The only times I can pay attention to long science/history documentaries is when I’m stoned. So I here I am, rather high, watching a show on the evolution of the eyes of animals. (How I started watching this show calls for another long story). The first eyes, I learn, merely saw different shades of light, those were jellyfish, then we have crustaceans, living 500 million years ago, whose eyes are made from rock. ROCK! Mother-fucking calcite eyes! Then the show gets to vertebrates, reptiles, mammals, and finally it starts talking about mammals who are adept at night hunting; i.e. cats and tarsiers.
Now the tarsier is an exceptionally badass primate whose eyes are bigger than their brains. But I want to talk about cats, and about “eyeshine,” in Latin, “tapetum lucidum.” We all know what that is, when we see felines at night their eyes literally shine, allowing us to deduce that they have incredible night vision and are adroit nocturnal hunters. William Blake knows what I’m talking about. In his famous poem, “The Tyger,” Blake talks about the fiery eyes of the titular beast and wonders how could this animal have been created, or “what immortal hand...could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The purpose of the poem is a deeply spiritual or religious probing of the universe. The poem is not merely about a large cat, but it is about Blake’s search for a certain idea of god; an idea that I have rejected for some time now because of association with shows like this from the history channel (and Schopenhauer, and the Holocaust, but more on that later).
William Blake’s world was not populated by any kind of evolutionary scientists. Indeed, “The Tyger” was written before Darwin was even born. But Blake asks fundamental questions that we still ruminate over today, ideas discussed in both scientific spheres and religious spheres. The lines, “What the hammer? what the chain?/In what furnace was thy brain?” evoke enquiries that even now, 214 years after Blake wrote the poem, prompt biological research. People want to know what’s up with eyeballs, or, less specifically, why things are the way they are. Blake, though, was searching for a spiritual guide, or some type of god, something who could have also “made the lamb, make thee [the tiger]?” Today I am blessed (haha!) to be able to listen to men and women who, through dutiful research and the wonders of television, can give me answers to Blake’s questions. These answers, however, do not lead me to believe in an omniscient being.
Blake could also have wondered what immortal hand might have framed the symmetry of snakes, sharks and crocodiles and marsupials, whose eyes also have light reflective properties. William Blake could find (I’m assuming from the poem) no other answer as to why animals have these attributes besides the existence of a sentient creator. I want to sense the tingling of doubt in Blake due to the previously mentioned line about a lamb and the juxtaposition of a benign animal to a dangerous one. Unfortunately, the physiological variations between prey and predator do not shake Blake’s spiritual leanings. Blake (I’m getting pretty damn critical of him now) could not know that rabbits can see all 360 degrees of their environment, in contrast to hawks who have incredible binocular vision.
I don’t want to further delve into current scientific knowledge that might have swayed Blake into becoming a non-believer, but I would like to interject one of my all time favorite quotes that just popped up in my brain. Thomas Paine writes, in the beginning of Common Sense, “time makes more converts than reason.” Paine was of course talking about independence from England and not disbelief in god, but the quote fits and I flaunt it all the time!
(originally written August 4, 2008)
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