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IN LOVE WITH THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME
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The late eighteenth century, as a result, became a time which delighted in fads, fashion and what we would now call conspicuous consumption. For an artist with no interest in changeable fashion and a desire to represent the eternal, Blake had been born at the wrong time.
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Blake was never going to have his head turned by the new and contemporary. Eternity was profoundly important to him, and the concept runs through his work. The opening of ‘Auguries of Innocence’, for example, represents some of his best-known lines:
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
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Blake’s concept of eternity sits at the heart of his Albion mythology and was central to his understanding of the universe. He often uses the word as you might expect a Christian to use the word heaven, as some blissful realm different to the material world. But while heaven is distant, Blake’s eternity is always just within reach, simultaneously within and without and potentially available to all. In his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, Blake had written that Swedenborg’s argument was ‘False’ on the grounds that ‘if a thing loves it is infinite’. After a moment’s reflection, he then added, ‘Perhaps we only differ in the meaning of the words Infinite & Eternal.’ Eternity is a word that can be used in ways that are only loosely defined, and he recognised that his understanding of the word may be different to how others used it. So what, exactly, was Blake talking about when he used the word ‘Eternity’?
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One common definition of eternity is that it refers to an infinite period of time. Understood in this way, eternity is simply time without end. This definition does not fit well with modern cosmology, however. This claims that time did not exist before the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, and that time may also end at some far-off future moment if the universe does indeed cease to exist, as some models predict. Eternity cannot refer to infinite time, therefore, because according to our current understanding of the universe there will only be a finite amount of time.
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Instead, eternity can be defined as all of time. Understood in this way, eternity is the period that contains everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. Yet for this definition of eternity to be something more than an intellectual abstraction and to describe something real, it is necessary for all of time to actually exist. If Blake’s eternity is a meaningful concept, in other words, then the future and the past need to be as real as the present. They need to be physical things, and not just a thought experiment.
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During Blake’s time, eternity was more of a religious or spiritual idea than a scientific one. As far as eighteenth-century science was concerned, the past no longer existed and the future was yet to happen. Eternity was little more than a metaphor. In the twenty-first century, however, this is no longer the case. This aspect of Blake’s idiosyncratic cosmology is supported by the work of Albert Einstein.
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In his special theory of relativity, Einstein showed that time passes at different rates in different circumstances. As hard to accept as this may be, the passing of time is changed by increases in speed and gravity. As a result, there are circumstances in which an event has not yet happened from the perspective of one observer, but which has already occurred from the perspective of someone else. This raises the question of how it is possible to say that something has happened, given that this may be true in some circumstances but false in others. According to Einstein, the answer is that we cannot. After relativity, the idea of ‘now’ became something that could not be satisfactorily defined.
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This led to the cosmological theory known as the ‘block universe’. In a block universe all of time, including that which appears to us to be the past and the future, exists together, as one large ‘block’ of four-dimensional spacetime. Events that occur within the block universe are defined by the four dimensions of breadth, width, height and duration. The block universe solves the problems of defining ‘now’ by making the concept irrelevant. In a block universe, the passing of time is little more than an illusion. Every event exists always, regardless of whether it happened hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years in the future. Every first kiss and every last word is like an exhibit preserved in a museum that only beings with a godlike perspective can explore.
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Blake displays a similar understanding about the illusion of passing time in Jerusalem, where he writes that, ‘I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once.’ He also writes:
And all that has existed in the space of six thousand years:
Permanent, ¬ lost not lost nor vanishd, &every little act,
Word, work, &wish, that has existed, all remaining still
These are descriptions of eternity that perfectly describe Einstein’s block universe.
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Belief in the literal existence of a block universe is called eternalism. The implications of eternalism are complex and, to most people, extremely disturbing. If the future already exists and cannot be changed, then there can be no free will. Your future actions were fixed before you are even born. This idea offends our sense of morality and justice, and reduces any feelings of pride and accomplishment we may have about our achievements into little more than vanity. How can we strive to prove ourselves if our life’s work was going to happen regardless? And likewise, how can we condemn Adolf Hitler or Judas Iscariot if the Holocaust and the betrayal of Jesus were always going to occur, and indeed already existed long before Hitler and Judas were born? If it was physically impossible for Hitler or Judas to act differently, how can we judge and blame?
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From the perspective of eternalism our legal system is absurd, because it assumes the existence of free will when it judges those accused of crimes. But in an eternalist universe there is no free will, so we are effectively condemning people for the crime of existing. In a similar way, victims of abuse were preordained to suffer. Their abuse was destined to occur even before life appeared on earth, or the solar system formed. You can debate at length whether this makes the universe immoral or amoral, but it’s clear that such a universe is a hard one to love.
