thorhammer
We are told that this is Isaac Newton, here depicted at the bottom of the “sea of illusory materialism”.
The card is unsettlingly ambivalent. On one hand, Newton is shown brightly illuminated, pushing back the darkness by the power of his mind. On the other, he is inundated by shortsighted dreams, reducing his genius to mere practicality and stripping it of its spiritual connotations.
And yet his right foot is forward – he is not an evil man . . . merely caught in tunnel vision. His posture is not a dynamic one and I think he was not one to accept change beyond his own ken. He may be a control freak.
In looking down and hunching over as he does, he has forsaken his inborn watchful instincts. The darkness is detail – he struggles for perspective and divorces his thoughts and conclusions from consequence. His science is carried out in a vacuum, which mirrors his own heart, claimed neither by evil nor good. But in releasing his discoveries, he relinquishes the lack of consequence and frees the power of his thought, second-hand, to be enslaved to evil or misguided good.
The cloak is woven on the “loom of Locke”, a reference to John Locke, a great mind of the Renaissance who is celebrated as one of the greats of modern science. Blake despised the pursuit of science for its own sake. The cloak, then, symbolises the Man covering himself with the over-zealous rationality that denies spiritual progress, magic and imagination.
\m/ Kat
The card is unsettlingly ambivalent. On one hand, Newton is shown brightly illuminated, pushing back the darkness by the power of his mind. On the other, he is inundated by shortsighted dreams, reducing his genius to mere practicality and stripping it of its spiritual connotations.
And yet his right foot is forward – he is not an evil man . . . merely caught in tunnel vision. His posture is not a dynamic one and I think he was not one to accept change beyond his own ken. He may be a control freak.
In looking down and hunching over as he does, he has forsaken his inborn watchful instincts. The darkness is detail – he struggles for perspective and divorces his thoughts and conclusions from consequence. His science is carried out in a vacuum, which mirrors his own heart, claimed neither by evil nor good. But in releasing his discoveries, he relinquishes the lack of consequence and frees the power of his thought, second-hand, to be enslaved to evil or misguided good.
The cloak is woven on the “loom of Locke”, a reference to John Locke, a great mind of the Renaissance who is celebrated as one of the greats of modern science. Blake despised the pursuit of science for its own sake. The cloak, then, symbolises the Man covering himself with the over-zealous rationality that denies spiritual progress, magic and imagination.
\m/ Kat
