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Wikipedia Commons A Woody Landscape 1801 |
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Library of Congress Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 2, Copy D |
https://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2011/01/blakes-nakedness_16.html
Preface to The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis:
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140726
Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their
Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great
a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.
But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is
perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents
us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and
patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both
alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or
refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on
for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.
This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage
with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your
right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not
living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if
followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally
meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few
miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork
you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a
river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it
and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection.
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil
but from other good.
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue
consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put
right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it
afresh from that point, never by simply _going on_. Evil can be undone,
but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must
be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or
else not. It is still ‘either-or’. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even
earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able
to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I
believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what
he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that
the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes
will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High
Countries’. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed
the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone
to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead
of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell:
and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a
part of Heaven itself.
There are only two things more to be said about this small book. Firstly,
I must acknowledge my debt to a writer whose name I have forgotten and
whom I read several years ago in a highly coloured American magazine of
what they call ‘Scientifiction’. The unbendable and unbreakable quality
of my heavenly matter was suggested to me by him, though he used the
fancy for a different and most ingenious purpose. His hero travelled into
the _past_: and there, very properly, found raindrops that would pierce
him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite—because, of
course, nothing in the past can be altered. I, with less originality but
(I hope) equal propriety have transferred this to the eternal. If the
writer of that story ever reads these lines I ask him to accept my
grateful acknowledgment. The second thing is this. I beg readers to
remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to
have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative
supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually
await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the
details of the after-world.
C. S. Lewis
_April, 1945_.
Night Thoughts
http://www.britishmuseum.org/collectionimages/AN00016/AN00016359_001_l.jpg
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotle
****************
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 20, (E 42)
"till the body was left a helpless trunk. this
after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devourd
too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off
of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoyd us both we went
into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body,
which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.
So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou
oughtest to be ashamed.
I answerd: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time
to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.
Opposition is true Friendship." ON HOMERS POETRY (E 269) "As Unity is the cloke of folly so Goodness is the cloke of
knavery Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer come out
with a Moral like a sting in the tail: Aristotle says Characters
are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do
with Character. an Apple tree a Pear tree a Horse a Lion, are
Characters but a Good Apple tree or a Bad, is an Apple tree
still: a Horse is not more a Lion for being a Bad Horse. that is
its Character; its Goodness or Badness is another consideration."Annotations to Watson, (E 615) That mankind are in a less distinguishd situation with
regard to mind than they were in the time of Homer Socrates
Phidias. Glycon. Aristotle & let all their works witness
[the Deists]<Paine> say<s> that Christianity put a stop
to improvement & the Bishop has not shewn the contraryhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyconhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phidias
UC Santa Barbara
Walter Isaacson
The Innovators
Page 248
"Defense Department money was not flowing freely to costly programs designed to allow collaboration among academic researchers."
Page 249
"He [Steven Cocker] never considered nuclear survival to be part of his mission. Yet when Lukasik sent around his 2011 paper, Cocker read smiled, and revised his thinking. "I was on top and you were on the bottom,so you really had no idea of what was going on and why we were doing it," Lukasik told him. To which Cocker replied with a dab of humor masking a dollop of wisdom, "I was on the bottom and you were on the top, so you had no idea of what was going on or what we were doing."
Page 251
"Janet Abbate noted ... the group that designed and built ARPA's networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system." These academic researchers of the late 1960's, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control."
Page 260
"The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented."
______________________
"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to CreateWilliam Blake" First posted Dec 20, 2010
Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar wrote a book, Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat,
to explain the concepts of the new physics in the context of classical
science. This quote crosses the dividing line between physics and
cosmology:
"In
Quantum Field Theory, things existing in the universe are conceived of
as patterns of dynamic energy. The ground state of energy in the
universe, the lowest possible state, is known as the quantum vacuum. It
is called a vacuum because it cannot be measured directly; it is empty
of "things." When we try to perceive the vacuum directly we are
confronted with a "void", a background without features that therefore
seems to be empty. In fact the vacuum is filled with every potentiality
of everything in the universe.
"...Unseen and not directly
measurable, the vacuum exerts a subtle push on the surface of existence,
like water pushing on things immersed in it . ... It is as though all
surface things are in constant interaction with a tenuous background of
evanescent reality. ...The universe is not "filled" with the vacuum.
Rather it is "written on" it or emerges out of it."
__________________________Illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost
The
following passages scattered through Blake's writing give the
impression that the 'weeping babe' or 'weeping infant' is man in his
potential form holding all possibilities. Like the Quantum Vacuum
mentioned above the babe does not contain but 'allows the patterns of
dynamic energy' to take form. The babe cannot be measured or defined but
awaits 'fill[ing] with every potentiality of everything in the
universe.' Into this babe we become immersed and become expressed
through his potential.
The Pickering Manuscript, The Crystal Cabinet, (E 488)
"I strove to sieze the inmost Form
With ardor fierce & hands of flame
But burst the Crystal Cabinet
And like a Weeping Babe became
A weeping Babe upon the wild
And Weeping Woman pale reclind
And in the outward air again
I filld with woes the passing Wind"
Jerusalem, Plate 62, (E 214)
"And Jehovah stood in the Gates of the Victim, & he appeared
A weeping Infant in the Gates of Birth in the midst of Heaven"
Jerusalem, Plate 63, (E 214)
"The Cities & Villages of Albion became Rock & Sand Unhumanized
The Druid Sons of Albion & the Heavens a Void around unfathomable
No Human Form but Sexual & a little weeping Infant pale reflected
Multitudinous in the Looking Glass of Enitharmon, on all sides
Around in the clouds of the Female, on Albions Cliffs of the Dead"
Jerusalem, Plate 81, (E 239)
"Humanity is become
A weeping Infant in ruind lovely Jerusalems folding Cloud:
In Heaven Love begets Love! but Fear is the Parent of Earthly
Love!"
------------
Plate 82, (E 239)
"the mighty Hyle is become a weeping infant;
Soon shall the Spectres of the Dead follow my weaving threads."
------------
Plate 82, (E 240)
"She drew aside her Veil from Mam-Tor to Dovedale
Discovering her own perfect beauty to the Daughters of Albion
And Hyle a winding Worm beneath [her Loom upon the scales.
Hyle was become a winding Worm:] & not a weeping Infant.
Trembling & pitying she screamd & fled upon the wind:
Hyle was a winding Worm and herself perfect in beauty:
The desarts tremble at his wrath: they shrink themselves in fear."
Four Zoas, PAGE 27, (E 317)
"And I commanded the Great deep to hide her in his hand
Till she became a little weeping Infant a span long
I carried her in my bosom as a man carries a lamb
I loved her I gave her all my soul & my delight
I hid her in soft gardens & in secret bowers of Summer
Weaving mazes of delight along the sunny Paradise
Inextricable labyrinths, She bore me sons & daughters
And they have taken her away & hid her from my sight"
Thel, PLATE 4, (E 6)
"Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed.
Art thou a Worm? image of weakness. art thou but a Worm?
I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lillys leaf:
Ah weep not little voice, thou can'st not speak. but thou can'st
weep;
Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked: weeping,
And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mothers smiles.
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bowd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd
In milky fondness, then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes.
O beauty of the vales of Har. we live not for ourselves,
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed;
My bosom of itself is cold. and of itself is dark,"
Four Zoas, PAGE 35, (E 324)
"The deep lifts up his rugged head
And lost in infinite hum[m]ing wings vanishes with a cry
The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy
Arise you little glancing wings & sing your infant joy
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"