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Supporters of eternalism respond to these issues in two ways. The first is to remind us that just because something is unappealing doesn’t mean that it can’t also be true. There is no guarantee that our universe will be something that we like. There is no reason why our own moral perspectives and sense of justice should coincide with the construction and behaviour of the entire universe.
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The second response is to dismiss the problem on the grounds that, in terms of how we live our lives on a moment-to-moment basis, it doesn’t really matter. Even if our sense of free will is nothing but an illusion, it is a consistent and convincing illusion and it is easy enough to go through life acting as if it was real.
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The greatest literary exploration of the concept of eternalism is the epic, Blake-inspired novel Jerusalem by Alan Moore, which includes a conversation about the true nature of reality between the eighteenth-century nonconformist minister Philip Doddridge and an angel. ‘Might I ask if, anywhere in this ingenious arrangement, any of us ever truly had Free Will?’ Doddridge asks the angel. The angel somewhat apologetically tells him that nobody had. ‘After a well-timed pause as if before the punch line of a joke’, the angel replies with a further question: ‘Did you miss it?’
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This exchange is overheard by a character called Bill, who understands the reason for the laughter triggered by the angel’s question: ‘[Bill] got the gag. In some ways, it was almost comforting, the notion that whatever you did or accomplished, you were in the end only an actor running through a masterfully scripted drama. You just didn’t know it at the time, and thought you were extemporising. It was sort of comical, Bill saw that now, but he still found some solace in the thought that in a predetermined world, there was no point at all in fretting over anything, nor any purpose to regret.’ Moore’s exploration of eternalism has led to him offering the following advice: ‘Never do anything that you can’t live with for eternity.’ Of course, it’s not like you have any choice in the matter.
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Despite these arguments, many people reject the idea of a block universe on principle and have attempted to find a different model of the universe, which, they hope, will work with relativity but also turn out to be more appealing. One such model is the ‘growing block universe’ theory of time. This claims that both the past and the present exist, in a similar way to the block universe proposed by eternalists, but that the future does not. The future remains ours to invent, and thus free will is back in the picture, along with morality and justice.
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In this model, the block universe is said to be continually growing as time passes, like a tree trunk expanding and adding more rings as the years pass. The past is continually present, which accounts for the temporal anomalies reported by the theory of relativity, but the future has yet to appear and, as such, it is not determined. The idea was first proposed in 1923 by the English philosopher C. D. Broad, who wrote that: ‘It will be observed that such a theory as this accepts the reality of the present and the past, but holds that the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.’
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Broad’s growing block universe is intuitively closer to our common-sense understanding of the world than the eternalist approach, but it appeals more to philosophers than it does to scientists. It still leaves the knotty problem of being unable to say if the current moment is actually ‘now’, as the ever-preserved past will feel as much like ‘now’ as the actual present moment. This uncertainty around the concept of ‘now’ makes definitive statements about the non-existence of the future somewhat problematic. From a scientific perspective, the existence of the future is not any weirder than the existence of the past, and to have one but not the other requires explaining.
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The growing block universe model has never shaken off the suspicion that, ultimately, it’s a bit of a fudge based on wishful thinking. That said, it is a model that fits well with the Gothic sensibilities that Blake shared. In Gothic art, the past is never really gone. It remains as an eternal, permanent presence which weighs on the present moment, and its cold, ominous atmosphere teases the idea that what appears to be ‘now’ may also be an undead past, unaware that its time has gone.
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It could be argued that if the future exists but can in no way affect the past or the present then it is ultimately irrelevant. Its existence or non-existence makes no difference. But if we find evidence that the future does influence the past, then we have to take seriously the idea that the future genuinely already exists. In the counterintuitive world of quantum mechanics, the idea that the future influences the past is still controversial, but it has its supporters.
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One of the most bewildering aspects of quantum mechanics is what Einstein memorably called ‘spooky action at a distance’, a phrase he used to describe a situation in which two separate particles have properties that are linked and which are not independent of each other. Physicists call this process entanglement, and it is one of the wildest and most counterintuitive descriptions of reality that we have.
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Imagine a pair of adult twins. Now imagine that they are heading out to a polling booth to vote in an election where there is a left-wing and a right-wing candidate. Both twins are undecided about who to vote for. On the way, however, one twin decides to vote for the left-wing candidate. Now imagine that, because he made this decision, at that exact same moment without there seeming to be any communication between them, the other twin is compelled to vote for the right-wing candidate. Alternatively, if the first twin had decided to vote for the right-wing candidate, then the other would have immediately chosen the left-wing one. This would be the case even if the twins lived in different parts of the country. It would even be the case if they lived on opposite sides of the universe.
