we are not overhearing a human conversation, we are observing a sensibility conversant with legend-laden winds.
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 | | By the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When midday is silent around, converse, O my love, with me! come on the wings of the gale! on the blast of the mountain, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around. (I.ii)
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The superstitions of Burns, the local tales memorialized by Wordsworth, the mythologies of Keatsall follow the same structural pattern we see here in Macpherson.
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Note the date of this, 1760.
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AA. And we can find similar things even earlierfor example, in the work of Gray and Collins from the 1740s and 1750s. The cultural fault lines along which the geography of Romanticism was formed will not be mapped on the grids of Cartesian geometrieswhat Blake called "the mill [of] Aristotle's Analytics." We need topological measures for discontinuous phenomena of these kinds, non-Euclidean mathematics of the type first pursued (for example, by Gauss and Bolyai) inthe Romantic Period itself! What we've been looking at here, in this view across the range that includes Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Ossian . . .
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XX. . . . and they don't exhaust this landscape by any means.
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AA. . . . no, of course not; but what we've been looking at is a kind of topological basin where sets of "attractors" (as the mathematicians say) hold dispersing phenomena in random patterns. Patterns, because the phenomena exhibit recursive forms (a few of which we have noticed); random, because the possibilities for other patternings are endless. We may come at these scenes and experiences from many directions. Patterning dissolves and other patterning appears; some of these patternings will recur in mutated forms, some will not. The locale is (like its own natural light) "incoherent"; but it is also a dynamic and self-integrated whole.
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How do we get to know it, then? people sometimes ask. And I want to say, simply by looking at it. "If the doors of perception were cleansed . . ."you know the rest. Even when we think we're following that great romantic star, the imagination, we often close ourselves up and see only through the narrow chinks of our caverned brains. Take Blake and his
Songs
and "The Tyger," for instance. Turn your view away from Burns for a moment and observe the
Songs
from
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