Immaterial World: Slowing Down with William Blake

September 6, 2018

In our inaugural exhibition of the fall season, Intimate Infinite: Imagine A Journey, we invite visitors to leave the distraction of their day to day lives outside the gallery walls and lose themselves in the art on view. Describing the concept behind the exhibition, organizer Brett Gorvy explained, “At a time when social media bombards us with thousands of fleeting images a day, I want to give visitors a chance to slow down, engage each work in close scrutiny and reflection, and take a journey, floor by floor…”

Slowing down and reflecting on the art is certainly the ideal way to view an exhibition, but even with the best of intentions it’s not always easy. As Gorvy notes, contemporary life offers no shortage of distractions, and perhaps the greatest challenge is the one presented by our own restless minds—so accustomed to multi-tasking that when we finally do get an opportunity to pull focus, many of us find ourselves struggling to pay attention.

The selection process for Intimate Infinite was inspired in part by the poem Auguries of Innocence, written by the English Romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827). Unpublished during Blake’s lifetime, in the two centuries since, Auguries of Innocence has become a sort of clarion call for the Romantic values he championed, so we decided to have a look at what this iconic text could teach us about slowing down and becoming absorbed in an artwork.

In its famous opening lines Blake entreats us:

“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.”

British writer Philip Pullman, President of the Blake Society, wrote that for him Auguries of Innocence is:

“…one of the greatest political poems in the language, for the way it insists on the right to life and freedom without qualification, uniting large things with small, and shows the moral connections between them:

” ‘A Robin redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State. […]’ ” ^[i]

In Pullman’s characterization of Blake’s poem as “uniting large things with small” and drawing “moral connections between them” lies an important insight into overcoming the challenges we face as we attempt to slow down: we must believe in the larger benefit that “small” things bring. Put another way, perhaps to see the world in a grain of sand, it helps to remember that—given some time (and an oyster)—that grain of sand could one day become a pearl.

In the first episode of his series for NPR called “How to See the World in a Grain of Sand,” Adam Frank, a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, approaches the question of how to connect the large with the small from a scientific perspective—not an uncontroversial stance in Blake’s world, as we will later explain. Frank argues that at its heart, science teaches us, “to see the sacred in the mundane.” ^[ii] To Frank, the opening lines of Auguries of Innocence are asking a question more than they are stating a belief, and science has the answer:

“Through the lens of science we can see how even the smallest thing can be a gateway to an experience of the extraordinary if only we can practice noticing.” ^[iii]

Yet while learning how to look carefully at one’s environment must surely encourage more meaningful engagement with the world, is science on its own enough to draw the equivalences Blake puts forth? Regarding the grain of sand scientifically will help us to understand how it can transform into a pearl, but can it help us to make a connection that is more abstract than that? In short—is a scientific understanding of art sufficient to take you on the journey Intimate Infinite invites?

Pullman would argue not. Discussing Blake’s unique concept of vision—which sorted and ranked the ways the world can be perceived in four levels, ranging from “single vision” to “fourfold vision”—Pullman explains that the use of a hierarchy stems from Blake’s belief that there is a benefit to being, “…able to see contrary things and know them both to be true.” ^[iv] Essentially, the more meaning one could extrapolate from a set of circumstances, the better. Thus the dog who starves at his master’s gate doesn’t simply indicate a case of miserly neglect—the starving dog is evidence of a society in moral decay. For Blake, single vision was the lowest form; referring to the ability to see only material things, it speaks of a literal, more scientific view of the world. Pullman underscores the disdain Blake felt for single vision, quoting a letter the poet wrote to Thomas Butts:

“[…] May God us keep
From Single vision and Newton’s sleep!” ^[v]

God save us all from having such boring dreams as Newton! He might have discovered gravity, but the famous scientist was too light for Blake. Speaking with CBC Radio producer Frank Faulk in a 2013 documentary about Blake and imagination, Laura Quinney, professor of British literature and poetry at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, explained that for Romantics like Blake who believed that the imagination is our highest faculty, their cause was argued in direct opposition to the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason above all else. ^[vi]

Jacob Hirsh researches the neural and cognitive basis of creativity, motivation, and decision-making as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Hirsh unpacked the implications of Blake’s thesis for Faulk:

“Placing creativity, placing imagination at the top of your value hierarchy—to say that it is the ultimate good, it is in fact the good from which all other goods emerge—really means that you have the generative capacity as the source of all other values, and in that sense I agree with Blake because imagination is capable of generating other values; it is capable of generating other worlds.” ^[vii]

Hirsh related this “generative capacity” to the Judeo-Christian belief that there is something of God in every man—something evidenced in our creative capacity.

“In that respect I agree with Blake that divinity and imagination are very much one and the same, because it is the process of imagination and creativity in our own lives that gives us the creative power to manifest reality; to manifest new worlds and to call new worlds into being.” ^[viii]

Notwithstanding the low status Blake assigned to empirical knowledge, today there exists a scientific basis for the idea that through our imaginations we can create a reality distinct from that of anyone else. Magnetic resonance imaging has shown that our brains use the same neural circuits for perception and imagination.

“So one of William Blake’s quotations is that the wise man and the fool do not see the same tree and in fact modern neuroscience, modern cognitive psychology really vindicate and support this idea, because the perceptual experience is so heavily embedded within the knowledge base of the perceiver that you can’t really differentiate the perception from the person who’s doing the perceiving! So it’s a much more participatory view of perceiving the world than what we used to see…” Hirsh explained. ^[ix]

So it seems that—in spite of all the media and content that are published alongside an exhibition to help shape our understanding of the art, from the exhibition statement and critical reviews, to the appearances it may make in your network’s social media feeds—ultimately, there’s no substitute for viewing the work in person; no one will see it like you do. From an intimate process comes infinite worlds.

Blake’s original manuscript of the poem is part of the permanent collection of The Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

This text was organized in the spirit of our exhibition Intimate Infinite, on view in New York through October 24.

[i] Philip Pullman, “Visions of Heaven,” Resurgence & Ecologist, no. 292, (September/October 2015): 22.

[ii] Adam Frank, “How To See The World In A Grain Of Sand,” March 19, 2013, in All Things Considered, podcast, 3:20, https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/03/27/174647716/how-to-see-the-world-in-a-grain-of-sand.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Pullman, “Visions of Heaven,” 25.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Laura Quinney, “Imagination, Part 1,” February 5, 2013, in Ideas, produced by Frank Faulk, CBC Radio One, 54:33,  https://soundcloud.com/cbc-radio-one/imagination-part-1.

[vii] Jacob Hirsh, “Imagination, Part 1,” February 5, 2013, in Ideas, produced by Frank Faulk, CBC Radio One, 54:33,  https://soundcloud.com/cbc-radio-one/imagination-part-1.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.