To Hold Infinity
1.
God calls to the man dressed in linen with the scribe’s inkhorn hanging at his hip and says to him, “Pass on into the midst of the city, into the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigh and grieve for all the abominations that are done in their midst. – Ezekiel 9:4
Some will find this presumptuous or even pretentious, or just naive or galling, or unhinged, or preposterous and absurd, or worse, downright blasphemous, but when William Blake was four, God pressed His face to the window, which made him scream and weep. When he was eight, Ezekiel, the prophet, peered at him from under a bush. Two years later, he saw a tree – a cherry tree – filled with angels crying “Holy Holy Holy”. A month on, angels walked towards him through the rye and strode above his head through the stars.
I have had no such experience, yet I often think back on a chicken potpie I made when I was nine. My first pastry. It was so inexpressibly beautiful that I could not find it in myself to eat it, to crack its flaky crust with a fork and punch that fork’s sharp, fluted tines into its hot, creamy core. Instead, I put it in my mother’s favourite biscuit tin and hid it behind her sewing kit and my father’s shoeshine box on the top shelf of the hallway closet. Three months later, having forgotten of its existence, I found it again, exactly where I had left it, but much blighted, rank as piss and covered with hair-like spores. I screamed and wept. Then I took it outside and buried it in the backyard.
I think of it often. If I could push aside Ezekiel and the marks in the men who sigh and grieve about the abominations done in their midst, I would be thinking of it now. Because I do this often with absent things. This happens especially after summer’s end when we put everything into the sheds for the last time. The silence falls, we close the doors and walk away. And all year long it sits there, the land, the sheds, the trees, the deck, and we try to imagine the state of it. What is happening to it. What it has become. Is it still there? Does any part of it still exist? Does anything still exist? This last question is not farfetched: it comes in close to us. We have all lost or forgotten something, left it in a pocket or on a bus, in a jar, under a sheaf of old bills in a drawer. We are these things, just as we are the maps of our cities and countries, the places we live. Or an elementary school pencil case. A Crown Royal bag filled with conkers. A shoebox filled with plastic soldiers. A stack of letters. A knife. A pressed flower in a book.
A multitude of just such things.
“Once, there was a kind of toy. It was just a horse chestnut with a bit of cloth over it, tied with a string, and two knots at the sides and two at the bottom, like hands and feet. The child whispered to it and slept with it under her shirt.”
This is from Marilynne Robinson’s 2014 novel Lila. It is an imaginative re-reading of the Book of Ezekiel. A fictional midrash, in a sense. I urge you to read it. The opening pages are here and I’ve put a link to a video of Robinson reading them at the bottom of this post.
2.
“Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every branch. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father for telling a lie.” — Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, 1869
Robinson tells us that Blake spoke of his visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters. Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy. He thinks all men partake of it, but it is lost by not being cultivated.”
Blake wrote in 1804 that he was “drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand.”
“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 crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!”
His wife once said, “I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise.”
Blake’s mother was a source for this. She and her first husband joined the Moravians during its most “enthusiastic” phase.
“Last Friday at the love feast,” she wrote in 1750 in her petition to join the Church, “Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds.”
The first dissenters, the Moravians kept a continuous prayer going for over one hundred years. Some Catholic orders participate in perpetual adorations of the Blessed Sacrament (aka the consecrated host), though these usually take the form of silent contemplation. There is a big difference between engaged prayer and passive sitting.
At the International House of Prayer in Kansas, prayers are kept going around the clock.
3.
And when I passed by you and saw you weltered in your own blood, I said to you when you were in your blood, “Live”. Yes, I said to you when you were in your blood, “Live”. – Ezekiel 16:6
The boy walks through hayfields, strolling back from a day in the Surrey hills, lungs clear and mind at rest, the blossoming orchards before him twinkling and shimmering, kindled by sunlight. The wind kindles the sparkling gold, bright blossoming white commingling with incandescent red, the leaves a flush of emerald. The outward lunges inward, prisms of tears gather in his eyes, the gossamer threads of light twinkle and flash through the blossoms, and the boy’s brain, already filled with thoughts of the might of stars and angels, kindles suddenly into dream-like, creative energy, and the sunny orchard becomes a Mahanaim, the place where Jacob, returning from Padan-aram to southern Canaan, met his angels, even to his outward eye.
I, like Blake, was an “introvert” at nine. I desperately wanted to better myself. My one passion was books – books on math, books on psychology, books on music. I wasn't particularly bright, but I read a lot, baked a lot — cakes and cookies — and made perfect frosting. I was a perfectionist. I would decorate each cake from a pastry-frosting bag, and if someone dipped a finger in the frosting, I'd be mad as hell.
