From "Nihilism" to "Justice"

            The selection from Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes is fascinating, insightful, frustrating, and surprising.  Above all, I found it intellectually exciting.  However, I want to explore the main outlines of his argument because I believe it has some problems, avoiding his interesting digresssions, like those on science, Christianity, and free will.  One of the main arguments that underlies his discussion is that "there are no background coordinates of our world" -- that is, there is no "Big Other" (God, Nature, or any creative, ordering principle) (445).  Reality is "a meaningless chaotic manifold" (444).  Nietzsche said much the same about reality, denying God and order, but ended up positing a kind of "Big Other" -- the will to power.  Zizek makes a similar move, denying one thing, on the one hand, and positing something else, rather obliquely, on the other.  The end of absolute nihilism can only be suicide or selfish hedonism.  As Yvor Winters said to Robinson Jeffers, if he really believed it was better to be a rock than a human being, he should kill himself.  Zizek turns out not to be an absolute nihilist.

            Throughout the selection, Zizek returns to various forms of "an anonymous Fate beyond social control" (459).  These include the process of capitalism, the development of science and technology, the destructive natural processes set in motion by human beings.  As Marx and Engels observed of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into thin air, all that is holy is profaned."  Science and technology (with genetic engineering, cloning, and nanotechnology) has shown that there is no natural order, no human nature, no Nature at all.  The study of evolution demonstrates that there is no evolution as a progressive development.  Rather, species have evolved because of "catastrophes" and "broken equilibria" (442) Any equilibrium is secondary; disequilibrium is primary. 

            The concern to prevent the runaway destructive natural processes from destroying the earth and the human race -- ecology -- Zizek identifies as "the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism" (439).  Although ecology purports to attempt to change humans' relationship to the earth, it is actually resistant to change and has "the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts" (440).  Thus, ecology is a false alternative which does not fundamentally challenge capitalist hegemony.  While dwelling on catastrophe, it hopes deep down that it will not really happen, and in this it is reinforced by our common sense, which is habituated to everyday reality and does not believe this reality can be disrupted (445). 

            Zizek, at moments, challenges these anonymous, seemingly uncontrollable processes.  He resists the absolute authority of science.  He discusses "the way science functions as ... an ideological institution" which provides certainty and stamps out or marginalizes "heretics" (446).  He expresses discomfort with tinkering with the human genome or attempting to create a synthetic cell.  Instead of deeming 90 percent of the human genome "junk DNA," he wonders if this "junk" is important and we just don't understand how life works  -- how "an 'infinite' (self-regulating) organic structure arises" (441).  He also balks at seeing the human being as completely empty and without agency, as a "blind circuit of neurons" (446). 

            Given such challenges, we might expect Zizek to offer some replacement "Big Other" or at least some principle for action.  And he does this in a rather sly way.  Zizek argues that the various forms of the "Big Other" stop us from acting in the face of possible destruction.  The Big Other as a "'reified' social system" or a natural process cannot be stopped because it has become an unconquerable reality -- an In-itself (453).  This reification of abstract processes comes about through prosopopoeia.  Through personification, the processes -- whether capitalist development, scientific progress, or natural processes -- become objective realities.  However, he makes sure to defend Hegel's "objective Spirit."  This Spirit is objective and real, independent of individuals, but it is not related to a "collective or spiritual super-Subject"(454).  There is no collective Subject beyond individual human beings.  But the objective spirit is related to individuals in so far as it is the "presupposition of their activity" (454). 

            His sly move occurs rather abruptly at the end of the chapter as a rationale for action. The ecological challenge should be met by reinventing and reviving what Zizek ironically calls the "'eternal Idea' of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice" and later "egalitarian terror" (460, 461).  Since there is no Big Other for Zizek, but rather a "meaningless chaotic manifold," he is not positing this Justice as an In-itself, a reality.  But, we can suppose, we should act as if this Justice existed, fully conscious that it is an invention.  Furthermore, if we act as "a people" with "large-scale collective decisions," are we not also reinventing the "collective or spiritual super-Subject"? (461, 454). Will this subject act with reference to a Hegelian "objective spirit"?  And most important for the implementation of his proposals, if the collective Subject and Justice are inventions, who will define them and, therefore, make the collective decisions?  The "terror" is presumably necessary, according to Zizek, in order to avert catastrophe and save human lives.  In the process of administering justice through terror, some people will have to receive "ruthless punishment" and perhaps die in order for the majority to be saved.  Is Zizek, then, promoting a kind of totalitarian utilitarianism?

