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haue lost my delight in all obiects, cannot I discontinue the facultie of seeing them, by closing mine Eis in sleepe? But why rather being entring into that presence, where I shall wake continually and neuer sleepe more, doe I not interpret my continuall waking here, to bee a prasceve, and a preparation to that? (371–73) Donne wonders why his body does not operate in better harmony: why his emotional feeling (the
“heaviness of [his] heart”) does not dictate his physical sensory capacity (the closing of his eyelids resulting in the end of his sense of sight). Ultimately, however, he adopts the perspective that such waking will be a beneficial masochism, one that enables him to prepare for the Heaven he cannot yet see.
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matters.188 These scientific positions are not often associated with the Doctor of Divinity.
However, the traffic between Boyle’s and Donne’s thought becomes obvious in Boyle’s eighth meditation.In it, Boyle finds himself in the same position as Donne in Meditation 15, a state of a very specific kind of pain: insomnia. Like Donne, in this moment Boyle also turns to the clock:
The same Violence of my Fit, that made me very much need Sleep, allow'd me so little of it, that I think I miss'd not hearing one stroke of the Clock all the Night long […] Of this uncertain going of the Clock, I never had occasion to take so much notice as the last Night, when, lying too constantly awak'd, I began to observe, that though all the hours were so tedious, as to seem every one of them extraordinary long, yet they manifestly appear'd to me not to be equally so; and therefore, when the Clock struck Eleven, to satisfie my self whether it did not mis-inform me, I call'd to one that sat up by me for the Watch I use to measure the time with in nice Experiments, and found it to want but very little of Midnight; and not much above an hour after, when by my Watch it was but about one, those that kept the Clock, whether out of Negligence, or Design, or to make amends for past Slowness, made it strike two, which seem'd to me to hint a not unusefull Rule in estimating the length or shortness of Discourses: For there are Cases, where the difficulty or importance of the Subject is such, that though it cost a Man many words, yet, if what he says be not sufficiently fitted to the Exigency of the Occasion, and the Theam, he may speak much, without saying enough. But on the other hand, if (as it often happens) a Man speak either Unseasonably, Erroneously, or Impertinently, he may, though he say little, talk too much; The paucity or number of Words, is not, as many think it, that which is in such cases to be chiefly consider'd; for 'tis not many, or few, that are requir'd, but enough.
188 See Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000) and Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
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And, As our Clock struck not so often as it should have done, when it struck Eleven, and yet struck a while after too often when it struck but two, because the first time it was Mid-night, and the second time it was but one of the Clock; so to estimate whether what is said have its due length, we are not so much to look whether it be little, or much, as whether a Man speak in the right time, and say neither more nor less than he should.189 Boyle uses his continual wakeful watching of the clock to practice not for the eternal waking, but to practice his experimental method in order to draw conclusions about decorum on earth. But even he, perhaps unexpectedly for one writing after the “dissociation of sensibility,” recognizes that objectivity can slide, that feeling can dictate the proper moment, that the measure of whether or not man has said enough can be whether or not he has said more or less than he should. Such meditations would be far less occasioned by the clock when the pendulum regulator became more widely found in the devices. Incidentally, it was invented by Christiaan Huygens, of whose father, Constantjin, Paul R. Sellin writes: "Donne seems to have exercised a special attraction for an outspokenly orthodox Calvinist like Constantijn Huygens, whose Heilighe Daghen –not to mention his translations from the Elegies, the Songs and Sonets and the Divine Poems—forms perhaps a supreme moment of poetic homage unequalled among contemporaries in England."190 Perhaps the elder Huygens’s poetic attraction unknowingly begot his son’s desire to regulate the clock.
189 Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections Upon Several Subjects. Whereto is premis’d a Discourse about such kind of Thoughts (London, 1665), 214–16. Also see Meditation 9, “Upon comparing the Clock and his Watch,” 219.
190 See Paul R. Sellin, John Donne and “Calvinist” Views of Grace (Amsterdam: VU Boekhandel, 1983), 49.
115 CHAPTER 4
EATING TIME IN PARADISE LOST: MILTON AND THE BOUNDARIES OF MAN
From its very beginning, the biblical text insists on maintaining the distance between man and God by means of a dietary differentiation. […] it is a feminine and animal temptation that is concealed under the first dietary trespass.
-Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the Fruit she pluck’d, she eat:
[…] Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else Regarded, such delight till then, as seem’d, In Fruit she never tasted, whether true Or fancied so, through expectation high
Of knowledge, nor was God-head from her thought.
Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint, And knew not eating Death.
-Paradise Lost, 9.780–92
Milton’s marriage to his third and final wife was predicated on food.191 According to a deposition during the contesting of the poet’s will, Milton entered into a pre-marital contract
191 Epigraphs: Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 95–96. All citations of Milton refer to Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y.
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stating that, should his intended wife Elizabeth Minshull, the cousin to a trusted physician of Milton’s, prepare food to his instructions, she would inherit his estate.192 Milton’s emphasis on this particular domestic duty makes a good deal of sense when one considers that, as William Kerrigan has argued, Milton believed that his blindness was the result of an improper diet, specifically of his retention of the gaseous fumes that afflicted him after the noontime meal (202–203). Eating felt like an exercise in peril for Milton, an exercise that placed him at the mercy of a benevolent woman.
Kerrigan and other scholars have conjectured that Milton transferred this fear of eating to his gustatory writing in Paradise Lost and speculated that the poet was drawn to the story of Eden in particular because of Eve’s food-service role in Adam’s fall. Here I want to argue that Milton’s poetry transfers this fear to the clock, and to hourly time, which he likewise depicts, alongside many early moderns, as consumptive or devouring. In contrast to Donne’s seductive clocks, Milton’s clock is threatening, a depiction of the danger that what one eats might eat one back. Milton does not celebrate clock, or leverage its attractions to religious purposes. He reviles it. This may seem like a counter-argument to my claim that there is an erotics of timekeeping more broadly in early modernity. It may seem like a case in which the clock is decidedly un- erotic. However, in actuality it illustrates eroticism’s vicissitude. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, I argue that Milton’s revolting clock opens up an exploration into profound and troubling feelings of ambivalence about sexual difference and individuation. Something like revulsion that might be experienced upon seeing a particular Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003) and are hereafter cited parenthetically by line number for poetry and by page number for prose.
192 William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), 205. For the deposition, see Joseph Milton French, The Life Records of John Milton, Vol. 5 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 220.
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sex act or offensive pornography, Milton’s terrifyingly erotic clock points to an ambivalence about the permeability of one’s own boundaries. To put this another way: for Milton, thinking about the clock and about clock time abuts thinking about identity, the consciousness of which he sees as dependent upon the temporal awareness that the clock represents. Far from being un- erotic, then, the clock in Milton’s poetry stands in for an exciting and horrifying element of the erotic: it represents the merger of self—physically and/or psychologically— into other.