“That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care,” said Blake. “The wisest of the ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act.” Or, in the lark-flown words of his Los, the fallen form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas, who creates the city of Golgonooza:
“I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.”
The imagination is dependent on sensation. Shut your eyes and the image burns inside, obscured and dimmed but present all the same. The mere idea does not exist.
4.
I am often struck and then overwhelmed by these manners of thoughts, which take in and soon devour the enormity and triviality of the world and the universe, from its grains of sand and wildflowers to my potpie and cake frosting to Jupiter and Saturn to the ashes in my father’s urn and Jerusalems old and new and every disposable contact lens fingered late at night out of my tired, failing eyes. They are still all there, all of them, as is every piece of forever plastic that I have ever touched or held or swallowed and this, for me, encompasses the full arc of all cosmic and earthly meaning. And, of course, meaninglessnesses. We are so caught up in our own little worlds, and our bigger ones, that we lose sight of who we are, and where we are, and what our purpose here is. Me me me, sigh sigh sigh, groan groan groan, grieve grieve grieve, over and over, page after page, century after century after century. It’s tiresome.
So, then, today, right now, let’s you and I step outside the deluded ken of our imagined self-importance by visiting the farthest thing from our minds — the farthest human thing — the plucky little space probe Voyager 1.
Roughly the size of the Renault Clio I’ve been driving around Brittany all month, it is, of course, not a car but a bus – a decahedral bus, to be precise – so-called because it has ten flat sides, to which scientists and engineers have attached recording and navigational instruments, thrusters, and a high-gain dish antenna that receives and, on good days, sends radio-wave signals.
It was launched by NASA in 1977. It flies faster than any other human thing. Right now, it is beyond Pluto – well beyond Pluto! – out between the stars amid the frothing plasma bubbles of interstellar space.
Attached to one of its side is an audiovisual disc of gold pressed in Creteil, just outside of Paris, and inscribed with all manner of earthly and unearthly things. The sound of surf, wind and thunder, for example. The songs of whales, birds and Chuck Berry. The brainwaves of a woman thinking about geology and history, and what it feels like to fall in love. Glenn Gould playing Bach.
Images, too. Drawings of a hydrogen atom in its two fundamental states and a chart showing the position of the Solar System relative to more than a dozen pulsars, with their exact periods indicated. A photograph of page 6 from Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Volume III, De mundi systemate. Another of a woman licking an ice cream cone next to a man eating a grilled cheese sandwich, and another man in a striped shirt pouring water in his mouth from a silver pitcher he holds at arm’s length above his head.
A woman in a supermarket stealing grapes and buying old bananas –
And these words, from Jimmy Carter, now (y)our oldest president, then in his first year of office :
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
5.
Voyager 1 sent us pictures, including this one, its last, taken 34 years ago 4 billion miles above my potpie –
The little speck in the middle of the bottom line is Earth. Carl Sagan, who, in a sense, commissioned this picture – suggested that NASA turn the bus around and snap wide-angle long-exposure shots of Earth through a very dark filter – gave it the name it still bears today – “Pale Blue Dot” and said of it:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
It was not a sunbeam; it was a result of kindling light reflecting within the lens assembly and the camera’s sunshade.
Between March and May 1990, Voyager 1 sent back 60 frames to Earth. Three of these frames depicted Earth as a tiny point of light. Each used a different colour filter – blue, green, and violet – with exposure times of 0.72, 0.48, and 0.72 seconds, respectively. These were then combined. Out of the 640,000 pixels that make up each frame, Earth occupies less than one pixel (specifically, 0.12 of a pixel).
Sagan: Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
6.
“‘The other evening,’ said Blake, in his usual quiet way, ‘taking a walk, I came to a meadow, and at the further corner of it, I saw a fold of lambs. Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty. But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.’ The lady, thinking that this was a capital holiday-show for her children, eagerly interposed, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Blake, but may I ask where you saw this?’ ‘Here, madam,’ answered Blake, touching his forehead with his knuckle.” – James Smetham, “Essay on Blake”, 1869.
Right after “Pale Blue Dot” was taken, the onboard cameras were turned off. To save energy. And a year ago, a memory bank, one of three onboard, all part of the world’s oldest running computer (in computer years, it is roughly a millennium old), was hit by a high-speed particle – no one knows how or why or even if; it might have just worn out – and the signals stopped making sense. A meaningless (the word NASA used was “mysterious”) sequence of ones and zeroes was all it could manage. The agency’s engineers devised a workaround by reorganizing code to bypass the faulty memory chip, which had 3% of its capacity irreparably corrupted. Due to the damage, they had to relocate the code, but no space existed for an additional 256 bits; the spacecraft’s total memory is limited to 69.63 kilobytes, equivalent to one standard jpeg file. So the engineers removed unused code, such as the code for transmitting data from Jupiter, which is unusable at the current transmission rate.