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For a rationally minded scientist, this situation is horrible. How can one decision suddenly create a separate decision that is made a great distance away, with seemingly no communication between the two? There seems to be no conceivable possible mechanism which could cause this to happen. Unfortunately for rationally minded scientists, experimental physicists have shown time and time again that this is exactly how two entangled particles behave.
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Entanglement was a problem for Einstein, because it contradicted his work which showed that the idea of events occurring simultaneously a great distance apart was meaningless. It also seemed to suggest that information was travelling between the two particles faster than the speed of light, by some currently unimaginable process. None of this seemed in any way likely, or indeed possible. Entanglement contradicted so many laws of physics that there were many scientists who, like Einstein, wanted to reject it outright. And yet, experiment after experiment on entangled particles kept showing that it exists. If you affect one of a pair of entangled particles by measuring it in some way that fixes its properties, then the properties of the particle’s twin instantly become fixed also, even if the two particles had been separated by countless thousands of miles.
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There are many ways to interpret results of experiments like this, but all of them seem fantastical, and none are universally liked. To give an example, one possible interpretation is that the particles aren’t separated at all because space is an illusion – it doesn’t physically exist. The two particles, therefore, are not really apart from each other. While this idea explains the observed phenomena, you can appreciate how hard it is for all but the most theoretical of scientists to get behind such notions.
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This is where the idea that events in the future can affect things in the past comes in. If we base our interpretation of entanglement on this idea, we find that there is no ‘spooky action at a distance’ occurring. Under this interpretation, instead of instantaneous communication occurring across space as if by magic, measuring one particle causes the change in the other to occur in the past, at the moment they were entangled.
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This ‘retrocausality’, as scientists call it, is as extreme as the other interpretations of entanglement, but it doesn’t break quite as many laws. It fits well with the theory of relativity because it has no need for simultaneous separate events. It also gets rid of any suggestion of faster-than-light communication occurring through some process that is currently unimagined and seemingly unimaginable. The idea that the future already exists is shocking, of course, but this explanation for entanglement is otherwise eminently neat and sensible. Given how horrible other explanations are, you can understand why it had supporters.
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The idea that the future exists and has the ability to affect the past is far from widely accepted among the scientific community, but it continues to linger, simultaneously absurd and implausible yet also temptingly neat and logical. If the Eternity that Blake spoke of is the simultaneous existence of all of time, then from a modern scientific perspective it can’t be ruled out yet.
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For all that we can find passages in Blake’s work that support the idea of a block universe, there are other passages that contradict this model. He repeatedly argued against the idea that the future was already fixed. In his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Providence, for example, Blake marked multiple passages that showed signs of Swedenborg’s acceptance of predetermination, to illustrate how he was in error. In the margins of chapter 14, Blake wrote: ‘Predestination after this Life is more Abominable than Calvins [belief that those chosen as God’s elect are predetermined] & Swedenborg is Such a Spiritual Predestinarian.’ Blake’s rejection of predeterminism seems to come from an understanding that the four-dimensional block universe it implies is a fixed, static thing, and that this is entirely at odds with his view of the cosmos as a place of energy and delight.
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There is another definition of eternity, however, other than all of time. This eternity is a state of timelessness, somewhere beyond the time-based real world. In this definition, there is no past or future, so the idea of ‘all of time’ becomes meaningless. Instead, there is just the present moment which, being free from the passing of time, exists as an eternal now. This definition is more common in religious and mystical circles,
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an individual’s past and future, which are a source of pain and anxiety, are only illusions created by their minds.
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remaining focused on the present is the key to peace and happiness,
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A similar sense of timelessness was experienced by the American neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, after she suffered a serious stroke in December 1996. This was caused by a major haemorrhage in the left side of her brain, which left her initially unable to speak, read, write, walk or remember her past. With the loss of what she calls ‘left brain’ functions – our capacity for logical, egocentric, analytical, and linguistic thought – she experienced the world through her remaining ‘right brain’ functionality. This was more emotional, holistic, spontaneous and spatially aware. The right brain, she wrote after her recovery, ‘thinks in pictures and learns kinaesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then explodes into this enormous collage of what the present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like […] in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.’ This is a profoundly Blakean image.
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The result of the loss of her left brain was an experience of profound joy and a different relationship with time. ‘The present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one,’ she wrote. This contrasts with the world as it is experienced by the left brain. ‘By organizing details in a linear and methodical configuration, our left brain manifests the concept of time whereby our moments are divided into past, present and future,’ she explained.
