Saturday, May 16, 2009

Darwin and Blake?




The Origin is a stunning piece of writing. Today I stumbled across this gem:

"The structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger's body. But in the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the elements of air and water. Yet the advantage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relation to the land being already thickly clothed by other plants; so that the seeds may be widely distributed and fall on unoccupied ground. In the water-beetle, the structure of its legs, so well adapted for diving, allows it to compete with other aquatic insects, to hunt for its own prey, and to escape serving as prey to other animals." Darwin pg. 72

Recently I saw Nancy Armstrong of Duke University give a talk on Darwin. In her lecture Armstrong talked about the crisis Darwin's work brought to the notion of the individual for European culture. Scattering The Origin of Species are all sorts of passages that show that Darwin's thinking has some strange resonance with the poet William Blake. Both men, in quite different ways, realized that idealized notions of the self had very little to do with reality. On this note compare Blake's The Book of Thel with the passage above.

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