Desire for the Infinite From There Is No Natural Religion, Plate 5
Reading from George W. Digby, Page 124, Symbol and Image in William Blake: "For not only is the infinite present in everything, but one thing is the mirror of another, and everything is linked and harmonized in a translucent chain of correspondences. This is the translucence of which Blake often speaks. Eckhart said, 'anything known or born is an image', and Jacob Boehem could see the inner life and nature of every natural object recorded on it as a 'signature.' In the poem sent to his friend Thomas Butts from Felpham, which begins 'To my Friend Thomas Butts I write / My first Vision of Light...,' Blake describes the miracle of the divine manifesting in the phenomenal. The poem records an instance of the power of contracting and expanding vision, which is one of Blake's fundamental images... This contracting and expanding of consciousness is the essence of human life; it is what makes possible the co-existence in one body of the divine and the human." Letter to Thomas Butts, Oct 2 1800 (E 711)
"And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age[;] & the all tremendous
unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order. And I heard Jehovah speak
Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant Divine"
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms, this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness."
No comments:
Post a Comment