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Bolte Taylor used a ‘bicameral’ model to describe the brain, in which the left and right hemispheres are said to work in fundamentally different ways. This model is less fashionable among neurologists now – the brain is far more complex than this neat, ‘broad strokes’ model suggests, and individual brains develop in different ways. If we are less concerned with how these functions map onto the physical brain, however, the model still proves to be a useful tool. The systematic and rational left hemisphere is what Blake called Urizen. The other three zoas are the domain of the right hemisphere, which is creative, emotional and in touch with the body. Bolte Taylor’s account of losing her left hemisphere reveals the extent to which Urizen has become dominant and works to drown out the other aspects of our mind, or even attempts to convince us that they are not real. This Urizenic domination is what Blake sees as the Fall of man and the cause of the sleep of Albion. It is what cuts us off from Blake’s divine spirit, which is the deep holistic ‘right brain’ bliss that Tolle and Bolte Taylor experienced after trauma to their left hemisphere or sense of ego. If they are to be believed, Blake may be right when he says this divine spirit will return when Urizen is tamed and the zoas brought back into balance.
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The experiences of Tolle and Bolte Taylor were extreme, but a more manageable version is familiar to practitioners of meditation, who often report entering a state of timelessness. Transcendental meditation, for example, is like microdosing Tolle’s epiphany in small, manageable daily doses that leave you energised and productive, and less likely to spend years grinning on park benches. Other forms of meditation attempt to quiet the ever-chattering dialogue of the mind through different methods, but the aim is always for the meditator to quiet the chattering ‘left brain’ voice of Urizen and sink into a deep state of ‘right brain’ consciousness, which has the quality of timelessness. This type of awareness is always present, but the domineering left brain drowns it out and leaves us blind to it. It is like when we see words printed on a page of a book. We are drawn to those words in order to lose ourselves in what they are telling us. It is only if the words dissolve away to nothing that we become aware of the paper.
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The idea of timelessness is not just a product of mystical thinking, however. The notion of a world without time has also been gaining in prominence scientifically. Its most vocal supporter is the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, known both for his poetically readable physics books and his work on quantum gravity.
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As Rovelli notes, one of the strangest things about time is that, at a fundamental level, there doesn’t seem to be any. In the equations that describe how the basic building blocks of the universe behave, a variable for time is absent. If it were somehow possible to film quantum events, the footage would make just as much sense played forwards as it would backwards, to the extent that it would not be possible to work out whether the film had been reversed. On a quantum level, events occur relative to each other, rather than relative to an external sense of the passing of time. As Rovelli explains: ‘The absence of time does not mean, therefore, that everything is frozen and unmoving. It means that the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a timeline, is not measured by a gigantic tick-tocking. It does not even form a four-dimensional geometry. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. The world is more like Naples than Singapore.’
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There is only one fundamental physical process which requires the presence of time, Rovelli notes. That process is entropy, the tendency of complicated things to fall apart. Its role in physics is defined by the second law of thermodynamics which states that, in an enclosed system, entropy will increase over time. Importantly, this process is irreversible. If you filmed a snowman melting it would be easy to tell if that footage had been reversed, because puddles of water don’t spontaneously form into snowmen. A snowman melting into a puddle requires the presence of time passing in one specific direction, in the way that a quantum event does not.
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With entropy, unlikely combinations of particles give way, over time, to a more random, jumbled combination of particles. But, as Rovelli points out, there is a problem here. Who gets to say when a combination of particles is unlikely? Who gets to judge if the position of particles in a system forms an intricate pattern that will be prone to entropy? If you looked at a sealed container of a number of gas molecules and found that those molecules were positioned in such a way that they spelt out your name, you would see this as a highly unnatural and unlikely distribution pattern. In technical terms, you would say that it possessed a low level of entropy. And yet, mathematically, every unique pattern of particle distribution is equally unlikely. What is it, other than the opinion of the observer, that marks this particular distribution out as different?
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As Rovelli sees it, defining whether a system is in a high entropy state is very often a subjective judgement call. It requires the presence of a conscious observer, who can declare that one pattern of particles is unlikely and another is not. Entropy, then, is the one physical process that brings the arrow of time into the world, and that process relies on conscious awareness. Or, in other words, time is created by the mind. As Rovelli writes, ‘The initial low entropy of the universe, and hence the arrow of time, may be more down to us than to the universe itself.’ Or, more poetically: ‘Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us?’
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Blake also describes time as being created by the conscious imagination. In The Book of Los, Blake describes how Los’s descent from the Eternal realm creates time itself:
Falling, falling! Los fell &fell
Sunk precipitant heavy down down
Time on times, night on night, day on day
Truth has bounds. Error none: falling, falling:
Years on years, and ages on ages
Still he fell thro’ the void, still a void
Found for falling day &night without end.
