Urizen
- Urizen is a character in the mythology of William Blake
- the embodiment of conventional reason and law
- Urizen is a personification the left hemisphere and the default mode network.
- intellect that determines laws and boundries and constructs a compact and orderly model out of the formless void of experience.
- The right hemisphere sees the whole first, and then the left hemisphere separates it into parts
- This can be considered an act of creation, in which the definite appears out of the indefinite.
- This is probably why many creation myths resemble to emergence of the left hemisphere
- It is he who constructs the human-scale world of rationality and logic in which contrary positions cannot both be physically true: Nothing can be fully understood without its opposite
- In The Book of Urizen (1794), Blake has Urizen describe his creation of the solid world while he was being buffeted by the storms that shake the realm of pure potential: Inwards, into a deep world within: A void immense, wild dark & deep, Where nothing was: Natures wide womb. And self balanc’d stretch’d o’er the void. I alone, even I! the winds merciless. Bound; but condensing, in torrents. They fall & fall: strong I repell’d. The vast waves, & arose on the waters. A wide world of solid obstruction.
- Imprint
- The Ancient of Days, one of Blake’s most famous images, shows Urizen in this act of creation. He is leaning out of a golden orb with his long white beard buffeted by the storm winds of the dark, cloudy unformed void, and he reaches down with an outstretched compass to measure the solid world he is building.
- Blake recognised that Urizen’s reason could create, but only by abstracting and dividing, and only then by becoming blind to what he was creating from. It is symbolic of how The left hemisphere prioritizes things that it already knows and expects. The circle he draws is finite, a limitation suggested by both explanations for the etymology of the name Urizen. The name implies both ‘Your Reason’ and ‘horizon’ – ‘horizon’ being a word derived from the Greek ‘to limit’.
- Urizen can be linked to the , which is responsible for the process in which Our left hemisphere unconsciously focuses on only a select few of the sensory signals it receives that it considers important.
References
- HIggs, John. (2021). William Blake vs The World Chapter 4 WITHOUT CONTRARIES IS NO PROGRESSION (p. 70). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type: Tags: Status:⛅️