skull were quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment.11 Thus, as Koestler observes, man is endowed with an organ that far exceeds his natural or adaptive needs as a creature: the human brain. Koestler implies that the brain of man is the only thing that actually does not fit logically in the natural, biological pattern, because of its complexity and its intricacy that seem superfluous within the frame of strict necessity. This is why it can be safely argued that the corpus of sciences is rather a group of narratives or language games, originating in the human mind through mysterious processes, characterized equally equally by regressions as by evolutions. We can speak of scientific imagination as well as of artistic imagination, since the workings of the human brain seem to tend towards creativity and playfulness, whatever type of narrative they produce. Johan Huizinga put forth a fundamental theory about culture in his renowned work, Homo Ludens: culture originates in play, that is, it begins in an irrational activity which is not even human specific. According to Huizinga, play can be recognized at the root of the most serious cultural productions, such as the ancient Vedas, for example. Also, play cannot be denied as a concept, the way one might deny truth or moral values, for example. The conclusion that Huizinga draws from his study is thus a very interesting one: play is the reason why men should consider themselves more than merely rational beings, since playing is something irrational:

10 11

Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Mans Changing Vision of the Universe , 1959, p. 513. Ibid., p.514.

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Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.12 Thus, play can be defined, in Huizingas view, as an influx of mind that tampers with the deterministic order of the universe, introducing the supra-logical in our reality. This is why playfulness can be considered as an antecedent of the sacred rituals performed in all religions throughout the world. As Huizinga theorizes it, play can not be ignored as an irrational element in human culture, because it signals the presence of a different reality beyond the apparent, palpable one. The human mind has therefore a propensity for playing or gaming with reality and for being creative in general. This fact hints at the presence of irrationality in the human mind in the first place, but also in the universe as such. The origins of this theory about play are to be found in Platos Laws, as Huizinga indicates. For Plato, life itself should be lived as play, since man is nothing more than Gods plaything: God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God's plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present [. . .] Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.13 Platos implication is that man, as the toy of God, should live by playing, that is, by performing rituals, practicing arts or merely playing certain games. According to Plato, the divine supreme seriousness can only be mirrored as play and ritual on the earth. However, this reflection of life as play is precisely what hints at its irrational and divine origins.

12 13

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1950, p. 4. Ibid., Plato, Laws, vii, p. 17-18.

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1.3. Single Vision and Newtons Sleep: The Enlightenment as a World of Absence The modern and postmodern intimations about knowledge differ to the greatest extent from the Enlightenment period, which was the time for scientific triumph, and during which science and reason were seen as supreme values, that can help man conquer and subdue the world. Among the Enlightenment thinkers, Francis Bacon actually believed that nature should be robbed of all its mysteries, so that man may effectively dominate it and make it serve his purposes: The present discoveries in science are such as lie immediately beneath the surface of common notions. It is necessary, however, to penetrate the more secret and remote parts of nature, in order to abstract both notions and axioms from things, by a more certain and guarded method. 14 As Bacon saw it, the secrets of nature could only be revealed by dissecting it and penetrating into its deepest recesses. Also, Bacon announced the dawn of modern technology that strives to modify the course of nature. Thus, he proposed a method through which, with the aid of artificial heat, for example, natural gestation could be accelerated in time: The operations of nature are performed by far smaller portions at a time, and by arrangements far more exquisite and varied than the operations of fire, as we use it now. And it is then that we shall see a real increase in the power of man when by artificial heats and other agencies the works of nature can be represented in form, perfected in virtue, varied in quantity, and, I may add, accelerated in time.15 Thus, Bacon believed (and thus foresaw the future of modern technology) that the imperfections of nature should be corrected with the use of artificial procedures. The belief in reason and in general, empirical laws went so far that Laplace, for example, was convinced that a single, unique equation could be devised so as to contain all the laws and all the physical events of all times.16 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer define the main characteristics
14 15

Francis Bacon, The New Organon, 2000, p. 36. Ibid., p. 214. 16 William Ernest Hocking, Science and the Idea of God, 1944, p. 90: Thus the ideal notion once made notorious by Laplace of a world equation which should describe the motions of all particles in the universe through all time loses none of its theoretical validity, though its attainment seems yearly more remote. And if the physical network of all history is thus in principle a matter of the most precise determination, we are presented with a world-scheme from which are absent not alone all the sense qualities of sound, color, taste, smell, but as well all the feeling, passion, and meaning from which, for human experience, physical events are inseparable. For man, no event is neutral; for physics no event is anything else. The idea that a single equation could reveal Gods thoughts is still significant for many physicists. Amir D. Aczel in his Gods Equation showed that Einsteins field equation may still be one of the closest approximations we have for Gods thoughts: In the final analysis, knowing God's thoughts more completely would require incorporating into the theory of relativity also quantum considerations. But whatever the final equation may be, Einstein's field equation will form a major part of it. In developing his amazing equation, Einstein realized his life's dream--he heard at least some of God's thoughts. This is Einstein's field equation with the cosmological constant, which is our best estimate of God's Equation: R - 1/2gR - g= - 8 GT (1999, p. 218)

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of the Enlightenment in their essay called The Concept of Enlightenment . According to them, the Enlightenment resembles a totalitarian form of politics, seeking to rule and completely dominate the world of nature, to the extent that it claims to apprehend and dissect the picture of reality and to subordinate it in a Baconian spirit. All this is supposed to be achieved through the power of reason: Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way, their potentiality is turned to his own ends. In the metamorphosis, the nature of things, as a substratum of domination, is revealed as always the same. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. It is a presupposition of the magical invocation as little as the unity of the subject. The shaman's rites were directed to the wind, the rain, the serpent without, or the demon in the sick man, but not to materials or specimens [] Like science, magic pursues aims, but seeks to achieve them by mimesis--not by progressively distancing itself from the object. It is not grounded in the sovereignty of ideas, which the primitive, like the neurotic, is said to ascribe to himself; there can be no over-evaluation of mental processes as against reality where there is no radical distinction between thoughts and reality.17 As Adorno and Horkheimer note, both the supremacy of reason during the Enlightenment and the magical practices of the primitive societies try to control reality, but the difference is that magic tries to achieve this aim through mimesis, therefore getting closer to the object, while the Enlightenment science completely distances itself from the object. Knowledge is used politically during the Age of Reason, as a form of power that can give man the long looked-for sway over nature: []Bacons view was appropriate to the scientific attitude that prevailed after him. The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over the disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles[...]18 Also, the two authors suggest that the world-view proposed by the Enlightenment was not only a totalitarian one, but also a highly unifying one, abolishing differences and exceptions, and aiming at an universal system which should be able to comprise everything in a logical arrangement: In advance, the Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows. Its rationalist and empiricist versions do not part company on that point [] Bacons postulate of una scientia universalis, whatever the number of fields of research, is as inimical to the unassignable as Leibniz mathesis universalis is to discontinuity. The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter. According to Bacon, the degrees of universality provide an unequivocal logical connection between first principles and observational judgments [] Formal logic was a major school of unified science.19
17 18

David Ingram and Julia Simon Ingram, Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, 1992, p. 51. Ibid., p. 49 19 Ibid., p.50.

17

At the same time, however, the analytical method of knowledge employed by the Enlightenment thinkers kept all things separated one from the other: the mind and body were separated by Descartes, the immanence and the transcendence could not communicate in Immanuel Kants system, and so on. Nevertheless, while there was no dialogue between the separate parts and no dialogue between the parts and the whole, the tendency was to look for general laws in all the fields of knowledge. The reaction against the superstition of the previous ages manifested itself poignantly in the tendency to impose coherence on the world. The propensity towards simplification and abstraction, specific to the Age of Reason, is the exact opposite of the tendency towards irrationality and diversification in the Romantic period that followed. Although the Romantics themselves went in search of simplicity, the simplicity they were striving to find was very different from what the Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to encounter. The Romantics were looking for the simplicity and freshness of the beginnings, which was precisely what the representatives of the Enlightenment had no access to, because of their persistent rational and analytical inquiry into the nature of everything that exists. It is obvious that the two cultural paradigms, Materialism during the Enlightenment age, and Romanticism, are in blatant opposition, perhaps more than any other two paradigms of thought. It can be said also that the modern and postmodern cultural paradigms are, at least in part, an echo or a thick web of influences springing from this opposition. In the light of these differences, it can be said that the two extreme states of mind that Lewis Carroll talks about in his book, Sylvie and Bruno are evocative of the opposition between the Enlightenment view of the world and the Romantic one: When a man's tipsy (that's one extreme, you know), he sees one thing as two. But, when he's extremely sober (that's the other extreme), he sees two things as one. It's equally inconvenient, whichever happens.20 Enlightenment tended to simplify and abolish distinction and particularity, or to see two things as one, while Romanticism endeavored to see deeper into things, to the point that any one thing could be considered as complex as two things. It is important to notice though that the Enlightenment achieved cognitive unity, which was at the same time based on rigorous analysis and therefore on dichotomy, while the Romantics were searching for a type of ontological organic unity, in which the world would be integrated in its whole as well as in its complexity. Gerald N. Izenberg in his Impossible Individuality speaks about this Romantic paradox of the organic synthesis, which, at the same time, posits the unity of the self with the whole and the importance of the individual as a separate identity. Izenberg identifies the three-stage history of being that appears in almost all the Romantic writings: the primal cosmic unity followed by the division into particularity and then the re-creation of the whole, in which the differentiation is maintained:

20

Lewis Carroll, The Complete Works, 1939, p. 215.

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Romanticism is the secularized and naturalized transformation of the Neoplatonic which posits a three-stage developmental history of Being as paradigmatic also for human reality: primal cosmic unity and goodness, subsequent differentiation into multiplicity and individual particularity, which is equivalent to a fall into evil and suffering, and then a return to unity and goodness that retains individual differentiation. The central trope of Romantic writing [] is the circuitous journey in which the visionary writer, as prophetic representative of all humanity, falls from primal unity into individuated and conflicted existence, separated from the whole and divided within himself, but returns at the end of his journey to a higher unity that restores his original harmony with the world while preserving his separate identity.21 According to Izenberg, one of the most potent Romantic paradoxes is the opposite tendency towards the delimitation of individuality, on the one hand, and the merger of the self with the whole on the other. In fact, as Izenberg shows, these two opposite tendencies eventually tend towards the same conclusion: both aim not at individuality but at the infinity of the self, be it by absorbing everything into ones own self, or by dissolving the self into the whole of the world: Individual particularity is by definition finite, because it is delimited by its difference from others. If, however, the self tries to expand by a constant absorption of the world into itself, its tendency is to become infinite and hence to obliterate its individuated identity. It follows that the two ostensibly opposite drives aim at the same thing, though by opposite means. Both aim not at individuality but at the infinity of the self, the one by absorbing everything into itself, the other by dissolving itself into everything.22 Thus, as Izenberg concludes, wholeness or plenitude is in the Romantic view of the world, dependent on individuality itself, on empathy and subjectivity: The way to the universe, to the sense of infinity, is dependent on individuality itself, on our passion for self-fulfillment, for the secret of authenticity is empathy, and hence infinity.23

21 22

Gerald N. Izenberg, The Impossible Individuality : Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1992, p.7. Ibid., p. 18. 23 Ibid., p. 20.

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1.4. Gravity- The Force that Pulls Everything Together The Age of Reason culminated with worldviews like that of Isaac Newton, who was the first to formulate the universal law of gravitation, a discovery which produced the impression that reality can be easily reduced and explained with the aid of a few simple and unquestionable rules. The realm of philosophy made its obvious contribution to this view with the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes or Francis Bacon. Simultaneously, neoclassic art brought its own contribution to the idea that the mystery of the world stands within the reach of human reasoning. The other name used for the Age of Reason, Enlightenment, summarizes the new attitude towards knowledge in the eighteenth century: the light of reason invades reality and subdues it with the same power as the first light created by God in the beginning of the world, as it can be seen in Alexander Popes poem Intended for sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey : Nature and Natures laws lay hid in night/ God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.24 Newtons theory of gravitation was thought to be able to completely elucidate the mystery of creation to the point that all truth can become demonstrative truth, therefore, a truth that can be demonstrated, rationalized and proved through experimentation. Light, the principle underlying the mystery of creation in the Bible, becomes the light of reason, that is, the absolute clearness of logical and experimental demonstration. The Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle comments on the great significance of the formulation of the universal law of gravitation in the beginning of his work, Sartor Resartus, a work destined to criticize under the play name of clothes philosophy the turn taken by rationalism towards the exterior and the abstract and its omission of the inner essence of reality: Our theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect. Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have been made on any other scheme [...] Of Geology and Geognosy we know enough: what with the labors of our Werners and Huttons, what with the ardent genius of their disciples, it has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the question, - How the apples were got in presented difficulties.25 The discovery of the law of gravitation marked the beginning of classical modern science, but also the beginning of a tendency towards objectivism, as the picture of nature seemed to be quite simple the physical world was made up of absolute space and absolute time, both of which were governed by
24 25

Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text , 1963, p. 808. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufeksdrockh , 1937, p. 3

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unquestionable laws. The belief in demonstrative truths led to very enthusiastic and selfassured scientific inquiries, like those of scientists like Pierre Simon de Laplace, who even ventured to state that the hypothesis of an absolute inventor and ruler of the universe was totally unnecessary: When the French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace explained his theory of the universe to Napoleon, Napoleon is said to have asked, Where does God fit into your theory? to which Laplace replied I have no need of that hypothesis.26 As Combs and Robertson observe in their work Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, Newton was the first scientist to define the world through pertinent, objective laws of physics and not through speculations only: Newton, with his Optiks and Principia, seemed to his contemporaries to have explained all of nature. Before Newton, there were speculations; after Newton, there were laws! Newton's laws of nature explained motion, force, and light in straightforward ways that lent themselves to practical application. His laws concerned material particles, their motion, and their interaction.27 Arthur Koestler analyzes in his Sleepwalkers, in the chapter suggestively entitled Enter Gravity, the significance of Newtons discovery of the mysterious law of gravitation, and its impact on the science of the following centuries. As Koestler observes, the law of gravitation clarified the picture of the world and the events that had remained unexplained so far, but, at the same time, the mystery behind the attraction at a long distance, with no material basis, was considered by many a breach in the materialist philosophy itself: With true sleepwalkers assurance, Newton avoided the booby-traps strewn over the field: magnetism, circular inertia, Galileos tides, Keplers sweeping brooms, Descartes vortices and at the same time knowingly walked into what looked like the deadliest trap of all: action-at-adistance, ubiquitous, pervading, the entire universe like the presence of the Holy Ghost. The enormity of this step can be vividly illustrated by the fact that a steel cable of a thickness equalling the diameter if the earth would not be strong enough to hold the earth in its orbit. Yet the gravitational force which holds the earth in its orbit is transmitted from the sun across 93 million miles of space without any material medium to carry that force.28 Newton himself observes the incongruity of the properties displayed by the force of gravitation and the materialist philosophy, even supposing that the agent of gravity may be immaterial or may be of a divine or spiritual nature: It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and effect other matter without mutual contact...And this is one reason, why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another, at a distance
26 27

Theodore Schick Jr., Can Science Prove that God Does Not Exist?, 2000, p. 63. Allan Combs and Robin Robertson, Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences , 1995, p. 5. 28 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Mans Changing Vision of the Universe , 1959, p. 502-503.

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through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.29 However, the scene left by the Enlightenment was a desolated and disenchanted one. This bare scenery formed of an austere, transparent and intelligible nature with a depersonalized, objective observer. The lack of spirituality and idealism from the Enlightenment world picture was what goaded the Romantic revolution to take place. Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the Enlightenment doctrine as having, in a way, the same aims as the mythical or magic- alchemic thinking, that is, it attempted to dominate the world through specific formulas. According to them, the mathematical, over-rational and material ways of viewing the world, transformed thinking into a ritual:30 Mathematical procedure became, so to speak, the ritual of thinking. In spite of the axiomatic self-restriction, it establishes itself as necessary and objective: it turned thought into a thing, an instrument which is its own term for it...The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself, the blinder its resignation in reproducing existence. Hence enlightenment returns to mythology, which it never really knew how to elude. For in its figures mythology had the essence of the status quo: cycle, fate, and domination of the world reflected as the truth and deprived of hope. In both the pregnancy of the mythical image and the clarity of the scientific formula, the everlastingness of the factual is confirmed and the mere existence pure and simple expressed as the meaning which it forbids [...]31 Thus, in spite of its alienating function and of its lack of spirituality, the Enlightenment paradigm resembled the mythical mode in the fatality of its enclosing, narrowing perspective of the world. As Adorno and Horkheimer observe, while animism spiritualized the object [...] industrialism objectifies the spirit of men.32 The Age of Reason functioned as a form of alienation for man from his own humanity and from his identity: It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men, even those of the individual to himself-were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected from him.33 The Age of Reason was complemented and followed by The Age of the Industrial Revolution. The technological advancements produced very important changes for the life of man in general and
29 30

Ibid., p. 503, Isaac Newton, Third Letter to Bentley, Opera Omnia, London, 177985, IV, 380. The actual evidence for the fact that thinking and reason had turned into a ritual is given by the existence of institutions such as the Royal Society, where the giants of science were held in the greatest esteem. 31 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Concept of Enlightenment, in David Ingram and Julia Simon Ingram, Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, 1992, p. 54. 32 Id. 33 Id.

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for that of the society as a whole. The Romantic poets vehemently criticized these industrial changes which caused a feeling of estrangement from nature and from spiritual life. Enlightenment meant the absolute triumph of reason and the natural laws over the spiritual. Although it cannot be denied that many of the Enlightenment thinkers or writers did believe in a divinity, the fact that they were striving to have a rational faith in God diminished somehow the spiritual force of the age. As the world became coherent in the light of Newtons theory of gravitation, there was no longer any need to assume the existence of a creator. Also, even more tragic was the fact that the spirit of man had no place in the clockwork universe described by the Age of Reason. The world was seen as a purely material construct, in which nothing could take place that was outside the chain of causes and effects. However, Newton for example, although an advocator of the logical chain of causes and effects, observed that the first cause of things, and the secret agent behind the gravitational pull was certainly not a material one: The ancient atomists rejected a universal fluid medium for the propagation of light, tacitly attributing Gravity to some other Cause than dense Matter. Later Philosophers banish the Consideration of such a Cause out of natural Philosophy, feigning Hypotheses for explaining all things mechanically, and referring other Causes to Metaphysicks: Whereas the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical. 34 Thus, among the philosophers and thinkers of the Enlightenment period, Newton is certainly one of those who vacillated many times between the strictly physical picture of the world, and another picture which would combine the natural causes with the metaphysical ones: Leibniz's claim that the material system is a machine absolutely perfect, a consequence of an excessive fondness for necessity and mechanism, is refuted by Newton's observation that the fabrick of the universe, and course of nature, could not continue for ever in its present state, but would require, in process of time, to be re-established or renewed by the same hand that formed it. Descartes beast-machine doctrine is as nothing compared with Leibniz's pre-established harmony, or with his pretense that the soul does not act on the body, nor the body on the soul; that both proceed by necessary laws, the soul in its perceptions and volitions, and the body in its motions, without affecting each other; but that each is to be considered as a separate independent machine. 35 Therefore, according to Newton, there is place in the universe for a supreme or divine will, but it is required only at times, for example in the beginning of the world, and every time the clockwork universe needs repair. It can be said then that Newton shared in the mechanist view as much as Leibniz or Descartes, since for him the divinity was nothing more than the power that stands behind the
34 35

Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2002, p. 332 Ibid., p.334

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clockwork, making sure it functions properly. There are parts in his work where Newton realizes that gravity, for example, has an unknown cause, and that the picture of the world he himself had put together is not entirely clear because of this: [] The first thing to be done in Philosophy is to find out all the general laws of motion (so far as they can be discovered) on which the frame of nature depends [] in this search metaphysical arguments are very slippery [] We find in ourselves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts (but the laws of this power we do not know) & see the same power in other living creatures but how this is done & by what laws we do not know. And by this instance & that of gravity it appears that there are other laws of motion (unknown to us) than those which arise from Vis inertiae which is enough to justify & encourage or search after them. We cannot say that all nature is not alive. 36 Still, essentially the mechanical and materialist views of the world dominated the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. According to these views, as Shimon Malin observed in his book Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, there was no place for the spirit in the postulates of materialist philosophy; matter and vacuum were the only two things that made up the universe: Materialism can be traced back to Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century B. C. It was passionately promoted by Epicurus in the second century B. C., and eloquently expressed by the Roman poet Lucretius around 55 B. C. Lucretius stated the essence of the materialistic doctrine as follows: All nature as it is in itself consists of two thingsbodies and the vacant space in which the bodies are situated and through which they move in different directions... nothing exists that is distinct both from body and from vacuity.37 Thus, in spite of the fact that many of the thinkers of the Enlightenment or of the century that preceded it, including Newton, were religious and stipulated the existence of a creator, giving him a part in their systems, in fact for them God was only the assembler of this universe that functioned as a perfect clockwork, and his liberty and power were immensely limited by the natural laws themselves: It seems probable to me that God in the Beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and as these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first Creation.38 It is obvious therefore, that the reality that Newton conceived of was completely inanimate. God was, at the most, an abstract entity, without form or substance. As Shimon Malin observed, Newton believed in a divinity that was perfect and infinite, but never manifest in the world:
36 37

Ibid., p. 344 Shimon Malin, Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality , 2003, p. 11 38 Isaac Newton, Newtons Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings , 1953, p.175.

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[] Newton reveals a concept of reality that contains two levels, God and nature. Since God created nature, His reality is supreme, certainly higher than the reality of the nature He created. But, as Pierre Simon de Laplace noted in the following centuries, the concept of God was logically extraneous to the Newtonian paradigm. The paradigm did not need a God to create or sustain it. Though Newton himself was deeply religious and devoted more time and energy to the study of theology than he did to the study of physics, the system he introduced was the foundation of a world-view that was not only materialistic but mechanistic: nature as a perfect clockwork, a reality which contains just the clockwork itself, without a designer or a craftsman who built it.39 It is very interesting that, throughout the ages, the concept of God shifted according to the way in which the world-view also shifted: for Newton God was the Great Mechanic, for Shaftesbury and Blake he was the Great Architect and later on, for Paul Dirac he was the Great Mathematician. As physicist Lee Smolin observed, the problem with the clockwork universe is that it hardly grants any place for man himself, although he is its very observer. Physics should include the living creatures as Smolin underlies since it pretends to offer a complete picture of the existing things, and Newtonian physics obviously failed on this point: [] There is no place for life in the Newtonian universe. On the basis of the physics that was known in the nineteenth century, it is impossible to perceive a connection between ourselves as living things and the rest of the universe. But physics must provide a way to understand what life is and why we are here. It is the science of everything whose task is to uncover those facts and laws that apply universally. Physics must underlie and explain biology because living creatures, like all things in the universe, are made out of atoms which obey the same laws as do every other atom in the world. An approach to physics that does not make the existence of life comprehensible must eventually give way to one that does. 40 A slightly different type of Enlightenment seems to subsist at present as well, as Saul Bellow proposes in his book Mr. Sammlers Planet. In his view, the numerous modern institutions advocating individual and social rights make of the modern scene another type of Enlightenment, in which the the dark satanic mills have changed into light satanic mills. Bellows use of the famous Blakean phrase to refer to both eighteenth century and modern Enlightenment is very suggestive. Essentially, the great number of laws, natural or social, or of rights in the modern era, are satanic mills, they form a revolving pattern, just like the mad clockwork structure, and they can lure man away from the essential or spiritual things, as they direct attention to the external world, instead of the internal one: The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London. Old Sammler and his screwy visions! He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery! Enlightenment, universal education, universal suffrage, the rights of the majority acknowledged by all the governments, the
39 40

Shimon Malin, Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality , 2003, p. 13. Lee Smolin, The Life of Cosmos, 1997, p.25

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rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the unity of the different races affirmed, Social Security, public health, the dignity of the person, the right to justice [] spread wide, democratized []41 The satanic mills of the Enlightenment were what Romanticism vehemently rejected, while substituting the opposite values: instead of reason, they proposed imagination, instead of thinking, feeling, instead of demonstrative truth, inspiration and visionary powers. 1.5. Re-enchanting the World: The Romantic Revolution The Romantics came with a whole new way of seeing the world. Their revolution acted virtually as a re-enchantment of the natural world, an attempt to reunite the realities that the Enlightenment had separated. In his Natures Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth, Peter Marshall describes the impact of the Romantic revolution, which is still considered as the decisive step towards the modernist view of the world: The writers and artists of Romanticism thus turned their back on naked reason and sought new springs of inspiration and knowledge. 'Thinking,' the German poet Novalis wrote, 'is only a dream of feeling, an extinct feeling, only grey, weakly living.' Romanticism marked the triumph of life over art and thought. The analytical and deductive methods of the scientists and philosophers of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment had merely destroyed what they sought to understand and control: 'To dissect is to murder,' Wordsworth reminded his contemporaries. This rejection of analytical reason took the form of praising the 'natural' wisdom of the savage, the peasant and the child, who still trailed clouds of glory and had not yet been imprisoned in the mental workhouse of modern civilization. Their visionary perception shone through the darkening gloom. 42 The notions held true by the representatives of Enlightenment were completely reversed by the Romantics, and among these, one of the most important was the faculty of imagination, which was held to be the only indicative of truth, as opposed to false reason: For Dr Johnson 'all power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity'; for the Romantics, it was reason uninformed by the imagination and feelings that led to the madness of rational man. 'I am certain of nothing,' wrote Keats, 'but the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of the Imagination.'43 The Romantic poets revolutionized the world of literature and art in general by giving in to fantasy and irrationality, and by introducing subjectivity in the work of art. Art achieved full aesthetic value in itself and the poets were compared to prophets, capable of revealing the ultimate truths of life and the universe. Inspiration and imagination, which had been so long despised during the Age of Reason,
41 42

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammlers Planet, 1970, p.25-26. Peter Marshall, Natures Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth, 1994, p. 270. 43 Id.

