It was time to peel this computer wallpaper from off my monitor screen and to replace it with the next plate. It's been more than two weeks since I put it up.
Here Urizen rears his hoary head: the old man sabotages innocence and imagination, represented by the figure of the child-like angel, by clipping his wings. I suppose more importantly is how the Urizen-figure does it: judiciously, soberly, rationally. The angel struggles but Urizen calmly goes about his trimming. Blake is trying to depict here the logical outcome of a person devoted to the rational at the expense of the imaginative.
The image is clear enough, but the words that accompany the image seem designed to scramble any rational approach to the plate. "Aged Ignorance" is the title and we can see how it works ironically with the image: the professorial/prophetic figure with his scribe/scholar glasses--looking so authoritative and trustworthy--is busy mutilating an angel. The inscription continues: "Perceptive Organs closed their Objects close." It's a little convuluted, relieved somewhat by the pun Blake makes on "closed" and "close." Here Blake seems to be saying that even with a brilliant mind, acute eyesight, scholarly authority, not to mention bottle-thick glasses, we might be blind to reality, which can only be engaged through the imagination, with includes the rational in balance with the affective and whimsical.
Finally, this image makes me think of some of my commentary from previous plates about angels. Some angels have wings, some don't (are floating children), which I always saw in opposition, the winged ones representing official religion, and the wingless ones something more contingent, chaos, "Experience." But now I'm thinking maybe the wingless angels are ones shorn of their wings by the Urizens of the world. We might actually see them as scarred victims of the regime of the rational. But also an affirmation: cut off our wings and we will still find a way to fly.
Posted by jeb at March 16, 2005 12:26 PM | TrackBack