My Eyes Are Like Telescopes

This line by Tom Verlaine has been running through my head all morning. Here’s the rest of the line:

My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards: but who wants hope?
If I ever catch that ventriloquist
I’ll squeeze his head right into my fist.

Then all sorts of other random Television lines came into my head: “Then Richie said, ‘Hey man, let’s dress up like cops and see what we can do,’/Suddenly, suddenly, I said, ‘We’d better not.'” or Dylan’s, “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the muse [actually, Mule, but I hear ‘muse’…a reader corrected me].” I wanted to write about the Imagination as an organ of perception, and these lines swirled in and out of that thought. The Imagination reveals a dimmension of reality Reason filters out. It is the world without the subject subtracted. I remembered Blake’s lines, or a paraphrase anyway, about a rich man seeing the sun as a gold sovereign whereas he, Blake, saw streams of trumpeting angels. Searching for the quote I found instead Blake’s comments on Homer:

“Every poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity, but why Homer’s is peculiarly so, I cannot tell: he has told the story of Bellerophon & omitted the Judgement of Paris which is not only a part, but a principle part of Homer’s subject.

“But when a Work has Unity it is as much in a Part as in a Whole. the Torso is as much a Unity as the Laocoon

“As Unity is the cloak of folly so Goodness is the cloke of knavery Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer come out with a Moral like a sting in a tail: Aristotle says Characters are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character. an Apple tree a Pear tree a Horse a Lion, are Characters but a Good Apple tree or a bad, is an Apple tree still: a Horse is not more a LIon for being a Bad Horse. that is its Character: its Goodness or Badness is another consideration.

“It is the same with the Moral of a whole Poem as with the Moral Goodness of its parts Unity & Morality. are secondary considerations & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry, to Exception & not to Rule, to Accident & not to Substance. the Ancients calld it eating of the tree of good & evil.

“The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.”