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became the two major faculties of man. According to Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Defense of Poetry, the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, that is, they are inspired by divine or supernatural forces and can prophesize about the future, and about the things that they do not fully understand themselves: Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 44 Thus, the Romantic Revolution was produced to fight back these materialistic ideas. The Romantic poets were revolutionary both by taking active part in the social and political revolutions of the time like the French Revolution or the American one, but also by warring against materialism through their ideas and their artistic creations. Shelley, as the other Romantics, believed that reason is only an instrument of the imagination, a necessary faculty but only as long as it is guided by the imagination: Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent; as the body to the spirit; as the shadow to the substance. 45 According to Shelley, reason can only perceive the differences among things while imagination can link one think to another and see the universe in its wholeness. Shelley comments on the role of the Romantic imagination, emphasizing its ability to reveal the truth and to withdraw lifes dark veil: All things exist as they are perceived -- at least in relation to the percipient. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos.46 The world of imagination is thus much more coherent than the familiar world we live in. As Shelley sees it, fantasy is what actually reveals the hidden order of things, and makes the familiar surroundings seem chaotic by contrast. For the Romantics therefore, imagination had a privileged role among the faculties of man, since it made it possible for them to perceive beyond the immediate surroundings and the immediate impressions. Imagination is directly related to vision and a certain way of perceiving things. As M. H. Abrams proposes in his Natural Supernaturalism, one of the most poignant characteristics of Romanticism which indeed influenced the subsequent ages was precisely this propensity to see things in a new way. According to Abrams, the Romantics believed that if an object
44 45

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelleys Prose: Or, the Trumpet of a Prophecy , 1966, p. 296. Ibid. p. 277. 46 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelleys Prose: Or, the Trumpet of a Prophecy, p. 295.

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was seen in a new way the object itself was made new: [] Of all Romantic innovations, none has so preempted the attention of poets, novelists, and painters (and the critics of poetry, novels, and painting) as the concern with the eye and the object and the need for a revolution in seeing which will make the object new.47 The American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau evidenced this attitude very well. For Thoreau, seeing the world with fresh senses is the only way to discover new things: I saw this familiartoo familiarfact at a different angle, and I was charmed and haunted by it [...] I had seen into paradisaic regions, with their air and sky, and I was no longer wholly or merely a denizen of this vulgar earth. Yet had I hardly a foothold there. I was only sure that I was charmed, and no mistake. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. Only what we have touched and worn is trivial, -- our scurf, repetition, tradition, conformity. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. Great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors from one angle.48 Thus, the Romantics criticized the Enlightenment because it had closed the gates of vision and imagination, not permitting the human mind to go beyond the factual and the immediate. For them, imagination was not necessarily a way of escaping in a totally different universe, but a way of perceiving the things of this world anew and thus constantly opening new possibilities and new meanings.

47 48

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 1973, p. 411. Henry David Thoreau, The Heart of Thoreaus Journals, 1927, p. 215.

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1.6. Teach These Souls to Fly: The World of William Blake William Blake was, among the Romantics, the poet who most vehemently fought reason and demonstrative truth, and affirmed imagination and poetic prophecy instead. Blakes declaration of war, in the beginning of Milton, addressed to materialism is very eloquent: I will not cease from Mental Fight,/Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand/ Till we have built Jerusalem/ In Englands green and pleasant Land.
49

The intellectual battle of the Romantics parallels thus the social and political

changes of the time, and Blakes works are especially representative for this fact, as they have a very particular shade of mysticism: London becomes Jerusalem, the city of God, in Blakes system, and it will only be saved from materialism through the free exercise of art and imagination. Also, in Blakes works we find the very symbol of revolution impersonated by Orc - as the main character for his prophecies Europe and America, and who also plays an important part in The Four Zoas. Foster Damon observes in his Blake Dictionary that: Orc is Revolution in the material world. He is a lower form of Luvah, the emotions [] because repressed love turns to war. Orcs consort is the Shadowy Female, who is this material world a lower form of Luvahs Emanation, Vala. He is the first born of Los and Enitharmon. 50 Blakes array of characters, coming from his own mythology, suggestively represents the intellectual battle that takes place inside the human mind. The four Zoas are the mental divisions of the eternal man Albion, after the Fall. Among them Urizen and Urthona or Los are especially antagonistic since they represent the reasoning power and the creative or artistic power respectively, both of which strive for domination inside the human mind. Thus, the poetry of William Blake is directly concerned with the divorce between reason and imagination, which, in the authors view, is the reason of the fall of man. In fact, Blake himself summarizes the function of his poetry in the introduction to the last chapter of Jerusalem, entitled To The Christians : I give you the end of a golden string, /Only wind it into a ball, /It will lead you in at Heavens gate/ Built in Jerusalems wall. 51 If we clang to the golden thread that Blake offers it would lead us to incessant weavings of our imaginations, filling for us a cup of sparkling poetic fancies that would certainly make us tipsie, such a cup of fancies as the fairy sitting on a streaked tulip asks from the poet, in the beginning of one of Blakes Prophetic Books, namely Europe, in exchange for a secret. And this secret which Blake found out from the fairy is that
49 50

William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 1972, p.481. Foster S. Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, 1971, p.309. 51 Ibid., Jerusalem, 77, p.716.

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the visions provided by the five windows will show us that the material world is not dead, and that every particle of dust breathes forth its joy : Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead? He, laughing, answerd: I will write a book on leaves of flowers If you will feed me on love-thoughts & give me now and then A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsie, Ill sing to you to this soft lute, and show you all alive. The world, when every particle of dust breaths forth its joy.52 It is the endeavour of all of Blakes work to show that the material world is not dead, and that everything that lives is holy , that everything possible to be believd is an image of truth 53, or that truth can never be told so as to be understood and not believed 54 His prophetic text Europe begins with one of his most famous of his illuminated plates it is the Ancient of Days , or God Creating the Universe . The image on the plate represents an aged man, squatting on the inside of his sphere, with his eyes closed or else, looking downwards, and creating the universe with a pair of golden compasses. Blake engages against the materialism of the Age of Reason, symbolized by the pair of golden compasses as an instrument for measurement and division, in all his poetry. At the same time though, in Blakes system the compass is also a symbol for the divine creation, the instrument with which God drew the heavens upon the face of the depth, as the image in The Bible indicates: When he prepared the heavens, I was there: / When he set a compass upon the face of the depth. 55 Thus, Blake contrasts through his symbol of the compass the divine creation of the world and the materialist view of the universe. Another plate suggestively represents Newton drawing a half circle and a triangle, in all likelihood, with a pair of compasses on a scroll, therefore making an open parallel between the deist religion and the materialistic philosophy of Newton: both are guilty of limitative views, regarding the material world. In yet another illuminated print, namely the seventieth of Jerusalem, Blake represents materialism in the form of a three headed, monstrous figure, this trinity or anti-trinity being composed of the heads of Newton, Locke and Bacon, three of the most important names in the Age of Reason: His bosom wide & shoulders huge, overspreading wondrous, Bear Three strong sinewy Necks & Three awful and terrible Heads, Three Brains, in contradicting council brooding incessantly Neither daring to put in act its councils, fearing each other, Therefore rejecting Ideas as nothing & holding all Wisdom
52 53

Ibid., Europe, iii, p. 237. Ibid., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p.151. 54 Ibid., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p.152. 55 The Holy Bible, King James Version, 1611, Proverbs, 8, 27.

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To consist in the Agreements and Disagreements of Ideas []56 Blake cannot accept the materialistic philosophy that these three thinkers formed because it binds imagination in pursuing strictly reason and logic, until wisdom is reduced, as he says, to agreements and disagreements of ideas. This is why Blake admits contraries: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.57 On the other hand, in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake criticizes both materialism and deism, showing that innocence and purity are destroyed by morality or the belief in moral virtues, or by experiments and the belief in the all-powerful reason. The two contraries, innocence and experience have equal value in the eyes of the poet. It is a common misinterpretation of Blakes work to assume that innocence is a symbol of the principle of good, while experience is a symbol of evil. What Blake means in fact is exactly the opposite: innocence and experience are two contrary states that must coexist in the world. The two parallel poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience, bearing the same title, The Chimney Sweeper, illustrate his critique of Enlightenment philosophy and deism. As Blake noticed, both the Enlightenment science and philosophy and the Enlightenment religion proceed from a common root and have a similar effect on man: both distance him from his natural state of innocence, and from the Divine Vision. Deism, as the religion of the Enlightenment, assumed that God himself can only be known through reason and rational methods. Blake specifically defended mans natural state of innocence against the deistic belief in morality. According to him, the moral laws that the Deists imposed on religion and man, just like Newtons materialist laws that were imposed on the natural world, spoiled the innocence and purity of both nature and man. The very notion of law comes in conflict with liberty and innocence, and Blake understood that innocence does not necessarily imply a sinless condition, but that the real sin is the belief in the need for moral laws. To make a distinction between good and evil is essentially wrong because contraries must coexist in a harmonious world. In the version of The Chimney Sweeper included in Songs of Experience, Blake symbolizes the plight of the moral laws through the blackening soot that covers the little boy. This symbolic blackness is further emphasized by its contrast with the snow, through which Blake conveys the contrast between innocence and experience. Experience is, according to Blake, the state in which man begins to make the distinction between evil and good, and this happens when the Divine Vision is lost, and moral laws are created. In the Chimney Sweeper, the little boy is brought into the state of woe by his own parents who are, suggestively gone up to the
56 57

Ibid., Jerusalem, 70: 3-9, p.708. Ibid. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 3, p.149.

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church to pray. The parents are clearly deists, who believe in moral laws above the natural state of innocence: A little black thing among the snow:/ Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!/ Where are thy father & mother? say?/ They are both gone up to the church to pray. 58 The state of innocence of the little chimney sweeper is described as his being happy upon the heath and smiling among the winters snow, and it is destroyed by his parents forging of moral laws that judge happiness and smiling as impure states: Because I was happy upon the heath, /And smil'd among the winter's snow:/ They clothed me in the clothes of death,/ And taught me to sing the notes of woe.59 In the correspondent poem from Songs of Innocence the same metaphor of the staining blackness of soot appears. The soot blackening little Tom Dacres white hair stands, in the same way, for either the natural religion of Enlightenment or for the technological developments of the Industrial Age that coat mans natural innocence in their materialist views: Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head/ That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd, so I said./ Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare,/ You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.60 Among the Prophetic Books, Europe and America best represent Blakes idea of revolution, symbolized by the awakening of Orc, the first born of Enitharmon, who is the incarnation of the energetic revolt against materialism. Moreover, as Foster Damon observes, Europe represents the land of imagination, or the continent of Los, among the four continents in Blakes philosophy: Europe is one of the four continents. As its position is North, it represents the realm of the Imagination. 61 The themes of Europe are outlined by Damon in his Blake Dictionary; both of the themes are related to the materialism and deism of the Enlightenment Europe, which Blake considered as being the two greatest departures from real Christianity: Two themes are then developed, both of them errors of official Christianity. The first of these is the triumph of the Female Will over the male by means of the false doctrine that sex is sin. For Urizen has escaped from his fetters into the North; and Los, having announced that now strong Urthona (himself) takes his rest, unobtrusively disappears, leaving Enitharmon free to establish her Will[...] The other error of official Christianity is materialism, which also begins with Enitharmon. Having closed the chief gate (sex) into Eternity, she relegates Eternity and its bliss to a future time and place which do not exist, the supposed heaven after death.62 Indeed, Europe describes the reign of materialism and natural religion, as Los is asleep and Urizen is awaken and imposes his aged ignorance on Albion, who thus loses his humanity and becomes an Angel. Also, Enitharmon tries to establish the Female Will, using the erroneous commands and moral laws against sex, as defined by the natural religion. The true humanity is revealed by Blake in the short
58 59

Ibid., Songs of Experience, p.212. Id. 60 Ibid. Songs of Innocence, p. 117. 61 Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p.131. 62 Ibid., p.132.

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poem preceding the Prophecy itself: man has five windows into Eternity, represented by the five traditional senses. The fifth sense, touch, is identified also with sexual pleasure, and Blakes criticism is directed especially toward mans misuse of this particular sense, as he fails to perform his sexual activities freely and hides instead, under the pretext of morality: Five windows light the cavern'd Man; thro' one he breathes the air; Thro' one, hears music of the spheres; thro' one, the eternal vine Flourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro' one can look. And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth; Thro' one, himself pass out what time he please, but he will not; For stolen joys are sweet, & bread eaten in secret pleasant.63 Man imposes on himself the moral laws that bind and restrain all his senses and keep him from seeing the Divine Vision, and, at the same time divide him. By being enclosed in his five senses instead of being able to use them so as to penetrate beyond the material world, man becomes a slave to nature and materialism, and fails to recognize his own spiritual nature and the fact that the whole world is alive as well. The fairy that is the main character of this little poem which precedes Europe and who, according to the poet, dictates the Prophecy to him, shows Blake that even flowers are eternal, that is to say, there is no material world at all. The eternal flowers that whimper because they were plucked are also a hint at mans unawareness of his own immortality and spiritual nature, and his fear of death: I took him home in my warm bosom: as we went along/ Wild flowers I gatherd; & he shew'd me each eternal flower:/He laugh'd aloud to see them whimper because they were pluck'd.64 The short poem is followed by a Preludium, in which the Shadowy Female announces the birth of Orc, intimating, at the same time, the meaning of this birth. She talks first about the immensity and about the cumbering richness of the material world: And all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains, Unwilling I look up to heaven, unwilling count the stars: Sitting in the fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine I seize their burning power [...]65 The birth of Orc is then described by the Shadowy Female, who suggestively identifies him with the infinite, born into the finite world as a baby, as the swaddling bands and the fact that he needs to be fed with milk and honey indicate: And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? To compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it With milk and honey?
63 64

William Blake, Complete Writings, Europe, iii: 1-6, p. 237. Ibid., p. 238. 65 Ibid., 1:15, 2:1-3, p. 238.

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I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.66 It is obvious then that Orc represents the image of the infinite/ Shut up in finite revolutions, the symbol of energy and infinity that is born in the material world in the shape of revolution. The flaming serpent Orc seems to parallel to the Biblical serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, and thus it symbolizes mans fall from eternity and descent into the material world: Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth: To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid In forests of night; then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rush'd And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh. Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel; Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.67 The most important change in the world where Orc appears is, as everywhere else in Blakes work, the relationship between God and man: here man becomes an Angel and God a tyrant crownd, that is, man loses his most important quality, his humanity, and becomes an angel instead, an entity without substance, a dream in the night of Enitharmon: Enitharmon slept Eighteen hundred years, Man was a Dream![...] She slept in the middle of her nightly song Eighteen hundred years, a female dream.68 The state of things that Blake describes is meant to show the state of man since the beginnings of Christian history, as the dream of eighteen hundred years suggests. The images are apocalyptic: Albion, the eternal man, struggles between the fires of revolution of Orc and the heavy clouds of Urizen that suggest the aged ignorance reigning over the world: And the clouds & fires pale rolld round in the night of Enitharmon Round Albions cliffs & Londons walls; still Enitharmon slept! Rolling volumes of grey mist involve Churches, Palaces, Towers: For Urizen unclaspd his Book: feeding his soul with pity The youth of England hid in gloom curse the paind heavens; compell'd Into the deadly night to see the form of Albions Angel Their parents brought them forth & aged ignorance preaches canting, On a vast rock, perciev'd by those senses that are clos'd from thought: Bleak, dark, abrupt, it stands & overshadows London city
66 67

Ibid., 2:13-16, p. 239. Ibid., 10:16-23, p. 241. 68 Ibid., 9: 1-5, p. 240.

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They saw his boney feet on the rock, the flesh consum'd in flames: They saw the Serpent temple lifted above, shadowing the Island white: They heard the voice of Albions Angel howling in flames of Orc, Seeking the trump of the last doom.69 The rolling volumes of grey mist coming from Urizens open book suggest the state of ignorance and blindness to real knowledge that dominates the world, in which the vision of the Human Form Divine is lost and replaced by the form of Albions Angel. In the midst of this confusing world, Albion is seeking for the trumpet of the last doom, therefore, trying to bring the Last Judgment on the world. Here we can see that Blake goes much beyond the political or social revolution, since the apocalyptic images point to the need for a spiritual or intellectual revolution. It is not just the French Revolution that had inspired so many Romantics that Blake hints at, but also a religious revolution that would abolish deism with its moral laws and materialism, with its thou shalt nots written over the doors: Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O womans triumph) Every house a den, every man bound; the shadows are filld With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses of iron: Over the doors Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys Fear is written: With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the walls The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.70 The revolution is supposed to bring freedom to every man bound, and this freedom is especially the spiritual and intellectual liberation from the chains of moral law and materialist philosophy. Albions Angel finally seizes the trump of the last doom, but he cannot blow the iron tube, and, suggestively, Newton appears and blows the enormous blast: A mighty Spirit leap'd from the land of Albion, Nam'd Newton; he siez'd the Trump, & blow'd the enormous blast! Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts, Fell thro' the wintry skies seeking their graves; Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation.71 The image is extremely suggestive: Newton and his materialist philosophy are again identified by Blake as the main causes of the apocalyptic disaster that reigns over England and baffles the human spirit and mind. After the blow of the trumpet, Orc appears again in France, suggesting the beginning of the French Revolution. The poem ends with the awakening of Los, probably a hint at the shift from Enlightenment philosophy to Romanticism and the beginning of the intellectual battle, as Los call to the strife of blood suggests it: Then Los arose: his head he reard in snaky thunders clad;/ And with a
69 70

Ibid. 12:1-13, p. 242. Ibid. 12: 25-31, p. 242-243. 71 Ibid. 13:4-8, p. 243.

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cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole,/ Calld all his sons to the strife of blood. 72 Thus, it is plain that in Blakes view religion and art were as close to one another as materialism and deism, symbolized always by Newton, Bacon and Locke. His main discontent with materialism was the fact that it shrunk the eyes of man through its demonstrative and deterministic methods of analyzing nature, and thus made the world seem bare and poor. Shrinking the eyes, therefore closing the gates of vision, results in shrinking nature as well, and practically obliterating such notions as eternity and infinity, which cannot be perceived by the limitative powers of reason only: And all the vast of Nature shrunk Before their shrunken eyes. Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave Laws & Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more And more to Earth, closing and restraining, Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete. Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke.73 The materialist philosophy is as reductive as a philosophy of the five senses, which deduces everything from everything else, until all the things in the world form a chain of events and beings. The chain of being is actually an idea that pervades culture from its beginnings up to the present. Arthur O. Lovejoy analyzes the history of this concept of the chain of being in the chapter Romanticism and Plenitude from his book The Great Chain of Being , and observes the shift in the meaning of this notion from the Enlightenment period when it was meant to describe the hierarchical scale of all beings from God to the Angels and to the lesser beings, all in a very logical and systematized organization in which all things in this world were linked together in a fixed chain, and where everything had its fixed place, to the Romantic period when the chain of being became a synonym for plenitude, that is, for the fullness of the world, for universality as the German Romantic Friedrich Schiller expressed it in Sturm und Drang: Every kind of perfection must attain existence in the fullness of the world... Every offspring of the brain, everything that wit can fashion, has an unchallengeable right of citizenship in this larger understanding of the creation. In the infinite chasm of nature no activity could be omitted, no grade of enjoyment be wanting in the universal happiness....That great Householder of this world who suffers not even a straw to fall to the ground uselessly, who leaves no crevice uninhabited where life may be enjoyed, who hospitably grants even that little flowering of pleasure which finds its root in madness, [...] this great Inventor could not permit even error to remain unutilized in his great design, could not allow this wide region of thought to lie empty and joyless in the mind of man... It is genuine gain for the completeness of the universe, it is a

72 73

Ibid., 15:9-11, p.245. Ibid. The Song of Los, 4:12-17, p. 246.

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provision of the supreme wisdom, that erring reason should people even the chaotic land of dreams and should cultivate even the barren ground of contradiction.74 Thus, if the tendency towards simplification and standardization of thought and life 75 was characteristic of the Age of Reason, the Romantic revolution brought about the contrary tendency towards diversity, towards possibility as opposed to concreteness, and the realization of every possibility of existence as a fulfilment of the principle of plenitude. The Romantic Revolution can be defined as a reaction of opposition to Reason, to the logical and rational pattern of thought, to objectivism, and an affirmation of Imagination, dreams, subjectivism, transcendentalism. This shift in the world view was the first outbreak of modernism, in the sense that it was the renouncing of two of the predominant views up to that moment: the religious view that was prone on adapting all knowledge to the biblical interpretation, and the classical scientific view where the reasoning power was considered sufficient for discovering the truth about the world, through the understanding and systematizing of the laws of nature. As opposed to this objectivism, one of the most important discoveries made by the Romantic Revolution was the discovery of the self, of subjective perception, of human imagination and of the dream world, all of which later influenced further developments in the arts, in philosophy, psychology, and even in science: for example the surrealist movement in modern art, transcendentalism and phenomenology in philosophy, psychoanalyses and the interpretation of dreams in psychology, theories of relativity, of quantum physics, or theories based on the principle of plenitude in modern science. Although the beginning of the use of reason during the Enlightenment era can be considered as a real illumination and was indeed the cause of many scientific and technological advancements for man, its other tenants- like the over-simplification of facts and the belief that the universe was entirely deterministic were blinding in other respects, such as the place of man and of consciousness in the world, and the nature of the human spirit. The Enlightenment philosophers went so far in their faith in reason as to advocate atheism, like Bacon did, as more appropriate for man because it could help him maintain his moral behaviour more than religion itself would. To the thinkers of the Age of Reason, the barrier between religion and madness or imagination was literally nonexistent. Anything that implied any other kind of faith than that provided by the pure exercise of reason and further demonstrated by experiment, was dangerous to man, and seen as part of his un-enlightened past, when the use of reason had not been discovered. Progress and an enlightened future seemed to be linked exclusively with the use of reason, which was in itself considered the greatest of moral virtues: Page 80. As the contumely is greater towards God, so the danger is greater towards men. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not. Praise of Atheism!
74 75

Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea , 1974, p.299. Ibid., p.292.