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

            In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon examines the complex nexus of values and beliefs centered on the concept of wilderness in the United States.  Rather than a pure, natural given, the wilderness is an “unntural” cultural creation.   In the idea of wilderness are intertwined two American obsessions: religion and nationalism.  The signifiers of these cultural categories are not always obviously apparent, as they undergo revalutation and take on disguises.

            Cronon organizes his analysis by exploring the influence of the concepts of the sublime and the fontier on the creation of “wilderness.”  We find religion interacting with both these concepts while nationalism primarily relates to the second.  Previous to the reinterpretation of the sublime in the Romantic period, wilderness generally had negative connotations.  It caused one to feel terror or “bewilderment.” In antiquity, the wilderness was also a place of temptation and spiritual purification.  This trandformative possibility of the wilderness was valued and developed so that by the late 18^th century the wilderness was where one could encounter the divine.  In the United States, due to the influence of writers like Muir, the transformation of wilderness was complete: “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple” (72).  Wild nature became sacred.

            Related to this revaluation, the wilderness also became a place where one could return to certain core human experiences.  In the wilderness, human beings experienced some primitive essence that had been covered over by corrupting and artificial layers of “civilization.”  This primitivism was given a nationalist tinge by writers like Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw American democracy emerging from the encounter bewteen primitive human nature and the wilderness.  This American democratic spirit could be reinvigorated by returning to the wilderness.  The wilderness must be protected because it is “the last bastion of rugged individualism,” which can ensure the renewal of an essential Americanness (77).  Wilderness as frontier also connotes a place of authenticity.  The wilderness is the irreducible “real” – the place where we can experience the “truth” of the world and ourselves.  The real and the authentic, according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade, are preeminently qualities of the sacred.  Thus, as Cronon observes, modern environmentalism is replete with “quasi-relgious values” founded upon such a conception of the wilderness (80).  The assumption of wilderness as sacred and authentic represents a structure of belief homologous to what is usually undertood by the word “religious.”

            Within this complex of “religious” belief and national identity, certain problems and contradictions emerge.  One of these involves class.  The wilderness as an artificial place of authenticity and Americianness can only be enjoyed and benefited from by the middle and upper classes who have the money and leisure to travel.  It is a place of recreation and of internal renewal separate from the urban centers where these visitors live and work.  The wilderness allows them to purify themselves of the corruption of a greedy, ugly, industrial-capitalist world, thus absolving them of any complicity in its injustices.  Poet and farmer Wendell Berry has often drawn attention to the need to live responsibly in a place where we both make a home and work.  When we preserve the wilderness because we expect it to purify us of our corruption and sins, we accept more easily the faults of the “profane” world we inhabit.  This mentality can tacitly accept political and economic structures that cause injustice and destruction, thus devaluing most of the earth and many of our fellow human beings.

Sublimity and Alienation

In his chapter on “Sublime Nature,” Cosgrove describes the reaction of artists in the Romantic period against the increasing mechanization of England, as it was being transformed by capitalist production.  These artists began to privilege the organic and natural over the mechanical and manufactured.  Suffering alienation in society due to the capitalist order of production, they sought to flee society altogether and find integration in a natural, moral order.  This led them to more and more wild and remote places, which seemed to exemplify some essential moral order, which was being corrupted by the man’s greed.  As Cosgrove observes, “Romanticism seeks divinity in the mountains and sermons in the stones” (232).  This tendency is clearly evident in John Muir’s description of his stay the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1869.  Like Turner and Ruskin, Muir’s emotional responses to nature are intimately connected to his careful and learned observation of plants, animals, rocks, and all kinds of natural phenomena.  Indeed, what Cosgrove says of Ruskin could be applied to Muir: “It is the duty of every individual to observe and seek to understand the messages written by divinity into natural forms and of that individual’s life and work to submit to them” (249).  Close observation of nature could also one to “see into the life of things,” that is, perceive the moral and providential significance of nature.