For tho’ day or night was not; their spaces
Were measured by his incessant whirls
In the horrid vacuity bottomless.
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In Blake’s mythology it is Los, the personification of imagination, that creates time, just as it is his emanation Enitharmon who creates space. In this way, it is imagination, and not the deluded rational Urizen, who is the ultimate creator of what Blake called, in the title of an 1821 watercolour, The Sea of Time and Space, or the earthly world we inhabit.
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Perhaps this subject only seems difficult because we have yet to adequately grasp what time is. As Rovelli notes, ‘If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time.’
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The word ‘eternity’, it seems, is a contrary. It contains two opposing definitions: all of time exists, and only the present moment is real. The past, present and future are a static, deterministic, unchanging universe or, alternatively, there is only the present moment, and it exists as an ever-changing process rather than as a solid thing.
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As with the rest of Blake’s contraries, he wasn’t interested in choosing one and dismissing the other. He was interested in the tension and dynamics introduced by these opposing ideas, because those dynamics were the engines that powered the universe. What is produced by the interplay of two contrasting models of time is richer and more interesting than if only one of them was presented as valid and the other dismissed. Blake always allowed room for two seemingly contradictory positions to be revealed as different aspects of a larger truth.
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In Blake’s work, you can find evidence for both perspectives. As we’ve seen, in Jerusalem he wrote that ‘I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once’, and he describes the fall, sleep, and eventual awakening of Albion as fixed events in linear time. Yet he disagreed with Swedenborg about predestination, believing instead that the future was not fixed and that we had free will and responsibility for our choices and actions. The importance he places on energy and creation only makes sense in this context. Rovelli’s idea that time is not an innate quality of physics, but emerges through the active engagement of human observation, fits Blake’s work well, most obviously in the labour of Los, his personification of the imagination.
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For Blake, the definition of eternity seems dependent on whether you are inside the human-scale universe looking out, or outside looking in. From outside the present moment, eternity is all of time, and it exists. From inside, in contrast, there is no time but a permanent moment of holistic peace, as Bolte Taylor discovered after her stroke. The reason we are rarely consciously aware of this timeless moment is because the Urizen-like default mode network in our minds has constructed a narrative called the self, a useful and practical illusion we have come to identify with. Being a story, this self needs to believe in the past and future, which fools us into experiencing Einstein’s ‘stubbornly persistent illusion’ of the passing of time.
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Our two contrary definitions of eternity, it’s worth noting, closely match how the two hemispheres of the brain perceive the world. The brain functions associated with the left hemisphere are abstracting, systematic and rational, and give rise to language and the perception of time as linear. This is the controlling, egocentric domain of Urizen, which believes itself to be the creator god of the ordered, prison-like block universe. The right hemisphere, in contrast, only perceives the present moment, and is focused on sensation, emotion and creativity. This is the domain of Tharmas, Luvah and Urthona, the remaining three zoas who are usually drowned out by attention-seeking Urizen. Our two contrasting models of eternity, then, are an illustration of how differently the two hemispheres function. They are also the exact same models you would expect the two hemispheres to create, given that we perceive the external world in our own image. Once again, we are reminded that we live inside our models, and rely on them to make sense of the otherwise unknowable external world.
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An intriguing remark Blake made in the margin of his copy of Swedenborg’s Divine Providence reads: ‘Devils & Angels are Predestinated.’ This suggests that the perspective of spiritual creatures is like Einstein’s block universe, in which all of time exists. For all that Blake criticised Swedenborg for believing in predestination, he also saw angels and devils as trapped in an unchanging Eternity devoid of free will. But Blake’s phrase suggests that it is only these higher spiritual creatures that this applies to. For human beings, it is another story.
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Angels and devils, as Blake saw them, were creations of the human mind. As hierarchical inhabitants of an ordered cosmos, they were the invention of Urizen. This makes sense, because the egocentric Urizen understands himself to be an isolated individual, separate from the rest of the cosmos, and the universe can only be perceived as constricting when you see yourself as separate from it. You cannot be a prisoner if you are also the prison.
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From this perspective, to perceive the timeless present moment is to escape from the limiting horror of the block universe. It is here in the right hemisphere’s model of time that we may find Bolte Taylor’s and Tolle’s conscious experience of pure bliss and joy. All we need to do to achieve this liberation, Blake tells us, is to balance the zoas so that Urizen no longer dominates. Human consciousness can experience liberty while the trapped, static eternal angels and demons of the block universe can only look on, amazed. Perhaps this is why, as Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ How the angels must envy us.