Blue-Fire Falcon

Encounter with faerie and William Blake's Two Fold Vision

Not long ago, in the local woods one night, I saw something very strange. A blue fire, the size of a falcon, streaking through the trees.

Some encounters can offer easy explanations. Some don’t.

I told a friend what had happened. Afraid he would think that I was full of woo, the rationalist in me went to work, hypothesising what it might have been, from a logical perspective. A satellite, maybe. An astronomical object.

The thing was, the friend in question is as close as you’re likely to find to an actual magician. Extremely learned. Skilled in arts and mathematics, and in the making of things with his hands. A marvellous balance between imagination and reason. What he said stuck with me.

‘Why collapse the electron?’

The famous ‘double slit’ experiment in quantum physics shows that an electron is both wave and particle until collapsed into one or the other by the absence or presence of an observer. In other words, why confine the experience to a single thing? To do that is to fall into ‘Single vision and Newton’s sleep’, as William Blake said. Much better to practice ‘twofold vision’ - where a thistle can be seen as both a spikey plant and a hectoring old man worthy of argument, as Blake once did by the Sussex coast.

Without this way of seeing there would be no Emily Dickenson, no William Shakespeare, probably no great art at all. We could imagine twofold vision as a confluence of attention styles; the scientist and indigenous elder, both co-present in the act of perception. Such a way of seeing is intensely valuable because it allows the world, and you as part of it, more eloquence, depth, and expression.

Without these, we are so limited in our capacity to experience the depth, wonder, and strangeness of the world, that we might as well be blind to them. And if we are blind and deaf to the speech of wild things, then our own wildness and speech becomes impoverished. We become robotic, mindlessly harvesting the treasures of the world, converting them into material products to fill the void left by single vision.

Why not open the other eye?

So what was this falcon-sized fire I saw blazing through the woods? The scientist in me says it was probably an especially bright shooting star, one that seemed closer than it was by some optical illusion. The indigenous elder in me (and for this I’m imagining William Blake) says ‘it was a faerie.’

William Blake, a possible self portrait. Look into the eyes of that man and tell me the fey does not exist.

Faeries are denizens of the world’s imagination. They can’t be seen with single vision. They can’t seen by collapsing the electron. They can only be seen by loosening the mind-forged manacles and being re-minded that the human animal swims upon a sea of dreams.

‘Gwion Gwion’ - Ancient Australian Aboriginal Rock Art

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

- Blake

The Ghost of a Flea, by William Blake

P.S. Inspired by reactions to this post, I wrote this: