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KEEP US FROM SINGLE VISION & NEWTON'S SLEEP!

"Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep."

— William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802.

Paolozzi after Blake:

Theodore Rozak: That Blake was a fire-eating radical and the ally of the English Jacobins has long been obvious from his life and from much of his writing. But the political significance of his "mental fight" against the psychology of science and the culture of industrialism has been less appreciated least of all in his own lifetime, when the task of keeping a minimum of skin stretched over one's bones was a full-time struggle for millions. Yet even during those first agonies of industrialization, Blake recognized there was another, darker politics unfolding beneath the surface of class conflict. He saw in the steady advance of science and its machines a terrifying aggression against precious human potentialities and especially against the visionary imagination. The "mind-forg'd manacles" he assailed were not simply the fetters of social oppression. They were that. But they were far more. Blake's attack struck through the "dark Satanic mills" at Newton, at Locke, at Bacon. 

Blake is objecting to the literalism of the Newtonian mindset. He would have us see multiple significances in everything.

Blake's Newton, 1795 (Personification of Man Limited by Reason):

From the Blake Dictionary:
Single vision is not properly "vision" at all: it is seeing with the physical eye only the facts before it. It "leads you to Believe a Lie | When you see with, not thro' the Eye" (EG d:105).

Twofold vision is seeing "through" the eye: it is the perception of the human values in all things. Then the thistle in the path reveals a discouraging old man (To Butts, 22 Nov 1802, 23-30), or the rising sun "an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy | the Lord God Almighty! 2 (J, K 617). Threefold vision "in soft Beulah's night", the creative state, where thought appears in emotional form. Fourfold Vision: "my supreme delight", is the mystical ecstasy, such as the one Blake has just been describing to Butts.

"Blake wrote "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death." Newton's theory of optics was especially offensive to Blake, who made a clear distinction between the vision of the "vegetative eye" and spiritual vision. The deistic view of God as a distant creator who played no role in daily affairs was anathema to Blake, who claimed to regularly experience visions of a spiritual nature. He contrasts his "four-fold vision" to the "single vision" of Newton, whose "natural religion" of scientific materialism he characterized as sterile."

Eduardo Paolozzi's Newton's Sleep:

wiki: "The print was intended by Blake to criticise Newton's profane knowledge, usurping the sacred knowledge and power of the creator Urizen, with the scientist turning away from nature to focus on his books."

"It can be interpreted as symbolising a confluence of the two cultures, the arts and the sciences, and illustrating how Newton changed our view of the world to one determined by mathematical laws. The sculpture makes the body resemble a mechanical object, joined with bolts at the shoulders, elbows, knees and ankles. The sculptures shows the visible seams of Paolozzi's technique of dividing his model and reassembling the pieces, for example on the head."

Rozak: Blake's effort was to redesign the mindscape of an alienated culture, to return his society to spiritual realities that had vanished from its consciousness. 

Ilya Prigogine's Order out of Chaos:

Twofold vision is the ability to see an unfallen world as well as a fallen one.

Blake's many-eyed seraphs:

Argus Panoptes

"Mercury, Argus and Io" by Bernardino Pinturicchio, 1492

Argus or Argos Panoptes (Ancient Greek: Ἄργος Πανόπτης, "All-seeing Argos") is a many-eyed giant in Greek mythology. Known for his perpetual vigilance, he served the goddess Hera as a watchman. His most famous task was guarding Io, a priestess of Hera, whom Zeus had transformed into a heifer. Argus's constant watch, with some of his eyes always open, made him a formidable guardian.

" And set a watcher upon her, great and strong Argus, who with four eyes looks every way. And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always."

According to Ovid, Argus had a hundred eyes. Hera had Argus' hundred eyes preserved forever in a peacock's tail so as to immortalise her faithful watchman. In another version, Hera transformed the whole of Argus into a peacock.

 Hera's defining task for Argus was to guard the white heifer Io from Zeus, who was attracted to her, keeping her chained to the sacred olive tree at the Argive Heraion. She required someone who had at least a hundred eyes spread out, always watching in all directions, someone who would stay awake despite being asleep. Argos was meant to be the perfect guardian.

She charged him to "Tether this cow safely to an olive-tree at Nemea". Hera knew that the heifer was in reality Io, one of the many nymphs Zeus was coupling with to establish a new order. To free Io, Zeus had Argus slain by Hermes. The messenger of the Olympian gods, disguised as a shepherd, first put all of Argus' eyes asleep with spoken charms, then slew him. Some versions say that Hermes used his wand to close Argus' eyes permanently, while other versions say that Hermes simply hurled a stone at Argus. Either way, Argus' death was the first stain of bloodshed among the new generation of gods.

CooL: Argus Panoptes is referenced in the scientific names of at least eight animals, each of which bears a pattern of eye spots: reptiles Cnemaspis argus, Eremias argus, Sibon argus, Sphaerodactylus argus, and the Argus monitor Varanus panoptes; the pheasant Argusianus argus; the fish Cephalopholis argus and the cowry Arestorides argus.

Umberto Eco's The Form of Disorder:

Eco’s text “La forma del disordine” closed the 1962 annual issue of Almanacco Bompiani, dedicated to the application of computers to “moral sciences and literature,” as specified by the issue’s title. Eco’s contribution addressed the impact of information science and computer programming on the art.

Eco Translated by Britt Eversole:
"Enter into this finite and limitless space curve. And now try to look away, to rest your gaze on a single detail. You will no longer succeed; you will be swept into the dance of the provisional and the relative; you will accumulate information that does not correlate
to a singular meaning but to the totality of possible meanings; you will not receive a message but the possibility of many co-present messages.

And you will no longer find reassuring coordinates that show you the high and the low, the right and the left. The cosmos explodes, expands, expands . . . and where will it come to an end?

The observer of the renaissance perspective was a good Cyclops who put his only eye up to the slot of a magic box in which he saw the world from the only point of view possible. The man of Munari is forced to have a thousand eyes on the nose, the neck, the shoulders, the fingers and the buttocks. And thus he turns restless in a world that bombards him with stimuli assaulting him from all sides.

Through the programmatic wisdom of the exact sciences an unquiet dweller of an expanding universe reveals himself.

I am not saying that this is a beautiful history. It is History."

"many-eyed" images from the essay in the Almanacco Bompiani:

Dragonfly-Eye: Online Library & Image Bank = https://www.dragonfly-eye.online/

"A reading is prepared with a planetarium projection of material that makes up a learning situation. Words are brought to images, and images to words by counter-statements. A dialogical reading allows for meaningful encounters, engaging a participatory, everyday conception of knowledge attempting to relate texts to more aspects of experience."

The Cell, 1958:

Dieter Rot stamp language: