Advent, Day 6: Angel Eyes

Author’s note: This year, for the month of December, I’m posting a daily series of Advent devotionals. Most of them are only available to paid subscribers, but on Fridays they’re open to all. For access to the whole series, you can get a year’s subscription at 20% off between now and Christmas—or purchase my book and send me the receipt for free access.

Blake, The Agony in the Garden

“Art is the tree of life.”
—William Blake

He was eight years old, maybe ten. Walking the green flats of Peckham Rye, a plane of grassy earth in London. Look it up on Google Street View, swing your lidless surrogate eye around on its stalk—a martian probe possessed by a human soul. By your soul. The child William Blake stood in that spot, or somewhere near, clothed in his own flesh and blood. His own eye kept him still there, gazing at what the Machine’s eye can’t transmit: there were angels in the tree.

“Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His father heard him tell this tale and hastened to beat the lie out of him; his mother held the man back, whether or not she believed her boy. Do you?

Days or years later, a summer’s morning. “He sees the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking.” Like a blind man half-cured, his eyes smeared with a muddy paste of dirt and spit from the mouth of God, peering through a film of spirit and slime. “I see men as trees, walking”—slender clouded silhouettes in procession, dimly perceived. A murky vision of pale fire.

The stately figures Blake would etch and print as a man were of this quality: gauzy yet muscular, brooding gods and reaching souls pressed into copper and ink. Dry pigment crushed and daubed onto metal like dry dust brushed onto darkened eyes, shading in the contours of the hitherto unseen. Bone black, yellow ochre, Prussian blue. The marrow of the earth formed into letters and shapes. Eternity in outline.

No one could blame his father for swearing indignantly that he had seen only sunlight in the trees, glittering through the leaves. But if powder and metal could be vehicles of flickering bodiless thought, if the soul came sheathed in the fluids of the eye and brain, if mud and spit could make blind eyes see, then light in the trees could herald the fluttering of bright wings.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.