This summer, just before we cut back the brambles and opened the sheds, NASA confirmed that the probe was once again transmitting data from all four instruments.
A few more tweaks will keep Voyager 1 providing data for another couple of years. Then, unless it hits something, it will continue travelling outward for the rest of Time. In silence.
7.
I’ve rotated “Pale Blue Dot”. It’s usually shown with the ray of sunlight illuminating Earth as a vertical line on the right side of the frame. This is because the Voyager’s point of view was approximately 32° above the ecliptic plane, Earth’s orbital plane around the Sun. From the perspective of an observer on Earth – me me me, for example – the Sun appears to journey across the so-called celestial sphere throughout the year, following a distinct path against a barely changing backdrop of stars that aligns with the constellations of the zodiac. This, of course, is nonsense. Or at least a type of nonsense.
By rotating it, I have set it free from its orbital clutch. Just as I have this –
And this –
8.
Oh! I have slipped
The surly bonds of the Sun
Put out my hand
And touched the face of God.
There’s more to say. But this is already too long. Most of us, because of the Infinity devices we hold in the palm of our hands, lack the cognitive aptitude to voyage much further. Myself included. I wanted to explore Lila’s take on Ezekiel, especially his heavenly chariot. I wanted to touch on the significance of Ezekiel’s visions in Blake’s artwork and poetry, and shoot the same skeins out to tether Voyager 1, and, well, bring in Jerusalem and its lost temples and the marks on the men – in our century – that sigh and grieve for all the abominations done in its midst and in their names. Mainly, however, I wanted to delve into what, in part at least, drives all the above: the concept of apokatastasis. For Marilynne Robinson, or more precisely her character Lila, like John Calvin and Karl Barth, apokatastasis pertains to the final redemption of all beings, including the damned and the Devil. For the Ancients, and for Blake, it was cosmological: the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens as in the former year; the periodic return of the cosmic cycle; the completion of the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, the so-called “Great Year”; and the return to a place in the heavens occupied at a former epoch.
In early Stoicism, it involved the return of planets and stars to their original celestial positions, which ignites a fiery, destructive transformation of the universe (ekpyrosis). Following this catastrophic conflagration, a rebirth occurs, initiating a cycle of destruction and recreation linked to a divine Logos.
For the Stoics, Zeus, when his thoughts turned outwards, created the material cosmos. His inward me me me thinking, his absorption in self-contemplation, created contraction, or apokatastasis. This fire within, the fire without – alternating expansion and contraction, represents the universe.
In Judaism, it is the concept of “restore” or “return” as applied to the restoration of Job’s fortunes, the rescue or return of captives, or the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
But enough of all that. Let’s send our thoughts upward but stay within the realm of the Real – and away from these newest abominations, out beyond the furthest edge of the Solar System, where Voyager 1 is closing in on the Öpik–Oort cloud, whose bodies replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner planetary region – where they are eventually consumed during close approaches to the Sun.
Barring incident, Voyager 1 should reach the outer limit of the Oort cloud in about 300 years. While we wait, let’s return to my friend downstairs – though he hasn’t forgiven me for mentioning him last week and the week before.
He is in the living room, watching yet another recorded game on his iPad. This one ends in a draw, 1-1. He knows this. What he didn’t know until just now is that the first goal, scored by his team, occurred in the second minute.
“Geesh,” he said. “This is going to be tough to sit through.” Then he laughed.
I suggested that we should head to the Sunday market in Plestin-Les-Grêves before it closes, and he agreed. “I can watch the rest later.”
Then he reminded me of an old Italian TV commercial. It opens on two fans sitting in the stands of a packed stadium. There is an empty seat between them. “Isn’t that weird?” says the younger of the two. “A sold-out playoff match, the biggest game of the year, and there’s an empty seat right at centre field.”
The older man says, without taking his eyes off the pitch, “That was my wife’s seat. She never missed a match.”
“Oh,” says the younger man, feeling awkward. Then, after a few seconds, he adds, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The older man nods, and they silently watch the action. After a few more seconds, the younger man turns to the older man and says, “Couldn’t you find someone who wanted to see the game? Someone in your family? Or a friend?”
“Nah,” says the older man. “They’re all at the funeral.”
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