William Blake warned his contemporaries against the dangers of the "single vision," of the reductive worldview, originated in "Newton's sleep." While the sleep of Reason yielded monsters, Newton's sleep brought forth his natural philosophy. This would eventually become, for almost three centuries, the unanimously accepted physical theory of the movement of bodies, from corpuscles to planets, and it would provide the mechanistic framework for understanding and explaining practically any issue in terms of forces and accelerations. However, the triumphant march of the rational mechanics would not proceed unchallenged. Soon, Newton's sleep would awaken Blake's inspiration, and he would reclaim the primacy of the Poetic principle over the rational one:

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again

(William Blake, There is No Natural Religion , b)

Blake goes straight to the point and addresses the very core of Newton's approach, the concepts of absolute space and time. He is little inclined to accept the idea of a pre-existent "void," wherein the corpuscles dance blindly under the command of reciprocally exerted forces. This would be nothing else than a void immense, wild, dark & deep / Where nothing was: nature's wide womb (William Blake, The Book of Urizen, pl. 4, II. 16-17).

He claims that voids and absolute space exist only for those who do not fill them with plenitude. Moreover, Blake warns that failure of filling up the void results in the void filling us, thus undermining the unity of our interiority and fragmenting our perception and understanding onto the fallen categories of Newtonian time and space. His fundamental intuition is that space, as well as time, are not absolute, pre-existent categories, but are generated by the human poetical drive:

The Four Living Creatures
[...]
[...] conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination,

(William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 98, 24-32).

Some say Newton's critiques in the Prophetic Books and especially in Milton are anticipatory of the insights set forth by relativity physics concerning the space/time continuum and other matters in the latter physics' correction of the Newtonian model. I think Blake's intuition moves fast past all the various post-Newtonian metric spaces -- relativistic or not -- and lands directly in cyberspace.

The Web of Knowledge

Cyberspace complies with Blake's vision of space and time. It does not exist prior to the objects it contains (the "places" which combine space and time); it expands with each site created by the wonders Divine of Human Imagination. Cyberspace is a compact space, without voids, since it is made up solely of interconnected intellectual constructs. Its immensity is filled with thoughts. Blake gives a strikingly detailed account of this space, which he imagines structured as a "net." Here is his account, which strongly suggests the World Wide Web:

7. Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all
The tormented element stretch'd
From the sorrows of Urizens soul
And the Web is a Female in embrio
None could break the Web, no wings of fire.

8. So twisted the cords, & so knotted
The meshes: twisted like to the human brain

9. And all call'd it, The Net of Religion

(William Blake, Book of Urizen, pl. 25, 15-22).

The above poetic account Blake gives of the net is an in-depth metaphorical insight into the structure of cyberspace. The web, as a distributed network, remains functional and is still able to provide ample information, even supposing some of its sites undergo changes, are demolished or become inaccessible. Consequently, none could break the Web, no wings of fire. The intricacy of the web (so twisted the cords, & so knotted the meshes) makes it similar to the human brain, which relates to the humankind, not to the individual. Indeed, the web may be viewed as the actualization of Karl Popper's concept of "The Third World," that is the body of objective knowledge that can eventually be used as a blueprint for reconstructing human civilization and culture. According to Popper, this information is continuously filtered out by tests, which attempt to prove its falsehood, so that only the reliable knowledge, which has survived the tests, is preserved. This is perfectly consistent with Blake's statement that Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falshood continually (William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 55, 65.)

Blake is by no means enthusiastic about the virtues of the web. He sees it dark and cold, stretch'd from the sorrows of Urizens soul. Urizen is the personification of Reason, which governed the scientific revolution of the XVIth Century. Reason's soul is sorrowful because devoid of the impetus of poetical inspiration, therefore the web (of knowledge) it brings forth is dark and cold. Blake thinks it is the artist's duty to redeem the web and to transform it into an eternal delight. To this end, he will use multimedia as his main tool.

The Art of Multimedia

The fact that William Blake was one of the first multimedia artists is highly meaningful. He was not just an illustrator of his works, a painter that doubled the poet. Ut pictura poesis could not have been his motto, for he did not suggest analogies between the narrative and the figurative, nor did he try to express the same meaning by two rival, independent discourses: linguistic and visual. He blended the text and the image into one engraved plate, and treated paradoxically the latter as a message and the first as an icon. He actually engraved the text itself, which implied the drudgery of drawing it on copper as if seen in a mirror, only in order to integrate better the two media into an intricate and unitary combination. As a matter of fact, this minute precision is not surprising for a person who thinks Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars / And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power (William Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 55, 62-63).

The plates, which compose Blake's works, should not be either "read" sequentially, or contemplated as independent pictures. They have to be explored by successive choices, along various paths, following a procedure not very different from the one a cybernaut uses when visiting a site on the Web. The pages of a site may be unfolded in multiple sequences; the links from one multimedia component to another can be activated at will. The exploration of a site (that is, of a spatial/temporal "place") offers the possibility to connect the real time of the visitor's live experience with the compressed, spatially encapsulated time of the web-site development. Blake uses a striking metaphor for expressing this encounter, the vortex.

The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its
Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity.
Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
[...]
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent.

(William Blake, Milton, pl. 15, 21-27).

The art of multimedia humanize the "dark and cold" net of cyberspace by populating it with "vortexes" that provide opportunities for meaningful, sometimes admirable, encounters. The occurrences of such encounters are the magic events of cyberspace.

Copyright © 2000 Adrian Mihalache All Rights Reserved

Adrian N. Mihalache is a professor at the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania. Presently, he is a Fulbright Scholar at Western Michigan University, Department of Anthropology where, together with Professor Arthur Helweg, he is working on the book "Ethnology of Cyberspace."

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