Alone in the wilderness, Muir does not feel alone. Deep in the mountains above Yosemite Valley, he paradoxically feels close to his friends and family: “The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness, and the nearer our friends” (81).  Nature offers him an unalienated existence, but he can only experience it when he is separated from society and other people.  However, one must have the sensitivity and perception to see and feel the beauty and meaning  of nature, for he earlier had noted that the shepherd in California, “seeing nobody for weeks or months …finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so” (19).  Muir, on the other hand, attempts to read God’s writing in the pine trees: “Definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with sunbeams. Would I could understand them!” (18). He can also hear the “sermons” in the stones. The animals and plants seem to call to him, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song” (44).  The particulars of nature reveal the very being of the divine: “Every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator” (94). 

Many of us might have a tendency to look down upon such beliefs and such raptures as Muir expressed.  They must be self-induced, we say.  And indeed they might, since it is impossible to know the truth of his subjective experience.  However, the positivism -- “with its separation of subject and object and its search for causal laws modeled upon Newtonian physics” -- that came to dominate in the 18^th century is not more valid as a schema for understanding the phenomenal world (252).   Cosgrove effectively argues that causal reasoning was an ideology tied to the rise of capitalism: “The shift from analogical to causal reasoning is logically related to changes in social organization between pre-capitalist and capitalist formations” (252).  Thus as a hegemonic ideology, this form of reasoning cannot bring us closer to “truth” than previous forms of reasoning. 

I was troubled, however, by some elitist implications in Muir’s book.  He says that the shepherd Billy is “asleep, or smothered and befogged beneath pleasures and cares” because he does not want to see Yosemite Valley (90).  Billy considers the valley “a lot of rocks” where one would be exposed to the danger of falling.  Similarly, the Native Americans are seen as degraded, unappreciative of nature’s beauty: “A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed, dark-haired, half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness” (124).  He’s most troubled by their uncleanliness, which he interprets as a sign of their unnaturalness, since “nothing truly wild is unclean” (135).

He goes into nature to escape alienation.  In the wilderness, he can experience his ecstasies and raptures before its divine beauty.  But he cannot tolerate those who don’t have the same sensibility as his, and so he experiences another kind of alienation: “To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural” (132).

Landscape Ideology

Landscape Ideology

Cosgrove’s chapter on English landscapes is a fine historical analysis of the complex inter-relationship between society, aesthetics, economics, and politics. He is also sensitive to the changes and revaluations that occur when ideas pass from one cultural context to another, in this case from Italy to England. One aspect of his analysis I found very interesting is the process by which a society hides a reality, whether social, economic, or cultural, with an artificially constructed image or conception of itself. With this conception, the ruling class attempts to deceive itself and the rest of society.

The reality for England in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, according to Cosgrove, is that it was becoming a mercantilist, capitalist state, rather than an absolute monarchy. This was due to the strength of its navy, the influence of Parliament, and the commercial occupations of many of the landowners. The effect of this on landscape design was that no imposing imperial palace was built to symbolize absolutist control over society. Instead, the landscaping symbol of England became the country house: “A well-managed country house and its lands form a self-sufficient world, a microcosm of the mercantilist state” (196).

Whereas in 16^th century Venice Palladio’s neoclassicism represented a desire to legitimate Venice’s imperialism, in England it evoked “the moral and political perfection” of republican Rome – which seems to indicate some anxiety about England's own emerging empire. In country houses the Palladian neoclassicism combined with Gothic touches to create a union of “Roman authority and Gothic liberty” (203). This liberty is only for the “lord,” the landowner who controls the layout, management, and production of the land. The controlling, neoclassical design applied to the landscape was disapproved of by the older aristocracy. They instead had an idea of a “natural” landscape -- not an overly modified one -- intended for use, in which the the lord cared for the peasant as for his children. Obviously, this paternalistic feudal fantasy of “merry England” never existed. The newer, commercial aristocracy was more concerned with maximizing the profits from their land. They imposed a formal neoclassical design on the land, which they could view as a painting from the commanding vantage-point of their house. The peasants’ dwellings were removed to clear the view, thus making invisible the major factor in the estate’s wealth. Nature was a garden that reflected “the stability and perfection of English civilization” (204). As England was moving to capitalist relations of production with cities as the centers of wealth and power, the image the ruling class used to represent the nation was the country house, whose aesthetically pleasing landscape design was considered “natural.”

