Spots Of Time

There is a sickness Wordsworth had, and I think I have it, and I suspect you might too. The only difference is that he wrote it down in verse so lovely it makes an illness of the senses sound more like music.

He called it the despotism of the eye. In Book XI of The Prelude, the book he titled “Imagination,” Wordsworth confesses to a stretch of life when “the eye was master of the heart,” when the eye, “the most despotic of our senses,” held his mind in “absolute dominion.” Read by itself, it sounds like penance for some sort of Romantic crime. Too much hill-walking, perhaps? An overindulgence in the picturesque? The eternal hazard of the nature poet.

The state to which i now allude was one
In which the eye was master of the heart,
When that which is in every stage of life
The most despotic of our senses gained
Such strength in me as often held my mind
In absolute dominion

But no, he means something worse. This is the eye that cannot stop seeking. A new surface and then another. More, more, more! Wordsworth is describing, in 1805, the exact feeling of picking up your phone for no reason and setting it down an hour later feeling robbed. Where did the time go? More to the point, where did the mind go?

The phone comparison tempts me, but it lets me off too easily. It also flattens the force of his words. He is describing a mind made helpless by stimulus, the slightly sick feeling of having looked at too much and taken in too little.

Then, two pages later, he does the maddeningly Wordsworthian thing. He makes the problem stranger just as I was getting comfortable with my little phone analogy. The answer to the restless eye is not less looking, exactly. It is a few images that have gone so far inward they have become part of him. A memory deep enough to stand against the present.

Induced, effect, in whatsoever degree,
Of custom that prepares such wantonness
As makes the greatest things give way to least,
Or any other cause which has been named,
Or, lastly, aggravated by the times
Which with their passionate sounds might often make
The milder minstrelsies of rural scenes
Inaudible — was transient. Had felt
Too forcibly, too early in my life,
Visitings of imaginative power
For this to last: I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In Nature’s presence stood, as I stand now,
A sensitive, and a creative soul.

There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired —
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life in which
We have had deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will.
Such moments, worthy of all gratitude,
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood — in our childhood even
Perhaps are most conspicuous. Life with me,
As far as memory can look back, is full
Of this beneficent influence.

The same words come back, but the order has changed. The passage has inverted. First the eye rules the heart. Then the mind rules the eye.

The cure for the tyranny of the eye is memory. Wordsworth calls them “spots of time,” charged moments, many from childhood, that keep a “vivifying virtue” and return years later to repair the mind once ordinary life has worn it smooth. The man enslaved to the new is saved by the old. What rescues him is a handful of deep memories he has been carrying the whole time, unspent.