Are you a clod or a pebble?

Blake, Manacles and a Hill Above the Ocean

I’m sitting in the clouds on a hill that would normally overlook the ocean. A gentle whiteness holds me. It comforts and sends me on a journey of sentimental foraging. I love the solitude it conjures. The quiet that comes when we can no longer see very far. I hide under the world’s blanket knowing that sometime soon, a new landscape will be discovered. 

From this cirrus serenity (okay, not technically cirrus, but I like the alliteration, so work with me), I return to a place I often go in moments of calm. I go to William Blake.

At first, my thoughts turn to one of his short poems, The Clod and the Pebble. I assume this is because I have just collected a smooth pebble from a beach whose sands carry memories and madness. A beach where the weight of the pebbles comes not from their density, but from their absorption of moments.

It’s a poem on the vagaries of love:

Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.

The polarity in the poem punishes me. The clod describes love as selfless and generous; the pebble describes it as selfish, possessive and destructive. But I know that neither speaks from a neutral position. Each sees love through the nature of its own experience. Just as we do.

Don’t we all arrive at relationships carrying invisible assumptions about what love should look like? What it should give us, what a partner owes us, and what it means when they disappoint us? We have a model, an ideal, the image of a cursed woman seeing life only in a mirror, ready to die for one direct look at love.

We have expectations. Or are they actually fear, possession, insecurity and the need to be reassured that we matter? Probably both.

The poem sings around in my head as I look at the small droplets of water running down the window. What is love, to them, I wonder? They have no cattle hooves to tread on them and no cool mountain stream to smooth their rough edges. They probably assess love by how quickly they glide, and by whatever the weather does to them.

But love is not what I want to dwell on. As the clouds lift, the ocean, shoreline and small town below emerge, as though someone were painting them into existence. My thoughts move with the landscape, and I realise that the clod and the pebble, each so certain of its own understanding, might be caught in Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”. The clod and the pebble aren’t wrong about love; they’re imprisoned by being a clod and a pebble.

In another of Blake’s poems, London, he writes:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

These manacles, like the mist that comforts me, shape what we see, how we see it, what we feel and how we understand those feelings. Their most insidious quality is that we rarely recognise them as constraints. We rarely recognise them at all. They look like reality itself. In the language of Indian philosophy, they might be understood as saṃskāras: the impressions and conditioning that shape how we perceive and respond to the world.

Our ideals of love, morality, the good life, beauty and meaning can all become manacles. We judge ourselves for feeling the “wrong” things, our relationships for failing to resemble ideals that no human relationship could sustain, our creativity for being bland, our thoughts for being shallow. We inherit beliefs from culture, convention and institutions; others arise from our own interpretations or from the experiences that have shaped us. The problem isn’t simply that we construct our reality, but that we often cannot distinguish the world from the frameworks through which we experience it.

I stop for a second and smile at how a few words in the right order, combined with being stranded (kind of) on a rainy hillock, can produce such thoughts. I feel like Wordsworth on Windermere. There is something absurdly beautiful about it: the way a poem, a pebble and a patch of fog can send us wandering into the architecture of our own minds. And yet, when experience contradicts what we believe, we may cling more fiercely to the belief, rearranging reality to preserve the architecture of our understanding.

This is all starting to feel like a bit much for top-of-hill pondering. I was here, after all, to escape this level of inquiry. My desire for a Vedāntic reprieve is being hijacked by poetry and philosophy. But I am okay with that.

Blake famously writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “Without contraries is no progression.” Today, I am feeling particularly contrary. The thick fog and the clear blue sky seem to mirror the contradiction. Perhaps the possibility of freedom is what makes our manacles visible in the first place. We want our understanding of the world to give us freedom, yet our need to understand can itself become a constraint.

What would happen, for example, if we tried to make our ideas of morality conform to a single ideal? If we insisted on dividing everything into good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly? Real life is rarely so tidy. Perhaps maturity isn’t the elimination of contradiction but the capacity to hold contradictory truths without forcing one to erase the other.

“Okay,” I say to myself. “Breathe.”

This all began as a road trip to escape. To discover. To feel. And here I am, about to make the astonishing leap into the air with my paraglider and feel truly free, only to be held back by my shackling thoughts.

Before I have even finished the word breathe, Friedrich Nietzsche pops into my head, as he does. What specifically arrives is something he wrote in his notebooks but never published in this familiar form: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

These interpretations, I realise, are where Blake’s manacles begin. We rarely encounter an experience and leave it there. We interpret it. We decide what it means, what it says about us, what caused it and what might have happened otherwise. Interpretation can bring us closer to understanding, but it can also keep us at a distance from the experience itself.

So which is it, closer or further away? I am not sure I am prepared to answer that now. My philosophical enquiry is being replaced by deep feelings, by the view of whales in the distance, the blue waters, and that remarkable transition that only nature can deliver. Like standing, wet, in the rain after a thunderstorm and simply breathing in deeply.

Do you smell that?

I am also distracted by voices that, as the fog lifts, acquire faces and smiles. People eager to begin their day of adventure. I wonder if they, too, have been pondering their own manacles, and whether their flights over the ocean are designed to unshackle them.

As I sit with this, a line from a Mumford and Sons song, Hopeless Wanderer, interrupts my thoughts:

I will learn to love the skies I’m under.

I will, I think.

I step out of the car, smile and greet the new faces. I look out over what I am about to soar through and, in that moment, I am free.

Or so I think.