Even in the cities, where the squalor of concentrated poor workers was impossible to ignore, there was an attempt to treat the city as the country. The design of London was structured by parks which held country houses. This amounts to a “denial of the role of the city as an increasingly autonomous center of capitalist accumulation, market control and ultimately production, organizing the life of the countryside” (217). Treating London as the country with landscaped parks and villas reveals an anxiety about the reality of England's capitalist development, and about the resulting discontented poor workers. Cogrove calls the imposition of landscape design, in the cases of England and Venice, a “landscape ideology” (222). In Venice this ideology involved “linear perspective, the logic of urban aesthetics, and urban visual control”; its aesthetics attempts to hide Venice's shift toward a “second feudalism”(221,222). In England “colore and aerial perspective, the logic of rural aesthetics and visual control over the countryside” obfuscate England's progression toward urban industrial capitalism (221). Thus aesthetics can serve state power not only by openly glorifying it but also by disguising its actual operations.

Spots of Time

            Although I had years ago read the “spots of time” section of The Prelude, it must have been done quickly or I must not have thought about it very deeply, because this time it struck me as very odd.  In the preceding stanza, Wordsworth describes how he purified himself of the business of the world through a re-immersion into “Nature’s presence” by which he is made “ a sensitive and creative Soul.”  This theme of revivification carries into the discussion of “spots of time,” which nourish and repair him.  The memory of these spots brings “a renovating Virtue.”  We might expect these experiences to be rapturous, mystical, and/or affirmatory – some kind of Maslowian peak experience. But upon scrutiny, they don’t seem life-affirming – quite the opposite.  They are experiences imbued with fear, death, doubt, discomfort, pain.  Paradoxically, the memory of them brings pleasure. 

            He offers two examples of such spots of time.  In the first, as a six-year-old, he has strayed on horseback from his accompanying servant.  He sees the place where the name of a murderer who was executed has been carved in the ground.  Then, proceeding uphill, he sees a “naked pool,” a beacon on a “lonely Eminence,” and a girl with a pitcher on her head struggling as she walks against the wind.  The scene indicates frailty, loneliness, nakedness, lostness.  Yet when this scene of ineffable “visionary dreariness” comes to mind later, when he is in the same place with his sister and fiancée, it becomes a source of joy and strength.  Why? It is not that the pleasurable feelings of the present have, through association, transformed the memory of the past experience.  Indeed, it is the difference between the feelings of the present and the past that is essential.  The present feeling “comes in aid” of the past feeling and so provides him with “diversity” of strength. So the restoring potential of the spots of time has to do with the overcoming of pain and suffering.  A joy is felt through the awareness of one’s emotional and spiritual strength.  This strength proves that “mind is lord and master,” and therefore we are not entirely subject to contingency. 

That the consciousness of freedom brings pleasure and power is not strange.  However, that Wordsworth – if we can generalized from his two examples – would seek these spots of time as “hiding places of my power” and sources of joy seems strange to me.  The second example emphasizes this strangeness.  Wordsworth and his brothers await a carriage to bring them home for the winter holidays.  They ascend to an eminence.  Like the landscape of the first spot of time, the environment is naked, dreary, and lonely: the day is stormy and windy, there is a single sheep, they shelter behind a “naked” wall, the bare hawthorn bush whistles in the wind, the woods are enshrouded by mist.  Within ten days of returning home, his father dies.  The death seems a “chastisement” and the landscape of a few days before now takes on more articulate meaning.  Wordsworth thanks God “who thus corrected my desires.” He seems to mean that God has taught him not to be overly eager to have his expectations met – that is, to trust more in God rather than follow his own impulses.  One might think that the memory of the landscape, so closely associated with his father’s death and an awareness of his selfishness, would be painful.  On the contrary, he often repairs to those sights and sounds and drinks from them “as at a fountain.”

I am glad to find Wordsworth’s poetry so odd because it shows that he is much more complex than I realized as an undergraduate. These spots of time suggest that for Wordsworth, whatever truth or meaning exists in life, although it may ultimately lead to joy and strength, arises from moments of intense suffering, confusion, doubt, and fear.  His spots of time push up against the limits of our comprehension of experience – or rather the limits of thought and language to interpret experience.

Wordsworth and Naming Places

Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places” touch upon themes of culture and nature, the same themes that figure in Paul Fry’s article “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth.” There Fry finds that the opposed positions that either nature or language is prior are not so absolutely distinct. Instead, in each position there is some overlap with the other. Those who believe Wordsworth is a nature poet acknowledge that he has “blank misgivings” about the reality of the sensible word, while those who believe him to be an anti-naturalist acknowledge that his language stumbles upon these blanks and abysses that are engendered from the sensible objects that are supposed to not really exist.

It seems like a better approach to accept that, in Wordsworth, understanding or consciousness emerges from a dynamic relationship between language/mind on the one hand and nature on the other. This mingling and interpenetration contribute to our conceptions of nature and to the development of culture (in the sense of living, dwelling, and making meaning in a place). The first poem begins with the poet’s perceptions of and responses to a spring morning. He closely observes the sights and sounds and attributes human feelings to them, committing what the New Critics called the pathetic fallacy. He humanizes the world around him even as he carefully notices its particularities. The rivulet that flows with the melted snows of winter “ran with a young man’s speed,” but its “voice … was softened down into a vernal tone,” anticipating the diminishing of the water’s rush that spring will bring (3-5). The poet senses a “spirit of enjoyment and desire” that he compares to “a multitude of sounds” (6,8). The spirit of enjoyment can only be an emotion of the poet that he is projecting onto the place, yet there really is a multitude of sounds circling in the air that he will later describe. Wordsworth is aware that the mind, to paraphrase lines from “Tintern Abbey,” both half-creates and perceives. He notices the “budding groves” of early spring, but when he assigns intentionality to them, he says they “seemed eager to urge on the steps of June” (my emphasis) (9).

The poem explores an interplay between culture and nature that parallels this interplay between sense perception and imagination. The “ardent” stream, when it turns in the glen, suddenly becomes calmer, making a “glad sound”; all sounds contribute to make a “a voice of common pleasure” (22-25). The rushing of the stream has become a “voice,” something which characterizes living creatures. In their turn, the animals' intermingled voices make a “song,” which is an element of human culture (27). Yet the speaker compares this song to something wild: “[it] seemed like the wild growth or like some natural produce of the air” (28-29) There is a complex mutual interpenetration of nature and culture so that the one cannot be easily separated from the other – they each can transform into the other. While on a summit in this secluded dell, the speaker views a “mountain-cottage”; his position and perception mediate between or unite the cultural and the natural (36). The speaker's subsequent statement is puzzling: “Our thoughts at least are ours” (38). It indicates an awareness of being a stranger, in a place not one's own. Indeed, he calls the nook “wild” (38). However, once he names the place after Emma, he humanizes it, incorporating it into human culture through language. Now the spot becomes so intimate and familiar that it is “my other home, / My dwelling” (40-41). The dell further is woven into human culture through the fact that its naming and the event which occasioned it pass beyond the speaker to the local shepherds and potentially to the entire community. The “wild place” has been given a story and a name through which others will know it (46). It is not simply that the name has made the wild place knowable or been substituted for its “reality,” as some might argue. Conversely, through the place and the human experiences attached to it – through the place's housing of memory in the name – humans are connected to each other across time, and so, in some way, it helps them understand themselves.

"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and the Law of Non-contradiction

 William Blake's “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is intellectual dynamite. Here Blake is at his most paradoxical, anarchistic, and defiant. One of  the main points is summed up in the last line of the work: “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” This rejection of dogma and coercion functions both on the level of form and content. This does not mean that the “The Marriage” has no coherence or order. On the contrary, it is knit together by related ideas and motifs, and the combination of disparate elements (poems, proverbs, fancies, demonstrations) provides a kind of order. Blake rejects as tyrannical the philosophical empiricism of the Enlightenment, which is related to an exaltation of Necessity – perhaps most succinctly state by Pope: “Whatever is, is right.” Blake rejected this both metaphysically and politically. Unlike the political radicals of France who dethroned the Virgin and replaced her with the goddess Reason, for Blake political liberation from the dominance of church and state can only occur through a revolution of the mind or spirit. We must change the way we perceive the world. The irreducible joy and frustration that come from reading “The Marriage” lie partly in the demolishing of strict categories and the challenging of certainties. His unique vision is multivalent and willfully contradictory, and when we take him seriously, instead of simply telling ourselves that he's crazy, we too have to look into that void that terrified the angel – something we mostly try to avoid.

It would be interesting to look at how contraries of order/disorder formally structure the work, but I'm going to focus on some of the ideas and explore a few examples of Blake's truth-in-contradiction. The “marriage” of Heaven and Hell results from the recognition of their contrariness, for “opposition is true friendship.” He distinguishes Energy and Reason as one of the pairs of contraries without which “there is no progression.” However, “the voice of the Devil” affirms that “Energy is the only life.” Blake also rejects the opposition between body and soul, not because the soul is produced by the body, but because the body is the limitation of the soul. That is, soul is the prior reality. The body is like a cave through which the soul sees. “The chinks in the cavern” are the five senses which are “chief inlets of the soul in this age.” This is not just a poetical conceit for Blake, but he indeed believed that the soul exists independently of the body and the body is a kind of “incrustation” on the soul. As he says in “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” “I look through [the eye] and not with it.” He goes on to compare the eye to a window, saying that he does not question his "corporeal eye" any more than he would question a window about a sight. Similarly, in “Marriage” he refers to “the doors of perception” which must be cleansed for the world to appear infinite. The senses are merely doorways which limit the vision of the soul. My point with this discussion is to show that Blake contradicts his own affirmation of contradiction. He proposes to show the contraries underlying experience, but also destabilizes the basis of these very contraries. His dualism becomes monism when he chooses. Indeed, any “systematic reasoning” would undermine the very purpose of “Marriage,” which affirms unsystematic “exuberance” (and even does so with mockingly “systematic” methods like arguments and lists).

For Blake, the overthrowing of the tyranny of limited sensory experience is inseparable from the overthrow of a tyrannous political regime. This makes both political conservatives and rationalists/empiricists uncomfortable. However, Blake's spiritual beliefs also make the conventionally religious uneasy. In what we might call Blake's theology we find another instance of contradiction and paradox that recur through “Marriage.” A major fear of the early Church Fathers was pantheism – of which they accused the pagans – because it abolished the distinction between human and God. If God is inseparable from his creation, the incarnation loses its meaning of reconciling God and man. Blake seems to be rejecting this distinction between human and divine. He states that “all deities reside in the human breast” and that “God only acts and is in existing beings or men.” Again, he says that “there is no other God” than “great men.” He calls Jesus “the greatest man,” diminishing Jesus's divinity. However, Blake also describes “Jehovah” as “he who dwells in burning fire” – indicating that he is “the God of inspiration and mercy” (A Blake Dictionary, Damon 206). Although Jesus is the greatest of men, after his death “he became Jehovah.” So Blake emphasizes at once Jesus's humanity and divinity, and he simultaneously obliterates the distinction between God and man and discusses God as a distinct being. These paradoxes, after all, are essential to Christianity, which in its beginning defiantly intended to insult reason and philosophy. (Blake used the paradoxical formulation of Athanasius in “There Is No Natural Religion”: “God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.”)

Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” challenges our prejudices, the ways we make sense of the world. His vision is sufficiently (and masterfully) contradictory (even contradicting his own contradictions) so that he threatens and upsets just about everyone. He questions the reality of a stable empirical world existing apart from our perceptions (“Where man is not nature is barren”). Instead, he suggests that our own beliefs – our own mind – deeply affect the reality we perceive: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” If the angel, whose head is full of Aristotle's Analytics, sees devils, monsters, and spiders in the void, for Blake the vision dissolves, as he finds himself on a riverbank in the moonlight listening to a singer whose theme is, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” In “Marriage” no single truth reigns, but rather multiple truths coexist. Once Blake has thrown out Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, the world becomes a less certain place but perhaps a more wondrous place: “Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.”