I've been staring at this image for a few weeks now. It doesn't terrify with the extreme claustrophobia of the previous plate ("Earth") but presents terrors (and a claustrophobia?) of its own, terrors that the world does not necessarily recognize as such but Blake does. The terror of what might be called "analysis paralysis"--over intellectualization; being trapped within the more airy element of disengaged and abstract thought. That is what the image suggests, the expression of the face, the placement of the hands: someone trying to keep his overheated brain from exploding.
Is it possible to be claustrophobic while sitting on a cloud (or mountaintop), stars twinkling above? Blake would seem to think so.
We should consider the motto, the words on the plate: "On Cloudy Doubts and Reasoning Fears." Doubts are certainly cloudy, but how can fears be reasoning? Doesn't reason dispel all fear? Contemporaries of Blake, such as William Godwin, may believe it but Blake cannot. The Enlightenment is a dead-end for Blake; it argues joy, love, vitality out of existence (perhaps because it argues sorrow, hate, and ennervation out of existence first, throwing off the contrary balance).
How is this an emblem for the spiritual life? Reason is not the end, but rather union with All That Is, which Blake sometimes calls the Human Form Divine. This is not far from any mystical teaching; for all of them, reason takes one so far and then one must make a leap into the unknown. The mountaintop worrier, beset by reasoning fears, needs to stand and leap towards the stars--to enter the empyrean of the Imagination.
I have a seminar paper to write on Blake, so I probably won't be blogging on the Gates of Paradise. But I may have some added insight when I come back to it.
Posted by jeb at December 9, 2004 8:21 PM | TrackBack