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but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no farther, and we see the times inclined (as the time of Augustus Caesar), were civil times. Atheism is thus the best of all. Bacon fools us. 76 Blake is repelled by the materialist philosophy which he considered to be a form of atheism in itself. In the Book of Urizen, he significantly replaces the myth of Genesis and Gods creation of the world with the creation of the world by Urizen, who symbolizes the vacuum left by science and reason in the world, which destroy art and the human imagination: Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific! Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon Hath form'd this abominable void This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?--Some said It is Urizen, But unknown, abstracted Brooding secret, the dark power hid.77 The unprolific Urizen does not create, he engenders a world but he does so by dividing and measuring, by establishing natural and moral laws and the seven deadly sins: Times on times he divided, & measur'd Space by space in his ninefold darkness Unseen, unknown! changes appeard In his desolate mountains rifted furious By the black winds of perturbation [...]78 As George Gilpin suggests in his essay William Blake and the Worlds Body of Science , the version of creation that Blake gives to us in The First Book of Urizen is the scientific one, that is, the one that the Enlightenment science put forth, the contrary of wisdom: The Biblical and Milton overtones leave no doubt but that we are examining Urizen's work of creation in mock-heroic prospect. If Pope in the Dunciad shows the literary dunces of his age establishing a kingdom ruled by Dulness, comingin her Majesty, to destroy Order and Science, and to Substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth, so also does Blake in The Book of Urizen show the scientific dunces of his age establishing a kingdom ruled by Urizen, coming in his majesty to destroy imaginative order and poetry, and to substitute the kingdom of unenlightened science upon earth.79 The science of Urizen is the science of Satan, as Gilpin notes, and again, Blake seems to see no difference between the reductive science of the Enlightenment and the satanic self-absorbed
76 77

William Blake, Complete Writings, Annotations to Bacon, p. 404. Ibid.., The Book of Urizen, 3:1-8, p. 222. 78 Ibid., 3:13-17, p. 222 79 George H. Gilpin, William Blake and the Worlds Body of Science, 2004, p.37.

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knowledge that caused Lucifer to fall from his privileged state in heaven. The scientists of Blakes time strove for unity, and so did Blake, but the unity the scientists were looking for was closer to singularity, to the absolute reducing of the complexity of the world to a single law, whereas Blake was seeking for a unity which was a lot closer to infinity, where every minute particular was part of the whole: Laws of peace, of love, of unity: Of pity, compassion, forgiveness. Let each chuse one habitation: His ancient infinite mansion: One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure One King, one God, one Law.80 Materialism teaches doubt & Experiment as Blake noted, and refuses to believe anything that can not be proven by experiment. Blake justly criticized this attitude of the philosophers of the Enlightenment since they did not leave any place in their research for further developments or further discovery, and tried to apply the deterministic and rational mode of thinking to the whole of reality: For thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes: God can only be known by his Attributes; And as for the Indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ & his Father, its all a boast. And Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this Worlds Fashion. To teach doubt & Experiment Certainly was not what Christ meant.81 As opposed to the materialist philosophy, Blake proposes that nature is imagination itself, that is, true vision can disclose the spiritual nature of everything that exists, including what is considered by science to be merely dead matter: The human essence for Blake is the imagination. He made no distinction between the perceiving mind and the perceived world. 'Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity...' he wrote, '& Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees.' For Blake the science which only sees nature as a machine is the 'Tree of Death'. But if we recognize that 'Nature is Imagination itself its study can become a 'sweet Science'.82 The philosopher John Locke, another of Blakes most targeted enemies because of the doctrine he preached, theorized, as other representatives of the Age of Reason had done also, that imagination and

80 81

William Blake, Complete Writings, The Book of Urizen, 4:34-40, p.224. Ibid., Everlasting Gospel, p.752. 82 Peter Marshall, Natures Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth, 1994, p.274.

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madness are closely linked, and that madness is actually caused by the sway of the imagination over reason in the human psyche: This at least is the cause of great errors and mistakes amongst men even when it does not wholly unhinge the brains and put all government of the thoughts into the hands of the imagination as it sometimes happens, when the Imagination by being much employed and getting the mastery about any one thing usurps the dominion over all the other faculties of the mind in all other, but how this comes about or what it is gives it on such an occasion that empire how it comes thus to be let loose I confess I cannot guess.83 As Wayne Glausser observes in his study Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century, Blake reversed Lockes terms, and associated sanity with imagination rather than with the sway of reason: Blake reversed the primary terms of Locke's prescription for health and sanity. He diagnosed a modern England in which reason had overthrown imagination, rather than the other way around. The body became a very important site in Blake's imaginative counterattack. 84Locke was one of the most important empiricists, famous for advocating that the human mind is created as a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which knowledge of the world was gradually imprinted through the senses. Blake reversed most of the principles of the Enlightenment philosophy, proposing that nature is imagination against the physicists that were able to see only atoms and laws of motion, and proposed that the human body is the human form divine against Erasmus Darwin and anatomists who transformed man in a purely material body. During the Enlightenment period, both nature and man were seen as machines, as part of the great clockwork mechanism of the universe. Blake advocated that both nature and the human body are created and influenced by imagination and desires, that is, everything is spiritual, both the outside and the inside of man or nature: The story of Blake and the body looks as if it might have a simple plot. Locke's philosophy had turned the body from the human form divine into an atomized material object. Blake's renovated imagination would undo the damage: And every Generated Body in its inward form,/Is a garden of delight & a building of magnificence,/ Built by the Sons of Los in Bowlahoola & Allamanda. (Milton, 26:31-33) When he says that every body is built by the sons of Los he means that bodies are continually created by desires, beliefs, interpretations, and all the other acts of human imagination, not by soulless natural causes.85 Again, Urizen is Blakes perfect symbol for materialism, his rational laws being associated by Blake with self-contemplation, as imagination is with brotherhood, that is, the philosophy of the Age of Reason divides precisely because it seeks to dominate the world through rational knowledge and rational laws:
83 84

Wayne Glausser, Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century, 1998, p.51. Ibid., 53. 85 Ibid., 54.

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The Book of Urizen mixes materials from many religious, philosophical, and literary texts, but most obviously it presents Blake's revision of Genesis. The godlike creator (Urizen) cannot tolerate the complexities of eternity, so he withdraws in self-contemplation, creates the limited world we know as nature, and invents rational laws to keep his subjects under control. An extended passage shows Los creating the fallen human body.86 Perhaps the notion that best differentiates between the Enlightenment and the Romantic view of the world is that of the chain of being, which had been known since Plato, and according to which all the things in the world are connected and form a ladder-like structure, from the superior to the inferior things in nature. As Arthur Koestler observes in his book The Sleepwalkers, the idea of a chain or scale of being dates back to Platos works, and is illustrated in Timeaus. Koestler quotes Macrobius speaking about the ladder or the chain of being: Since from the Supreme God Mind arises, and from Mind, Soul, and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life [...] and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homers golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.87 The theory of emanations, which can be found all through Blakes work and which is related to the idea of the chain of being, assumes that the supreme being or the divinity overflows and creates the rest of the world as a reflection of itself, in a qualitative descent, going from man to the smallest creatures and the inanimate things: Macrobius echoes the Neoplatonist theory of emanations which goes back to Platos Timeaus. The One, the Most Perfect Being cannot remain shut up in itself; it must overflow and create the World of Ideas. which in turn creates a copy or image of itself in the Universal Soul, which generates the sentient and vegetative creatures- and so on in a descending series, to the last dregs of things. It is still a process of degeneration by descent, the very opposite of the evolutionary idea; but since every created being is ultimately an emanation of God, partaking of His essence in a measure diminishing with distance, the soul will always strive upward, to its source.88 This principle of continuity or plenitude arranges all the things in the world hierarchically and also is responsible for the many correspondences that exist between different objects. As Koestler observes, the principle of plenitude was also used to make the connection between man and the rest of the world, and between the earth and the heavens:

86 87

Id. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, 1959, p. 94. 88 Ibid. 94-95.

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The principle of continuity made it not only possible to arrange all living beings into a hierarchy according to criteria such as degrees of perfection, powers of soul or realization of potentialities (which of course, were never exactly defined). It also made it possible to connect the two halves of the chain-the sub-lunary and the celestial into a single, continuous one, without denying the essential difference between them []Where no obvious clues could be found to determine an objects degree of excellence, astrology and alchemy provided the answer by establishing correspondences and influences, so that each planet became associated with a day of the week, a metal, a color, a stone, a plant, defining their rank in the hierarchy.89 However, as it was noticed before, the concept of the chain of being changed to the greatest degree from the Enlightenment period to the Romantic one, as Lovejoy remarked, shifting from the scientific determinism of the Age of Reason, in which all things were supposed to be connected in as much as there was no cause without effect, and not one thing existing independently of the others, a sort of mechanic plenitude that signified also spiritual absence, to the Romantic idea of plenitude, an organic plenitude that made also reference directly to spiritual plenitude, in which every minute particular was part of the whole and in which everything that was possible was considered as already existing. Alexander Pope illustrates the way in which the chain of being was conceived of during the Enlightenment epoch, as the structuring principle of the natural world, in which all things are connected and in which every link is essential to the existence of the others, since otherwise, it would affect the theories of evolution of one thing from another: Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect... [...] from Infinite to thee, From thee to nothing. On superior powrs Were we to press, inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scales destroyed; From Natures chain whatever link you strike, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.90 The natural chain that the thinkers of the Age of Reason believed in was very different from the Romantic chain of being, which was truly the belief in the plenitude of the world, in the fullness of the world and in its capacity for comprising all possibilities. During the Enlightenment period, the universe looked like a monotonous clockwork, in which all things were connected in a natural cause and effect chain, and in which creation was only present at the beginning of the chain. The world was not void as such, but, as no room was left for anything new to be created, and since the human spirit was missing, the world was one of absence rather than of plenitude. As opposed to this view, Blakes famous poem,
89 90

Ibid., p.96. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, 1906, p.63.

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Auguries of Innocence, best states the principle of plenitude, in which a grain of sand holds infinity in its core and in which everything that exists is true and eternal: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.91 This famous quatrain of Blake reveals one of the central ideas of his work: the plenitude of the world is apparent in the finest detail and on the finest scale of things as well as in its grand whole. As it shall be seen, Blake intuitively perceived the fractal dimension of the universe, seeing an infinite world, a mass of sand in a single grain of sand. This pattern continues all through the poem, and Blake closely approximates the modern chaos theory in mathematics by showing how a detail in the system can affect the whole in an improbable way: A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A Dove house filld with doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thro all its regions A dog starvd at his Masters Gate Predicts the ruin of the State [ ]92 Blake seems to look at the world through a magnifying glass to see the plenitude of the universe in the tiniest entities. As he himself pledges, Blake looks at the world thro the Vegetative Eye, and not with the eye93, merging thus the material body and the soul in one unitary instrument for perception. It can be said that the act of vision actually achieves this unity between the material and the spiritual. Therefore, Blake is able to see the infinite in every thing that exists, intuitively understanding that any one thing is much too complex to be judged merely by its apparent properties, and to be reduced to its functionality in the universe. Thus, plenitude is affirmed and opposed to absence: Blake believes that to doubt anything in the world would actually destroy the whole. It is obvious to him that if the sun and moon would doubt anything, they would cease to exist: He who doubts from what he sees Will neer Believe, do what you Please. If the Sun & Moon should doubt, Theyd immediately Go out.94

91 92

William Blake, Complete Writings, The Pickering Manuscript, p.431. Id. 93 Ibid. A Vision of the Last Judgment, p.617. 94 Ibid., The Pickering Manuscript, p.433.

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In a famous fragment from one of the letters addressed by Blake to Thomas Butts, the poet expresses the gist of his work: not only is he unable to remain fixed in the limited, material world of Duty & Reality in which most people live, but in his visionary flights he takes the whole world with him: [] With my whole might I chain my feet to the world of Duty & Reality. But in vain! the faster I bind the better is the Ballast for I so far from being bound down take the world with me in my flights & often it seems lighter than a ball of wool rolled by the wind. Bacon & Newton would prescribe ways of making the world heavier to me & Pitt would prescribe distress for a medicinal potion. But as none on Earth can give me Mental Distress, & I know that all Distress inflicted by Heaven is a Mercy.95 Indeed, as it will be apparent all through his work, Blake elevates the whole of the world in his imagination, making it obey, as it were, an inverse force of gravity. In his view thus, imagination is the most important faculty for perceiving the truth.

95

Ibid., Letters, To Thomas Butts 11 September 1801, p.809.

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II. The Religion of Art and the Art of Religion

I have heard Gods voice in my sleep, or Blakes awake, or my own [...] Allen Ginsberg Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. William Blake 2.1. To Gratify Senses Unknown: The Power of Imagination in the Works of Blake and Yeats William Blake was, perhaps, among the other Romantic poets, the greatest promoter of imagination and the visionary powers, against the use of systematic reason only. In fact, his particular views on art and life were best defined by William Butler Yeats in his essay on William Blake and the poetic imagination, with the phrase the religion of art, which accurately describes the mingling of aestheticism and mysticism in his poetry, and, at the same time, Blakes need for the invention of new symbols for expressing his beliefs, the symbols existent in the realms of religion, mythology or literature being insufficient for his purposes: There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world he knew. He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world he knew; and he understood it more perfectly than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world we know, because in the beginning of important things in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished [...]96 Blake was a mystic but also one of the precursors of aestheticism in its modern understanding. To him religion and art were indissolubly connected, both being necessary to achieve the fourfold vision . Vision and dreaming are the actual states of awakening for the human soul, not what is perceived in the light of reason :
96

William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 1961, p.111.

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Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep! 97 In Blakes view, there are four states or levels of vision, such as they were classified by critic John Beer in his book entitled Blakes Humanism: (1) The state of Darkness (Blakes Ulro) in which unilluminated Reason alone holds sway. (2) The state of fire, the state in which energy is freely exercised. A creative artist or a lover, purely by exercising his energies, enters this state, which is later called Generation. Another symbol for it is the destructive sun. (3) The state of Light (paradise) often called by Blake Beulah (from Isaiah, where the word is translated married and from Bunyan, where it is the country from which the pilgrims can see the city to which they are travelling). Blake sees this state as one in which the first two (Heaven and Hell ) are married. It also expresses his idea that sexual love can give a brief revelation of that eternal light which belongs to the state of full vision. Its symbol is the moon. (4) The state of full Light or vision which reconciles all the others. It is recaptured only rarely by the Genius in his moments of full inspiration, for example. Its symbol is the lost sun of vision described by Swedenborg, in which heat and light are reconciled. 98 Imagination, or the fourfold vision is the only sense able to perceive the truth, reason can be of no use by itself, simply because, From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth. None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions.99 Imagination alone can speak the truth, not only because its nature is spiritual but because logic and reason can only deduct further knowledge from what is already known or else from experiment and this would imply moving in a vicious circle. Blakes view in this respect is close to that of James Joyce as given in one of Stephen Dedalus musings: Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.100 Thought by itself can only breed more thoughts, it is the soul that gives the form of things; the soul and the body are seen usually as the inside and, respectively, the outside of a being or of a thing, but in Joyces and Blakes view the soul is the depth but also the form of something, a form that can be revealed through the use of imagination. The idea that the soul is the form of forms was obviously borrowed from Aristotles On the Soul, where the soul is seen as an actuality of being, contrasted with the matter which is merely potentiality. The soul is thus the form or the substance of a natural body, and if destroyed, the entity that contains it naturally ceases to exist:
97 98

William Blake, Complete Writings, Letters, To Thomas Butts 22 November 1802, p. 818. John Beer, Blakes Humanism, 1968, p.33. 99 William Blake, Complete Writings, There is no Natural Religion, p. 97. 100 James Joyce, Ulysses, 1967, p. 26.

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But since it is also a body of such and such a kind, viz. having life, the body cannot be soul; the body is the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it. Hence, the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body as above characterized. Now the word actuality has two senses corresponding respectively to the possession of knowledge and the actual exercise of knowledge. It is obvious that the soul is actuality in the first sense, viz. that of knowledge as possessed, for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of soul, and of these waking corresponds to actual knowing, sleeping to knowledge possessed but not employed, and, in the history of the individual, knowledge comes before its employment or exercise.101 Thus, Blake repeatedly denies Natural Religion or Deism, and instead builds an art of prophecy, in which the most important role belongs to the Poetic Genius, the equivalent also of a prophet. The two traditionally separated notions of art and religion become one and the same in Blakes system: If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophical & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, &stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. 102 Natural Religion was, as Foster Damon explains in his Blake Dictionary, the religion made by historians, sociologists and philosophers of the Age of Reason, and it was supposed to be founded on facts of nature, and it held the belief that God was the Creator of the world, but once His work was finished He no longer interfered with His creation: Deism, or Natural Religion, the fashionable philosophy of the Age of Reason, attempted to make religion intellectually respectable by the application of common sense. The reaction against fanaticism which had caused the bloodiest of wars; the rise of the sciences on the principles of Bacon, Newton and Locke.all tended to produce the Age of Reason [] The Deists accepted God the Creator; but once his creation was established according to his principles, there was no reason for him to interfere with it again. All miracles and revelations therefore were delusion and superstition. Man was created naturally good, and the moral systems of all religions were derived from his laws of conduct, as found in human nature.103 Thus, when he denied Deism, Blake also denied all inner value of morality or the moral virtues, in so much as these were merely applied to reality from without, as a result of the reasoning process. Deism, which was a form of theological rationalism or having faith in God on the basis of reason without reference to revelation, devised moral laws that were founded on a rational process. For Blake, this kind of laws had no inner value, because the spirit did not intercede in the process any way. Thus, although as a Christian Blake followed the Bible and implicitly the Christian morality, he could not agree with a religion that proceeded from a number of external laws that were then taken as norms for the human spirit. On the contrary, faith has to begin in revelation and in the spirit of man himself, and only afterwards impose morality. His view of religion excluded sin, the ten commandments of Jehovah,
101 102

Aristotle, On the Soul in Aristotle: Selections, ed. Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, 1995, p. 177. William Blake, Complete Writings, There Is no Natural Religion, p. 97. 103 Foster S. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 1971, p. 100.

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death, and even the existence of Hell, as a mode of punishment for the sinners on the Earth. To Blake, a sin is not doing evil, but distinguishing between good and evil in a rational way, or else being an accuser : Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God; he ought to know that Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief & Eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. 104 The fact that sin does not exist, that is, it is merely an illusion given by the perspective of the Fall, is proven by Blake throughout his work in several ways but first of all through his notions of innocence and experience as he notes: Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with Ignorance. 105 Thus innocence is never conditioned by ignorance, so the two notions innocence and experience do not stand in opposition as such. The original sin does not consist in knowing as such because knowledge is not evil, as it had been supposed for a long time by theologians. An example of this mode of thinking is that of Saint Augustine where the desire for knowing for the sake of knowing is represented as a harmful temptation that can drive the spirit away from God: Far over and above that lust of the flesh which lies in the delight of all our senses and pleasures whose slaves are wasted unto destruction as they go far from You there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delights in the body but by making experiments with the bodys aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge [...] Thus men proceed to investigate the phenomena of naturethough the knowledge is of no value to them: for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing....In this immense forest of snares and perils, I have cut off and thrust from my heart many sins, as you have given me to do, O God of my salvation [] Certainly the theatres no longer attract me, nor do I care to know the course of the stars [...]106 For Blake, knowledge is never a sin, except when it is attained under the dominion of Reason by itself, or Urizen, that is, when it is limited by materialism and experiment. On the contrary, knowledge must be praised in opposition to the purity accompanied by ignorance: Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governed their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Entrance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other Peoples by the Various arts of Poverty and Cruelty of all kinds. 107 Thus, to sin is actually the contrary of giving in to passions it is the restraining of desire, the absolute governing of Urizen, his taking over the place of Luvah in the Eternal Man or Albion, and subsequently his division from Ahania, which is the equivalent of pleasure. Those who preach the restraining of
104 105

William Blake, Complete Writings, Last Judgment, p. 615. Ibid., The Four Zoas, p. 380. 106 Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, p. 89. 107 William Blake, Complete Writings, Last Judgment, p. 87.

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desire do so precisely because they are weak, because they are not fit for seeing the fourfold vision and cannot adjust their minds to the infinity that lies hidden in every thing, so they live with perceiving only the utter delusion of the limited world: Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. 108 To restrain desire is to deliberately delude oneself to believe only that which accords to the limitative laws of reason, that is, controlling desire is also denying oneself the possession of the infinite: VI. If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot. VII. The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. 109 Since all the limitations applied to the intellect, to desires, to imagination and to everything else which is human can only be what they already are limitations, the only way to reach truth and grasp the fourfold vision is to give in to ideas of sweetness and infinity: The soul of sweet delight can never be defild. 110 It is only the Poetic Genius that can perceive and be perswaded by the sweetness and infinity lying at the heart of every minute particular in the universe: Isaiah answerd: I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discoverd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirmd, that the voice of honest indigantion is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote. Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied: All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains. 111 True knowledge is to have firm perswasion of something in the same way as the prophet and the poet might have, and not to seek laws and truths which can be demonstrated. The sacred can be revealed only by opening ones mind to the realms of imagination. God can not be known otherwise. For this, the only faculty needed is the Poetic Genius, and as Blake explains, the Poetic Genius is the faculty that experiences , a notion that he distinguishes clearly from the scientific experimental knowledge, which is based on doubt and the necessity for demonstration: As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of. Principle 1st. That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was calld an Angel & Spirit & Demon. 112 In both There is no Natural Religion and All Religions are One Blake speaks of religion in terms of art and of art in terms of religion, that is, the Poetic Genius and the Prophet are of the same nature, and are based on inspiration and artistic creativity. Thus he denies morality as a value both for religion
108 109

Ibid., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 149. Ibid., There is No Natural Religion, p. 97. 110 Ibid., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 152. 111 Ibid., p. 153. 112 Ibid., There is no Natural Religion, p. 98.

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and for art to the same extent, and both are based on knowledge as inspiration and experience: Principle 5th. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is every where calld the Spirit of Prophecy. 113 Consequently, the imagination is the principal instrument of knowing, and in this Blake was influenced by his readings of Jakob Boehme and Paracelsus, as William Butler Yeats observes in his essay on William Blake and the Imagination: He [ Blake ] had learned from Jakob Boehme, and from old alchemist masters that imagination was the first emanation of divinity, the body of God, the Divine members, and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things sinful and righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again that everything that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live lethargies and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from old times.114 Yeats observes thus the most important creeds of Blakes poetry: that art is the true religion of man, and the true gate to immortality since it can open the hearts both to other hearts and, at the same time to all living things, thus creating another type of chain of being things linked together with the aid of imagination. Yeats himself apostrophised the unbelievers of beauty: Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? 115 For Yeats, as for Blake, the dancer cannot be known from the dance itself because the body and the soul form the same entity: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?116 Other poets, and especially the romantics, have praised beauty and art as being eternal and true as, for example John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, stating that Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.(Keats, 849) To Keats the perception or the creation of beauty are the only certainties given to us on earth, and they are at the same time sufficient. Nevertheless, Blake was an innovator in the real sense of the word by taking the mysticism of the previous ages and at the same time anticipating many of the artistic principles of the modernists
113 114

Id. William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 112. 115 William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1990, p. 41. 116 Ibid., p. 58.

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and postmodernists and combining them to form a special recipe of art and spirituality, as being the one and the same thing, and together forming the true path to eternity: This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body. This world of imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and TemporalAll things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination, who appeard to Me as Coming to Judgement among his Saints & throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establishd...117 Blake makes imagination into the most important faculty of both man and God, and thus the two become undistinguishable: The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God Himself, The Divine Body, Jesus: we are his Members 118 or Man is All Imagination. God is Man & exists in us and we in him.119 Thus, a very special view of the spiritual union with God is conceived here the union of man with Christ takes place through Human Imagination; the Imagination is at once the body of Christ, and also the body of man, replacing thus the strictly organic perception of our senses with visionary perception. Blake suggests this idea once more in the last plate (12) of There is no Natural Religion, where he makes a drawing of Christ together with the textual transcription: Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. 120 This implies that the sacrifice of Christ for man, that is, Jesus willing taking up of mortality so that man may gain immortality, or, the divine union of man with God may be realized only depending on mans ability to see fourfold or to see the infinite in all things, otherwise man could only see himself, or limited selfhood, which is the result of any division: He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only. 121 Imagination is necessarily accompanied by the Daughters of Inspiration , whom Blake opposes to the Muses in Ancient Greek Philosophy, who were the Daughters of Memory , the goddess Mnemosyne. Milton had made this distinction between creating from memory and creating under the influence of pure inspiration, and Blake quotes him on this subject in his annotations to Reynolds: A work of Genius is a Work Not to be obtaind by the Invocation of Memory & her Syren Daughters, but by Devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge & sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his Altar to touch & purify the lips of whom he pleases. 122 The view that imagination and memory are but one and the same thing was also propagated by philosophers of the Age of Reason, such as Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan:
117 118

William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment, p. 606. Ibid., Laocoon, p. 776. 119 Ibid., On Berkeley, p. 775. 120 Ibid., All Religions Are One, p. 98. 121 Id. 122 Ibid., Annotations to Reynolds, p.457.

