Time In all his tuneful turning (ii)
Four major philosophies of time, each seen from a human perspectove, voiced together as a polyphony, and presented “subcutaneously” — beneath the surface of the poem, and of the reader’s conscious awareness.
That’s what I admire in Thomas’ poem, and what I would compare with Stephen Hawking’s analog of another great scientist’s “Single vision & Newton’s sleep!” — for the juxtaposition of Dylan Thomas vs Stephen Hawking is indeed an age-old one, finding its classic instantiation in William Blake‘s antipathy towards Isaac Newton.
William Blake, Isaac Newton, The Tate Gallery
I’ll let Alan Moore, he of the comics [Watchmen, eg], explain:
For Blake, the boundaries of Newton’s thought were the cold, stone parameters of an internal dungeon to which all humanity had been condemned without its comprehension or its knowledge. Despite the invigorating consequences Newton’s influence would have for a then-nascent industry, Blake would elsewhere describe this rigid and reductive pall as ‘Newton’s Sleep’, a drowse insensible to vision or to ethical restraint beneath which it appeared the world had fallen. Goya to the contrary, here the monstrosity was birthed not by the sleep of reason, but instead born from that sleep which reason represented. From our own industrially despoiled and bankrupted contemporary perspective, Blake’s view surely seems a product of extraordinary prescience rather than of the angel-addled madness which some of his less insightful critics have attributed.
Enough.
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Sally Benzon:
March 16th, 2018 at 11:26 pm
Wonderful post! Thank you.
Charles Cameron:
March 17th, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Thanks, Sally!
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This is courtesy of Grurray:
,
Sally Benzon:
March 18th, 2018 at 2:57 am
Ahh, yes, and searching for home.
Always, always, home. The one,
The only, knowing I roam. When here
Searching my heart for home. . .
Charles Cameron:
March 18th, 2018 at 3:05 pm
I’m searching for the philosophers stone
And it’s a hard road, Its a hard road daddy-o
When my job is turning lead into gold
Grurray:
March 19th, 2018 at 5:17 pm
Hi Charles, St. Paddy’s day puts me in a bit of a mythic/nostalgic mood. Fortunately, there are more than enough revelers around to balance it all out.
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I always look at Blake’s Newton with some unease. I think Blake is angry at Newton’s legacy, which was in full bloom with the Industrial Revolution, and Newtonians, who weren’t necessarily representative of Newton’s actual beliefs. Newton was educated by the Cambridge Platonists, and he agreed with them that God directly participates in our everyday lives by emanation and extension. Newton was also an alchemist who actually spent a great deal of time trying to synthesize the Philosopher’s Stone. His experiments eventually led him to devise his theory that light was composed of particles. That insight was conflated by Thomas Hobbes and others into the Mechanical Philosophy that Blake rejected. Despite being mostly socially maladroit, Newton was still good friends with Hobbes, so he publicly went along with his indulgent Deist interpretations.
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However, Newton disliked Gottfried Leibniz, his rival in the development of calculus. Leibniz believed in mechanistic Monadism, in which the universe is the sum total of the elements in nature behaving in a billiard ball-like rational order, set in motion by a push from God who then stands back and lets events proceed as He attends to more important matters. Newton’s law of gravity contradicted this simplistic view of reality, and more importantly it suggested that it was ultimately possible for God to act directly on individuals from far away. Exactly how Blake felt, but he would never have known it because the enlightened Rationalists at the time weren’t interested in preserving Newton’s theological underpinnings.
Sally Benzon:
March 20th, 2018 at 12:00 am
Grurray, thank you for your comments about Blake, Newton, and Leibniz. Much appreciated. Meanwhile, Van Morrison’s song keeps going through my mind. Rather a lovely and poignant grace!
Grurray:
March 20th, 2018 at 5:31 pm
You are quite welcome Sally. I’m a big Van Morrison fan.
I should mention a correction to my rant, that it wasn’t Hobbes who was Newton’s friend but John Locke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding
I’ve been