Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 11: Part 1

"Nocturnal the river of hours flows/from its source, the eternal tomorrow."

The concept of spacing in Derrida's Differance is related to this quotation which is taken from Miguel de Unamuno's poem. There is something which hovers just beyond the last, the space in which the next will reside; yet as soon as it is occupied by the next, a new space is created to hold the next next. We call this space, tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes. It shadows, in fact, what was and the moment it opens up, it is closed off. What we are describing then is a relation to this space, the last's relationship to the next. The eternal tomorrow, the one that never comes.

Tomorrow is adequate to describe the spacing and temporalizing aspect of Differance, in fact, it is so readily apparent that it ruin's Derrida's game, which is what I'm all about, beating Derrida at his own game.

For this I go to Borges, whose History of Eternity proffers the Blakean notion that in eternity, the past, present and future happen simultaneously, and as we know from Einstein's Relativity, this is literally the case for light. As an object approaches the speed of light, the past and the future collapse into an expanding present.

For Derrida, there is no outside of time, Eternity is a collapsed word set, redoubled in several turns. The words stay the same, the meanings in context change, but the movement is always there, even if it comes back as Nietzsche's ghost in an eternal return.

This is not the eternity we wish to endure, rather, we postulate a framework which hovers just beyond the real, where the future is present, and the past is also present, and we can see the unfolding of the present into the future as man on a mountain overlooking the city-scape.

Now this man is not outside of space just because he can see the entire city at once, in this "outside of time" there is still sequence. There is an order to events, but that is all. Time is a discontinuity of happenstances, not the continuous ebb and flow we have in the earth realm. Perhaps there is a realm even higher than the sequential space of no-time, I do not know.

In Blake eternity is the manner in which a child perceives time, as a succession of events, and then he is indoctrinated by Urizenic adults. We fall into the cinematic time of the sun dial, quite possibly the origin of the spiral construction of time.

The difference between this construction and the sequential construction, is that we can roll the sequence forward and backward, or see the entire sequence as a whole. This in ticker time is accomplished by force of will, by measurement. In Blakean sequence, there is no measure, no notion of time at all. We simply disregard it.

According to Plotinus:

"For all the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea is heaven; and animal, plant, and man. For spectacle they have a world that has no been engendered. In beholding others they behold themselves. For all things are translucent: nothing is dark, nothing impenetrable, for light is manifest in light. All are everywhere, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows."

This is a "unanimous" universe, as Borges so wonderfully puts it. Unanimous, insofar as it is of a united spirit. This is only partially a univocal tradition. It is partially monist. It is both univox and polyvox at once, these two notions not being mutually exclusive. Monadism, is reconcilable with monism, we are one and we are many, e pluribus unum. The One, the All-Father, the Pleroma as he is referred to by the Gnostics, disarticulates himself, and solidifies, and we are his articulations. This is the nature of Blake's universe, and Blake's schema, of which our mythographical framework has been partially derived (as is Northrop Frye's). And Blake's is derived from Plotinus, and Jacob Boehme.