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This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination [...] But when we express the decay and signify that the sense is fading, old and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thingAgain, imagination being only of those things which have been formerly perceived by sense, either all at once, or by parts at several times; the former (which is the imagining of the whole object, as it is presented to the sense) is simple imagination, as when a man imagines a man, or horse, as he hath seen before. The other is compounded, when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur [...]123 Hobbes rationalism denies the existence of imagination. According to him everything, like the image of a centaur for example, is built up by a combination of things previously seen. Hobbes definition resembles Coleridges notion of fancy. Thus, in his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge makes a famous distinction between fancy and imagination, thus emphasizing the way in which the Romantics understood imagination. Fancy is only a combination of already-givens, while imagination is the power to make first a synthesis of everything and then to recreate the whole in an infinite number of ways. Fancy appears to be able to work only with fixities or solid notions, and therefore the only thing it can achieve is a different arrangement of things or some new object composed of the parts from other objects. By contrast, imagination dissolves, breaking the resistance of the objects, and therefore can mould the things anew giving them a new life. Thus, the Romantic imagination is a truly creative power that never completely exhausts the meaning of things and is capable therefore to discover an of infinity of infinities: The Imagination then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.124 Likewise, Blake, through his extensive symbolism, a great part of which being of his own invention, announces the modern age in which the subconscious, the dreams and visions and their symbols and archetypes acquire a great importance. Carl Gustav Jung insists that in our present state of civilisation
123 124

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill , 1904, p.3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in Brian Hepworth, The Rise of Romanticism: Essential Texts, 1978, p. 350.

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we have not yet arrived at a high level of consciousness, as we might think, and the unconscious with all his symbols still plays the major part in our lives: Il ne fait pas de doute que mme dans ce que nous appelons un haut niveau de civilisation, la conscience humaine nest pas encore parvenue a un degr satisfaisant de continuit. Elle est encore vulnrable et susceptible de se fragmenter. 125 So, to deny imagination and dreams, according to Jung, would be to deny the greatest part of what man is; and also to deny the symbols hidden in our dreams and psyche is as great an error, since these are the keys to archetypes which are part of mans basic knowledge about his own humanity and experience in the world. Jung also proposes as a very significant matter the fact that action, may be very well considered as the beginning of things, and not consciousness, which is again very well paralleled by Blake s system, in which the harmony of eternity can only be achieved when all the four Zoas stand in their proper places in the Eternal Man. Just as modern psychoanalysis theorizes, when Reason or the superego takes precedence over our subconscious, a state of utter unbalance ensues. As Jung sees it in his Essay on the Exploration of the Subconscious, actions or acts are never invented, they are only done, that is, the workings of the subconscious with its archetypes is usually behind them: Le Faust de Goethe dit trs justement: Am Anfang war die Tat (Au commencement tait laction.) Les actions nont jamais taient inventes. Elles ont t accomplies. La pense, par ailleurs, est une dcouverte relativement tardive de lhomme. Il a dabord t pousse a agir par des facteurs inconscients. Et cest nest que beaucoup plus tard quil a commence a rflchir, sur les causes qui le poussaient. 126 The same thing happens during the more particular act of creation the subconscious and the imagination are acting, and reason is an accessory to them, a helping power. It is in this way that invention takes place always. The surrealists also had this belief and tried to expose the workings of the subconscious in their dream like artistic creations, by random associations and strange metamorphosis of one thing into another, as in the paintings of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, for example. Salvador Dali evinced, like Blake, a fascination for the Human Form Divine , which he merged in some of his paintings with the landscape, or with vegetative or animal forms, adding thus a macrocosmic side to it, for example as pairs of lovers made of the sea foam, or mingling their form with that of the entire sky. The art of Dali is overwhelming because of the numberless dream like associations in his paintings, all of which point to one thing: the complexity of reality is equal to that of the dreams, and at the same time impossible to reduce by means of any kind of logical statements. According to Shelley, poetry is nothing else but the visitation of divinity in man:
125

Carl Gustav Jung, Essai dexploration de linsconscient, 1977, p.37 : There is no doubt that even at what we call a high level of civilization, the human consciousness is not yet come to a satisfying degree of continuity. It is still vulnerable and susceptible to fragmentation. (my translation) 126 Ibid. 139: The Faust of Goethe justly says that In the beginning there was the action. The acts have never been invented. They have only been accomplished. Thought, on the other hand, is a late discovery of man. At first, it was activated by unconscious factors. And it is only later that it started to reflect on the causes that were driving it. (my translation)

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Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.127 This inevitable connection between the divinity and poetry that Shelley talks about is, needless to say, something that Blake also considered as essential. Both poets believe that art can reconcile all contraries, by marrying the opposite notions and thus achieving an organic whole. Moreover, both Shelley and Blake saw art as an alchemical power that can turn everything it touches to gold through the metamorphous imagination. Also, poetry can strip the veil of familiarity from the world and thus display what both of the Romantics call the naked beauty, the spirit behind the form of things. Thus, Blake believed that the world exists not merely to serve the five senses, but to gratify senses unknown, implying thus once more that an infinite universe exists in each small detail of the larger universe, and that this can only be perceived with the naked eye of the human imagination: But knowest thou that tress and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? trees, beasts and birds unknown; Unknown not unperceived, spread in the infinite microscope, In places yet unvisited by the voyager and in worlds Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown []128

127 128

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry, William Blake, Complete Writings, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 4:14-18, p. 192.

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2.2. Were all Golden Sunflowers Inside: William Blake and Allen Ginsberg In his song of experience, Ah! Sunflower Blake symbolizes the visionary powers through the metaphor of the sunflower seeking after that sweet golden clime / Where the travelers journey is done129; in this vision, the soul or the imagination of man are united with art, or man is the sunflower (and traveler , because the sunflower counts the steps of the Sun, who looks for rest in the sweet golden clime of pure art and beauty, where there are no moral laws. There is no need of external moral laws that This perfect union of humanism and art is possible because, as seen throughout Blakes work, the ethics, that would normally correspond to the human soul as a guiding doctrine is paralleled in Blake by aesthetics. The same notions are to be recognized in Ginsberg s Sunflower Sutra where the unconcealed influences from Blake follow the latters text to the details- the same attribute golden is employed to suggest the inner light of art and the visionary powers. Ginsberg (as Blake himself, actually) blames the soiling of the purity, of the pure visionary art (and visionary art is the measure of truth) on civilization and industrialization: artificial worse-than dirt-industrial-modern-all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown . 130 Civilization is the grime that is laid upon the pure soul of man, and he sees it as grime because it is artificial, not natural, therefore not given and pure. It must be observed that it was not by accident that Ginsberg chose as material illustration of civilization the locomotive suggesting, in an exact parallel to Blake, the same idea of tiresome movement (here mechanical, modern movement also), the weariness and endeavor of reaching that golden clime: Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! / The grime was no mans grime but death and human locomotives 131 The sunflower is the image of a sweet natural eye, a symbol therefore of visionary powers: A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent /lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye /to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited /grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden /monthly breeze! 132 In the second part of Howl, we find the same idea of the human natural soul depressed and encumbered by civilization: Moloch in whom I am consciousness without a body! Moloch / who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! 133 The image of the human soul and body, frightened out of their natural ecstasy is to be found in Blakes
129 130

Ibid., Songs of Experience, p. 215. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1959, p. 29. 131 Id. 132 Id. 133 Ibid. p. 17.

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Ah! Sunflower: Where the Youth pined away with desire/ And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow /Arise from their graves, and aspire/ Where my sunflower wishes to go. 134 Also, another parallel could be made between Blakes sunflower which is weary of time and the idea of civilization and modernity in Ginsberg, modernity as weariness, both poets being equally nostalgic about the purity of beginnings, and an escape from time into eternity, where, as Blake says, All is Vision. There is a further similarity between the two poets, this time in the attitude they share towards their art they both see it as a prophecy, not merely as artistic creation: So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,/And deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jacks soul too, and anyone wholl listen (.)135 Thus, both Blake and Ginsberg aspired towards a sweet golden clime (which as a spatial dimension resembled the Elysian Fields and as a temporal one the Golden Age of prophecy) where nature itself has a soul. In his poem Rocket, Ginsberg dreams up a religious sweet planet that Blake himself would have certainly liked, where all the nature is divine; on this utopian planet science and art are manufactured by the nature itself and are thus part of the Great Brain of the Universe: I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it preferably religious sweet planets no money fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His golden pocket.136

134 135

William Blake, Songs of Experience, p. 215. Allen Ginsberg, p. 30. 136 Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, 1961, p. 39.

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2.3. Where Man is Not, Nature is Barren: William Blake and Miguel de Unamuno The mixture of art and mysticism is to be found also in the works of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, who in The Tragic Sense of Life speaks about religion and God, and the way in which these are related to the human spirit. Unamuno comes very close to Blakes own philosophy in his works, as he identifies all the rational obstacles that were put by science in the way of proving the existence of God. According to him, the existence of the divinity in the world is neither necessary nor required by any thing else that exists, nor does it form an integral part of any science or sub-division of human culture. Unamuno observes that Laplace was right in eliminating God as a hypothesis from the world of reality, since neither of the rational reasons that were meant to demonstrate the existence of God, such as the postulate of the creation of the world by God or the postulate that the order of the world indicates the existence of a supreme creator, prove in any way that a God is really necessary to explain our existence in the universe or the existence of the universe itself. Thus, Unamuno shows that the tragedy of life and of human condition is precisely the fact that we, as humans, do not seem to fit into or to be able to accept our own cultural and scientific theories, because although they can prove many things to our reason, they fail to be sufficient for our souls, which will always seek beyond the rational. As Unamuno points out, the clash between our inner worlds and the world outside comes about because man cannot refrain from feeling, in the same way that he cannot refrain from thinking. Thus, man constantly attributes subjectivity and consciousness to the universe itself (by postulating the existence of God), and to every individual thing in the universe: Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe, nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality, spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish that of all the other individual things each one should also be an I."137 It is impossible for man to accept that all the things in the world are devoid of an I, a self or individuality, or that the whole world is not as alive as ourselves. Again Unamunos thought comes close to that of Blake, in the picture that he offers of the world, where everything is alive in its own way, and where every minute particular is an individuality. Man has to sympathize, as Unamuno says,
137

Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples , 1921, p. 146.

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or to empathize with everything in the world, be it animate or inanimate and to feel its aspiration to consciousness, and at the same time to see all these minute particulars as parts of the whole, all linked together and possibly forming a huge organism that is also alive: Sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of living beingsOur life is composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo of sub-consciousness. Not more absurd than so many other dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis of consciousnessAnd since we have given a loose rein to the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one another [] And more than once in the history of human feeling this fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness of the Universe.138 Thus, no matter what science is trying to teach man about the world, he cannot abstain from seeing the world as alive as himself, a reflection of his own consciousness and sensitivity, alive in its parts or its minute particulars as well as in its whole. The premise of consciousness actually forms the basis of religious belief, together with that of the immortality of the soul, which is another way in which man denies the reality of death and materiality. The human soul has to continue its existence even after the death of the material body, as man cannot conceive himself as a mere organic cell in the organic body of the world. Everything in the world has to have a soul, that is, it has to be alive, just like man feels he is alive, and not as mere form of matter made up of atoms and chemical elements, as in the materialist nightmare. Life itself cannot be envisaged by man, if it is soulless: Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself, and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the universal consciousness, this consciousnessthat is to say, Godis all.139 To possess consciousness of all that happens in ones body, for example, would mean, according to Unamuno, to feel the universe happening within oneself, that is, to be able to be conscious not only of ones own existence and of ones own spirit, but to feel conscious of the separate existence of everything else that exists. Man is not conscious of all the souls of all things at the same time, but he nevertheless is endowed with a spirit that is able to apprehend consciousness in many other things than
138 139

Ibid., p. 148. Id.

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himself. Thus, as Unamuno explains, our own spirituality is the origin of religion and of our belief in the existence of God. The author even reverses the idea of the constant creation of things by God, with the idea that God himself is constantly produced by other things: To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousnessthat is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is ad extra.Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for Godwe believe that God exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.140 Therefore, it can be said that as the divinity produces all the things in the world, so all the things can produce in their turn the divinity, implying, as Blake believed that everything that lives is Holy and that all things in the universe are part of the sacred whole. The essence of divinity is everywhere in the world, and at every point in time, and Blake sensed that when he said that only Error is Created. Truth is Eternal141, that is not only God but man himself and all the other things in the universe are eternal and have known no beginning or creation as such. If all things are eternal, it means that all things are subjective as well, and that they have their own consciousness: The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And strictly speaking, it is not possible to speak of outside and inside, objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt; indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure is the feeling of divinity in us.142 There is no inside and outside, Unamuno believes and again agrees with Blake, who believed that Mental Things are alone Real; what is calld Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place 143. The essence of Unamunos system is that of Blakes as well: divinization is the same thing as humanization, that is, the essential attributes of both are resumed by the sublimity of the human spirit. This view is supported, as Unamuno shows, by the religions of ancient Greece where the demi-god, or the hero who was half man, half divinity was a common and recurrent figure: Its gods not only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if demi-gods, that is, demi-men,
140 141

Ibid., p. 149. William Blake, Complete Writings, A Vision of the Last Judgement, p. 617. 142 Ibid., p. 157. 143 William Blake, Complete Writings, A Vision of the Last Judgement, p. 617.

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were believed to exist, it was because the divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated.144 Furthermore, the existence of God cannot possibly be proven by reason in the manner the law of gravitation, for example, can be proven mathematically. This amounts to saying that his existence can only be proven intuitively, as a reflection of mans own spirituality: In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of language by simply adding the capital letter to the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena from which we derive itBut the God who is the result of this process, a God who is nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite, cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us.145 Therefore, as both Blake and Unamuno understood, the essence of divinity is the same with that of humanity, and the truth of this can only be known intuitively or with the help of imagination. The world of universal consciousness is therefore a world of plenitude, in which the spiritual pervades all things, and in which all things can create God, and not only the other way around as it might happen in a deist universe. 2.4. Tho It Appears Without, It Is Within: Blakes Jerusalem Blakes greatest work that illustrates his ideas about art, imagination and divinity is certainly Jerusalem. The theme of the poem is announced by Blake himself in the first lines of the poem: Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through /Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life./ This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & evry morn [...] 146 The theme is indeed all comprising: it treats of the fall and regeneration of man, passing through all the intermediary, historical stages as well. The poem opens suggestively with the image of Jesus, the Savior, talking to Albion the Giant Man, and trying to persuade him to reunite with his lost emanation, Jerusalem: Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine: Fibres of love from man to man thro Albions pleasant land[...] Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one? I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
144 145

Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 162. 146 William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 4:1-3, p. 622.

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Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense! Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!147 Thus, the first scene of the poem also contains the main tenants of Blakes philosophy: Jesus, the Divine Vision, calls Albion to him, telling him that he is not a God afar off, but a brother, and that they are one and the same thing, and should live in perfect unity. The sin of man, as Blake interprets it, is Albions rejection of the religion of the forgiveness of sins and of unity of the divine with the human, to form the Human Form Divine. Instead, Albion hides and then rejects his emanation, Jerusalem, who is the symbol of imagination, divinity and spiritual freedom, and opposes the religion of Jesus with that of the moral laws: But the perturbed Man away turns down the valleys dark; Phantom of the over heated brain! shadow of immortality! Seeking to keep my soul a victim to thy Love! which binds Man the enemy of man into deceitful friendships: Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith. My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself! The Malvern and the Cheviot, the Wolds, Plinlimmon & Snowdon Are mine. Here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue! Humanity shall be no more: but war & princedom & victory!148 The error of humanity is, in Blakes view, mans mental division from the initial wholeness into the four Zoas, or the four separate states of mind: Los or Urthona representing the human imagination and the poetic genius, Urizen representing reason, Luvah emotion and Tharmas the senses or desire. The Universal Man is a synonym for the Universal Brotherhood of these faculties that have to remain undivided so as to be able to attain the divine vision of the world. Thus, as Blake sees it, humanity is more than the total of the human race; it is not a collectivity, but rather a single, Eternal Man who, after the fall, is divided into separate mental states. He therefore conceives of a brotherhood inside the universal man himself, which actually means that all the faculties and all the senses of man should be used and maintained in equilibrium. The fragmentation began thus inside the eternal man, and the tendency towards selfhood is what produced it. It is obvious that reason plays the most important role in this initial division, since it is the faculty which assumes that it can take control over the world and over itself, and which is able to devise its own laws and rules. The words of Albion already quoted prove this fact by stating that Jerusalem is indefinite, and that what man needs is demonstrative truth and moral laws.

147 148

Ibid., 4:6-8, 16-21. Ibid., 4: 22-32, p. 622.

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In his Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams observes the way in which the fall of the Eternal Man is actually a division of the initial wholeness or plenitude, into incomplete parts, which will form a world of absence and void: Eden [] is the ideal mental state of Perfect Unity(which is correlative with the ideal human community of Universal Brotherhood), and in this original state his Universal Man, like the primal Adam of his predecessors, was sexually undivided, and incorporated all of mankind and the cosmos as well. His fall was a falling apart, a fall into Division; and since this is a fragmentation of unitary man both into isolated individuals and into an alien external world, the fall coincides with the creation of man and nature, as we ordinarily experience these entities. Again in traditional fashion, the original sin in this fall was what Blake elsewhere calls Selfhood, the prideful attempt of a part of the whole to be self-sufficient and to subordinate other parts to its own desires and purposes.149 The realm of generation and history, as Abrams notes, is a world of disorder and chaos in which the Four Zoas travel mentally, through states of woe and through a world of absence. History itself is the journey of the divided humanity through the ages: The process of this dreadful state/Of Separation he conceives as a progressive dissociation of the collective human psyche into alien and conflicting parts, each of which strives for domination. In the pictureform of myth, the Universal Man divides into the Four Mighty Ones, the Zoas, or primary faculties constituting the integral mind, and the Zoas in turn divide off from their feminine Emanations, and may subdivide again from the male remnants, or Specters. These Giant Forms, and those which are the product of still further divisions, are portrayed as mental travelers through the realms of generation and the endless cycles of history, suffering the torment of inadequacy, isolation, and ever recurrent conflict, in the restless quest for fantasied satisfaction-that sweet golden clime- which their splintered condition cannot provide.150 Still, as Abrams observes, the target to be attained by man is not mere innocence as such, but organized innocence, in Blakes phrase, that is, a state which can be attained through artistic vision and imagination. This is the role that Los Golgonooza has, as the city of art, meant to redeem man from his sleep of Ulro or the single vision of reason: Blake embodied in his myth of the active existence by which man, exhibiting the cardinal virtue of energy, must earn his way from simple innocence back and up to a higher paradise of organized innocence; and in this process Blake [] assigns the crucial function to imagination and the arts. Los labors stubbornly at his furnace with hammer and anvil in the task of building the city of Golgonooza. In Northrop Fryes terse and lucid explanation of Blakes imagerepresentation of the social role of art: When this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding, will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the New Jerusalem which is the total form of all human culture and civilization.151 Thus, Jerusalem as the city of God and Golgonooza are one and the same thing, both being temples of artistic plenitude and divine beauty, uniting thus, once more, art and religion in Blakes view. In
149 150

M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature , 1973, p. 258. Id. 151 Ibid., p. 261.

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Jerusalem, the main plot is Albions betrayal of his emanation Jerusalem, representing imagination, and his subsequent embrace of Vala, the symbol of nature: Albion embraces Vala only under a delusion, duped by her lies that she, not Jerusalem, was Albions Bride & Wife in great Eternity, and that she, as Nature, Mother of all, is both the material source of imaginative form and the superior to it in beauty: Know me now Albion: look upon me I alone am Beauty/ The Imaginative Human Form is but a breathing of Vala. It is only when the regenerate form of Vala is reunited with Jerusalem the true beauty which is the complement of mans imaginative creativity, and of whom Vala, or natural beauty, is only the shadow- that she can play her essential but ancillary role in consummating the apocalyptic marriage with the Universal Man.152 As Blake says in his address To the Christians from Jerusalem, there is no other Gospel than the liberty of both body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination, that is, the practice of art and that of religion are very similar, and that giving in to this unrestrained freedom of the imagination is the only way to serve God as well: We are told to abstain from fleshly desires that we may lose no time from the Work of the Lord. Every moment lost, is a moment that cannot be redeemed every pleasure that intermingles with the duty of our station is a folly unredeemable & is planted like the seed of a wild flower among our wheat. All the tortures of repentance are tortures of self-reproach on account of our leaving the Divine Harvest to the Enemy, the struggles of intanglement with incoherent roots. I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.153 Blakes view in Jerusalem, as in his other works is very original: religion in general usually considers science and art as sinful practices that distance man from God, but Blake sees these two as the only ways to actually attain the divine vision: O ye Religious discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise Art & Science! I call upon you in the Name of Jesus! What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? is it Meat & Drink? is not the Body more than Raiment? What is Mortality but the things relating to the Body, which Dies? What is Immortality but the things relating to the Spirit, which Lives Eternally! What is the joy of Heaven but Improvement in the things of the Spirit? What are the Pains of Hell but Ignorance, Bodily Lust, Idleness & devastation of the things of the Spirit[?]154 Jerusalem describes the state of the Eternal Albion after his loss of the divine vision- he changes from the Eternal Man into the land of England, that is, his Sublime & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd in the Earth. The fixed rocks of the land are a metaphor for the transformation of the Human Imagination into the material world. Albion loses his divine vision and thus he becomes separated from his

152 153

Ibid., p. 263. William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem 77, p. 716. 154 Id.

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emanation, Jerusalem, and he is transformed in the land of England, a world of generation, while his sons and daughters become the inhabitants of England: There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into Englobes itself & becomes a Womb, such was Albions Couch A pleasant Shadow of Repose calld Albions lovely Land His Sublime & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd in the Earth His Reason his Spectrous Power, covers them above Jerusalem his Emanation is a Stone laying beneath O behold the Vision of Albion.155 The reign of Abstract Philosophy is seen as the reason of the devastating state in which Albion and his emanation are, and the world becomes a mere Chaotic Void, a world of literally physical absence, the stellar void, which points also to spiritual void: But all within is open'd into the deeps of Entuthon Benython` A dark and unknown night, indefinite, unmeasurable, without end. Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination (Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus blessed for ever). And there Jerusalem wanders with Vala upon the mountains, Attracted by the revolutions of those Wheels the Cloud of smoke Immense, and Jerusalem & Vala weeping in the Cloud Wander away into the Chaotic Void [...]156 The Abstract Philosophy consists of the scientific demonstrative method of knowledge, but also of the distinguishing between good and evil, which is again the fault of the reasoning power. Blake believed that contraries were necessary for human existence and that everything is clothed in good and evil as well, therefore denying evil results in negation, which, in his view, is the real evil: And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation Not only of the Substance from which it is derived A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.157 Thus, in the midst of the chaos and the negations left by the abstract philosophy, Los, the imaginative power in man, starts building Golgonooza, the city of art, a temple of artistic and aesthetic creation, meant to redeem man and to counterbalance the evils done by Urizen in the human mind:
155 156

Ibid., Jerusalem 1:1-7, p. 620. Ibid., 5:56-63, p. 623. 157 Ibid., 10: 7-16, p. 629.

