20 January 2025 by Jian Zhi Qiu
Quote from Dear Su Yen pp.199-201
Dear Su Yen
I like your idea of your soul 'reviving'; I think of a plant which has been drooping from lack of water and now is beginning to grow upright and strong again.
William Blake is said to have seen things with great intensity, with an intense sense of their being. We can feel this sometimes when a stone or rock or tree may seem to have intense significance and meaning, though what that significance is we cannot explain. He believed there was a spiritual reality behind the physical reality which we see, and that the spiritual reality was in fact more real than the physical. His drawings of things express this spiritual reality rather than the physical and so, unlike some artists who may draw spiritual things in a vague mystical sort of way, his work is noted for its precision, detail and exceptional exaggerated strength.
Here is part of another poem by Blake:
Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake (1757-1827)
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.
I don't quite know what people mean by "spiritual' these days, except that I think it is something in our own minds and expresses the wonder and connectedness of things. But here are some thoughts. In most cultures there is a very early stage of religion known as “animism”; it is when people believed that every rock, stream or tree has its own spirit which might speak to you. For those people the whole world was full of magic. These ideas continued long into Christian times. It certainly made a walk in the country very exciting. This is shown in the Greek myths, although by that time people had human-like gods as well.
Coming to more abstract and human ideas, the Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates believed every person, possibly every thing, had a soul. When we are born a soul comes from some 'perfect place' where it lived happily, but then it forgets. When we see beauty or love we recognize it because it reminds our soul of that perfect place. Things in this world are imperfect, but we strive to recreate that perfection which we left behind. This is part of Plato's Theory of Ideal Forms; it had a practical application in Greek architecture where stonemasons distorted forms so that they would appear perfect, though it is possible the stonemasons had the idea before the philosophers thought of it. In Asia the minimalist Buddhist Zen gardens of Japan and China use very basic informal compositions of rocks and gravel.
At one level these are very boring, but it is possible to experience intense symbolic significance when looking at them; this is vividly described in a book called Yet Being Someone Other by Laurens Van der Post.
I know you understand something of this because you said you preferred old books, 'Because they speak to me' I liked that.