The dazzle of my epiphany, the revelation of something so momentous and transcendent of everyday life suggests ‘beyondness’. Even a plodder like me will wonder if the radiant skeins of mist reflected ‘bright shoots of everlastingness’. Previous centuries would hardly have doubted it. And if there were a God eager to offer me intimations of immortality, might he not have thought the dazzling mist wheeze would have worked handsomely? It bore all the accoutrements of mystery, but what I saw was the certain reality of it – the good down-to-earthness of the shape-shifting mist, the copper-bottomed sureness of hazy sunlight, and the solid reliability of the ephemeral.
Blake was a connoisseur of visions and found with disappointment that most other people weren’t.
‘The tree which moves some men to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way,’ he lamented.
I like to imagine myself in the ‘tears of joy’ camp here….
‘What it will be Questioned, When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly Host singing Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’
….but I can’t say I go all the way with him here; it does look a bit more fiery Disk-ish to me. Who knows whether his sight or mine is more defective? Or whether both of us are 20:20 and the sun is both fire and angels and a billion other interpretations severally beamed into our several understandings?
In the summer of 1928, Virginia Woolf “got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me; something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows – once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making ‘reality’ this & that, whereas it is one thing.”
Is that STA? or is it perhaps the same vision as Blake’s alighting on a very different mind stored with a different library of references?
‘One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which suddenly strikes us … that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it…There is beauty, not only in vision, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.’ Chesterton is the most vehement advocate of objective reality (and for him it led to God). The great delight of any epiphany is not only the newness of the revelation but the conviction of your previous wrongness, the hilarious awareness of your own stupidity and mutton-headed inability to see what had so long been staring you in the face.
The pleasure of being right always has a touch of vanity about it. It puts you at the centre of things, checking yourself in the mirror and wondering if people have noticed your rightness. It is to walk through this rich world of aromatic mystery not smelling a thing except the opinions you’re wearing and which you haven’t changed for weeks. It is a centripetal, vorticising passion, in love with limitation and narrowness and itself. Its emblematic look is the smirk. Ruskin won’t allow such complacency: ‘Let him [the reader] be assured of this, that unless important changes are occurring in his opinions continually all his life long, not one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject true. All opinions are living and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree – not of a cloud.’
The pleasure of being wrong, by contrast, is expansive and generous. It has all the comedy of watching someone slip on a banana-skin without the attendant malice, because you yourself are the victim. It pricks pomposity, debars vanity and admits plainly and cheerfully how very much bigger the universe is than your capacity to know it, and how much infinitely bigger it is than the tiny fenced-off parts of your capacity which are your opinions. An opinion forms a mass and distorts reality around it. When you admit you are wrong, you realize again ‘There is more, there is more’ and the complexity is unending. You are free again to look and wonder at the strangeness of things (‘Hello, lamp-post, what you knowing?’). The great, rich ocean of ignorance will never be filled by the pebbles of knowledge we chuck at it.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try to get things right. There’s no merit either in blethering unthinkingly or in burying one’s head in the sand (though both have their adherents). Keats’s ‘I have not one idea of the truth of any of my speculations – I shall never be a reasoner, because I care not to be in the right,’ sounds reckless, lazy and, frankly, a bit smug. But in his identification a few weeks before of ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ he discovers another path to understanding – by engagement and attention. Wonder is more important than knowledge. In fact, of course, wonder often leads to knowledge, but knowledge is the by-product. Wonder is the thing. We often think there is a polarity between people who know and people who don’t know, which the media, most obviously and trivially in quiz shows, perpetuate. But the greater polarity is perhaps between those who think they know and those who know they don’t.
Annie Dillard had a vision too. She saw a cedar tree. ‘It was less like seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance….I’m still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.’ The world is not a passive state waiting to be probed by my busy mind – thought after thought after thought like a file of ants on a mission – but a riotous flood poised to burst into me. When the Psalmist exhorts us to know the divine, he extols sensation not thought: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’
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