Robin Ince
“May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep”
When did William Blake become something more than a song I sang in the school chapel?
There was no Damascene moment. It was incremental. A corner of the Tate Britain, a conversation with Stewart Lee, an elderly complete poems bought in a seaside town charity shop. He appeared in the margins and between the lines of the work of some of my favourite authors. Is it surprising that the final turning point was the work of scientists, not mystics.
Rumours of Isaac Newton’s joie de vivre are sparse to the point of non-existence. Despite being a keen biblical scholar, he was never discovered by friends celebrating prelapsarian humanity by reading Paradise Lost in the nude. Newton seems to fit the stern and austere stereotype of the scientist who was keen to measure the world, but not to rejoice in its beauty. In William Blake’s famous evocation him, he is a Schwarzenegger with dividers, measuring the world and turning it into Plato’s cave shadows. To investigate the world with evidence seeking tools was to rob the Universe of its wonder. Stripping rainbows of their leprechauns or other magical qualities disturbed Blake and Keats. For Keats, it reduced the beauty to a prism and for Blake, it turned the white light that was symbolic of the spirit into a mathematical equation.
Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture of Blake’s Newton, which was subtitled “Personification of a Man Limited by Reason”, dominates the piazza of The British Library. Rather than welcome the bibliophile visitor to this remarkable archive of printed materials, it seems to warn them not to spend too much time studying for fear that their search for truth will become obscured by shadows created by their own enquiry.
There is a rebuttal in the words of Richard Feynman, “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. ... What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
He also said, “the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of man.”
Perhaps it is here where we again find the false hostility between building up an image of the world through evidence based thinking and creating a world from imagination and myth.
As our understanding of the matter of the universe has journeyed down to smaller and smaller scales, the work of Blake has been increasingly quoted by scientists. Though his mystical picture of the cosmos may appear to shun the scientific method, its desire to fascinate is a shared vision.
“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”
The superb science writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin (my favourite pun title in the physics genre) titled his most recent book Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand. He attaches that particular quotation to his essay on the “quantum insanity” of our understanding of atoms and their emptiness despite their solidity. Blake may have been happy to know that this property of the Universe does not fit with the classical physics of which Newton was part of.
Jacob Bronowski was one of the greatest popularisers of science, creating the landmark TV series Ascent of Man and writing The Common Sense of Science and Science and Human Values, but his first two books were The Poet’s Defence and William Blake: A Man without a Mask.
In Kathleen Raine’s essay on Blake in issue 10 of the utterly delightful Man, Myth and Magic (coming up next week in issue 11, it’s The Roots of Ritual Magic, the curious occurrences at Borley Rectory and the cover star is seventies celebrity witch, Alex Sanders), the opening paragraph states that “Blake rejected reason and preferred imagination as the path to truth.”
On the stairwell of Huddersfield Library, you will find the Einstein quotation, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
(Interruption - now, at this point I was going to enlarge on scientists’ interest in William Blake. I had based the idea of the article on Bronowski’s writing on Blake and the frequency with which I had seen part of his poetry quoted at the beginning of chapters in science books. Unfortunately, after further investigation, it seems the fascination wears out after the grain of sand, wild flower and infinity, so the premise has fallen apart. You can leave this article now if you want, or stay to see how I may make a detour to justify the outset. I will rely on my scant knowledge of quantum mechanics and the idea of the block universe).
Peter Ackroyd opens his biography on Blake with a comment on the artist’s view of time.
“In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity.”
Blake may not have been drawn to Newton’s clockwork universe, with a place for everything and everything in its place, but perhaps the Einsteinian universe may have been more to his liking. Here it is not space and time, but spacetime
In my first telephone conversation with Alan Moore, I caught him in a moment of delight as he just discovered that Einstein agreed with him. This was during the writing of his titanic novel, Jerusalem (a book so weighty so that “only the strongest could critique it” according to Moore). Jerusalem plays with the idea of the block universe. In the block universe, all of space and time is in one block. All the events of the universe and your life can be found there, though it is not navigable in terms of burrowing backwards through the block to revisit your past. There may be some solace in knowing all is preserved. I think Blake would have had fun with the block universe, it is more than a pair of dividers mapping out measurements of certainty.
I think he would have felt more at home in the probabilistic universe of quantum mechanics that grew from late nineteenth century scientific thought and experiment. It messes up this view that science and scientists are just perpetually measuring things to put on a big list, as if the Universe were an itinerary rather than an adventure. The possibilities can still seem endless, though some measuring can help decide which ones are more probable than others. What would Blake have made of the multiverse and many worlds theory? How many sides on that grain of sand, how many worlds in that grain of sand?
The William Blake show at Tate Britain runs until the 2nd Feb.
www.robinince.com
