The Pointing Finger

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Dear All,

 

" The Pointing Finger " is a lecture given at Shanti Sadan on 29th March 1980.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

The Pointing Finger

 

IN A LETTER to his brother Theo, written when he was in Arles in 1888, the Dutch

painter Vincent van Gogh wrote:

 

" If you study Japanese art, you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic

and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the

earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a

single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant,

and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then

the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole. "

 

In this passage which might have been written by William Blake a hundred years

before, so closely does it echo the spirit of Blake's writings, Van Gogh has

also epitomised the spirit of the art of the Zen masters. And it also expresses

the apparent conflict between science and art, rationalism and mysticism, which

so much troubles our own generation in the contemporary world.

 

The dichotomy is between the desire to analyse, reason, measure and define

objectively the object of knowledge on the one hand, and the conviction that to

fully know the object as it really is one must penetrate into its heart and in a

sense submerge oneself in it by meditation on it. The attitude of the scientist,

who distances himself from the thing he is examining, like a geologist examining

a specimen under the magnifying glass, is contrasted with the insight of the

true lover of the object, who through his imaginative insight and intuitive

grasp, has a more complete and profound understanding of the object than the

mere analyst. Dr. Charles Singer, an authority on the history of science, has

pointed out that William Blake was one of the first to recognise that Sir Isaac

Newton inaugurated a new phase in the ascendancy of science in the seventeenth

century. For Blake, this was not an unmitigated blessing, but the arrival of the

spirit of materialism, advocating a narrow view of reality.

 

A mighty Spirit leap'd from the land of Albion,

Nam'd Newton: he seiz'd the trump and blow'd

the enormous blast!

Yellow as leaves of Autumn, the myriads of angelic

hosts

Fell thro' the wintry skies seeking their graves,

Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation.

 

This was how Blake announced the advent of the Newtonian spirit and the rise of

science! This passage comes from the prophetic book Europe published in 1794,

and it is significant that both in Blake's colour print of Newton and in the

picture of the Creator, which appeared as the frontispiece to this poem, and is

one of the most striking and powerful designs among all Blake's work, the two

figures, one of Newton and the other of the Ancient of Days, are depicted

holding a pair of compasses or dividers. Milton had written of the Creator in

Paradise Lost:

 

He took the golden compasses, prepared

In God's eternal store, to circumscribe

This universe and all created things.

 

For Blake the process of creation involves the process of limiting things down

to a finite measure. As such, the methods of Newton and of science are well

adapted to deal with the measurable objects of the finite universe. But the

approach involves a narrowing down of the vision to look only at a partial view

of reality as seen with the senses. This allows one to see what can be measured

- the finite dimensions of the thing - but, as in Blake's view, each and every

object really has infinity hidden within it, 'we come to believe a lie when we

see with, not through, the eye'. The real vision is:

 

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.

(Auguries of Innocence)

 

For Blake it is all a question of vision. The vision of the scientist is narrow

and confined and misses the full nature of the object by concentrating on the

concrete particular. The scientist is committed to seeing with the eye, not

through it. He speaks in another of his poems of

 

All the vast of nature shrunk

Before their shrunken eyes.

 

This is his picture of what it means to descend from the true vision, given to

the enlightened poet or artist, as compared with the scientist. He speaks of

mankind being bound down by the process:

 

Till a philosophy of the five senses was complete Urizen wept and gave it into

the hands of Newton and Locke.

 

Blake was unwilling to be confined in what to him was a narrow blinkered

outlook. His natural mode of seeing was that of the intuitive artist.

 

Now I a fourfold vision see,

And a fourfold vision is given to me;

'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And threefold in soft Beulah's night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From single vision and Newton's sleep!

 

According to Blake's biographer, Mona Wilson, he means by single vision here,

purely material perception. In twofold vision an intellectual value is added, in

threefold an emotional, and in fourfold a spiritual. 'Single vision and Newton's

sleep' characterise for Blake the attitude which relies simply on the view of

things as they appear to the senses.

 

But the reality of the object is not confined within the finite limits of what

can be measured. The 'thing-in-itself' contains an element which transcends the

finite and is literally immeasurable. Hence the world of sense appearances only

presents a fragmentary aspect of reality. The object as it appears to us in

sense experience points to something which is not contained within that

appearance. The reality which it leads us towards is not fully accessible or

comprehensible by the senses. In other words, each and every sense object is

like a pointing finger providing a clue to a reality behind the appearance. The

seventeenth century poet George Herbert wrote:

 

The man who looks on glass

On it may stay his eye,

Or, if he pleases through it pass,

And then the heavens espy.

 

And Goethe was expressing something of the same truth when he said: 'The things

that must pass are only symbols'. Everything which appears within time and space

must pass. As the Bhagavad Gita says:

 

To that which is born, death is indeed certain...

Beings have their beginning unseen, their middle seen, and their end unseen

again. (2.27-28)

 

Creation is the realm of the finite. As Blake shows in his great picture, the

Lord creates the finite universe by imposing what can be measured on the

immeasurable reality. But the real nature of the reality is still immeasurable.

 

This is why the world, in the words of the Gita, is made up of two aspects, the

perishable and the imperishable, and each and every object in the world has the

same character. For this reason there is no object which cannot lead man beyond

the finite to infinity, if he only meditates on it aright, nor is there any

object which, conceived as such, escapes its limitatiions in the realm of the

finite. It is an inadequate symbol of the reality behind the appearance. We can

see the world in a grain of sand in Blake's phrase, but only by going beyond the

object to penetrate to the reality which it both reveals and conceals; the

uncreated light and reality which exists at its heart.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 89-93