Blake's "To see a world in a grain of sand"

"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."

Lately I have been reading the legendary Chinese painter Feng Zikai's essays. I was touched and moved deeply by a piece entitled "Gradually", and the fact that Feng quoted Blake's lines even lifted the meaning and message beyond the mundane level, in a sense that matters on Earth are capable to get rid of the confinement of chronology or parameters of any kind, notwithstanding the fact that these matters are constantly imposed meanings and standards of human knowledge.

A grain of sand might be a minute detail to the human eyes, and in the relative sense a world is far too vast, far too difficult to conduct any thorough expedition upon. Eternity and an hour, infinity and the palm; these are juxtapositions, stark contrasts, two ends of a spectrum, just as the acidic and the alkaline, black and white, that no one would equate one another. Yet Blake did it, through a philosophical way. To say an object is minuscule and minute is as if negating its capacity to carry a vast number of details in the ordinary. However human standards are not the absolute standard that dictate the world. Forms of beings can vary, and standards are relative. Imagine bearing the eye of an ant, a grain of sand may truly be huge boulder that carries the most fatal power to bring its life to a halt; imagine bearing the eye of a bee or butterfly, wild flower must be a heaven full of vividness, fertility, as a cornucopia of abundance, harvest, fruitfulness. Human eyes are such a constraint to our own imagination; seeing shall never be equated to believing. One can never imagine the significance behind minute details in the world because he can never stretch his sight beyond the magnification of his own reception. Thus the state of being of the world is never absolute, rather it is arbitrary, inconsistent, subject and relative.

If one has the honourable bravery to try his own eyes and imagination, to break through the human pre-existing and congenital imposition of barrier bestowed by nature, he would have the capability to see through the lens of Blake. I was very astounded by the utter resemblance of the appearance of a brain cell and the universe. As an absolute result one must have a slight imagination of the possibility of himself actually residing in the brain cell of another extremely enormous being. This thought is not without its temptation; it leads us to a spiral of queer thoughts: are we not the puppets of the enormous being's imaginative faculty? Are we not what it envisages in secret? Are we not then, the very minute details of this enormous being's fanciful world, that formed his great mind of inexhaustible possibilities and can-do's? The ever smallest and insignificant being on Earth forever bears the quality of endless possession of microscopic details, and the microscopic details are forever capable of nanoscopic details. It is as though William Blake is the M. C. Escher of the poetic field; he envisages the impossible as the possible, converses the dead end into a continuing flow of river, exhausting any meaning in the world in order to find it inexhaustible. 

The relativity of time is even a more tempting and romantic idea. The randomness and arbitrariness of happenings would seem to empower an hour, a mere hour, and transform it into an important moment in history. Irreversible is the nature of time. Once a happening occurs in a however small frame of time, it is eternity. It is not only the hour can be eternity, it is as well the minute or the second. In an hour it indeed lives a million of possibilities. In the most romantic love story a young and attractive girl offers a kiss to the boy, and that moment, sets an equation to infinity and eternity. An outsider can never fathom what complex emotions are lingering in between that second of eternal happening, but can only tell that it is a truth that is unable to be turned back and negated. In the most tragic story a bomb explodes in the most crowded plaza in town, murdering thousands of beloved ones of hundreds of warm homes. That moment of fatal entailment would move the victims eternally, and although the casualties happen in a mere second, the impact is however vast and far-reaching; hundreds of thousands of variety of feelings and sentiments are passing to and fro between individuals. People's lives are forever ruined. Families collapse. Now this is the substantiality of having eternity in a second or an hour. 

A moment to remember, a moment to destroy, a moment that is almanacked on to the book of history, multiplied by billions of these books possessed by everyone in the world - that is the nature of eternity, and potentially, it is possible to make a grasp onto, because however tiny a detail is, it is capable of being destructive, powerful, dynamic, dramatic... as a cornucopia, the symbol of abundance.