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Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty; trembling in fear The Spectre weeps, but Los unmovd by tears or threats remains I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.158 Los endeavors to Create a System, and not to Reason & Compare, he gives vent to his inspiration and imagination, building a system that is not meant to distinguish and divide but to reveal and to invent beauty. As Los says, he acts for Albions sake, that is, he is trying to preserve the divine humanity in man by re-establishing the fourfold vision of art: And thou my Spectre art divided against me. But mark, I will compell thee to assist me in my terrible labours: To beat These hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death, I am inspired. I act not for myself; for Albions sake[...]159 The city of Golgonooza is indeed fourfold, and everything else in it is also fourfold. The fourfold structure of Golgonooza is inspired, as Blake himself confesses, by the vision of Ezekiel who saw the Four Zoas in his dream: Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. / And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. /And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. /And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. /Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. /As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. /Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies.160 Thus, Golgonooza has four gates, corresponding to the four cardinal points and to the four Zoas and the senses each of these represents: the eyes in the south for Urizen, the ear in the north for Los, the nostrils in the East for Luvah and the tongue in the West for Tharmas. All the gates are also fourfold and open into the four regions corresponding to the four states of humanity: Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro. Significantly, the gate of Tharmas is closed, that is, the sexual in man is repressed because of the abstract philosophy and of deism. Thus, the city of art is also a divine temple and a map of the human mind and body, signifying that art and humanity are one and the same, and together form the essence of the divine. The fourfold vision or the divine vision is nothing else but the vision of the
158 159

Ibid., 10: 17-21, p. 629. Ibid., 8: 14-17, p. 627. 160 The Holy Bible, King James Version, Ezekiel, 5-11.

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integral, united man that sees his humanity as a whole, as a divine form. The wholeness of man is obviously imperative for perceiving the wholeness of the world. All the faculties of man, his imagination, his reason, his emotions and his sexuality must be integrated in the Human Form Divine, and act together in harmony and brotherhood. To Blake, the perfection of this fourfold humanity represents the state of Eden, of organized innocence, and artistic beauty. The essence of Blakes humanism is closer to that of Unamuno, than to the humanism of Renaissance or of Enlightenment, for example, both of which saw man, in Shakespeares famous phrase as a piece of art: What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties [] in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, and yet, to me what is this quintessence of dust? 161 The humanism of the Renaissance described man as a paragon of beauty, but essentially, for them, it was a work of nature, admirable when compared to the other living creatures of the earth. However, Blakes humanism is very different: his sympathy for humanity is the same that Unamuno also shared: it is the sympathy for the worlds of consciousness and imagination that are in themselves infinite and therefore the rest of the world is infinite as well. The power of human imagination is so great that it indeed seems unlimited and divine, and thus, divinity itself cannot be understood or conceived of without it. This is why Blake encourages constantly the productions of the human imagination and intellect, art and sweet science as the supreme practices of humanity. To feel that the human imagination and the universe are one and the same is to feel that the world itself is a great work of art, and to understand that the truth cannot be perceived otherwise than by looking at the whole world in its plenitude. It should be noted that when Blake says that everything is imagination, that man and God, and nature itself are imagination, he does not mean in any way that they are imaginary, in the sense of illusory, but that they are as infinite as the workings of imagination and resemble its structure, its subjectivity, more than the objectivity of nature, as science proposes. Thus, the system that Los creates and names Golgonooza, with its fourfold structure is nothing else but a description of Blakes own philosophical system: And the Four Points are thus beheld in Great Eternity West, the Circumference: South, the Zenith: North, The Nadir: East, the Center, unapproachable for ever. These are the four Faces towards the Four Worlds of Humanity In every Man. Ezekiel saw them by Chebars flood. And the Eyes are the South, and the Nostrils are the East. And the Tongue is the West, and the Ear is the North.162 As Blake put it, in the world of fourfold vision, everything exists and there is no death and this world of plenary existence is the world of imagination itself, an imagination that does not belong to someone
161 162

William Shakespeare, Hamlet II. ii: 303-308, 1972. William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 12: 54-60.

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in particular, but that encloses everything in itself: For everything exists and & not one sigh nor smile nor tear,/ One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.163 Blakes very recurrent image of the revolving wheels is very significant for his idea of plenitude and the difference between the state of Eden or the world of imagination, and that of Ulro, where unenlightened reason holds sway. As he sees it, the world of Urizen (dominated by the Looms of Locke and the Water wheels of Newton) is a world of wheels without wheels, that is, its shape is that of the mechanic clockwork designed by the Enlightenment thinkers, in which the things that make up the world grind on each other like the little wheels, with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other; things are thus determined and influenced by one another, in a system that resembles the laws of motion proposed by Newton. Eden, on the other hand, can also be pictured as being made up of wheels, only this time the wheels are revolving one within the other, in perfect harmony. The image of the wheels within wheels is very suggestive: all things in the universe are part of each other and of the whole, and participate in it in perfect harmony with each other, and the image of the revolving wheels serves to build up the idea of constant movement of the imagination, with all its contents: I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I View, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which, Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace. 164 The idea of the image of plenitude and of God associated with that of the wheel may have been borrowed by Blake from both Ezekiel and Jacob Boehme, who describe divinity exactly in the same way, as a system of wheel within wheels: []The being of God is like a wheel, wherein many wheels are made one in another, upwards, downwards, crossways, and yet they continually turn, all of them together []When a man beholdeth the wheel, he highly marvelleth at it, and, in its turning, cannot at once learn to conceive and apprehend it: But the more he beholdeth the wheel, the more he learneth its form of frame; and the more he learneth, the greater the longing he hath to the wheel; for he continually seeth somewhat that is more and more wonderful, so that a man can neither behold it, nor learn it enough.165 In Boehmes view, God can be imagined as a system of wheels revolving within wheels because the divinity cannot be apprehended all at once, and man learns of the form of God in the same way he would learn of the form of the form of a revolving wheel: through its movement, which also reproduces
163 164

Ibid., 14: 65, 15:1 Ibid., 15: 6-20. 165 Jacob Boehme, The Aurora, in Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit: William Blake, Jacob Boehme and the Creative Spirit , 2004, p. 44.

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its form. In the same way, the plenitude of the world is not given directly to the beholder, but is apprehended through its own motions and through the imagination. The idea of the plenitude of the eternal world of humanity is contrasted in Blakes works with the absence of the world of generation, in which man is, significantly only a little grovelling Root, outside of Himself, that is, he is separated from the body of the world and that of Jesus, and remains only as a root without the possibility to grow a full body. In the eternal world, as Blake implies, all things would have to be connected, the stars with the mountains and the mountains with man: They know not why they love nor wherefore they sicken & die Calling that Holy Love: which is Envy Revenge & Cruelty Which separated the stars from the mountains: the mountains from Man And left Man, a little grovelling Root, outside of Himself. Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist: But Negations Exist Not: Exceptions & Objections & Unbeliefs Exist not: nor shall they ever be Organized for ever & ever: If thou separate from me, thou art a Negation: a meer Reasoning & Derogation from Me, an Objecting & cruel Spite And Malice & Envy: but my Emanation, Alas! will become My Contrary: O thou Negation, I will continually compell Thee to be invisible to any but whom I please, & when And where & how I please, and never! never! shalt thou be Organized But as a distorted & reversed Reflexion in the Darkness [...]166 Separation and division are negations in Blakes system, only love and brotherhood are able to unite and maintain all things in equilibrium, whereas to separate or to divide oneself into selfhood (as in the divisions of Albion into the four Zoas, or the further divisions of the Zoas from their specters and their emanations) means to deny. Contraries have to be accepted in the wholeness of the world. Additionally, Blake may have been inspired in this vision of the universe as a system of revolving wheels by the astronomical models which were held as true since the Greek antiquity and up to the Middle Ages. Many of the astronomers from Aristotle onward had attempted to create a geometrical system that would explain the circular motions of the stars. As Arthur Koestler explains in his Sleepwalkers, Aristotle, Eudoxus, Ptolemy and many others seemed to care little for what the physical reality actually looked like and they endeavored only to create a geometrical model that would coincide with their observations of the motions of stars. Eudoxuss ingenious system, made up of twenty-seven spheres, was actually a spheres-within-spheres complicated model, which, although fictitious as such, roughly predicted the actual motions of each planet. 167 It is not impossible to surmise therefore that
166

William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 17: 29-42. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Mans Changing Vision of the Universe , 1959, p. 63-64: It is an ingenious attempt--Eudoxus was a brilliant mathematician, to whom most of Euclid's fifth book is due. In the earlier geocentric models of the universe, each planet, we remember, was attached to a transparent sphere of its own, and all spheres were turning round the earth. But, since this did not account for the irregularities of their motions, such as standing occasionally still and going backward for a while: their stations and retrogressions, Eudoxus assigned to each planet not one, but several spheres. The planet was attached to a point on the equator of a sphere, which rotates round its axis, A. The two ends of this axis are let into the inner
167

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Blake may have had these astronomical models in mind when he envisioned the universe as a system of revolving wheels. This argument is strengthened by the fact that, as it was noticed before, in Blake the material dimension of the world is very important, even when the poet soars in his purest visionary flights. Thus, through his metaphors, such as the wheels without wheels or the Satanic mills, Blake intends a literally physical picture of the world that has fallen from the absolute plenitude into a merely ontological plenitude. Northrop Frye in his essay, The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism, argues that Blake associated the description of these mechanical laws of motion with the wrong kind of divine creativity, which was opposed to the organic whole: Not every poet, naturally, associates mechanism with the movements of the stars as Blake does, or sees it as a human imitation of the wrong kind of divine creativity. But the contrast between the mechanical and the organic is deeply rooted in Romantic thinking, and the tendency is to associate the mechanical with ordinary consciousness, as we see in the account of the associative fancy in Coleridge Biographia or of discursive thought in Shelley Defence of Poetry. This is in striking contrast to the Cartesian tradition, where the mechanical is of course associated with the subconscious. The mechanical being characteristic of ordinary experience, it is found particularly in the world outside; the superior or organic world is consequently inside, and although it is still called superior or higher, the natural metaphorical direction of the inside world is downward, into the profounder depths of consciousness.168 Thus, once again Blake emphasizes that the world should be seen rather as an inside than an outside, an organic whole and not a mechanic system. The strict materiality is only an illusion of the fallen world, of the senses of man, which are shut in narrow doleful form: Ah! Weak & wide astray! Ah! Shut in narrow doleful form! Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground! The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, closd up & dark, Scarcely beholding the Great Light, conversing with the ground: The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out True Harmonies & comprehending great as very small: The Nostrils, bent down to the earth & closd with senseless flesh That odours cannot them expand, nor joy on them exult: The Tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys []169 The narrowing of the human senses results in a narrowing of the objects perceived. At the same time though, it is obvious that Blake maintains the material dimension of the world in his description, since he does not merely speak of the senses as such, but of the organs that are the gates of the senses. Also, it is clear that the organs themselves are literally shrunken by the limited perception of man.
surface of a concentric larger sphere S 2, which rotates round a different axis, A 2 and carries A around with it. The axis of S 2 is attached to the next larger sphere S 3, which rotates again round a different axis A 3 : and so on. The planet will thus participate in all the independent rotations of the various spheres which form its nest; and by letting each sphere rotate at the appropriate tilt and speed, it was possible to reproduce roughly--though only very roughly--the actual motion of each planet.
168 169

Northrop Frye, Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute , 1963, p. 6-7. William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 49: 32-41, p. 680.

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Blake criticizes vehemently the moral laws which are guilty precisely of this type of divisions and negations, one of the most important of these being the repression of sexuality and the hypocrite chastity which is the very opposite of his idea of organized innocence. He reaffirms in Jerusalem, as in other parts of his work that Art & Science cannot exist but by Naked Beauty displayd, that is, the aesthetic beauty is pure in itself and has nothing to do with moral virtues: Have you known the Judgment that is arisen among the Zoas of Albion, where a man dare hardly to embrace His own Wife for the terrors of Chastity that they call By the name of Morality? their Daughters govern all In hidden deceit! They are vegetable, only fit for burning Art & Science cannot exist but by Naked Beauty displayd.170 The only way in which the truth can be seen is through vision and faith, in spite of those who believe that God and the Human Imagination are just delusions of the mind and have no actual reality in the objective world: O Lord & Saviour, have the Gods of the Heathen pierced thee? Or hast thou been pierced in the House of thy Friends? Art thou alive! & livest thou for-evermore? or art thou Not: but a delusive shadow, a thought that liveth not. Babel mocks saying, there is no God nor Son of God That thou O Human Imagination, O Divine Body art all A delusion, but I know thee O Lord when thou arisest upon My weary eyes even in this dungeon & this iron mill.171 The main mistake of the people who deny the divine vision is that they build up systems based on doubt and experiment, like those of Bacon, Newton and Locke who Deny a Conscience in Man, and who worship nature instead. In Blakes terms, this would translate as Albions worship and communion with Vala instead of Jerusalem, with nature as the mere physical world, instead of the art and the divine imagination: Fear not my Sons this Waking Death. He is become One with me Behold him here! We shall not Die! we shall be united in Jesus. Will you suffer this Satan this Body of Doubt that Seems but Is Not To occupy the very threshold of Eternal Life. if Bacon, Newton, Locke, Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus Of the Heathen, The God of This World, & the Goddess Nature Mystery Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon & hidden Harlot Is it not that Signal of the Morning which was told us in the Beginning [...]172

170 171

Ibid. 36: 44-49. Ibid. 60: 52- 59. 172 Ibid. 93: 18- 27.

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The dialogues between Albion and Jerusalem, in which he rejects her, are beautifully written. In one of these Albion speaks of his own error, which he does not recognize as such though: he brought love into light of day, to pride in chaste beauty, and fancied Innocence is no more, that is, he built a system of moral laws in which love was considered a sin. Jerusalem replies with one of Blakes famous lines, saying that The Infant Joy is beautiful, but its anatomy/ Horrible ghast & deadly!, that is, the analytical reason and the moral laws destroy the infant joy, the innocent happiness of love: Albion again utterd his voice beneath the silent Moon I brought Love into light of day to pride in chaste beauty I brought Love into light & fancied Innocence is no more Then spoke Jerusalem O Albion! my Father Albion Why wilt thou number every little fibre of my Soul Spreading them out before the Sun like stalks of flax to dry? The Infant Joy is beautiful, but its anatomy Horrible ghast & deadly! nought shalt thou find in it But dark despair & everlasting brooding melancholy!173 The way in which Jerusalem expresses her pain at having every fiber of her soul analyzed and dissected by the light of Reason, makes the process seem literal and all the more dreadful. Blakes only law is that of the forgiveness of sins, as the doctrine preached by Jesus, because it admits of the contraries of good and evil, and because it is the only law that can preserve the state of innocence. According to the poet, man can change his sexual garments at will, whereas the essence of his humanity and innocence stays the same, and cannot be defiled: Man in the Resurrection changes his Sexual Garments at will./Every Harlot was once a Virgin: every Criminal an Infant Love. 174 Thus, the essence of humanity cannot be changed by the acts of man or the so-called sins, and the soul of man remains the same, undefiled. Jerusalem ends with the vision of Albion who has united again with England, and recognizes the divine form of Jesus. Suggestively, the form of Jesus is the same as that of man, and also like that of Los: As the Sun & Moon lead forward the Visions of Heaven & Earth England who is Brittannia entered Albions bosom rejoicing Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form A Man. & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los.175

173 174

Ibid., 22: 16-24. Ibid. Jerusalem, 61: 51-52. 175 Ibid. 96: 1-7.

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The likeness of these forms restates the identity relationship that Blake established between humanity and divinity. As in the Bible, Jesus ultimately dies for Albion, explaining to him that there can be no true love without a little Death/ in the Divine Image, and man cannot exist but by Brotherhood. Following the sacrifice of Jesus Albion awakens Jerusalem and reunites with her: Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day Appears upon our Hills: Awake Jerusalem, and come away.176 The last part of the poem is probably the most beautiful, as it is made up of a series of images which describe the way in which Albion, within whom the Four Zoas have reunited, stretches a hermaphrodite bow, as Blake describes it, the Bow is a Male & Female, in which the arrows of love are quivering and shots a fourfold arrow at the Druid Spectre. The image is all the more overwhelming since the vision has to be fourfold, since each of the four Zoas draws his bow and shots the arrow: So spake the Vision of Albion & in him so spake in my hearing The Universal Father. Then Albion stretchd his hand into Infinitude. And took his Bow. Fourfold the Vision for bright beaming Urizen Layd his hand on the South & took a breathing Bow of carved Gold Luvah his hand stretch'd to the East & bore a Silver Bow bright shining Tharmas Westward a Bow of Brass pure flaming richly wrought Urthona Northward in thick storms a Bow of Iron terrible thundering.177 The war is a war of love and an intellectual war for which man arms himself, in the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities: And the Bow is a Male & Female & the Quiver of the Arrows of Love, Are the Children of this Bow: a Bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness: laying Open the hidden Heart in Wars of mutual Benevolence Wars of Love And the Hand of Man grasps firm between the Male & Female Loves And he Clothed himself in Bow & Arrows in awful state Fourfold In the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities each with his Bow breathing [...]178 The bow is male and female to symbolize the union and love of man and woman, and also the union of the sexes in the Eternal man. The flaming fourfold arrow annihilates the Druid Spectre, the annihilation itself being fourfold, and interestingly enough, the much criticized figures of Bacon, Newton and Locke appear in Heaven, along with those of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, thus joining the contraries once more, : Then each an Arrow flaming from his Quiver fitted carefully They drew fourfold the unreprovable String, bending thro the wide Heavens The horned Bow Fourfold, loud sounding flew the flaming Arrow fourfold
176 177

Ibid. 97: 1-4. Ibid. 97: 5-12. 178 Ibid. 97: 12-17.

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Murmuring the Bow-string breathes with ardor. Clouds roll round the horns Of the wide Bow, loud sounding Winds sport on the Mountains brows: The Druid Spectre was Annihilate loud thundring rejoicing terrific vanishing Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer [...]179 In this way, science itself is redeemed and it becomes the Sweet Science that Blake speaks of at the end of his other long epic, The Four Zoas. The powers of reason and imagination being in equilibrium, there is no reason why science should not have the same place as art in the world of eternity. This proves once again that what Blake criticized was not science as such, but the excessive and exclusive use of reason by man. With the fourfold vision, chaos becomes eyed as the Peacock, that is filled with color and life, just like the rainbow: And every Man stood Fourfold, each Four Faces had. One to the West One toward the East One to the South One to the North. the Horses Fourfold And the dim Chaos brightend beneath, above, around! Eyed as the Peacock [...]180 The poem ends with the image of All Human Forms identified, the image of absolute humanity, and of the human imagination and consciousness pervading all things, turning solid matter into life: All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. All Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.181

179 180

Ibid. 98: 1-9 Ibid. 98: 12-15. 181 Ibid., 99: 1-4, p.747.

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III. Infinity of Infinities and the Most Absent of Absences: Blake versus Borges and the Postmodern Paradigm

Did he smile his work to see? William Blake Aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposicin que no implique el universo entero182 Jorge Luis Borges 3.1. The Fearful Symmetry of Blakes Tyger In Blakes famous poem The Tyger, probably the most quoted among his Songs of Experience, the tiger could be taken by an uninformed reader as an incandescent symbol of evil, especially because of the inevitable parallel with the symmetric figure of the lamb, as it appears in Songs of Innocence: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? So, at a first glance, the tiger figure is the burning fire of evil that inspires awe in the beholder. Still, the poem says more than that, and a clarification of its meaning can be found in Jorge Luis Borges short story Blue Tigers, which seems to be a sort of prose re-writing of Blakes poem. The plot of the short story is very suggestive: it starts with the story tellers confession about his repeated dreams of a blue tiger, then it continues with his journey to India where he had hoped to find the blue tiger that haunted his dreams. Instead of the mysterious tiger, he recognizes the special blue color he had dreamt of in the little pebbles that he finds by a stream, in a remote village. From hence an account of the fearful properties of these pebbles begins the story teller discovers with awe that the number of the pebbles that he had collected in his hand and had taken away, never stays the same. The pebbles are impossible to count or to keep track of, and the absurdity of this unexplainable fact gives the same intimations of evil as the wondrous and still unexplainable outline of the tiger and of its origins, as proposed by Blakes poem. The infinity suggested by the ever-changing number of the pebbles that defy count and the laws of mathematics and physics and its connotation of evil was clearly suggested to Borges by the views of
182

Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos Fantasticos, at http://borges.netfirms.com/: Even in the human languages, there is not one sentence that does not imply the whole universe(my translation)

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the Pythagorean School and of Aristotle, for whom perfection lied in limitation and order. The universe had to be limited, otherwise the idea of order would be shattered, and hence the world would be imperfect. Thus, the Pythagoreans conceived of infinity ethically: to them the infinite was always evil, while the finite was good, as Ilie Parvu remarks in his book on The Infinite: Dupa unii autori contemporani, rolul scolii pitagoreice in evolutia temei infinitului trebuie inteles pornind de la incercarea ei de a unifica intr-o singura doctrina o conceptie fizica, una matematica si una etica asupra infinitului. In sens fizic, apeironul reprezenta aerul opac (opus focului, care reprezenta limita); in perspectiva matematicii, lucrurile sunt numere; de aici urmeaza cuantificarea prin nelimitat a apeironului ; prin descoperirea irationalilor, acesta devine infinitul matematic (incalculabilul). Conform doctrinei etice a pitagoreicilor, infinitul se afla la originea raului. Despre aceasta semnificatie etica a apeironului Aristotel ne da indicatii atat in Metafizica cat si in Etica nicomahica. In ultima lucrare se spune: Raul tine de infinit, as cum presupun pitagoricii iar binele de ceea ce este limitat. 183 The same evil spirit seems to enliven the blue pebbles in Borges story; the choice of the pebbles as objects for this fable of infinity is not an accident, because, as Borges himself remarks, the Latin word calculus meaning pebble is at the root of the mathematical term calculation: Si me dijeran que hay unicornios en la luna, yo aprobara o rechazara ese informe o suspendera mi juicio, pero podra imaginarlos. En cambio, si me dijeran que en la luna seis o siete unicornios pueden ser tres, yo afirmara de antemano que el hecho era imposible. Quien ha entendido que tres y uno son cuatro, no hace la prueba con monedas, con dados, con piezas de ajedrez o con lpices. Lo entiende y basta. No puede concebir otra cifra. Hay matemticos que afirman que tres y uno es una tautologa de cuatro, una manera diferente de decir cuatro... A m, Alexandre Craigie, me haba tocado en suerte descubrir, entre todos los hombres de la tierra, los nicos objetos que contradicen esa ley esencial de la mente humana.184 In his short story, Borges accounts for the idea that the infinite and the irrational, both of which deny the order of the universe, are especially frightening when they attack the basic laws of mathematics or science, such as they were construed with the aid of reason. This is why the symbol of the tiger is substituted in his story by that of the blue pebbles. What is equally important in the Borgesian story is the recurrent dream of the pebbles the dream is the world over which the irrational holds sway, but
183

Ilie Parvu, Infinitul, 2000, p. 30: According to some contemporary interpreters, the role of the School of Pythagoras in the evolution of the notion of infinity is to be understood starting from their attempt to unify in a single doctrine, a physical, a mathematical and an ethical view of infinity. In the physical sense, the apeiron represented the opaque air (as opposed to the fire, which represented the limit); from the perspective of mathematics, things are numbers; this is where the quantification of the apeiron as the unlimited comes from; through the discovery of the irrational numbers, the infinite becomes the incalculable. According to the ethical doctrine of the Pythagoreans, the infinite is the origin of evil. About this signification Aristotle indicates that: The evil pertains to the infinite, just like the Pythagoreans suppose, and the good is that which is bounded.(my translation) 184 Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos Fantasticos, at http://borges.netfirms.com/: If someone told me there are unicorns on the Moon, I would accept or reject this information or I would simply abstain from judgment, but I could certainly imagine them. However, if someone told me that on the Moon six or seven unicorns can be three, I would declare it impossible from the start. If someone understands that three plus one equals four, he will not try to prove it with the help of coins, dices, chess pieces or crayons. He just understands it. He cannot conceive of any other number. There are mathematicians who affirm that three and one is just a tautology, a different way to say four.I, Alexandre Craigie, from all the men of the earth, had the chance to discover the only objects that contradict this essential law of the human mind.(my translation)

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here, the dream is only a continuation of reality, as the pebbles in the dream which are at the same time the Leviathan, as a symbol of the irrational, await for the sleeper to wake up, ready to begin their illogical transformations all over again: El sueo era ms o menos el mismo. El principio anunciaba el temido fin. Una baranda y unos escalones de hierro que bajaban en espiral y un stano o un sistema de stanos que se ahondaban en otras escaleras cortadas casi a pico, en herreras, en cerrajeras, en calabozos y en pantanos. En el fondo, en su esperada grieta, las piedras que eran tambin Behemoth o Leviathan los animales que significaban en la escritura que el Seor es irracional. Yo me despertaba temblando y ah estaban las piedras en el cajn, listas a transformarse. 185 All this suggests that the tiger in Blakes song belongs to this gallery of symbols of irrationality, together with the Biblical Leviathan, or Herman Melvilles white whale, Moby Dick, or the Borgesian blue pebbles. All of these symbols are meant to impersonate the powers of the irrational, the mystery, and this is why they produce fear. The same idea of the frightful irrational powers can be traced in Herman Melvilles Moby Dick, the story of the quest for the white whale, which is in itself a fight with the irrational, metaphysical reality. As the one of the characters eloquently questions himself, the world does not seem to be fixed in any way, but to sway over the waves like an unanchored ship. This symbol is obviously meant to describe the irrationality of the universe: I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable though. 186 The long cable that holds all things in the world together, and seemingly keeps them from sinking or drifting into the infinite, is very loose and allows the existence of many horrors , which is one of the names that Melville assigns to the white whale. Also, the writer makes and interesting parallel between Genius and the dumb beast, implying that Genius can reside in the pyramidical silence of the whale: But how? Genius in the sperm whale? Has the sperm whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great Genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great sperm whale been known to the young Orient world, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless [] 187 To deify the tongueless crocodile or the dumb whale is to sense that irrationality and the divine or the infinite are indissolubly connected, and that the mere silencing of human reason and consciousness is able to open up the gates into infinity. The same thought becomes apparent in Blakes poem, as the idea

185

Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos Fantasticos, http://borges.netfirms.com/: The dream was more or less the same. The beginning announced the frightful end. A banister, some iron stairs that descended spirally and a basement or a system of basements that deepened with other stairs, narrowing in forges, dungeons and marshes. At the bottom, the stones were also Benemoth and Leviathan, the monsters that in the Bible represent God or the irrational. I would wake up trembling, and the stones were there in the drawer, ready for a new transformation. (my translation) 186 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1993, p. 418. 187 Ibid. p. 288.

