Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/21/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Poem of the Day: William Blake

Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

--William Blake

For some reason, I can never read this poem without thinking of A Hard Day's Night:

Reporter: Are you a mod or a rocker?
Ringo: Um, no. I'm a mocker.

Being somewhat of Voltaire's and Ringo's disposition, I take a little offense at Blake's mockery of mockers. Yes, what he's getting at is the sterility of Enlightenment materialism and, more in Rousseau's case than in Voltaire's, the negativism of revolutionaries. But in Candide Voltaire turned his mockery on Leibnizian rationalism, and Rousseau's valorizing of the natural seems right in line with Blake's own way of thinking. Still, when you get into prophetic mode the way Blake did, it's hard to maintain nuance. As for Democritus's atoms and Newton's particles, I have a feeling that Blake would have been gratified by the advent of quantum physics, in which things turn out to be both particles and waves.