“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.”
-William Blake
Go read those lines again.
done?
Now think them through a bit.
I've been seeing this idea pop up in alot of places. George Steiner first brought it to my attention in his book Errata by pointing out the paradox of language and the written word. There are limits to language in the sense that we use predetermined symbols which correspond to certain concepts or things or ideas, but within those limits, there is a Infinite Universe. Now I'd like to add a quick note here: there are several kinds or types of infinity. If you've ever read the Phantom Tollbooth, you'll remember this one passage where the main character is in either a tunnel or on a staircase(both maybe, I can't remember) and it's a monotonous infinity. Chesterton also mentions this when he talks about lunatics in Orthodoxy, the logic of the lunatic makes perfect sense, but it is a mad sense, a never ending circle, like a dog chasing its tail. Boethius also brings this theme up when he talks about the difference between eternity and mere immortality. The eternal is Presence itself, time only imitates the ever-presence of eternity in the Present. While immortality is merely a sucession of future turning into present which becomes past, eternity is a transcendent Present of all time. (There's ALOT more to be said on that subject, but that's for a term paper) Eliot's line about the "still point" the "intersection" (I'm getting sidetracked here, so I won't go and find the exact quote). What I hope all these examples have done is to give an idea of what I am not trying to describe. The sense of infinity I describe is not the monotonous infinity of a never ending corridor, but rather the infinity of possibility, an infinity rife and pulsing with creative potential. That is the sense in which language (confined as it is by representative symbols used to denote concepts) is infinite.
Another example of this paradox of infinite freedom within tangible confines can be seen in the production of a play (This is a variation on the theme of language). Ms. Card, in the context lecture I attended this evening, spoke of a certain set of restraints that a director is subject to (Which can be grouped into two main categories of Restraints of the text and Restraints of the community which produces the play), yet within these constraints, there is an infinity of variety which makes it possible to see something different every time the play is incarnated.
Once I got started, everything around me started to explode with this theme. Take Western Concert Music, twelve notes...A-B-C-D-E-F-G with their respective sharps and you can get anything! Palestrina, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, John Williams, Coldplay, name any genre! And that's just the beginning, you have different forms: the symphony, the sonata, theme and varaiation, the prelude, the etude, etc. There's a form, and there's endless possibility.
And what about Chemistry? There are only 92 naturally occuring elements on Earth and they form literally everything around us.
Architecture, Sculpting, Biology, Painting, Art, Humans (!) And this last one got me. Each created in the image of God, each an individual. Yet the more we become Christ-like, the more we truly become ourselves. Tolstoy may have been right in saying all happy families are alike, but I think it would be more accurate to say that all happy families are alike in the potentiality for Joy.
Which brings me to The Great Divorce by Lewis. The grey town of the opening stretches to infinity in all directions, but it is so numbingly same. The real shocker is when you find out that all of hell cannot even affect a butterfly of heaven. (Note: As Lewis himself says, the illustrations of The Great Divorce are not meant to be literal ideas about the respective places, just as Dante's Comedy aren't meant to be factual descriptions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven).
If you take anything away from this ramble, take this:
Heaven can never be exhausted. Whatever else it is, it can and could never be merely infinite. All these examples I've listed so far are but the muddy trickles from the Fountain. How great our joy and wonder when we come to the Source?
It is the Good which is really interesting and evil which bores the hell out of a person (or rather, into him).
The sculpture which took an artist a month of 8-hour-a-day carving to complete can be destroyed in 2 minutes.
So there you have it, my long long and still incomplete ramble on the paradox of limits and freedom.
It is through law that we become truly free.
Let's discuss!
2 comments:
good job on attempting an infinite post, but you're much closer to where you started than where you would finish.
Gotta love that quote by Blake. It is amazing how we can capture infinity in one moment at time, and yet never really grasp the concept of it because it is supposedly "infinite" by definition. Human languages attempt to make sense of the unknown, the infinite, and convert it into something finite so that we can put it under a microscope to analyze. Like science, as you brought up chemistry, in which elements are defined by its mass and components, so on so forth, as a means of understanding our universe. There's also the argument that people bring up saying our world, our planet, our surroundings, are finite and will have an end, thus we should take care of what we have. So which is it, finite or infinite? And if that cannot be answered, what is finite and what is infinite? When we talk about concepts like time, music, composition, and so forth, we can attribute infinity as a characteristic, but when we look at the life in terms of having a beginning and an end, there will always be an end somewhere, right? Every infinite present at hand will end the next nanosecond, only to have yet another one begin. Makes it sound like an infinity of finite things, doesn't it? Paradoxes are fun, and while language allows us to break something apart into its bare components, it also allows us to put scramble and arrange things so that they can fit our own interpretation and expression.
I stop rambling now, am not making sense. Good thinking post!
Post a Comment