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of evil is only secondary among the attributes of the tiger. This is obvious in the main question that the text, which is formed only of questions, asks: Tyger ! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 188 The only difference between the last stanza of the poem, recently quoted, and the symmetrical first stanza, is the verb that accompanies the framing of the fearful symmetry in the first stanza Blake employed the modal could , meant to suggest the power and the art that the creation of the tiger requires. However, in the last line of the poem the verb is changed to dare , implying another type of strength -that of looking straight into the face of the unknown, of bearing the revelation of the gulf of infinity and perfection or symmetry. That these powers are the visionary faculties particular of the Poetic Genius, is made clear in the fourth stanza of the poem, where the creation of the tiger, although questioned all through the poem, is implied to belong to the power given by imagination, as the symbolism used here suggests with its clear resemblances to Loss furnaces: What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 189 That art alone has this magnificent and divine power of creation is further suggested by the use of the hand and of the eye as instruments for creation, therefore, the main tools used in artistic creation, the eye that gives visionary power and the hand for painting or etching or writing. The same idea of infinity suggested by the tiger is found in Ted Hughes Tiger Psalm, which seems to have been palimpsestically constructed from Blakes poem. The very title given by Hughes connects the idea of divinity and the tiger: The tiger Kills like the fall off a cliff, one sinewed with the earth, Himalayas under eyelid, Ganges under fur Does not kill. Does not kill. The tiger Blesses with a fang. The tiger does not kill but opens a path Neither of Life nor of Death: The tiger within the tiger: The tiger of the Earth. O Tiger! O Sister of the Viper! O Beast in Blossom!190
188 189

William Blake, Complete Writings, Songs of Experience, p. 214. Id. 190 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, 2003, p. 578.

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Hughes tiger does not kill, instead it opens a path which lies beyond both life and death: that of the tiger within the tiger this road that leads to the innermost essence of the tiger, to the sinews of his heart, is itself an opening into infinity. But, probably the most troubling question is the one in the last but one stanza of Blakes poem Did he smile his work to see? The smile is a very important element in Blakes poetry, and its meanings are partially elucidated in the poem taken form The Pickering Manuscript, entitled The Smile: There is a Smile of Love,/ And there is a Smile of Deceit,/ And there is a Smile of Smiles/ In which these two meet. 191 This Smile of Smiles could be interpreted as a certain state which is beyond innocence and experience (symbolized in the first stanza by love and, respectively, deceit ), or which is a point where innocence and experience meet. This unique smile is only smiled by the poet or artist who in his visionary joys perhaps, or in his moments of true understanding and inspiration can embrace divinity and end all Misery: And no Smile that ever was smild, But one Smile alone, That betwixt the Cradle & Grave, It only once Smild can be: But, when it once is Smild, Theres an end to all Misery.192 In these lines Blake seems to describe a fourfold smile, the correspondent to the fourfold vision, as we can derive from another poem included in The Pickering Manuscript, The Crystal Cabinet:, where the state called Beulah, the threefold vision, is described: O, what a smile ! a threefold Smile Filld me, that like a flame I burnd; I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid, And found a Threefold Kiss returnd. 193 The smile, together with the tears, is taken to be symbolic and holy because it is human and it belongs to the states of mind specific to man. Thus, Blake makes of these two much more than simple emotions they represent intellectual manifestations or states: For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing, And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of the Martyrs woe Is an Arrow for the Almightie s Bow.194 Thus, the question about the creator of the Tyger, Did he smile his work to see?, implies that the creator is the Poetic Genius, enfolding his creation in his fourfold smile. The same idea of the tiger as a
191 192

William Blake, Complete Writings, The Pickering Manuscript, p. 423. Ibid. p. 423-424. 193 Ibid. p. 429. 194 Ibid., p. 430.

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symbol for visionary powers is to be found in one of the Proverbs of Hell where Blake observes that: The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. 195 As many of the other proverbs of Hell teach, inspiration and artistic genius can not be acquired through instruction, the mere use of reason can not result in genius; this is why excess and exuberance, wrath and every other form of passion are the real roads to wisdom: The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of the woman is the work of God.196 All these passions and states pride, lust, wrath, nakedness are four of the capital sins as Christian religion teaches, all labeled with thou shalt not ; Blake encourages these passions, because for him genius can never be gained by walking in straight paths , but only in the crooked ones.197As Foster Damon observes, Blake even inverted the traditional religious classification of men as the elect, the redeemed, and the reprobate: His [Blakes] reprobate and transgressors are (like the devils in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) the original geniuses, whether in religion, art or science. They break all rules and transgress the laws because they act from immediate inspiration, the direct perception of truth. 198 Surprising as it may seem, Blakes methods of creation and some of his artistic creeds come close to those of postmodernism. In his article entitled Blakes Material Sublime, Steve Vine puts forth an interesting theory of the sublime and the idea of infinity in Blakes work. According to Vine, Blakes technique of etching and illuminated printing, as presented by him in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, indicates a very important fact about his idea of the sublime: his method of etching resembles the endeavor to display, to reveal the infinite in the material. Moreover, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is also the work in which Blake proposes that there is no distinction between the body and the soul, or between the material and the sublime. Infinity is therefore to be revealed during the very process of creation in the material corpus itself: In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Blake famously describes his own practice of relief etching and illuminated printing as a process of material transformation: as the materialization, we could say, of the sublimities of soul[] Instead of infinity transcending materiality--with the soul in sublime exaltation over the body--infinity is disclosed in the body of the material itself. The sublime becomes sensual (E 39); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14) or material. If the infinite, then, becomes a property of materiality, it does so not in any final revelation--in an apocalyptic revelation or display of its truth--but in a process of revelation, in a revealing. Blake's use of the present continuous formprinting, melting, displaying-195 196

Ibid., The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 152. Ibid., p. 151. 197 Ibid., p. 152. 198 Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 87.

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insists grammatically on the revelation of infinitude as an activity rather than an end. The infinite is never finally revealed, but is always about to be revealed, is always being revealed. The infinite is always in the process of (its) revelation, for Blake's corrosives designate a process rather than a product, a displaying rather than a display. The infinite resides in the corrosion and melting away of the material, but this process is internal to the material itself. The material is not so much sublimated as the sublime is installed in the material.199 As Vine notes, Blakes creative method and his idea of the sublime resembles, at least in part the idea of the postmodern sublime, as presented by Lyotard. The postmodern theories propose that the sublime is found in differentiation and particularity, rather than in the grand narratives, and this idea comes very close to Blakes praise of the minute particulars: It is, indeed, in the temporality, contingency and particularity of aesthetic presentation that Lyotard finds the postmodern sublime: a sublime of singularity or heterogeneity that, refusing all general or universal protocols, is uncannily anticipated in Blake's aesthetic championing of the Minute Particular, a Lyotardian perspective allows us to read that anticipation under the sign of the sublime. For the minute particulars of Blakean aesthetic production anticipate Lyotard's postmodernism insofar as the latter's revisionary Kantianism uses the sublime to characterize the heterogeneous singularities of postmodern presentation--instituting a sublime of particularity and differentiation rather than of any universalizing grand narrative[] And it is in the name of particularity, of course, that Blake assaults Sir Joshua Reynolds' generalizing classicist aesthetic in his fierce annotations to Reynolds' Discourses on Art (1797). Whereas Reynolds' Discourses aim to establish what John Barrell calls "uniformity of taste(24) among the viewing public, Blake insists on and enacts the ethics of dissent, difference, particularity, singularity []200 Indeed, according to Blake,To Generalize is to be an Idiot, whereas "To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit201. There is no general knowledge; things can only be known as particulars. Knowing has to include the whole and all its minute particulars at the same time: What is General Nature is there Such a Thing [...] All Knowledge is Particular 202 A distinction should be made here, however, between general knowledge and universality: Blake believed in the existence of innate ideas in everything, which were at the same time universal features. In his Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynoldss Discourses, he affirms that Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is Not to be Acquired. It is Born with us. Innate Ideas are in Every Man, Born with him; they are truly Himself. The Man who says that we have No Innate Ideas must be a Fool & Knave, Having No Con-Science or Innate Science. 203 Thus, for Blake general laws are wrong precisely because they attempt to apply some properties to an object from the outside, while the universal archetypes in fact reveal the innate qualities of all things.

199 200

Steve Vine, Blakes Material Sublime, 2002, p. 240. Ibid. p. 342. 201 William Blake, Complete Writings, p. 641. 202 Ibid., p. 648.
203

Ibid.,

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For Blake, the outline is very important since, if the outline is blurred, the forms of things are blurred too and we lapse into generality once more. Therefore, the minute particulars are essential for the preservation of the whole, of plenitude itself: He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars, General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer, For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity; Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!204 Discrimination and particularity are indeed the main coordinates of Blakes work. He emphasizes thus the Line of the Almighty, pointing to the fact that without the delimiting line, without the differentiation, all is chaos again: The wirey line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions. Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the Line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. 205 As Vine notes, and also the essence of his ideas of the sublime and the infinite, in spite of the fact that his view of the world is concerned with the absolute and the eternal: One road by which chaos threatens to return is the usurpation of art by Accident. Minute Discrimination is Not Accidental, Blake thus insists in his annotations to Reynolds: for All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination The discriminating line of the sublime, that is, is coeval with the artistic act itself: with the artistic act as the formal and intentional structuring of chaotic materiality. For Blake, Discrimination is not Accidental because it is grounded in the intentional act of a creative subjectivity.206 Blakes plenitude and his absolute knowledge are not totalitarian and, in fact, the plenitude is made up of all the minute particulars in the world. Also, the significance that Blake attributes to the outline in his designs, to the delimiting boundary of form, supports his praise of individuality and discrimination. The postmodern aesthetics is centered on the idea of jubilation, as Lyotard pointed out or the inventing of new language games and methods of creation to present the unpresentable, which is the sublime itself: Hence Lyotard's formulation of the sublime: 'presenting the existence of something unpresentable'. Lyotard adopts the idea of the sublime to describe the way in which art or literature can disrupt established language games and ways of representing the world. Modern art, he argues, has the capacity to present the fact that the unpresentable exists: that there are things that are impossible to present in available language games, voices that are silenced in culture, ideas that cannot be formulated in rational communication. Following the two parts of the sublime feeling (pain and pleasure), the existence of the unpresentable can be signalled by the
204 205 206

Ibid., Jerusalem, 55: 60-66, p. 687.

Ibid., Descriptive Catalogue, p. 564.

Steve Vine, Blakes Material Sublime, p. 244.

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sublime in two distinct ways, one of which Lyotard calls modern and the other postmodern. This difference is the basis of the distinction between the two forms. Lyotard describes this difference in terms of modernist nostalgia and postmodern jubilation []207 The postmodernist aesthetic is characterized rather by the interplay between absence and plenitude. On the one hand, the postmodernists believe in the infinity of the world, and in the infinite number of possibilities for existence, but they do this by replacing meaning with numberless interpretations. The world in the postmodernist view is clearly not a closed object, governed by strict and inevitable rules, as the world of the Enlightenment was. Still, postmodernist aesthetics seems to borrow from the Romantics the idea that the world is laid open before our imaginations, and that there is no fixed objective reality. As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz stated in his poem Noche en claro (Sleepless Night), everything is a door that needs only the light push of a thought: Todo es puerta /basta la leve presin de un pensamiento [...] 208 Blake himself believed that there are gates and doors that can lead to Paradise, in all things and in all the minute particulars, and that anything possible to be believed is certainly true. Also, he believed in the marriage of Heaven and Hell, and of all the other contraries, and believed in vision and in dreams more than in finite perception and rational truth. However, although these may be seen as common points with postmodernism, it should be observed that the postmodernists seem to share the feeling of alienation with the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In spite of the absolute freedom of thought and imagination that they borrow from the Romantics, the postmodernists feel trapped precisely because of the endless potentialities of interpretation and meaning, and of the possibilities of existence. They seem to walk on a mined field of potentialities, and this makes their work seem a constant play between the idea of hyper-absence and that of infinity or plenitude. To them, the world is clearly not locked and waiting to be discovered and opened with the key of reason, as the thinkers of the Enlightenment believed, but although it can be opened at every step or with every thought, its meaning is never stable. Paz illustrates this idea in his poem called Blanco (White), remarking that the world seems to be filled with inventions and possibilities, and that any one thing can generate or create another: the spirit can be an invention of the body, the body may be an invention of the world, and the world may be an invention of the spirit. There is here an almost ceaseless circle of creations that do not follow logic and do not have an end. Things are no longer seen as mere objects, but as interpretations, inventions, potentialities and productions. The plenitude of the world already seems a trap: the world is infinite but as Octavio Paz expresses it, too transparent, obviously not in the sense that it can be easily
207 208

Simon Malpas, Jean-Franois Lyotard, p. 47. Octavio Paz, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1990, p. 94: Everything is a door/ all one needs is the light push of a thought...

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understood, but in the sense that all the things seem to open into other things, or anything can be seen through another or in another thing: El espritu es una invencin del cuerpo El cuerpo es una invencin del mundo El mundo es una invencin del espritu No Si irrealidad de lo mirado la transparencia es todo lo que queda... 209 A very similar idea is expressed by Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life, where he notes that if the world has been created by God, that is, by a supreme soul or a universal consciousness, it may just as well be believed that our bodies are the creations of our souls: If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it; and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be? And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more than, it has been made by itif, indeed, there be a soul.210 In the postmodernist world, there can not be a single truth, but all things can be seen as truths in a way, as inventions or as simulacra, to use Baudrillards term, not just of the human mind, but of other things as well. Octavio Paz expressed this idea in his poem Vuelta (Return), by admitting that to choose is to be wrong, no matter the case, that is, no truth is better than another, and the idea of being at a crossroad, i.e. between two different meanings, is useless. The only thing that remains is language as a vehicle of interpretations and creations: No estoy en el crucero elegir es equivocarse. Estoy en la mitad de esta frase. 211
209

Ibid., p. 328: The spirit is an invention of the body The body is an invention of the world The world is an invention of the spirit No Yes the unreality of the seen transparency is all that remains. 210 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 149. 211 Octavio Paz, The Collected Poems, p. 372: I am not at a crossroads: To choose Is to be wrong I am in the middle of this phrase.

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The extreme postmodernists however, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard for instance, entertained the notion that the truth is not even multiple on the postmodern scene, but that it simply does not and can not exist. Derrida for instance, proposed that truth can never be reached since every thing must be set up permanently against a system of differences, and thus the meaning is always deferred. To reach this conclusion, Derrida analyzes the concept of centered structure which is the very basis of cognitive coherence in the traditional view, and testifies that there is no one center around which the structure can be coherently built, but an infinite number of centers that can be substituted one for the other randomly and incessantly: The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called the origin or end, arche or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]-that is, in a word, a history- whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play.212 The center is not a locus but a function, as Derrida sees it, and therefore the central signified can never attain full presence, as it cannot be present outside a system of differences: The central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.213 Thus, for Derrida, truth can never be reached because it is trapped in this game of absence and presence. For him, as well as for many of the postmodernists, the only thing that is absolute on the postmodern scene is the play between absence and presence, which prevents full presence to be attainted at any point in the game. Nevertheless, although truth and plenitude as such, in the sense of full ontological and cognitive presence, can not be obtained, there remain an infinite number of games that play and outplay one another. Jean Baudrillard extends the imports of these games of absence and presence, adopting an even more radical view. He puts forth thus his famous theory about the complete disappearance of the real from the postmodern world, positing therefore that all we have is a procession of simulacra. Moreover, Baudrillard emphasizes that simulation is not to be confused as a notion with pretense, or the contrast between appearance and reality, since he does
212 213

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, 2001,p. 354. Ibid., p. 353.

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not use the term in this sense. By simulation he actually means the total absence of reality, which is made up of models of the real generated continuously, without a referent. Thus, there is actually an excess of models for the real, a hyperreal, which does not allow for the existence of any real locus as such: Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territoryprecession of simulacrait is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.214 Baudrillard posits then that the map precedes the territory, the representation or the discourse precede the very objects that they represent. This paradox goes much beyond the epistemological postmodernist theories that claim that truth does not exist. In Baudrillards view, it is precisely the territory, the ontological reality that is absent, and is replaced by an excess of generated models or simulacra. Thus, in the Postmodernist thought, absence, presence and plenitude become major structuring principles at both the cognitive and the ontological level. In Blakes system of thought, there is a clear opposition between the anti-world, the world of spiritual and ontological absence at the same time, and the world in its state of absolute plenitude. According to Derrida and Baudrillard, there is only play, an absolute game that involves absence and plenitude. What is interesting is that, although absence of meaning and even of reality become crucial aspects of the postmodern world, pointing therefore to a certain sense of a hyper absence, it cannot be denied that another, although very different kind of plenitude still subsists. Thus, the plenitude in the postmodern world is that of the infinite number of games, of the infinite systems of oppositions, the infinite paranoid connections or even of the infinite simulacra. The world is thus on the verge of hyper-absence and an infinity of infinities, although paradoxically, the infinities seem to be empty. The hyperreal denies the real precisely because of its prolificacy. All there remains thus is the non-sense of this world which seduces and absorbs the observer into an infinity of sings without reference: Only signs without referents, empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs, absorb usThe mind is irresistibly attracted to a place devoid of meaning. It is non-sense that seduces; seduction employs signs without credibility and gestures without referents.215

214 215

Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, 1988, p. 166. Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, Forget Baudrillard?, 1993, p. 36.

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3.2. The Postmodernist Chain of Command versus the Romantic Chain of Being: Pynchon and Blake In Gravitys Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon gives us his postmodernist construction of the play between plenitude and absence: the system, as an abstract, mysterious, totalitarian power, replaces nature and the natural laws. Pynchons postmodernist world is very far from the classical, Enlightenment world in which the natural laws were triumphant. The system is the only absolute power coordinating the postmodern world. If relativity and subjectivism were the main novelties brought by modernism, the postmodern world-view shifts back towards absolutism rather than relativism but this time, the absolute is the absurd system. The postmodern world is dominated by uncertainty and irrationalism: as Thomas Pynchon observes in his Gravitys Rainbow, all things seem to be interconnected in the postmodern world, but these connections differ widely from the rational ties that made the traditional worldview into a coherent whole. The multiple connections between beings, things and events in the postmodernist world are all drawn through paranoid associations: Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in a Chain of Being.216 The very basis of all traditional logical argument- that of cause and effect following each other- is replaced here by unwonted connections, forming a play between the signifiers and the signified, underlain by unknown, irrational drives. Meaning is no longer attached to the signifier; both objects and meanings seem to float on the postmodern scene without being necessarily connected. The perpetual war described in Gravitys Rainbow, also coordinated by the system, replaces in the postmodern world nature and its laws. The world becomes itself a state of war, a Chain of Command, in which the political completely substitutes the natural: [] P.W.E. laps over onto the Ministry of Information, the BBC European Service, the Special Operations Executive, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the F.O. Political Intelligence Department at Fitzmaurice House. Among others. When the Americans came in, their OSS, OWI, and Army Psychological Warfare Department had also to be coordinated with. Presently there arose the joint, SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), reporting direct to Eisenhower, and to hold it together a London Propaganda Coordinating Council, which has no real power at all. Who can find its way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized?217

216 217

Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow, 1973, p. 77. Ibid., 76-77.

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The obvious supreme reality of the postmodern world seems to be paranoia, and the labyrinthine play between absence and plenitude. Paranoia translates obviously as the impossibility to know the truth, because of the endless chain of interpretations and suspicions that can be applied to the universe. The dream of the mythical serpent which held the tail in its mouth that Pynchon talks about is a pertinent representation of this paranoid world, which seems at the same time to be a returning and resonant cycle, a predictable world, that is, and a violation of the same cycle: Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which the dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning, is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that productivity and earnings keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity- most of the World, animal vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. 218 The serpent is an image of the chemical formula of benzene, according to the anecdote that tells of how the chemist Kekule discovered the formula through a mysterious dream. Pynchon points here, as he does in fact all through the book, to the fact that even the things and the pieces of elementary knowledge that seem to be objective and that are usually taken for granted, may hide a deep mystery at their core, and may be another trick played on us by the System: No return, no salvation no Cyclethats not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the serpent to mean. No: what the Serpent means is hows this- that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring, just like the snake with its tail in its mouth, GET IT?219 In fact, the most interesting thing about Gravitys Rainbow seems to be the obvious allusion made by the title to the Newtonian, classical science of the Enlightenment. Newton was, as it is well known, the noteworthy discoverer of both the universal law of gravitation and of the spectrum of the light (or the rainbow). Both of these milestones of classical science are taken up by Pynchon in his book: although the richness of the text can hardly allow for a single theme or a single central idea, one of the most notable things in the book seems to be the plot of the falling rockets and their mysterious connection to the sexual life of agent Slothrop. The agent even has a map on which the points and dates of the fall of the rockets correspond to his sexual encounters. The idea is very complex: first of all, the falling rockets are an allusion to the force of gravity and their explosion and the arc they describe in the air an allusion to the rainbow. Moreover, the rockets are mysteriously connected to Slothrops love affairs, implying at first sight, that these coincidences are determined by the system. However, there is more to this: the correspondence between love and gravity, that is between a human feeling and a
218 219

Ibid., p. 412. Ibid., p. 413.

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physical law of the universe seems to indicate that the universe itself can be subjective, and that the law of gravity may actually be something Messsianic: Yess, yess, all staring at him, but then why keep saying mind and body? Why make that distinction? Because its hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and a psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go....To find that Gravity, taken so far for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in the Earths mindbody....having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, rewoven molecules to be taken up by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side []220 The rocket is also an obvious phallic symbol, and its zero-shaped target hints at the female sexual counterpart. As Pynchon indicates, the planet is itself animated, no longer the objective piece of rock revolving in space, but a subjective, conscious form of being driven by secret lusts and love, just like man: She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning its tail... she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green...there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau. Pfau Zwei. Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love...at Brennschluss it is done- the Rockets purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center has submitted. All the rest will happen according to the laws of ballistics The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in. Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm...221 This image of the animated earth is an example of the postmodern total abolishment of objectivity, not only in the sense that the observer is no longer objective, but in the sense that all objective states have also disappeared from the scene. The idea that the world is an image of man, endowed with love and different passions, can be linked to Blakes Giant Man, Albion, and the world in which everything has the human form divine, and in which the image of man as a microcosm reflects the image of the macrocosm. Imagination has no boundaries and the world itself seems to be imagination (not the product of someone elses imagination, but imagination itself). However, as it was said before, the postmodern world does not endure in its state of wholeness. In one of the little rhymes that are scattered throughout Pynchons book, he notes that it would be much preferable to be a victim in a Greek tragedy, than a victim in a vacuum, by vacuum being implied the postmodern scene: Aw, the sodium lights arent, so bright in Berlin, I go to the bars dear, but nobodys in!
220 221

Ibid., p. 590.= Ibid., p. 223.

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Oh, Id much rather bee In a Greek trage-dee, Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite.222 Pynchons wish translates as the wish to be a victim in a coherent, meaningful world, like that of the Greek tragedy, where destiny was considered to be unavoidable, and the future could be known before it actually came, rather than to be a victim in the chaotic and truth-less postmodern world. Blake too had his own personification of the rainbow, under the name of Leutha, whom he called the lureing bird of Eden: Where is my lureing bird of Eden! Leutha silent love! Leutha, the many colourd bow delights upon thy wings: Soft soul of flowers Leutha! Sweet smiling pestilence! I see thy blushing light: Thy daughters many changing, Revolve like sweet perfumes ascending O Leutha silken queen!223 Blakes Leutha has itself sexual connotations- she is a sweet smiling pestilence, her light is blushing, and she is a luring bird; the rainbow makes the connection between Heaven and earth and it is found in the Bible as the symbol of the covenant between man and God, stating that the world shall not be destroyed. In Pynchons book the symbolism related to light and the rainbow is continued with the story of Byron the Bulb, a story of the life of an electric immortal bulb that is never extinguished, therefore the story is one of artificial light, an important invention of man, which actually can be considered to parallel Gods initial creation of light: But Phoebus doesnt know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within the sight of the statue of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witnessing the more languorous forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito the bulb over in the next sconce whos always planning an escape, Bernie down the hall in the toilet [...], his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state [...]224 By giving the story of an artificial bulb that can talk, Pynchon actually makes the inanimate a part of the subjective world, showing that a story can be written from the perspectiv of any kind of thing, and not just from that of man. The fact that Pynchon takes up John Donnes famous phrase No man is an island, stated in Meditation 17, is very significant: he obviously implies the hidden connections that exist between everything in the postmodern world: Yes-Im-the Fellow thats hav-ing other peop-les
222 223

Ibid., p. 415. William Blake, Complete Writings, Europe, 13: 9-14. 224 Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow, p. 649.

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fan-tasies, /Suffering what they ought to be themselves-./I dont even get to ask for whom the bells []225 3.3. Mirrors and Fatherhood are Abominable: The Postmodern Idea of Plenitude According to Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges is another postmodernist writer who constantly uses the play between absence and plenitude in his works. Many of these works are centered on some irrational phenomenon, like that of the blue tiger discussed in the beginning of this chapter. In his Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius he introduces a strange race of people, living on Tlon, the story of whom he finds in an encyclopedia. Although at first sight the strange account of another type of rational beings, which live in a different universe, seems a successful science fiction story, it is not so at all. In fact, Borges here as in his other works as well, writes about us and about our universe, or about how things would be on earth once man has relinquished his excessive rationality and the persistent belief in objectivity. On Tlon, the only discipline of study that exists is psychology, implying that the universe is actually made up of mental states, as Blake himself encouraged us to believe: No es exagerado afirmar que la cultura clsica de Tln comprende una sola disciplina: la psicologa. Las otras estn subordinadas a ella. He dicho que los hombres de ese planeta conciben el universo como una serie de procesos mentales, que no se desenvuelven en el espacio sino de modo sucesivo en el tiempo. Spinoza atribuye a su inagotable divinidad los atributos de la extensin y del pensamiento; nadie comprendera en Tln la yuxtaposicin del primero (que slo es tpico de ciertos estados) y del segundo -que es un sinnimo perfecto del cosmos.226 Also, reason, Borges says, is replaced on Tlon by a process of thinking that associates ideas, no matter the irrationality or randomness of this association. Again, Borges comes quite close to Blakes theory of imagination, by proposing a mode of thinking that belongs to fiction and literature in general, and which is based on associations of ideas and metaphors. It is obvious however, that for Blake the association is not merely mental, but organic also; his imagination links all the things together, but at the same time, is able to recreate from the whole an infinity of infinities, as Coleridges theory of the Romantic imagination proposes. What Blake and Borges actually share in this respect is the idea that states are irreducible and it is in this irreducible character of the whole and of the parts at the same time, that the idea of plenitude is formed. Ideas can only be associated and not deduced one from
225 226

Ibid. p. 12. Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos Fantasticos, at http://borges.netfirms.com/: It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tln comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tln would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second - which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos.(my translation)

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another because, all mental states are irreducible and therefore, equally important regardless of their truthfulness or fallacy: La percepcin de una humareda en el horizonte y despus del campo incendiado y despus del cigarro a medio apagar que produjo la quemazn es considerada un ejemplo de asociacin de ideas. Este monismo o idealismo total invalida la ciencia. Explicar (o juzgar) un hecho es unirlo a otro; esa vinculacin, en Tlon, es un estado posterior del sujeto, que no puede afectar o iluminar el estado anterior. Todo estado mental es irreducible: el mero hecho de nombrarlo, id est de clasificarlo, importa un falseo. 227 The irreducible character of all things is another example of the postmodern idea of plenitude: all things exist, and there is no rational classification of the things according to their truthfulness or fallacy. However, as in the works of other postmodernists, this plenitude of the world results in a feeling of anxiety, translated by Borges phrase: mirrors and fatherhood are abominable. This phrase clearly states that paternity, that is, actual creation or procreation and reflection or mirroring are in exactly the same thing, that is, anything may be created and multiplied by reflection, in the same way in which something can be born out of something: El texto de la Enciclopedia deca : Para uno de esos gnsticos, el visible universo era una ilusin o (ms precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables (mirrors and fatherhood are hateful) porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.228 This kind of world resembles the world of fiction, and Borges affirms it as well when he talks about the libraries in Tlon. There, all the books go unsigned and they do not have a single meaning either- they are just a compilation of permutations and possibilities and always contain the counterbook as well: En los hbitos literarios tambin es todopoderosa la idea de un sujeto nico. Es raro que los libros estn firmados. No existe el concepto del plagio: se ha establecido que todas las obras son obra de un solo autor, que es intemporal y es annimo (...)Tambin son distintos los libros. Los de ficcin abarcan un solo argumento, con todas las permutaciones imaginables. Los de naturaleza filosfica invariablemente contienen la tesis y la anttesis, el riguroso pro y el contra de una doctrina. Un libro que no encierra su contralibro es considerado incompleto.229

227

Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos Fantasticos, at http://borges.netfirms.com/: The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas. This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tln, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it - i.e., of classifying it - implies a falsification. (my translation) 228 Ibid. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe . (my translation)
229

Ibid. In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous [] Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. (my translation)

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Again, the belief that contraries are equally true is the same as the one adopted by Blake in his philosophy. Thus, Borges perfectly illustrates the postmodern idea of plenitude, in which all things exist and they can be multiplied by creation, by permutation or reflection and in which all things are irreducible. This time, the world seems too full and too infinite and this induces a feeling of anxiety and entrapment. In La biblioteca de Babel (The Babel Library), Borges continues his idea about infinity, and makes the world seem an infinite, unlimited library, which however, is periodical- that is labyrinthine, since the books are repeated in the same disorder, that is the universe appears as a combination of infinity, disorder and repetition: Acabo de escribir infinita. No he interpolado ese adjetivo por una costumbre retrica; digo que no es ilgico pensar que el mundo es infinito. Quienes lo juzgan limitado, postulan que en lugares remotos los corredores y escaleras y hexgonos pueden inconcebiblemente cesarlo cual es absurdo. Quienes lo imaginan sin lmites, olvidan que los tiene el nmero posible de libros. Yo me atrevo a insinuar esta solucin del antiguo problema: La biblioteca es ilimitada y peridica. Si un eterno viajero la atravesara en cualquier direccin, comprobara al cabo de los siglos que los mismos volmenes se repiten en el mismo desorden (que, repetido, sera un orden: el Orden). Mi soledad se alegra con esa elegante esperanza.230 Another short story, La escritura del Dios (The Writing of God) enlarges upon another of his common themes related to the idea of plenitude: the character in his story is locked up in a circular prison, from where he tries to discover the writing that God has left for us, and which, he believes, should be a single word and still express the plenitude of the world: Qu tipo de sentencia (me pregunt) construir una mente absoluta? Consider que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposicin que no implique el universo entero; decir el tigre es decir los tigres que lo engendraron, los ciervos y tortugas que devor, el pasto de que se alimentaron los ciervos, la tierra que fue madre del pasto, el cielo que dio luz a la tierra. Consider que en el lenguaje de un dios toda palabra enunciara esa infinita concatenacin de los hechos, y no de un modo implcito, sino explcito, y no de un modo progresivo, sino inmediato. Con el tiempo, la nocin de una sentencia divina parecime pueril o blasfematoria. Un dios, reflexion, slo debe decir una palabra, y en esa palabra la plenitud.231

230

Ibid. I have just written the word infinite. I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope. (my translation) 231 Ibid., What sort of sentence, I asked myself, would be constructed by an absolute mind? I thought that even in the human languages there is not one single sentence that does not imply the whole universe; to say the tiger is to say the tigers that engendered it, the deer and turtles it devoured, the grass that the deer ate, the earth that was the mother of the grass, the sky that gave its light to the earth. I thought that in the language of a god any word must express this infinite concatenation of facts and not in an implicit but in an explicit way, not in a progressive but in an immediate way. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed childish and blasphemous. A god, thought I, should only say one word, and that word would express the plenitude. (my translation)

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Thus, one single word, or one single thing of the universe can be an image of plenitude and can contain everything else in itself in an explicit way, as Borges emphasizes. The world described in this way is one that resembles a dream more than the idea of reality we are used to. As Blake himself said, it is possible to see infinity in a grain of sand, and Borges saw it too, when he says, in the same story, that it is possible to dream of a grain of sand that begins to multiply so much as to seem infinite and suffocating, and then to wake up but only to continue the dream: [] So que en el piso de la crcel haba un grano de arena. Volv a dormir; so que los granos de arena eran tres. Fueron, as, multiplicndose hasta colmar la crcel, y yo mora bajo ese hemisferio de arena. Comprend que estaba soando: con un vasto esfuerzo me despert. El despertar fue intil: la innumerable arena me sofocaba. Alguien me dijo: No has despertado a la vigilia, sino a un sueo anterior. Ese sueo est dentro de otro, y as hasta lo infinito, que es el nmero de los granos de arena. El camino que habrs de desandar es interminable, y morirs antes de haber despertado realmente.232 The world becomes not only a dream within a dream, but an infinite number of dreams enclosed in other dreams. The idea of divinity is still the same circular infinity, the image of an infinite wheel that is everywhere at the same time, and which contains everything that exists in its motion: Entonces ocurri lo que no puedo olvidar ni comunicar. Ocurri la unin con la divinidad, con el universo (no s si estas palabras difieren). El xtasis no repite sus smbolos: hay quien ha visto a Dios en un resplandor, hay quien lo ha percibido en una espada o en los crculos de una rosa. Yo vi una Rueda altsima, que no estaba delante de mis ojos, ni detrs, ni a los lados, sino en todas partes, a un tiempo. Esa Rueda estaba hecha de agua, pero tambin de fuego, y era (aunque se vea el borde) infinita. Entretejidas, la formaban todas las cosas que sern, que son y que fueron, y yo era una de las hebras de esa trama total, y Pedro de Alvarado, que me dio tormento, era otra. Ah estaban las causas y los efectos, y me bastaba ver esa Rueda para entenderlo todo, sin fin. Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir! Vi el universo y vi los ntimos designios del universo. Vi los orgenes que narra el Libro del Comn.233 The image of divinity as a wheel also appeared in Blakes wheels revolving within wheels, expressing the perfect harmony and infinity of heaven. On the other hand, Gabriel Garca Mrquez also reverses the objective and the dream realities in his short story Ojos de perro azul, where the two characters, a woman and a man only meet in a
232

I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of the prison. I went to sleep again; I dreamed that the grains of sand were three. They continued multiplying thus until they filled up the prison and I was dying under the bank of sand. I realized I was dreaming: with an effort, I woke up. Waking up proved to be useless: the innumerable grains of sand were still suffocating me. A voice told me: you havent wakened up to reality but to a previous dream. This dream is inside another dream, and it goes on like this infinitely, because the number of the grains of sand is infinite. The road you have to walk back is endless, and you will die before truly waking up. (my translation) 233 And then it happened what I cant forget nor communicate. It was the union with divinity, with the Universe (I dont know if those words differ). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols; there are some who have seen God in a splendor, there are those who have perceived it in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw a high Wheel, that was not in front of my eyes, neither behind, nor beside, but everywhere at one time. That Wheel was made of water, but of fire as well, and it was (even though its border was visible) infinite. Interwoven, it was formed by all the things that will be, are and have been, and I was one of the fibers of the total weft and Pedro de Alvarado -who caused me pain-, was another one. There they were the causes and the effects and I only had to look at that Wheel to understand it all, endlessly. Oh, the happiness of understanding, greater than the one from inventing or feeling! I saw the universe and I saw the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins that describe The Book of Council (Borges, my translation)

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common dream, and try to find one another, unsuccessfully, in reality: Me gustara tocarte, volva a decir. Y ella dijo: Lo echaras todo a perder volvi a decir, antes que yo pudiera tocarla. Tal vez, si das la vuelta por detrs del velador, despertaramos sobresaltados quin sabe en qu parte del mundo. Pero yo insist: No importa. Y ella dijo: Si diramos vuelta a la almohada, volveramos a encontrarnos. Pero t, cuando despiertes, lo habrs olvidado. 234 The dialogue of the two dreamers in Marquez story reveals the way in which, iny dreams, a single motion or action can take us to another very different dream. This sensitivity and feebleness of the dream reality that can change with a single movement is an allusion to our own, presumably objective reality, which seems palpable at first sight, but which may be just as easily changed and influenced as a dream.

234

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ojos de perro azul, at http://www.literatura.us/garciamarquez/perroazul.html: I would like to touch you, I said again. And she said, You would destroy everything, she said again, before I could touch her. Perhaps if you go around the nightstand, we will wake up startled in God knows what part of the world. But I insisted: It does not matter. And she said: If you go around the pillows, we will meet again. But you will have forgotten everything when you wake up.

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IV. Steps toward the Romantic Temple of Plenitude and its Relevance for the Science of the Twentieth Century She took an atom of space & opened its centre Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art William Blake God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations. Robert Browning The Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that Allen Ginsberg

4.1. Sweet Science Reigns: Blakes Fractal Geometry of Nature The Four Zoas, the poem which is second in length to Jerusalem among William Blakes works, perfectly expresses his intellectual battle against the limitative science that the Enlightenment had concocted. If in Jerusalem the focus is on Albion and his emanations, in The Four Zoas the actual conflict among the main powers that fight inside the human brain comes into focus. The poem is filled with the lamentations of the divided Zoas and of their specters and emanations, which rove through a world of absence and chaos, longing for the initial unity. The intellectual war is symbolic, as it plastically represents the division of the human faculties into separate entities. If the man is not whole, if he cannot see through all his senses at once then he cannot perceive the wholeness of the world, this seems to be Blakes most important message. The war is clearly opposed thus as a state of things to the state of brotherhood, where all the faculties of man join together in harmony. Going much ahead of his time, Blake anticipated the modern psychoanalysis, grafting The Four Zoas around the displacement of Tharmas (desire) who hides in secret, and in his replacement with Urizen (reason, the superego): 95

Begin with Tharmas, Parent power, drakning in the West / Lost! Lost! Lost! Are my Emanations! Enion, O Enion,/ We are become a Victim to the Living. We hide in secret. 235Albion himself calls on Urizen to reign, when he loses the divine vision, the vision of plenitude and turns his eyes outward to the self, the singularity: Rising upon his Couch of Death Albion beheld his Sons Turning his Eyes outward to Self losing the Divine Vision Albion calld Urizen & said. Behold these sickning Spheres Whence is this Voice of Enion that soundeth in my Porches Take thou possession! take this Scepter! go forth in my might For I am weary, & must sleep in the dark sleep of Death []236 Significantly, the gate of Tharmas is closed, and Albion can no longer hear the voice of Enion, the emanation of Tharmas that represents energy and desire. Urizen is called the Prince of Light symbolically, because he represents the divine reason in man, the power of certainty that is associated with objectivity and science usually. However, here Urizen becomes a malefic power: he represents certainty on the one hand, but at the same time, the certainty he confers is so limitative that it changes into doubt: And Urizen, who was Faith & certainty, is changed to Doubt 237 Obviously, Blake alludes here to Descartes, according to whom thinking originates in doubt, as the famous Cartesian phrase announces: Dubito ergo cogito, Cogito ergo sum. Moreover, existence itself is founded in thinking, and therefore implicitly in doubt. Thus, failing to see the wholeness of the world, man is left with a few rational certainties that form only emptiness and absence. A world which is founded in doubt is, as Blake saw it, an anti-world, a world of literally physical absence. After the fall into division of the four Zoas, Urizen, the Architect Divine unfolds his plan and creates the Mundane Shell, a purely material world which absorbs existence and life as a draught: Mighty was the draught of Voidness to draw Existence in/ Terrific Urizen strode above, in fear & pale dismay [] 238 The absence thus draws the wholeness of the world in itself, leaving a void behind. The science of the Enlightenment thus virtually petrifies the human imagination: Petrifying all the Human Imagination into rock& sand []239 When Newton and Locke begin to materialize the entire universe, every trace of spirituality disappears from the new formed world. Thus, the disaster is not only that man loses his divine vision, but that when imagination is frozen the whole world freezes as well. Blake thus perceived the inevitable connection that exists between the perceiver and the perceived; the objective reality is affected by the subjective perception, and Blake emphasized this idea repeating throughout the poem that the Zoas become what they behold. The relation between the subject and the object has
235 236

William Blake, Complete Writings, The Four Zoas, 1: 24-26. Ibid., 2: 1-6. 237 Ibid., 2: 105. 238 Ibid. 2: 18-19. 239 Ibid., 2: 38.

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a very great significance in Blakes poetry and in the Romantic poetry in general. Blake extends the human forms to the actual space coordinates: the Zoas all have a respective cardinal point in the actual space, as well as a situation in the human brain. Therefore, they are both within and without, that is, what happens inside the mind, the representation that man gives to the world and the way in which he understands it is indissolubly connected with the objective reality itself. The Romantics thus celebrated the idea of subjective perception, through which they intended to re-affirm mans connection with the world he lives in, as opposed to the view of the Enlightenment thinkers who had separated completely the physical world from that of the human spirit. In the Four Zoas, Blake actually represents the way in which the inward reality, what happens in the human brain virtually extends outwardly: Their eyes, their ears, nostrils & tongues roll outward, they behold /What is within now seen without; they are raw to the hungry wind.240 The world is turned thus into a mathematical plan, where everything is measured, calculated and categorized where men cannot see any visions anymore, but only the dark and stern laws designed by Urizen: But many stood silent & busied in their families And many said We see no Visions in the darksom air Measure the course of that sulphur orb that lights the darksom day Set stations on this breeding Earth & let us buy & sell Others arose & schools Erected forming Instruments To measure out the course of heaven. Stern Urizen beheld In woe his brethren & his Sons in darkning woe lamenting Upon the winds in clouds involvd Uttering his voice in thunders Commanding all the work with care & power & severity[]241 A large part of the poem is dedicated precisely to this symbolic representation of the effect that the science of the Enlightenment had on the world as such. Blake actually imagines the way in which the material universe is created with blocks of rock, with cubes of light and heat 242, with universal curtains. Cutting, dividing, measuring and building with golden compasses, Urizen creates the world as a closed shell that loses its infinity: .on golden hooks they hang abroad The universal curtains & spread out from Sun to Sun The vehicles of light, they separate the furious particles Into mild currents as the water mingles with the wine. While thus the Spirits of strongest wing enlighten the dark deep The threads are spun & the cords twisted & drawn out; then the weak Begin their work; & many a net is netted; many a net Spread & many a Spirit caught, innumerable the nets Innumerable the gins & traps; & many a soothing flute Is form'd & many a corded lyre, outspread over the immense
240 241

Ibid., 2: 55- 56. Ibid., 2: 136-134. 242 Blakes imagery of the cubes of light coincides with the corpuscular theory of light put forth by Max Plank and Albert Einstein at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which actually led to the quantum revolution in physics.

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In cruel delight they trap the listeners, & in cruel delight Bind them, condensing the strong energies into little compass []243 It is very interesting that for Blake this apparent order left by science is in fact a chaos. Once again, he anticipates. This time what he anticipates is modern science and more specifically the chaos theory in mathematics, which announces there is a hidden pattern that emerges out of irregularity. Therefore, the explicit order of nature that belongs to Newton and Urizen is replaced by a different, deeper order of things that reveals actually the infinite. Urizens geometry is the classical geometry in which there are only basic, general forms, such as squares, polygons, circles and so on: In sevens & tens & fifties, hundreds, thousands, numberd all According to their various powers. Subordinate to Urizen And to his sons in their degrees & to his beauteous daughters Travelling in silent majesty along their orderd ways In right lined paths outmeasurd by proportions of number weight And measure mathematic motion wondrous along the deep In fiery pyramid or Cube or unornamented pillar Of fire far shining travelling along even to its destind end Then falling down, a terrible space recovering in winter dire Till fired with ardour fresh recruited in its humble season It rises up on high all summer till its wearied course Turns into autumn, such the period of many worlds Others triangular right angled course maintain. Others obtuse Acute Scalene, in simple paths but others move In intricate ways biquadrate Trapeziums Rhombs Rhomboids Paralellograms. triple & quadruple, polygonic In their amazing hard subdued course in the vast deep [...]244 Benoit Mandelbrot, the famous mathematician who proposed the existence of the fractal dimensions of the world and of the fractal geometry of nature, revealed a truly revolutionary perspective of the universe. He, like Blake before him, sensed that nature was deeper and more beautiful than it was apparent at first sight. He shifted the course of geometry from the investigation of mere forms and shapes to that of structure and patterns. According to Mandelbrot and to other contemporary scientists all the objects in the world, even those that were ignored by the classical science as mere accidents of nature, such as clouds, trees, coast lines and so on, are self-similar to a certain extent. This means that the part is similar to the whole in pattern, and this goes on and on, down to the finest scale of representation. As Leslie Alan Horvitz emphasized, Mandelbrot proposed that, in spite of the degree of fragmentation or irregularity the basic pattern still prevails: Rather than settle for four dimensions ranging from zero (a point) to three, Mandelbrot went further and postulated a succession of fractional dimensions. Fractional dimension, it turned out, had a particular advantage when it came to measuring irregularitiesthose qualities, in other
243 244

Ibid., 2: 152-163. Ibid., 2: 269: 286.

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words, that otherwise have no clear definition: the degree of roughness, for example, or fragmentation [] What Mandelbrot proposed was that, whatever the degree of irregularity, it remained constant over different scales.245 Viewed like this, the structure of the world seems to be made of multiple frames, of patterns inside other patterns: Above all, fractal means self-similar. Self-similarity is symmetry across scale, implying recursiona pattern inside of a pattern inside of a pattern, and so on.246 This view of the natural objects is incredibly close to Blakes complex vision: as it was evidenced so far, Blake saw the plenitude of the world in the Minute Particulars of everything. To him, everything that lives is holy; this vision of the world obviously cannot be sustained unless all the details are included in the general pattern: Arise & drink your bliss For every thing that lives is holy, for the source of life Descends to be a weeping babe For the Earthworm renews the moisture of the sandy plain Now my left hand I stretch to earth beneath And strike the terrible string I wake sweet joy in dens of sorrow & I plant a smile In forests of affliction And wake the bubbling springs of life in regions of dark death [...]247 Also, the recurrent image of the weeping babe is in fact an intuition of the power of every thing to generate, to give birth to another complexity or structure of the system. Blakes humanism is also important: he sees the human form divine inherent in all the other forms existent in the world. Wholeness cannot be seen otherwise but in the minute particulars, as Blake emphasizes, and, at the same time, every particular is a man: [] he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized & not as thou O Fiend of Righteousness pretendest; thine is a Disorganized And snowy cloud: brooder of tempests & destructive War. You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue! I act with benevolence & virtue & get murderd time after time: You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you May take the aggregate; & you call the aggregate Moral Law: And you call that Swelld & bloated Form; a Minute Particular. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.248 Blake evidently saw the hidden order of the world in the minute particulars, and he opposed it to the disorganized and blurred general laws. He also perceived the falseness and uselessness of the moral
245 246

Leslie Alan Horvitz, Eureka! Stories of Scientific Discovery, 2002, p.223. Ibid., p. 226. 247 William Blake, The Four Zoas, 2: 365- 373. 248 Ibid., Jerusalem, 91: 20-31.

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laws: these are only the pretense of those who preach virtue without acting virtuously. As elsewhere, Blake emphasizes that to analyze and to form general laws is to murder the minute particulars, the special characteristics of each and every thing that exists in the world. J.D. Memory actually dedicated a poem to Blake, in which he discusses the poets fractal vision of the world, as seen especially in his famous Auguries of Innocence, which has been already discussed here. The poem is entitled Blake and Fractals and summarizes Blakes ability to perceive the fact that a single grain of sand might contain a whole world at its core: William Blake said he could see Vistas of Infinity In the smallest speck of sand, Held in the hollow of his hand. Models for this claim weve got In the works of Mandelbrot: Fractal diagrams partake Of the essence sensed by Blake. Basic forms will still prevail Independent of the scale.249 Similarly, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake sees a fractal image in a bird that cuts the airy way: the bird is likely to enclose an immense world of delight but this world may be simply closed because of our strictly sensual perception of the objects around us: How do you know but evry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, closd by your senses five?250 The same view was shared again by Borges as well, and one of the most eloquent examples in his work is the short story called The Aleph, in which the postmodernist writer describes the miraculous point in space which simply contains everything else: On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; and on and on, until I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the Earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth.251

249 250

J. D. Memory, Blake and Fractals, p. 280. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 6-7, p. 150. 251 Jorge Lus Borges, The Aleph.

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Although the actual size of the Aleph as Borges informs us is very small, the infinite appears within its boundaries. This is one of the most important ideas of Borges work: the infinite can appear in the midst of an apparently bounded object. Blake in his turn, emphasized as it was already noticed, the limit, the outline in painting and in any other form of art, perceiving at the same time the infinity in every limited detail. Like the fractal geometry, the chaos theory in mathematics proposes that there is a hidden order in complexity, and that the irregular and unpredictable systems can still display an intrinsic harmony. As Combs and Robertson observe, the image of nature that the modern world proposes is very non-Newtonian, perhaps as Blake himself would have desired it. Also, the inner and unlimited harmony that Blake perceived in everything seems to have been finally given a place in the picture of the world; the miracle and order are thus finally a part of the world and not considered mere accidents: The nonlinear revolution creates a very non-Newtonian image of the world. The first message of chaos is that physical and lawful does not mean predictable, controllable, or completely knowable.Thus, an evolving ecological universe is lawful and physical but not completely predictable, controllable, or knowable. It is a bit more illusive, more endlessly mysterious than a Newtonian world. Chaos' second message is that there is order hidden in complexity. Nonlinear interdependent dynamics have penchants for creating such things as patterns, coherence, stable dynamic structures, networks, coupling, synchronization, and synergy. This is why when nonlinear interdependence is restored to the world, the miracle of order production is made part of the world, not some kind of accident.252 Thus, the end of the Four Zoas also points to this plenary view of the world. Tharmas, who had been displaced in the beginning of the poem returns with his flocks to the Eternal Man and thus the brotherhood of the Zoas is reestablished: For Tharmas brought his flocks upon the hills & in the Vales/ Around the Eternal Mans bright tent the little Children play/ Among the wooly flocks The hammer of Urthona sounds []253 Through very interesting and suggestive metaphors, Blake shows how the initial unity of man is restored and how the paradise is regained. For example, Urthona and Tharmas labor together to make the wine of ages and the bread of ages, symbols that recall the Christian rituals of communion. Urthona symbolically grinds the corn of Urizen, while Tharmas sifts it. This raw corn of Urizen, or simply the material view of the world is refined and prepared with care by the Urthona and Tharmas who represent imagination and desire, and thus a new vision of the universe emerges: Then Dark Urthona took the Corn out of the Stores of Urizen He ground it in his rumbling Mills Terrible the distress Of all the Nations of Earth ground in the Mills of Urthona In his hand Tharmas takes the Storms. he turns the whirlwind Loose Upon the wheels the stormy seas howl at his dread command
252 253

Allan Combs and Robin Robertson, Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences , p. 22. William Blake, Complete Writings, The Four Zoas, 9: 838-839.

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And Eddying fierce rejoice in the fierce agitation of the wheels []254 The ending of the poem is indeed an image of the sweet science that Blake tried to teach to the world: the eyes of man are expanding, and thus the world becomes more and more humanized, to the point that every sunrise resembles the birth of a new man: The stars consumd like a lamp blown out & in their stead behold The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds One Earth one sea beneath nor Erring Globes wander but Stars Of fire rise up nightly from the Ocean & one Sun Each morning like a New born Man issues with songs & Joy []255 Clearly, the Romantics and Blake especially attempted to unify the subjective and the objective worlds because they intuitively felt that the empty world described by the Enlightenment science was not the actual reality. For Blake as well as for the other poets, the miracle of the human spirit was enough to prove that the world is alive and mysterious. In Blakes system, man himself, in his wholeness, is the essence of everything there is. This is why, to become more than man is in fact, for Blake, to become less: Attempting to be more than Man We become less, said Luvah As he arose from the bright feast, drunk with the wine of ages. His crown of thorns fell from his head, he hung his living Lyre Behind the seat of the Eternal Man & took his way Sounding the Song of Los []256 Quite significantly, Blake reverses the notions of religion and science at the end of the text: although it is obvious that he is a religious poet and that he attacks the science of the Enlightenment, he wants to emphasize that what he indeed believes in is a sweet science, a state in which the world is free from both religious and scientific prejudices or limitations: Urthona is arisen in his strength no longer now Divided from Enitharmon no longer the Spectre Los Where is the Spectre of Prophecy where the delusive Phantom Departed & Urthona rises from the ruinous walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War The war of swords departed now The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns.257

254 255

Ibid., 9: 806-810. Ibid. 256 Ibid. 9: 709-712. 257 Ibid., 9: 849- 855.

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4.2. The Relevance of Blakes Work for the Contemporary Scientific Paradigms One of the most important advancements in modern science is the tendency to include the human consciousness or the human spirit in the overall physical reality. Kurt Gdels experiment, through which he applied the theory of incompleteness to Turing machines, demonstrated that the human mind is always superior to the artificial intelligence because it can discern truth from falseness when the machine cannot. Douglas R. Hofstadter quotes J. R. Lucas article about Minds, Machines and Gdel in his book entitled Gdel, Escher, Bach: However complicated a machine we construct, it will, if it is a machine, correspond to a formal system, which in turn will be liable to the Gdel procedure for finding a formula unprovable-inthat-system. This formula the machine will be unable to produce as being true, although a mind can see it is true. And so the machine will still not be an adequate model of the mind. We are trying to produce a model of the mind which is mechanical-which is essentially dead- but the mind, being in fact alive, can always go one better than any formal, ossified, dead system can. Thanks to Gdels theorem, the mind always has the last word.258 The human mind probably functions better than a computer precisely because it is not made of reason and logical deductions only. Another scientific strand of thought, the quantum theory in physics, detected the impossibility to measure an electrons impetus or speed and to specify its location at the same time. Thus, it is obvious that the Uncertainty Principle has greatly challenged the notion of a strictly objective and solid reality. As Shimon Malin observes therefore, the universe doesnt seem to be made of hard facts after all: Heisenberg realized that the quantum theory does not give us the right to assign simultaneous, precise values to both the position and to the velocity of electrons, but it does allow us to assign simultaneous, approximate values. The mathematical structure of the theory is such that one can find out a precise answer to either the question Where is the electron? or How fast is the electron moving? but the theory does not allow us to have simultaneously precise answers to both questions. If one wishes to have simultaneous answers to both questions, one has to settle for approximate answers; and a higher degree of precision in the answer to one question can only be reached at the expense of a lower degree of precision in the answer to the other.259 As Malin observes, these whole new conclusions about our reality influence the way in which science itself is to be defined among the other endeavors of man. It can even be said that there is a shift from attempting a description of what used to be called with certainty reality or nature, to a description of what can be known or said about the world: But how, you may ask, is nature in itself, apart from these divisions? Isn't science supposed to account for that? No, says Bohr. The very question of whether it is meaningful to even speak about nature in itself is outside the domain of science. Bohr's student A. Peterson quotes him as saying: It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns
258 259

Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 1999, p. 472. Shimon Malin, Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality , 2003, p. 32

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what we can say about nature. One profound difference between Einstein's understanding of the phrase the description of nature and Bohr's is the difference between the ontic and the epistemic views. Ontic means relating to being; epistemic means relating to knowledge. According to Einstein's ontic view, the task of science is to describe nature as it is. According to Bohr's epistemic view, the task of science is to describe what we can know about nature, that is, the results of all conceivable perceptions and experiments. 260 The electrons, for example, do not exist as actual things but as mere fields of potentialities and only become real when they are measured: Erwin Schrdinger's discovery of wave mechanics led to insights concerning the nature of electrons and other subatomic entities. When left alone, electrons are not things. They do not actually exist in space and time; their existence is merely potential. They emerge into momentary actual existence by acts of measurement. Hence, unlike classical measurements, quantum measurements are creative; they literally create the entities that are measured[...]According to Heisenberg's ontic interpretation, when the electron is not measuredin the space between the electron gun and the screen, for exampleit does not exist at all as an actual "thing. It exists merely as a field of potentialities. Potentialities for what? For becoming an actual thing, having certain properties, if measured. But as long as it is not measured, there is no thing there. We are suggesting that the electron actually exists at the electron gun and that it actually exists at the TV screen, but it does not exist in between, except as a collection of potentialities.261 This new perspective on the world seems to be quite coherent with Blakes own philosophy: first of all, Blake and the Romantics in general reacted against the pure objectivism of the previous ages, and realized that the use of reason as the only instrument of the human brain was not going to bring man closer to the truth. Moreover, Blake saw the whole universe alive, and apparently, the mystery of the quantum world, in which the potentialities become, through the collapse of the wave function, also known as the Schrodinger psi-function, actualities seems to indicate that Blakes assumption may be true: The journey toward an alternative world-view begins with a close look at the assumption of realism. Two great thinkers of the twentieth century have pointed out that realism is not a fundamental truth about the nature of reality. Alfred North Whitehead demonstrated that concrete facts are experiences rather than objects; and Erwin Schrdinger pointed out that a scientific inquiry always starts by removing the Subject of Cognizance from its domain and treating its subject matter as a lifeless object. He called this procedure the principle of objectivation [...] Quantum mechanics, however, contains a deep mystery. The mystery, which is known as the collapse of quantum states, is the process whereby the potential becomes actual. An analysis of the process of collapse indicates that the principle of objectivation has to be transcended, and, in addition, it provides broad hints about the alternative paradigm. Similarities between the process of collapse and the ideas of Plato lead to the following questions: Is it possible that seemingly inanimate objects are alive? Was Plato right in believing that the whole universe is alive?262

260 261

Ibid., p. 37-38. Ibid., p. 42. 262 Ibid., p. 91.

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Also, for Blake, the laws of the human spirit are actually part of the laws that govern the whole of the world. In The Emperors New Mind, Roger Penrose proposes a similar way of understanding the phenomenon of consciousness in the world: consciousness is not something that is somehow applied from the outside to the objects of the classical, Newtonian world, but something that is somehow rooted in these very same physical laws: Perhaps, also, the phenomenon of consciousness is something that can not be understood entirely in classical terms. Perhaps our minds are qualities rooted in some strange and wonderful feature of those physical laws which actually govern the world we inhabit, rather than being just features of some algorithm acted out in the so-called objects of a classical physical structure.263 Thus, when Blake understood that somehow there is no such thing as a corporeal world separated from the spiritual, he guessed that imagination itself is rooted in what is usually called the objective reality. Indeed, it seems obvious that consciousness and the material world actually spring from the same physical laws. There are yet other theories in modern science that seem to describe the world more as the Romantics saw it. For example, Ilya Prigogine proposed in his Order out of Chaos that our vision of the world at the present moment is evidently changing towards the multiple and the complex, as the Chaos Theory in mathematics and the fractal geometry prove it. Also, another all-important discovery, the irreversibility of time or Prigogines temporal asymmetry, points to the fact that there are perhaps no eternal and general laws of the universe after all: The feeling of confidence in the reason of nature has been shattered, partly as the result of the tumultuous growth of science in our time [] Our vision of nature is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal and the complex[...]We were seeking general, all-embracing schemes that could be expressed in terms of eternal laws, but we have found time, events, evolving particles.A new unity is emerging: irreversibility is a source of order at all levels. Irreversibility is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.264 Although there is a controversy at present related to whether there can exist eternal physical laws as such, under the current developments it is believed that, in any case, the physical laws themselves may be subject to evolution as the entire universe is also. All in all, modern science today seems to have departed almost completely from the Newtonian paradigm of eternal and general natural laws that can summarize many events in a single formula. David Bohm was the one who actually theorized that contemporary science needs to approach the world in its plenitude, rather than approaching each event separately: Let us first consider the mechanistic orderthe principle feature of this order is that the world is regarded as constituted of entities which are outside of each other, in the sense that they exist independently in different regions of space (and time) and interact through forces that do not
263 264

Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind, p. 294. Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature, 1984, p. 292.

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bring about any changes in their essential natures. The machine gives a typical illustration of such a system of order. Each part is formed (e.g., by stamping or casting) independently of the others, and interacts with the other parts only through some kind of external contact. By contrast, in a living organism, for example, each part grows in the context of the whole, so that it does not exist independently, nor can it be said that it merely interacts with the others, without itself being essentially affected in this relationship.265 Bohms explicate and implicate order resemble to the greatest extent Blakes system of wheels without wheels and wheels within wheels: Bohm believes that when the entities in the world are laid for interpretation as one outside the other, as if there was no connection between them, a mechanist view of the world is obtained. When all things are seen as part of the whole and judged through their various connections, the order is implicate, and the universe itself can be seen as a giant organism, in which a cell has a certain function only in connection with everything else: We proposed that a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning to enfold or fold inward). In terms of the implicate order one may say that everything is enfolded into everything. This contrasts with the explicate order now dominant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things.266 As it has been shown, the ideas included in Blakes system are very similar: he too believes that there is a hidden order beneath the surface of things, and that the order can be pictured as a system of wheels that revolve harmoniously inside other wheels.

Conclusion
265 266

David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 2002, p. 219. Ibid., p. 225.

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One thought fills immensity. William Blake Creer es crear.267 Miguel de Unamuno

We shall conclude by restating the main purpose and ideas of this work. First of all, the discourses of art, science and philosophy have been brought together so as to give a brief account of the way in which the principles of absence and plenitude structure the cultural paradigms at a few crucial points in the intellectual history, and moreover to provide an interpretative frame for the works of William Blake. The main investigation was done thus in the writings Blake, with an emphasis on his original and complex system of thought. As it was shown, these two principles of absence and plenitude are actually inherently manifest in Blakes works, at the most fundamental level of interpretation, and seem to be reflected (and transformed through their reflection), in a very interesting way, in the postmodern paradigm. In the attempt to draw a final parallel between William Blake and a few aspects of the postmodern thought, as mirrored in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, we shall look once more at Blakes theory of imagination and we shall identify its similarities with an essential feature of postmodernism. As it was already remarked, in Blakes view, imagination is more than just a mental faculty. For most of the Romantic poets, imagination is the faculty that can achieve the organic unity between the self and the whole of the universe. For Blake, imagination is the main structuring principle of the world itself, that is, he manages to extend the concept beyond the moment when the union with the whole has taken place. After the self has been reintegrated in the whole, a state of plenitude ensues, in which the world has the structure of imagination or vision, that is, it is infinite, open and absolute. This enables Blake to insist that In Eternity All is Vision 268 or that Imagination is Eternity.269 The world seen in this way is both ontologically infinite (because, as it was seen before, Blake is careful to maintain the material dimension throughout his works) and infinitely meaningful as imagination is the creative power par excellence, and so the sense creates and recreates itself infinitely in the universe. In this respect, we shall mention an important idea in Blakes work that will provide a
267

Miguel de Unamuno, Tres novelas ejemplares y un prlogo. http://faculty.washington.edu/petersen/321/unamprol.htm: To believe is to create. (my translation) 268 William Blake, Complete Writings, The Laocon, p.776. 269 Ibid., The Ghost of Abel, p. 779: Can a Poet doubt the Visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune, but Imagination has. Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves: Imagination is Eternity.

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final link between his thought and the way in which it is reflected in the postmodern paradigm. Thus, in one of his designs, Blake represents imagination as a very interesting frame-within-frame pattern. The drawing is called Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall or The Poetic Inspiration 270 and represents a poet lodged in the very depth of his own imagination writing from dictation coming from an angel. The idea of depth of the imagination, the innermost recesses of the human mind, is very suggestively represented: the poet is seated in a chamber which is surrounded by the frames of other chambers, suggesting first of all the depth or the profoundness of artistic inspiration. The poet is deep within his own self, where the Eternal Worlds can actually be found, at the very point where imagination actually springs into action: Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonishd at me, Yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.271 These inner Worlds of Thought are the ones that lead to infinity, and to what Blake repeatedly calls, throughout his work, Naked Beauty display d , without which no true knowledge can exist. The idea of naked beauty, as already seen, has primarily a religious connotation in Blake, being associated by him with the innate purity of the human spirit that cannot be defiled as such. In this sense, Blake argues that the moral laws cannot be superior to the human spirit. More than this, the phrase naked beauty also acquires a more complex reading: Blake seems to imply that once the outer layers of reality have been peeled so to say, a true state of imagination and vision can be achieved. Thus, reality has in Blakes view, a multi-layered, multi-framed structure, similar to that of imagination itself. Also, the multiple frames at the core of which we find artistic inspiration suggests the idea of the vortex, such as it was understood by Blake: The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its Own Vortex, and when once a traveller thro Eternity Has passd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding like a sun, Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth, Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent.272 Defining infinity as the vortex that exists in every thing, Blake identifies the circular and downward spiraling movement of the whirlpool or vortex with that of the infinite: the way of reaching the infinite

270 271 272

Cf. http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=p&ID=2002 William Blake, Complete Writings, Jerusalem, 5: 16-20, p. 623.

William Blake, Complete Writings, Milton, p. 497.

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is to follow the spiraling movement of imagination to the essence of every thing that exists. All things can thus engulf and absorb other things, in their own substances. A similar view of reality, but with different implications, appears in one of Jorge Luis Borges sonnets, entitled Ajedrez (Chess). Borges is perhaps the most prolific writer on the theme of plenitude in its postmodern sense, and of a sub-theme of this the very thin boundary between reality and dream. In his view, plenitude does not only imply the infinite chains of being but the linking together of all the things in the world, devoid of any hierarchy. He speaks thus of the circular or cyclic plenitude, where all the things in the universe are not only inseparably linked to one another but determine and contain each other in a multitude of frames. This idea is effectively presented by Borges in his sonnet. The world is seen as a chess board, with its alternative white days, and black nights, and in which man himself is prisoner of some divine game: Tambin el jugador es prisionero (la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero De negras noches y blancos das.273 Thus, Borges suggests a labyrinthine time, not only a spatial labyrinth, created by the random progression of the game pieces on the chess board, in an infinite alternation. We can not guess what the next movement may be, but we have it clear that we are prisoners of this insubstantial, dream-like woof or web of relations. As we can see, the postmodern view of the world as an infinite set of games resurges here, in Borges poem. First, the chess pieces are the prisoners of the game man plays with them, of the infinite movements and alternations on the black and white squares of the chess table. Then, man himself is the prisoner of the chess-like life or of Gods divine game, in which the white days alternate with the black nights. Up to this point, Borges view in the poem does not seem like an entirely new idea, since the liability of man and his dependence on Gods will has been observed many times. However, the postmodernist view of the world as infinite play becomes apparent in the last stanza of the poem, where God himself appears to be the prisoner of a superior game: Dios mueve al jugador y ste, la pieza. Qu dios detrs de Dios la trama empieza De polvo y tiempo y sueo y agona?274 The fact that Borges postulates a God beyond God, playing each other and their creations at the same time, in an endless series of games reemphasizes the postmodern idea of an empty plenitude: the divinity is no longer an absolute power, because the world itself no longer has a central signified. God is an absolute power in the game he plays, but then immediately becomes relative since his game is part
273

Jorge Luis Borges, Sonetos (Sonnets) at http://www.metajedrez.com.ar/borges.htm: The player is also a prisoner/ (Omar gave the sentence) of another chessboard/ Of black nights and white days. (my translation) 274 Ibid., God moves the player, the player moves the piece. / What god beyond God begins this woof / Of dust and time and dreams and agony?(my translation)

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of an even larger game. In this context, all that remains in the postmodern world is a web of games between absence and plenitude, what Borges calls, The woof of dust, time, dreams and agony. Thus, as Beverley Southgate proposes in his study, entitled Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom, Romanticism, among other cultural paradigms has elements of proto-postmodernism in that it unloosens the imagination and believes in a continuous process of recreation of everything in the world, thus preventing the world from remaining in a static form: Rather than just accepting the losses necessarily incurred through the adoption only a single theory or vision, we can contrive to remain aware of those losses and aware of their potential value - so that their retrieval remains an ever present possibility. The world thus remains not in static form, but a perpetual process of recreation, and experience becomes a matter of individual responsibility. That is, our universe becomes what we let it be.275 To resume once more the way in which the principles of absence and plenitude function in Blakes work, and the way in which they are reflected in the postmodern thought, we shall look at two quotes from Miguel de Unamunos Tragic Sense of Life, that seem to summarize the above mentioned dichotomy. First of all, as Unamuno notices, man is always in search of plenitude, the type of plenitude that can be attained by imagination, and not by reason, just as Blake himself thought. The tragedy of the human life then resides precisely in this permanent opposition between absence and plenitude, between the reason that declares that all is absence and vanity, and the imagination that always tries to integrate and totalize, and form a whole of everything that exists: For reason annihilates and imagination completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life. Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! Imagination, the heart, the word All! And between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities! All is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! All is plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of vanity.276 Unamuno seems to summarize here the tragedy that the Romantics themselves perceived, and Blake in particular, in relation to the opposition between absence and plenitude: reason and imagination are always in contradiction once they are separated in man, the one tending towards plenitude and the other towards absence. On the other hand, the postmodernists believe that the world itself is a multiple frame of games that play and outplay each other continuously. Thus, the tragedy of the postmodern world

275 276

Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom , 2003, p. 79-80. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 178.

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may be likened to that of Don Quixote: the postmodernists no longer believe in the palpable reality, but only in a hyperreal, that has no reference to reality as such: The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about usnamely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kulturor, in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics.277 The conclusion is thus that for both Blake and the postmodernists, the world and is irreducible to culture, in any of its forms, and therefore they cannot resign themselves to it.

277

Ibid., p. 321.

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